Business History Review 85:2 (Summer 2012, forthcoming)
The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450-1850. Edited by Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. vii + 671 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, index. Hardback, $150.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-921087-9.
Reviewed by Michelle Craig McDonald
Oxford handbooks are among the most prestigious reference resources available to researchers, students, and the general public, providing feature essays by leading scholars and informed analyses of major topics and themes. It is fitting that Atlantic history, one of the most dynamic historical sub-disciplines of the last half century, be so recognized. Even better that the effort is shepherded by two of the field’s most prolific authors, Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan. Atlantic history, first developed and supported by Bernard Bailyn at Harvard and Philip Curtin and Jack Greene at Johns Hopkins, and subsequently expanded upon by generations of their respective students and others, seeks to demonstrate the ineradicableconnections between the European, African and American communities that border the Atlantic Ocean. Many of these former students appear in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, and in tracing and analyzing the movements of people, commodities, political and religious ideas, and cultural practices across and around the Atlantic Ocean, they move well beyond the national and imperial frameworks that dominated the early years of scholarship.
Atlantic history has already produced an extensive synthetic literature, some by the same editors and authors of this volume. Highlights includeThe British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by David Armitage and Michael Braddick (2002; second edition, 2009); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (2005); and Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, edited by Jack Greene and Philip Morgan (2009). But this work sets itself apart by offering a fresh narrative framework that eschews traditional chronological or geographical demarcations and is instead based on four themes: “emergence; consolidation; integration; and disintegration” (p. 2). Moreover, topics are considered comparatively, rather than as one piece of a larger geographic, international puzzle. And if some efforts are more successful than others, the editors’ choice to organize the volumes thirty-seven authors around such broad headings means that essays often divided into Native American, Iberian, or African histories, or alternatively political, social, or economic methodologies, appear alongside each other.
The benefits of casting the net so broadly are two-fold. First, there is a real balance of traditional and more imaginative analyses. Two of the field’s luminaries, for example, Stuart Schwartz and David Hancock, provide excellent overviews of the Iberian Atlantic and the world of merchants and commerce, spanning two and four centuries respectively. Such approaches create a firm foundation of time and space against which to measure other essays in their respective sections, such as those by David Shields and J.R. McNeill, who each tackle more oblique angles of the Atlantic experience. Shields explores “the extent and penetration of aesthetic experiences” through sensory perception (smell, taste, sound, sight, and touch), creatively recapturing a visceral impression of how the Atlantic felt to those who moved through and inhabited it (p. 131). McNeill, meanwhile, moves well beyond ideas of the “Columbian Exchange” to chart the environmental implications of Atlantic economic activity in a world where “pigs and plasmodia share the stage with people” (p. 289).
Second, the volume highlights the work of non-U.S.-based historians. Almost a third of the authors are based in Canada, Great Britain, France, Spain, and Latin America (although the absence of African voices is notable). And while not all of these scholars necessarily focus on the nation in which they currently reside, the wealth of non-English sources throughout the book attest to editors’ efforts to address what has, in the past, been an evidentiary bias towards Anglo-based research, and consequently British Atlantic scholarship. While incorporating the rich archival sources and research of other Atlantic languages does not necessarily preclude geographical bias, but it certainly helps to mitigate it in ways that other syncretic work has not.
The result is a rich, thoroughly international tapestry that weaves together more familiar histories about migratory movements and the peopling of the Americas, of the slave trade and slavery, and of political upheaval and revolution, with lesser known studies about household formation, colonial science and the natural world, and the development of maritime law. While most chapters still adopt a particular perspective, the composite result does much to underline the limitations of old-style imperial and nationalist history, and argue instead for the necessity of regional analyses. Better still, for classroom teaching purposes, most essays are succinct and accessible—the longest chapter, Matthew Edney’s essay on early Atlantic cartography, is a mere 26 pages, and then only because it contains so many useful illustrations. The editors scrupulously limited the other thirty-six entries to 19 pages or less. If there is one drawback, it is that this Oxford Handbook’s expansive thematic approach may also prove to be a liability; individual essays will no doubt appear on syllabi in short order but the volume as a whole is likely too long and expensive to work well as an undergraduate reader. It would, however, make an invaluable contribution to any college or university library, and should be on the bookshelves of everyone slated to teach the Atlantic survey next year.
Michelle Craig McDonald is associate professor of history at Stockton College. She is the author, most recently, ofPublic Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern, 1500-1800, with David Hancock, published by Pickering & Chatto (2011.) At present, she is working on a history of United States investment in the Caribbean coffee industry, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press.