Atlantic History: Concept and Contours [Hardcover]

Bernard Bailyn (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674016882 | ISBN-13: 978-0674016880 | Publication Date: March 31, 2005 | Edition: First

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.

(20050401)

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Atlantic History] will provoke and inspire future work in the field because it poses all the right questions: What is a civilization? What are the phenomena that tie it together? How do the participants in its making perceive it?...Perhaps the largest theme of Atlantic History is the story of how this boisterous economy stimulated thinking along liberal conceptions of individual rights and the abolition of human bondage.
--Hans L. Eicholz (Claremont Review of Books 20071005)

In part thanks to Bailyn's advocacy, inspiration, and entrepreneurship, the richness and popularity of Atlantic history have burgeoned astonishingly...Bailyn's purpose in his short and invaluable Atlantic History is to trace and celebrate the evolution of Atlantic history as an idea, and to set out his personal interpretation of its main contours in the period between the earliest European invasions of the Americas and the American Revolution.
--Linda Colley (New York Review of Books )

This work is more than a genealogy of a concept; it is a deep meditation on the nature of historical inquiry. While acknowledging the influence of public discourse, especially during the formative post-World War II period, Bailyn again and again asserts an inherent internal logic, based on "reasons that lay deep in historical thinking" as the source and motive for early explorations in Atlantic history...We are in Bailyn's debt as perhaps the foremost proponent of Atlantic history. Through his own work and his annual "International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825" at Harvard beginning in 1995, he has trained a generation and more of young historians who account for much of the excitement and vitality in the field today.
--Phyllis Whitman Hunter (Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, 2006 )

As Bernard Bailyn describes in the opening pages of his most recent book, Atlantic history has rapidly become a popular and significant field within the broader discipline of history...Now, from his vantage point as one of the leading figures in this field, Bailyn has written a valedictory examination of its development and major issues. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours will serve current and future historians as both an effective introduction to the field and an advanced exploration of its historiography. As is the case with Bailyn's many other books, Atlantic History is written in a clear and concise fashion...Regardless of the reader's level of experience, it will be an enjoyable and fascinating exploration of a global perspective on the Atlantic world. Like so much of his scholarship, Bernard Bailyn's most recent book is certain to find a place of prominence on required reading lists and professors' bookshelves. I join with others in recommending it to readers.
--William E. Doody (Journal of World History )

This might be one of the shorter books published by Bernard Bailyn in his long and productive career, but it promises to be one of his more influential...Atlantic History delineates a vast research agenda that calls for attention...and it also provides evidence, deriving from his own research and reflection, of just how fruitful the outcomes will be for those willing to pursue the lines and methods he suggests.
--Nicholas Canny (International Journal of Maritime History )

Bailyn's new book is...typically elegant and stylish and is intended to shape this amorphous new field by showing where Atlantic history came from and by advancing a theoretical apparatus within which Atlantic scholars should work...He brilliantly and concisely distils his past statements on how Atlantic history developed...He manages to do one of the hardest things a historian can do--describe the process by which a multitudinous world in motion came together around common themes--with skill and economy. He does much, in short, to bring order out of chaos and shows how we might begin to have a clear definition of a complex but very exciting historical subject. Once more, as so often in the past, we are in his debt.
--Trevor Burnard (Journal of American Studies )

[Bailyn’s] Atlantic is a transnational and international vision of admirable, even intimidating, range...[Although] Bailyn’s method and findings will not find universal agreement, they deserve universal respect. It is a formal and methodological virtue of this style of writing that it provides material with which others can work: those of more Francophone sensibility will find here much that is ‘good to think with’; fellow empiricists will find that there is much matter in it. For that, and much else, all of us interested in the Atlantic owe Bailyn a huge debt of gratitude.
--Michael Braddick (History Transnational )

About the Author

Bernard Bailyn is Adams University Professor, Emeritus, and Director of the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes) and The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (National Book Award), both published by Harvard.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; First edition (March 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674016882
• ISBN-13: 978-0674016880
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #328,453 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mapping Atlantic History, October 16, 2005

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Hardcover)

After reading Bailyn's "ATLANTIC HISTORY: Concept and Contours" many of the more recent histories of North America I've read suddenly make a lot more sense, histories such as Alan Taylor's AMERICAN COLONIES, and WILLIAM COOPER' S TOWN, Linebaugh and Rediker's radical THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA, as well as Victoria Freeman's DISTANT RELATIONS to name just a few.

Bailyn provides admirable summary of the how the "concept" of Atlantic history was launched -- by Walter Lippman in an essay justifying America's involvement in the Great War -- and then taken up by politicians in the wake of WWII as justification for the such organizations as NATO whose mission was to bind together more tightly the interests of the states of Western "Christendom" against those of the Communistic (and godless) East. Some historians supported this new notion with tendentious misreadings of history, but others of a more empirical bent began to undertake histories that looked beyond the old narratives of individual nation states and focused instead the commonalities of conquest and colonization in the Americas and Africa as practiced by Westerners.

Bailyn dicusses the "contours" of Atlantic history by outlining the discipline's key findings, elucidating its key ideas, citing its indispensible texts, and historic techniques such as statistical investigations, e.g., the construction of a slave trade database compiled from actual records which demonstrate how the slave system served to underwrite the entire system of trade in the "inland sea" of the Atlantic. For the amateur historian, and perhaps even for the professional, Bailyn's "Notes" section is exceedingly useful as it offers a rich survey of the most important texts that have emerged in this rich and rapidly expanding field of study.

Here are a couple of exemplary passages from the book. "In its first, original phase Atlantic history in the broadest sense is the story of the creation of a vast new marchland of European civilization, an ill-defined, irregular outer borderland, thrust into the world of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and in the outer reaches of the British archipelago. Life in this contested marchland was, literally, barbarous: that is in its initial stages it was, in large areas, a scene of conflict with alien people, alien in language and mores, hostile in purpose, savage and uncultivated. Europeans, native Americans and displaced Africans, all -- each from their own point of view -- saw it that way. For all, others were intent on destroying the civility -- European, native American, African -- that had once existed. Latin America, to paraphrase John Elliott, was no wilderness; the conquest made it that." Page 63.

Bailyn's notes the barbarity of the conquerors did not vary by religious conviction or national origin. "Puritan New England was not different from Mexico or Peru. '"It was a fearful sight,"' the pious gentle Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote of New England's Pequot War (1637), "'to see [the Indians] frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.'" Page 65. Indeed the Dutch and English conquerors read accounts of the Spanish conquistadors and were more than familiar with their techniques. The Dutch, having been subjects of Spain, may have been less frequently cruel in their dealings with native peoples than others, but were capable of exceeding cruelty. For instance, Dutch soldiers in a raid near New Amsterdam cut some of the native children in pieces "before the eyes of their parents, and threw the pieces thrown into the fire or into the water." Pg. 63. Clearly, the Spanish were not the only conquistadors.

I don't mean to give the impression that Bailyn speaks only of the barbarous first or conquest phase, he also does a admirable summary of the colonial phase. Once the domination of indigenous people's was relatively complete, the colonists and those who stayed at home in Europe profited mightily from the slave trade: the labor system that wove together, for instance, the economic lives of New England farmers who sold their agricultural products to the slave masters in the Caribbean, so that they could buy fine lace and fine wine and other items from Europe and so keep maintain the appearance of civility. Labor for the sugar, rice, tobacco and cotton plantations came primarily from West Africa, but was also supplied by the exportation of the many dispossessed, conquered and persecuted people in England, Ireland, Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe. Athouigh Bailyn doesn't say it explicity, the economic imperatives of globalization have been around for a long, long time.

I don't mean to suggest that Bailyn concentrates only on the most barbarous elements of Atlantic history. He offers insight into how certain cultural aspects drove and supported this vast, complex process. Quakers are, for instance, a paramount example of a tightly knit but far-flung commmunity who profited mightily in the chaotic marketplace of that time both because of the bonds of trust forged in their communal worship, and also and because there were Quakers at every entrepot in the system, relaying intelligence on the fluctuating prices of slaves, sugar, rum, tobacco, whale oil, etc. As Bailyn notes, black markets, corruption, bribery existed side by side with "official trade" and so it best served those who could outwit the authorities, or those authorities who could actually enforce their authority. Ideas flowed as well, ideas of liberation, revolt and democracy. Bolivar, son of a wealthy planter, educated in Europe, knew of Montesqieu, Madison, Jefferson and Rousseau -- not unusual for a member of the Atlantic elite.

A marvelous work of tremendous reach and scholarly erudition packed into just a weekend's reading, "Atlantic History" takes stock of this new current of historical research and points presciently toward the new directions it may take.