Extra-Atlantic History

Extra-Atlantic history is the history of the Atlantic told through its link­ages with other oceans and seas.^[348] On its eastern side, it opens into the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar; on the western shore, only the isthmus of Panama, less than 80 kilometres at its narrowest, separated it from - or linked it to - the Pacific before the digging of the Panama Canal.

From the fifteenth century onwards, historical actors would never have mistaken the Atlantic for a discrete oceanic realm. For Columbus, what would later be known as the Atlantic was a gateway to Asia, an alternative to a Mediterranean and trans-continental route increasingly blocked by the Ottoman Empire. His successors in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who sought a North-West Passage likewise assumed the Atlantic was not bounded and land-locked.

The political economy of empires and transnational trading compa­nies likewise shaped the linkages between the Atlantic and other oceanic regions. The English East India Company could not have functioned in the Indian Ocean without its Atlantic outpost on St Helena; its Scottish successor and competitor, the short-lived Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies of the late seventeenth century, proposed a bi- hemispheric vision of global trade centred on the Isthmus of Darien (hence its popular name, the Darien Company).^[355] Until the opening of the Suez Canal, the Cape of Good Hope was the pivot between the Atlantic world and the Indian Ocean, a ‘tavern of the seas’ where empires joined and oceans connected: up until 1869, the two oceanic worlds could not be distinguished.^[356] Commodities such as rice, indigo and breadfruit were transplanted from the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic as staples for settlers and the enslaved and products for intercontinental commerce; the tea dumped into Boston harbour on the eve of the American Revolution came from China to North America in East India Company ships.

* * * * *

All three of these newer Atlantic histories, infra-Atlantic, sub-Atlantic and extra-Atlantic, expand and deepen Atlantic history, both in time - beyond its default boundaries within early modern history - and in space: beneath its surface, across its waters and into the broader reaches of the world ocean as a whole. By drawing methods and inspirations from other oceanic histories, they may help to bring Atlantic historiography into a more productive and enduring dialogue with oceanic history tout court. They might also provide remedies for some of the Atlantic world­weariness that has beset the field in recent years. If Atlantic history does have a future, it will be as a subset of world history viewed through the lenses of oceanic history.^[358] We are all global oceanic historians now - even the avowed Atlanticists among us.

Further Reading

Among existing oceanic histories, Atlantic history is particularly well supplied with handbooks, companions and survey volumes. To experi­ence the evolution and consolidation of the field in recent years, one could read sequentially Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic history: A critical appraisal (Oxford, 2009); Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, eds., The Oxford handbook of the Atlantic world, 1450­1800 (Oxford, 2011); Joseph C. Miller, Vincent Brown, Jorge Canizares- Esguerra, Laurent Dubois and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, eds., The Princeton companion to Atlantic history (Princeton, NJ, 2015); and D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and William O’Reilly, eds., The Atlantic world (Abingdon, 2015).

Important edited collections from the earlier boom in Atlantic his­tory include David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic world, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, 2002; 2nd edn, 2009); Horst Pietschmann, ed., Atlantic history: History of the Atlantic system, 1580­1830 (Gottingen, 2002); Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic world: Essays on slavery, migration, and imagination (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2005); Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in global history, 1500-2000 (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2007); James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and empire in the Atlantic world (NewYork, 2008); Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts, eds., The Atlantic world, 1450-2000 (Bloomington, IN, 2008); and Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic history: Latent structures and intellectual currents, 1500-1830 (Cambridge, MA, 2009).

In 2002, I noted that Atlantic history had not yet suffered ‘death by a thousand textbooks’; the texts that soon appeared greatly helped to move the field forward, among them Douglas R. Egerton, Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane and Donald R. Wright, The Atlantic world: A his­tory, 1400-1888 (Wheeling, IL, 2007); Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic world: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their shared history, 1400-1900 (Cambridge, 2009); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Atlantic in world his­tory (Oxford, 2012); John K. Thornton, A cultural history of the Atlantic world, 1250-1820 (Cambridge, 2012); Catherine Armstrong and Laura M. Chmielewski, The Atlantic experience: Peoples, places, ideas (Basingstoke, 2013); and Anna Suranyi, The Atlantic connection: A history of the Atlantic world, 1450-1900 (Abingdon, 2015).

Atlantic history is also now well supplied with economical overviews of the field and its fortunes. See especially Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic his­tory: Concept and contours (Cambridge, MA, 2005); John G. Reid, ‘How wide is the Atlantic Ocean? Not wide enough!’, Acadiensis, 34 (2005): 81­87; Trevor Burnard, ‘Only connect: The rise and rise (and fall?) of Atlantic history’, Historically Speaking, 7 (2006): 19-21; Alison Games, ‘Atlantic history: Definitions, challenges, and opportunities’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006): 741-57; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Benjamin Breen, ‘Hybrid Atlantics: Future directions for the history of the Atlantic world’, History Compass, 11, 8 (August 2013): 597-609; Richard J.

The expanding possibilities for articulating Atlantic history with other histories, oceanic and global, can be tracked in David Eltis, ‘Atlantic history in global perspective’, Itinerario, 23 (1999): 141­61; Donna Gabaccia, ‘A long Atlantic in a wider world’, Atlantic Studies, 1 (2004): 1-27; Philip J. Stern, ‘British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and connections’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (2006): 693-712; Paul W. Mapp, ‘Atlantic history from imperial, continental, and Pacific perspectives’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (2006): 713-24; Peter A. Coclanis, ‘Atlantic world or Atlantic/world?’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (2006): 725-42; Lauren Benton, ‘The British Atlantic in global context’, in Armitage and Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic world, 1500-1800 (2nd edn.), pp. 271-89; Nicholas Canny, ‘Atlantic history and global history’ and Peter A. Coclanis, ‘Beyond Atlantic history’, in Greene and Morgan, eds., Atlantic history, pp. 317-36, 337-56; Emma Rothschild, ‘Late Atlantic history’, in Canny and Morgan, eds., The Oxford handbook of the Atlantic world, 1450-1850, pp. 634-48; Douglas R. Egerton, ‘Rethinking Atlantic historiography in a postco­lonial era: The Civil War in a global perspective’, Journal of the Civil War Era, 1 (2011): 79-95; Kate Fullagar, ed., The Atlantic world in the Antipodes: Effects and transformations since the eighteenth century (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2012); Cecile Vidal, ‘Pour une histoire globale du monde atlantique ou des histoires connectees dans et au-delà du monde atlantique?’, Annales HSS, 67 (2012): 391-413; Paul D’Arcy, ‘The Atlantic and Pacific worlds’, in Coffman, Leonard and O’Reilly, eds., The Atlantic world, pp. 207-26; Christoph Strobel, The global Atlantic 1400 to 1900 (Abingdon, 2015); and John McAleer, ‘Looking east: St Helena, the South Atlantic and Britain’s Indian Ocean world’, Atlantic Studies, 13 (2016): 78-98.