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More About This Title Atlantic World
English
Before the voyage of Columbus in 1492, the Atlantic Ocean stood as a barrier to contact between the people (and their ideas and institutions), plants, animals, and microbes of Eurasia and Africa on the one hand and the Americas on the other. Following Columbus’s voyage, the Atlantic turned into a conduit for transferring these things among the four continents bordering the ocean in ways that affected people living on each of them.
The appearance of The Atlantic World marks an important achievement, for it stands out as the first successful attempt to combine the many strains of Atlantic history into a comprehensive, thoughtful narrative. At the core of this ground-breaking and eloquently written survey lies a consideration of the relationships among people living in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with a focus on how these relationships played important roles—often the most important roles—in how the histories of the people involved unfolded. The ways of life of millions of people changed, sometimes for the better but often for the worse, because of their relationship to the larger Atlantic world. And unlike existing texts dealing with one or another aspect of Atlantic history, The Atlantic World does not subjugate the history of Africa and South America to those of the “British Atlantic” or Europe.
With historians and other scholars beginning to reconceptualize the Atlantic World as a dynamic zone of exchange in which people, commodities, and ideas circulated from the mid-fifteenth century until the dawn of the twentieth century, the interconnections between people along the Atlantic rim create a coherent region, one in which events in one corner inevitably altered the course of history in another. As this book testifies, Atlantic history, properly understood, is history without borders—in which national narratives take backstage to the larger examination of interdependence and cultural transmission.
Conceived of and produced by a team of distinguished authors with countless hours of teaching experience at the college level, this thoughtfully organized, beautifully written, and lavishly illustrated book will set the standard for all future surveys intended as a core text for the new and rapidly growing courses in Atlantic History.
English
Douglas R. Egerton is Professor of History at Le Moyne College. He is the author of the forthcoming Death or Liberty: African Americans and American Revolution (2007), He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (1999), Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (1993), and Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism (1989).
Alison Games teaches Atlantic history at Georgetown University, where she is the Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History. She is the author of Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), winner of the Theodore Saloutos Prize in Immigration and Ethnic History. She has written extensively on different aspects of Atlantic history, and her articles have appeared in such journals as Slavery and Abolition, Itinerario, the American Historical Review, and the William and Mary Quarterly.
Jane Landers is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and the author and editor of a number of books on Africans and the circum-Atlantic world, among them the prize-winning Black Society in Spanish Florida.
Kris Lane is Associate Professor of History at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His books include Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750 (1998) and Quito, 1599: City & Colony in Transition (2002). His other published works treat the topics piracy, Slavery, gold mining, headhunting, and witchcraft in colonial Ecuador and Colombia. He is currently completing a book on the early modern emerald trade.
Donald R. Wright is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at the State University of New York-Cortland, where he teaches African, African American, and world history. He is the author of The World and a Very Small Place in African: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia (2nd ed., 2004), and two books in Harlan Davidson’s American History Series: African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (2nd ed., 2000), and African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831 (1993).
English
Introduction 1
Method 4
Selected Readings 6
Chapter One. Conceptualizing the Atlantic World 9
The Atlantic and Its Continental Boundaries 13
Atlantic People in 1450 17
European 19
Africans 22
Americans 24
Geographic Constraints and Cultural Divergence 30
Selected Readings 37
Chapter Two. The Roots of an Atlantic System, 110-1492 41
Europeans and Sugar in the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic 44
Into the Atlantic 49
Sub-Saharan States and Empires 54
Portugal’s “Guinea of Cape Verde” 58
Lower Guinea and the Kongo 64
The North Atlantic 66
An Age of Territorial Expansion: The Empires of the Western Atlantic 68
Selected Readings 75
Chapter Three. Iberians in America, 1492-1550 77
The Spanish in the Caribbean 81
The Portuguese in Brazil 88
Spanish Mainland Expeditions 92
Spanish Expansion into South America 101
Establishing Spanish Rule 104
Spain’s Advancing Frontiers 109
Selected Readings 112
Chapter Four. European Rivalries and Atlantic Repercussions, 1500-1650 115
A Fractured Unity 117
Taking Quarrels out of Europe 129
The Western Atlantic Entrepreneurs, Pirates, and Trading Posts 131
North Atlantic Settlements 138
Undermining Spain: Africa and Commerce 142
The Rise of the Dutch 143
Selected Readings 147
Chapter Five. Labor, Migration, and Settlement: Europeans and Indians, 1500-1800 149
Indian Labor Systems 150
European Laborers and Migrants 161
Settlements 168
Plantations 173
Family Settlement and Religious Migrations 178
Selected Readings 183
Chapter Six. The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas, 1580-1780 185
Appetites for Sugar—and Labor 187
Captives and Trade Goods in Africa 191
The Middle Passage 197
Slavery in the Americas 202
Maroon Settlements and Slave Revolts 208
Selected Readings 213
Chapter Seven. Trade in the Atlantic World, 1580-1780 217
Urban and Regional Transformations 218
The Cultures of Consumption 228
Transformations in Africa in the Wake of the Slave Trade 240
Selected Readings 251
Chapter Eight. Racial and Cultural Mixture in the Atlantic World, 1450-1830 255
The Atlantic’s New People 256
Africa’s Coastal Cosmopolitans 258
Cultural Transformations in the Western Atlantic 263
European and Africa Ethnicities in the Western Atlantic 266
Indigenous Responses and Cultural Innovations 271
Free People of Color 278
Selected Readings 288
Chapter Nine. The Atlantic Shrinks: War, Reform, and Resistance, 1689-1790 291
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Warfare and Its Consequences 293
Total War 296
The Regional Impact of Warfare 298
War, Peace, and Geographic Ignorance 303
An Age of Imperial Reform 305
Resistance and Rebellion 315
Selected Readings 320
Chapter Ten. The First Imperial Rupture, 1754-1783 323
The Nine Years’ War 325
The Reshaping of the Americas 331
British Imperial Reform and Anglo-American Political Culture 334
The War Widens 341
Declaring Independence and Building Republics 343
Loyalists: Red, White, and Black 348
More Atlantic Repercussions 353
Selected Readings 357
Chapter Eleven. Revolutions and Counterrevolutions: The Season of Irony, 1789-1804 361
What is That in Your Hand? 362
Where Does It Bloom 365
The Tricolor in Black and White 365
The Reign of Terror 371
Washington’s Dilemma 372
The Thermidorian Reaction 375
The Haitian Détente 377
The Revolutions of 1800 and 1804? 385
Selected Readings 389
Chapter Twelve. The Ebb and Flow of Empire, 1804-1830 391
Independence: Northern South America 395
Independence: The Southern Cone 399
Independence: New Spain 405
Independence: Brazil 410
British Triangulation and Neoimperialism 414
Atlantic Africa 416
The Monroe Doctrine 419
The Panama Congress 422
Selected Readings 425
Chapter Thirteen. Industrialism and a New Imperialism, 1780-1850 427
Mercantile Capitalism Transformed 427
The Market Revolution and the American South 430
Thomas Jefferson: Unwitting Industrial Promoter 434
An Army of Redressers 439
Migration in an Industrial Age 441
Economic Neo-Colonialism 447
Atlantic Africa: New Exports, Cheap Imports, Heightened Dependence 452
Selected Readings 458
Chapter Fourteen. Abolishing Slavery in the Western Atlantic, 1750-1888 461
Abolition: The Early Years 462
Abolition by Law 468
Stopping the Slave Trade 473
The End of Slavery in Europe and the Americas 476
Abolition and Africa 482
Labor in the Post-Emancipation Period 485
Reconfiguring the Global Process 491
Selected Readings 493
Index 494
English
"I congratulate the authors of [The Atlantic World], who have not simply put together a comprehensive monograph about the Atlantic, but have put specialists from all the regions. They have produced a highly readable book not as a collection of articles, but as a joint written effort we seldom see. ...they may have presaged the way we all have to work in future collaborative schemes." (Dennis R. Hidalgo, Adelphi University, for H-Net Reviews, November 4, 2007)
"The authors' goal of writing a truly borderless and interconnected history of the Atlantic produces many new and provocative insights. ...Arguably the book's strongest accomplishment is the integration of West Africa into Atlantic history. ...a major contribution to the field of Atlantic history." (H-Net Reviews, November 5, 2007)
