Three (More) Concepts of Atlantic History
Fifteen years ago, I proposed three concepts of Atlantic history to anatomise existing approaches and to point up prospective pathways for the field: these were circum-Atlantic history, trans-Atlantic history and cisAtlantic history.[314] By circum-Atlantic history, I meant ‘the history of the Atlantic as a particular zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission’: in short, Atlantic history as transnational history.[315] Trans-Atlantic history is ‘the history of the Atlantic world told through comparisons’ between empires, nations, states and similar communities or formations, such as cities or plantations - that is, Atlantic history as international, interregional or, as we might now say, inter-polity history.[316] And cis-Atlantic history comprises ‘the history of any particular place - a nation, a state, a region, even a specific institution - in relation to the wider Atlantic world’, or Atlantic history conceived as local history and even as microhistory.[317]
This typology was not exhaustive and I intended the three categories to be mutually reinforcing: circum-Atlantic history made trans-Atlantic history possible and both depended on cis-Atlantic histories; these emerged in turn from circum- and trans-Atlantic connections and circulations.
At the time, and for many years after, they adequately captured the bulk of work conducted as the history of an Atlantic world that was largely defined against inter-oceanic and global connections, conceived of as a holistic, multi-continental system and viewed as the sum of experiences above the waves and on the territories adjoining and within the Atlantic Ocean. By now, they no longer seem as comprehensive as they once did, not least because they were derived mostly inductively, from existing practices within Atlantic history itself.The evolution of oceanic history in the last decade suggests a pressing need to extend my original trichotomy to take account of more recent developments, within and beyond Atlantic history, and to imagine new prospects for Atlantic history itself. With these goals in mind, let me offer three more concepts of Atlantic history in addition to my original triad:
1. Infra-Atlantic history - the subregional history of the Atlantic world.
2. Sub-Atlantic history - the submarine history of the Atlantic world.
3. Extra-Atlantic history - the supraregional history of the Atlantic world. My aim in the latter part of this chapter is to describe each approach, with examples drawn from Atlantic history and its historiographical neighbours, to account for their significance and to suggest how each can draw Atlantic history into closer and more productive dialogue with other oceanic histories. These three new concepts supplement but do not supplant my earlier trichotomy. Taken together, they can offer novel ways to re-energise the field of Atlantic history and to increase its integration with other areas of historical analysis.
Infra-Atlantic History
Infra-Atlantic history is the inverse of circum-Atlantic history as ‘the history of the ocean as an arena distinct from any of the particular, narrower, oceanic zones that comprise it’.[318] In contrast to that integrative approach, it focuses instead on those more specific and bounded regions that flow into or abut upon the larger ocean but which have their own integrity as islands and archipelagos, littorals and beaches, straits, gulfs and seas in their own right. It is the history of the peoples who inhabited these sub-regions, who lived by the sea or pursued maritime lives in coastal and insular waters. This is not the Atlantic as a congeries of cis-Atlantic histories, because there is no assumption that those places should be connected to a larger circuit of communication. Nor is it the Atlantic as a ‘world’ or a ‘system’ but instead as a series of distinct spaces and the competing visions that emerged from them.
To paraphrase a distinction Greg Dening made for Pacific history, it is history in the Atlantic rather than history of the Atlantic.[319]Infra-Atlantic history draws inspiration from adjacent oceanic histories that have also attempted to break down wider oceans into their component parts. As Jonathan Miran notes in his essay on the Red Sea in this volume, ‘most maritime spaces are innately fractured, fragmented and unstable arenas’; with this, he affirms the argument of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell that the Mediterranean should be spared from Braudelian synthesis by decomposition into many microecologies or Sugata Bose’s similar claims in favour of the dizzyingly various ‘hundred horizons’ visible in the Indian Ocean arena.[320] It has been suggested that the future of global history in an age of resurgent nationalism, populism and anti-globalism lies in narrating disintegration as well as integration.[321] On this view, a segmented Atlantic has as much to reveal as a coordinated one. This is because it is more likely to reflect particular experiences than to fall into the traps of Eurocentrism - the assumption that the Atlantic was a European preserve or invention - or whiggism, the premise that Atlantic integration was inevitable, even irreversible.
Infra-Atlantic history can be discovered first throughout the islands of the Atlantic. That search takes us back to one possible root of the term ‘Atlantic’ itself. Around 355 BCE, Plato in the Timaeus imagined the island empire of Atlantis, in the western ocean beyond the Mediterranean ‘frog-pond’, which warred with Athens before disappearing in a cataclysmic flood. The first European voyages into the Atlantic lent his myth fresh plausibility - or, at least, utility in accounting for earlier links with the Americas - though it later became a western analogue to the Indian Ocean’s Lemuria, a sunken superpower around which identities later swirled.[322] The first recorded westward explorer of the Atlantic was Plato’s near-contemporary, the island-hopping Pytheas of Massalia (Marseille), who made it to Britain, Orkney and Shetland and possibly even Iceland in the fourth century BCE.[323] Long thereafter, the Atlantic would be a realm of imaginary islands - the Fortunate Isles, St Brendan’s Isle, the Island of the Seven Cities and Ultima Thule, among others - before Europeans learned that it was indeed a sea fringed with many insular formations, from Orkney and Shetland in the north to the Canaries and the Azores in mid-Atlantic and the Greater and Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean.[324] All had their own infra-Atlantic histories before trans-Atlantic contact and their inhabitants would continue to live such histories even when they became more deeply implicated in an emergent Atlantic world.
The Atlantic gradually came into focus as a sea with islands, but was it also a sea of islands? Pacific studies prompt the question.[325] In that oceanic history, the paradigm of a sea of islands expresses Indigenous consciousness of attachment and importance; it reframes as plenitude what outsiders put down as the absence or insignificance of territories in the ‘Earth’s empty quarter’.[326] There were no Indigenous Atlantic equivalents to the immense colonising voyages of the Polynesian navigators, which made islands into stepping-stones across vast oceanic expanses.
The ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’, populated by islands from the Canaries to the Azores and joined together by Atlantic winds, could hardly compare with these, though the Caribbean islands and the adjacent coastal regions of southern North America and northern South America have a claim to be a ‘trans-oceanic Mediterranean’ or even an ‘Atlantic Oceania’, albeit on a far smaller scale than anything within the Pacific.[327] Territories such as Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha and St Helena remained remote from each other and from the five continents until well into the twentieth century, and for much of the eighteenth century, St Helena had functioned as a gateway to the Indian Ocean world while the Falkland Islands ‘open[ed]... facilities of passing into the Pacifick Ocean’.[328] These were islands in the Atlantic, but not quite of it.Mediating between the Atlantic, its islands and the lands that surround it are its coasts and beaches. All maritime activity begins from these regions where land and sea meet but their potential within Atlantic history has only just begun to be explored.[329] Within the historiography of the Pacific, the beach holds a special place as a metaphor for the meeting of cultures and a space where mutual understandings and misunderstandings were performed and identities continually reshaped.[330] The beach has not functioned as illuminatingly in Atlantic historiography, perhaps because of a later European association with the seaside as a location for leisure and pleasure, aesthetics and athletics.[331] Infra-Atlantic history might restore significance to such spaces by doing what Henry David Thoreau punningly called ‘littorally... walking down to the shore, and throwing your line into the Atlantic’, to look for more local and bounded objects of study where the ‘ocean is but a larger lake’.[332] Here were points of interaction between the human and the natural (especially protein-rich resources such as fish) and between land and sea - oceanic histories in miniature, in effect.
The histories of frontiers and borderlands have been largely terrestrial and located within the interiors of continents but there is great potential for examination of the ‘saltwater frontier’ where incomers and indigenes, especially, met from the early fifteenth century in Africa and from the early sixteenth century onwards in the Americas, both Caribbean and continental. Exchange and interchange, followed often by conflict and dispossession, took place first in these liminal spaces, as native habitations were transformed into bridgeheads for settlers to protect themselves by sea or project their power over land, for example along the eastern seaboard of seventeenth-century North America.[333] ‘The American coasts can be said to have been Europe’s initial New World frontier’, and that idea can be extended around the edges of the Atlantic world, especially along its western shores.[334]
Infra-Atlantic history extends well beyond the moment of early interactions. After the initial period of encounter and occupation, European powers attempted to integrate new territories and subjects into their networks of sovereignty and authority. Imperial entanglement was always incomplete because a patchwork of corridors and enclaves rendered empires uneven in their penetration and, like any network, made up as much of holes as linkages. Within the Atlantic world, coasts, rivers, estuaries and islands were sites for the elaboration of empire, both on the fringes of continents and in archipelagos like the West Indies where empires competed for control cheek by jowl with one another in contested ‘interpolity microregions’ well into the nineteenth century.[335] When examined at this granular level of micro-regions, infra-Atlantic history shows that two features of Atlantic history usually assumed to have an elective affinity, connectivity and integration, were only contingently related: to be enmeshed within Atlantic networks was not necessarily to be part of an ever more entangled Atlantic world. Yet infra-Atlantic history, may still appear superficial, in the literal sense of the term. Like most species of Atlantic history, it starts on the surface of land and ocean and builds upwards and outwards from there. To go deeper, we need to consider ‘su^-Atlantic’ history.