The Atlantic World A History, 1400 - 1888

by Egerton, Douglas R.; Games, Alison; Landers, Jane G.; Lane, Kris; Wright, Donald R.

• ISBN13: 9780882952451
• ISBN10: 0882952455
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-20
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

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 reconceptualise 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 organised, 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.

Author Biography

Douglas R. Egerton is Professor of History at Le Moyne College. He is the author of the forthcoming Death or Liberty: African Americans and the 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 of 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 Africa. 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).

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Method	p. 4
Selected Readings	p. 6
Conceptualizing the Atlantic World	p. 9
The Atlantic and Its Continental Boundaries	p. 13
Atlantic People in 1450	p. 17
Europeans	p. 19
Africans	p. 22
Americans	p. 24
Geographic Constraints and Cultural Divergences	p. 30
Selected Readings	p. 37
The Roots of an Atlantic System, 1100-1492	p. 41
Europeans and Sugar in the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic	p. 44
Into the Atlantic	p. 49
Sub-Saharan States and Empires	p. 54
Portugal's "Guinea of Cape Verde"	p. 58
Lower Guinea and the Kongo	p. 64
The North Atlantic	p. 66
An Age of Territorial Expansion: The Empires of the Western Atlantic	p. 68
Selected Readings	p. 75
Iberians in America, 1492-1550	p. 77
The Spanish in the Caribbean	p. 81
The Portuguese in Brazil	p. 88
Spanish Mainland Expeditions	p. 92
Spanish Expansion into South America	p. 101
Establishing Spanish Rule	p. 104
Spain's Advancing Frontiers	p. 109
Selected Readings	p. 112
European Rivalries and Atlantic Repercussions, 1500-1650	p. 115
A Fractured Unity	p. 117
Taking Quarrels out of Europe	p. 129
The Western Atlantic: Entrepreneurs, Pirates, and Trading Posts	p. 131
North Atlantic Settlements	p. 138
Undermining Spain: Africa and Commerce	p. 142
The Rise of the Dutch	p. 143
Selected Readings	p. 147
Labor, Migration, and Settlement: Europeans and Indians, 1500-1800	p. 149
Indian Labor Systems	p. 150
European Laborers and Migrants	p. 161
Settlements	p. 168
Plantations	p. 173
Family Settlement and Religious Migrations	p. 178
Selected Readings	p. 183
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas, 1580-1780	p. 185
Appetites for Sugar-and Labor	p. 187
Captives and Trade Goods in Africa	p. 191
The Middle Passage	p. 197
Slavery in the Americas	p. 202
Maroon Settlements and Slave Revolts	p. 208
Selected Readings	p. 213
Trade in the Atlantic World, 1580-1780	p. 217
Urban and Regional Transformations	p. 218
The Cultures of Consumption	p. 228
Transformations in Africa in the Wake of the Slave Trade	p. 240
Selected Readings	p. 251
Racial and Cultural Mixture in the Atlantic World, 1450-1830	p. 255
The Atlantic's New People	p. 256
Africa's Coastal Cosmopolitans	p. 258
Cultural Transformations in the Western Atlantic	p. 263
European and African Ethnicities in the Western Atlantic	p. 266
Indigenous Responses and Cultural Innovations	p. 271
Free People of Color	p. 278
Selected Readings	p. 288
The Atlantic Shrinks: War, Reform, and Resistance, 1689-1790	p. 291
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Warfare and Its Consequences	p. 293
Total War	p. 296
The Regional Impact of Warfare	p. 298
War, Peace, and Geographic Ignorance	p. 303
An Age of Imperial Reform	p. 305
Resistance and Rebellion	p. 315
Selected Readings	p. 320
The First Imperial Rupture, 1754-1783	p. 323
The Nine Years' War	p. 325
The Reshaping of the Americas	p. 331
British Imperial Reform and Anglo-American Political Culture	p. 334
The War Widens	p. 341
Declaring Independence and Building Republics	p. 343
Loyalists: Red, White, and Black	p. 348
More Atlantic Repercussions	p. 353
Selected Readings	p. 357
Revolutions and Counterrevolutions: The Season of Irony, 1789-1804	p. 361
What is That in Your Hand?	p. 362
Where Does It Bloom?	p. 365
The Tricolor in Black and White	p. 365
The Reign of Terror	p. 371
Washington's Dilemma	p. 372
The Thermidorian Reaction	p. 375
The Haitian Détente	p. 377
The Revolutions of 1800 and 1804?	p. 385
Selected Readings	p. 389
The Ebb and Flow of Empire, 1804-1830	p. 391
Independence: Northern South America	p. 395
Independence: The Southern Cone	p. 399
Independence: New Spain	p. 405
Independence: Brazil	p. 410
British Triangulation and Neoimperialism	p. 414
Atlantic Africa	p. 416
The Monroe Doctrine	p. 419
The Panama Congress	p. 422
Selected Readings	p. 425
Industrialism and a New Imperialism, 1780-1850	p. 427
Mercantile Capitalism Transformed	p. 427
The Market Revolution and the American South	p. 430
Thomas Jefferson: Unwitting Industrial Promoter	p. 434
An Army of Redressers	p. 439
Migration in an Industrial Age	p. 441
Economic Neo-Colonialism	p. 447
Atlantic Africa: New Exports, Cheap Imports, Heightened Dependence	p. 452
Selected Readings	p. 458
Abolishing Slavery in the Western Atlantic, 1750-1888	p. 461
Abolition: The Early Years	p. 462
Abolition by Law	p. 468
Stopping the Slave Trade	p. 473
The End of Slavery in Europe and the Americas	p. 476
Abolition and Africa	p. 482
Labor in the Post-Emancipation Period	p. 485
Reconfiguring the Global Process	p. 491
Selected Readings	p. 493
Index	p. 494
Special Topics
Atlantic Distance and Time	p. 11
Maps and Our Sense of Things	p. 12
Transatlantic Voyages before 1492	p. 25
Spices of the East?	p. 44
Dependent on Wind for Propulsion	p. 50
Ecological Imperialism	p. 52
Early Iberian Slavery	p. 59
Food, Commerce, Consumption, and Catholicism	p. 67
Captives	p. 79
Man's Best Friend? War Dogs and the Spanish Conquest of America	p. 85
Pero Vaz de Caminha's Letter to the King of Portugal	p. 88
American Food Crops in Eurasia	p. 91
Tenochtitlán	p. 95
The Legend of El Dorado	p. 108
The Day of the Dead	p. 124
Enclosure	p. 128
Pirates	p. 133
The Fur Trade	p. l39
Promotional Literature	p. 166
Who was Pocahontas?	p. 174
What's In a Name?	p. 176
Holy Women	p. 180
The Slave Trade and Numbers	p. 186
The Atlantic Slave Trade and History	p. 190
Warfare and Slave Trading: Chicken or Egg?	p. 193
In Exchange for Slaves	p. 194
Confusing Slavery with Cotton	p. 205
Down the Road to Underdevelopment	p. 221
Atlantic Drugs and Popular Music	p. 228
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