Atlantic History: Concept and Contours

by Bernard Bailyn

Atlantic history is a newly and rapidly developing field of historical study. Bringing together elements of early modern European, African, and American history--their common, comparative, and interactive aspects--Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to the independence movements and the globalizing industrial revolution. In these probing essays, Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study.

He first considers Atlantic history as a subject of historical inquiry--how it evolved as a product of both the pressures of post-World War II politics and the internal forces of scholarship itself. He then outlines major themes in the subject over the three centuries following the European discoveries. The vast contribution of the African people to all regions of the West, the westward migration of Europeans, pan-Atlantic commerce and its role in developing economies, racial and ethnic relations, the spread of Enlightenment ideas--all are Atlantic phenomena.

In examining both the historiographical and historical dimensions of this developing subject, Bailyn illuminates the dynamics of history as a discipline.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, School, World History, Theory, American History, European History

160 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2005

About the author

Bernard Bailyn is an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He has been a professor at Harvard since 1953. Bailyn has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice (in 1968 and 1987). In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

In reading a book like this, I am struck by the way in which Bernard Bailyn is not only an immensely skilled historian of Atlantic History [1], but he is also a thoughtful and skilled writer about Atlantic History as a field of study, in which he modestly does not focus on his own considerable contributions to the field but rather on the broad scope of research areas within the field as well as its origins at a particular time in history where the connections between the United States (and Latin America and Africa) and the European world became both highly important and also somewhat politicized.  The fact that Atlantic History came to prominence in the aftermath of World War II when the United States was being urged to continue its involvement with Europe in the aftermath of Hitler's defeat and in a period of growing independence within Africa suggests that while Atlantic History involves a lot of people who are not necessarily politically motivated, that the political context of the times has a lot to do with what historical questions are asked and researched.

This book is a short one at just over 100 pages and is divided into two sections.  The first section of the book deals with the idea of Atlantic History, and in this section the author talks about the history of Atlantic History as a field of study.  The author examines the influence of Braudel and demonstrates that Atlantic Historians have tended to aggregate regions through connections rather than disaggregate them as Braudel did.  Bailyn comments that Atlantic History is far more than imperial history, but that it connects matters of social and economic and intellectual history together, demonstrating the way that linkages penetrated deep into the areas connected through trade and population movements, sometimes in deeply unexpected ways, like Basque local gentry benefiting from imperial service to demonstrate their distinctive culture.  The second part of the book looks at the contours of Atlantic History.  It is here where Bailyn shows his mastery of the relevant historiography, providing a great deal of examples that show how paying attention to Atlantic History gives one insights that one would not have if one was looking at isolated regions alone, such as the advanced nature of the spread of intellectual ideas (some good, some bad) through imperial channels in both English North America (which got less Rousseau, which is for the best) as well as Latin America.

In reading this book, one is aware that Bailyn himself clearly has some larger political concerns even if his history does not appear to be determined by them.  His expertise in New England history notwithstanding, he also shows himself to be deeply interested in the savagery of the marchlands of the 17th century European settler colonies on the littoral of North America and the ways that any analogies or reminders of home were treasured by all parties involved in that brutal and barbarous environment.  Likewise, the author is clearly someone who is opposed to the frequent American tendency to be involved in isolationist thinking and behavior.  The author clearly supports an interventionist approach between North America and Europe and also appears to have a high degree of interest in having North America continue to receive continental thinking, something I am far more dubious about myself than the author appears to be.  Thankfully, Bailyn is a sufficiently witty writer and a sufficiently light touch with his material that his evident desires for increased integration between Europe and North America, to say nothing of Latin America and Africa, are not argued in a way that is offensive to a reader with a different and less pro-European worldview.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

[Emily Kamm · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a fine introduction to the historiography of the field, brief and easy to read. Bailyn hardly paid more than lip service to the role of Africans and Indigenous Americans in the evolution of the interconnected Atlantic world system, but that's also not surprising. It was a perfectly good overview of the kind of Atlantic scholarship I want to avoid.

[George Siehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book the historian Bernard Bailyn presents two essays. The first, the "Concept" of the subtitle is a historiographic survey of the scholarly literature relating to the "Idea" of Atlantic History. The second essay is more focused on the actual history of this vast geographic area and is likely to be of more interest to a general reader.

The first will be of primary interest to scholars, but does provide a guide to the literature for serious readers as well. Bailyn here traces the evolution of the idea of Atlantic History from its first intimation by journalist Walter Lippmann in World War I to a broader array of scholarly suggestions following WWII. Bailyn points out contemporary developments during and after the latter war that fed the gestation of the idea. These included Churchill's Atlantic Charter formulation, the creation of NATO, and the formation of the Atlantic Council and other similar groups in the United States.

Earlier areas of interest in the Atlantic arena included the many works on exploration, empire, and naval warfare. These had been well developed, he writes, but did not address the broader vision of Atlantic History. What was needed to raise interesting new questions for research was a focus that integrated the many themes that had been discussed in the past. Atlantic History provides that larger stage. Beginning in the Fifties many historians began that work of integration, a journey Bailyn then traces.

The "Contours" essay also identifies scores of books detailing aspects of history within this new framework. But it also provides details of that history, quoting from those sources. It is here that the general reader may come to enjoy this book. The history he covers is heavily focused on the era of empire building and the onset of the industrial revolution. While more modern aspects are not dealt with in detail, one can engage with what is there.

One question I have had for some time is how did Spain, given its early reaping of treasure from the New World, fail to maintain its prominence in world affairs rather than being pushed aside by the Dutch, English, and French. Bailyn details the interplay between these forces. A key element in Spain's fading came from its failure to develop manufacturing. As a result, when the other nations did develop industries they were able to market their goods in the Spanish colonies. His description of the fraud and deceit employed is fascinating. He notes that the silver obtained from New World sales by various manufacturers of other nations "was a major (perhaps even the determining) factor in the development of capitalism in western Europe," quoting one of his sources. Another writer noted, "Spain kept the cow and the rest of Europe drank the milk."

"Much of Europe's exploitation of Spain's American empire rested on smuggling, on corruption, on fraud of all kinds..." he writes. Spain was not the only victim of such unlawful behavior, only the most victimized. Thus, the diminishment of Spain, treasure fleets notwithstanding.

In North America, the French avoided the limits on molasses imports to Boston by devious means. He writes that records showed that 384 hogsheads of molasses entered Boston in 1754-1755, although "40,000 hogsheads per year were needed to keep the province's sixty-three distilleries going, none of which ceased operation." This is history anyone can savor.

More coverage of modern events would have been nice. But, the historians who were writing Atlantic History in the last half of the 20th Century were focusing on the past, as historians do, not on what was happening on their doorstep. Nonetheless "Contours" is engaging reading.

[Daphna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This teeny-tiny book--only 110 pages, and those each about half the size and length of a typically formatted volume--has two main goals: first, to write the history of a historiographical trend, showing how the field of Atlantic history came to be and how it has changed over the past half-century; and second, to sketch the three major phases in early modern Atlantic history itself. In the first chapter, Bailyn persuasively demonstrates that the idea of an interconnected Atlantic world--one in which the big ocean is, to use one historian's formulation, an "inland sea"--came about in the wake of post-WWII interest in integration. The same intellectual and political currents that brought about NATO and the Marshall Plan encouraged historians, too, to see an East and West linked by Judeo-Christian ideals that could help stop the spread of communism. Only later did interest in demography and migration make the slave trade part of the story. Throughout, though, the political and ideological desire for a narrative of Atlantic unity was bolstered by empirical data: as one historian writes, the “Atlantic Community as a cultural fact was a matter of everyday experience” in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The second chapter is even more lively. Bailyn acknowledges the complexity and variability of circumstances in "world in motion" whose "dominant characteristics shifted repeatedly," yet he also persuasively lays out three distinct historical eras. The settlement period, which corresponds roughly to the late-16th to mid-17th century, is characterized by savage barbarism, by hostilities between all sides who came into contact with each other, and by war whose purpose was not only tactical but genocidal. Civilizations aimed to destroy other civilizations, and everything was "fluid, indeterminate, without stable structures or identities." Countering this trend, but equally destructive, were those who saw the New World as a New Jerusalem--those who, spurred by rampant utopianism, imagined a blank canvas on which to draw up a new society. After about a century, though--that is, after the destruction accomplished its goal--development and integration began to take place: national boundaries were consolidated, communication systems were put into place (for more on this far-flung network of merchants and missionaries, see Alison Games's "Web of Empire"), and legal and illegal trade led to prosperity and collaboration. The third and final phase of early modern Atlantic history begins with the Creole (defined here, as elsewhere, as New World-born descendants of European parents) ascendency. Increasingly self-aware, colonists began to see themselves as different and their home governments as selfish and unwilling to protect the colonies' best interests. Their revolutions--from France to Haiti to the United States--inspire each other and create governments more committed to the individual rights and the rule of law.

Overall, this was an engaging read, though a specialized one: it's useful to me as I prepare to read a variety of Atlantic histories--I now have a taxonomy into which i can fit the historical approaches of a variety of scholars--but I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone who didn't already have a need/desire to learn about the field. (The first half, which provides detailed summaries of influential pieces of Atlantic history, is particularly esoteric). I couldn't help feeling that this study would be more suited for a journal article than a book--it's useful, but the fact that I had to pay $12 for something this small is a bit of a cheat.

[Gregory Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some very interesting historical concepts, as it outlines a lot of the key elements for the Atlantic history perspective. By no means is this book popular history, and for such a short book, the information is dense and very scholarly in nature.

[AFMasten · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that this is a masterfully written book. Readable, yet so packed with information. The first part tells us how the field of Atlantic history evolved. Where it came from and what it is not. It is not the sum of a bunch of national histories, for example. It evolves from research, from demographic history, social history, political history, and the history of thought. The second part tells us of what it consists. It is a history of a world that was multitudinous, embracing the people, and circumstances of four continents, countless regional economies, languages, and social structures. The variations are enormous, yet there is a history of another order – a broader, more general and inclusive history, Atlantic in its essence, common to all the manifest events and to all the variant circumstances in Europe, Africa, and America. Those three elements cover the three centuries 1) violent instability, 2) dynamic economic networks, and 3) Enlightenment Ideals.
In this contested "marchland," life was literally barbarous because all were intent on destroying the civility - European, Native American, African - that had once existed. Commercial webs – social, cultural, and demographic (of family, illegal trade, slavery, and religion) – developed as the Atlantic world matured. Ideas circulated too, arresting scientific, Enlightenment, constitutional thought from all over the Atlantic world. Successful creole leaders (American born of European ancestry) gain a sense of independence and usher in (at different times and in differing circumstances) the final phase of early modern Atlantic life: the rights of man, the freedom to work, think, speak, and write...a government where innocence, humanity, and peace will reign and where equality and freedom will triumph under the rule of law. These ideals circulated, survived, and, however unrealized, persisted, and continue to unify the cultures of the Atlantic World.

[Grub Street Hack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bailyn’s Atlantic History seems to be made as an introduction to students of Atlantic history. As its subtitle suggests, the book is divided into two parts. The first part, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” outlines the historiography of Atlantic history. Bailyn rejects Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World as the genesis of Atlantic history, calling it “disaggregative” and “based on a formulation essentially epistemological not historical” (4-5). Instead, Bailyn looks to imperial history and the efforts of Walter Lippmann as Atlantic history’s parents. Lippmann, however, is portrayed not as an innovational thinker, but as ethnocentric. Bailyn’s portrayal of Lippmann’s view of the “Atlantic community” is akin to our understanding of the West, and Lippmann’s efforts to solidify this framework are tied by Bailyn to an anti-communist, pro-Christian ideology that believed that the Atlantic world was part of an inherited Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian tradition.

In the second part of his book, entitled “On the Contours of Atlantic History,” Bailyn offers a brief history of the Atlantic. Of note, he describes a rough pattern to Atlantic history: First, the Iberian powers conquer and flex hegemony in the sixteenth century; followed by successful challenges to Spain’s dominance by the English, French, and Dutch; then a power struggle for power among North Atlantic powers; and finally the ultimate success of the British. He also places special emphasis on the role of smuggling by writing “that nowhere was imperial governance, designed abroad, absolute, its mandates uniformly enforced. Everywhere the formal precepts and injunctions were modified, compromised, and redirected in response to the pressures of local situations. ‘I obey’ was the formula of Spanish-American administrators faced with rigid decrees, ‘but I do not execute’” (81).

[Emmanuel-francis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. This is a collection of earlier essays by Professor Bailyn, as such, I was both aware and had an earlier sympathy for the arguments made within. Yet, to see them brought together was nothing short of incredible. I guarantee that you will not see the world the same way again.

The arguments for a transnational view of the history of the Atlantic region strike me as common-sense. As the professor acknowledges, a work which properly synthesises the region's history is yet to be written. Yet what exists at present, certainly makes the case for acceptance of the Atlantic view being basic to historical understanding.

[Flynn Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential distillation of Atlantic history’s past, present, and continually-evolving future. Bailyn presents the Atlantic world itself as a necessary crucible for modernity. Without it, much of what defines modern politics, economies, and ideologies would make little sense.

[Lonerr · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting history book that covers many aspects concerning the multitude of regions across the Atlantic ocean.

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really slow start but it picks up halfway through.

[Aura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible book! It practically says that the author himself was the main historiographical starter of the field of Atlantic History, dismissing all previous works and situating origins of the field outside History itself. It brings forward an Eurocentric perspective on Atlantic History, stating that the interactions among regions began in an effort to expand "European cultures". It glorifies British empire while trashing the Spanish and dismissing the accomplishments of Dutch and Portuguese. Moreover, he dismisses the actual impact of Africa, only briefly mentioning the impact slaves had on the Americas. Overall a horrid, reductionist, synthesis which shows historical conservatism and a lack of knowledge on recent scholarship on Latin America, Africa and transnationalism.

[Alexander Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is comprised of two sections. The first sections traces the developments in the history profession and the world at large that led to the concept of Atlantic history. The second part of the book outlines what Atlantic history is. This book is purely an introductory reading for those unfamiliar with the concept of Atlantic history. Its concise and can easily be read in a few hours. Atlantic history is a growing field and this book is ten years old, but it is still a valuable introductory text.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short historiography examines disciplinary interest in the Atlantic world emerged within academic scholarship. Bailey finds that scholarship tends to be fragmentary and aggregate, focusing on a particular aspect of the Atlantic Worlds interrelations, usually national, and he concludes that a true history of shared aspects has yet to be written.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good synopsis of the origin of "Atlantic History" as a historical field of study, and a quick run-through of some of the most salient new research to emerge in this realm. At 111 pages, it's a breeze.

[Katie Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very concise introduction to the field of Atlantic History

[Jason Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has some good information but is written with no thought to the enjoyment of the reader. It is incredibly boring.

[Sebastian Fuentes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read for understanding how Atlantic History as a field of study came about and how the application of Atlantic history as an analytical tool may be applied.

[Mike Emett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for the "Atlantic World" and "Colonial American History" graduate seminars.