Of Human Bondage: Creating an Atlantic History of Slavery

This article deals with the field of Atlantic history, which first rose to prominence in North America in the early 1990s. Based on a critical review of two recently published books that reflect this “new” historiographical current, it presents the various debates dividing the Atlanticist community, including the different ways of conceptualizing the Atlantic world, practicing Atlantic history, and envisioning the future of Atlantic studies. It argues that the Atlantic world should remain a simple historical framework instead of becoming the main object of investigation. The goal is thus to write a situated history that, while taking into account all historical actors, focuses on the redefinition and renegotiation of power relationships among individuals, groups, and socio-political formations in this interconnected world born out of European colonialism and imperialism.

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REIMAGINING THE AFRICAN-ATLANTIC ARCHIVE: METHOD, CONCEPT, EPISTEMOLOGY, ONTOLOGY

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s0021853714000061 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 55 (2) ◽

pp. 147-159 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

James H. Sweet

Keyword(s):

Atlantic World ◽

Atlantic History ◽

African Slaves ◽

Colonial Archive ◽

History Of ◽

Colonial Institutions ◽

African Atlantic

AbstractFor many scholars, the history of Africans in the Atlantic world only becomes visible at the juncture of the history of ‘the slave’. However, the sources upon which most of these studies are based, and the organization of the colonial archive more generally operate as something of a trap, inviting researchers to see how African slaves embraced or manipulated colonial institutions and ideas for their own purposes. This article focuses on methodological and conceptual meta questions that challenge how historians conduct African-Atlantic history, arguing that sources of the African past exist in the Americas, if only we are open to seeing them.

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The Idea of Atlantic History

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300021513 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 19-44 ◽

Cited By ~ 45

Author(s):

Bernard Bailyn

Keyword(s):

International Seminar ◽

Atlantic History ◽

Ancien Regime ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

Long Time ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

Overseas Expansion ◽

Twentieth Anniversary ◽

Ancien Régime

When I was invited to participate in the conference marking the twentieth anniversary of Leiden's Centre for Overseas Expansion and to contribute to the conference's retrospection of recent scholarship on the history of overseas expansion, I happily agreed. And I agreed specifically to contribute a paper on what was rather casually, I think, called ‘The Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’. Since I had been working, one way and another, in that area for a long time, I expected no difficulty in writing up a reasonable paper. But the more I thought about the subject, and the more I reviewed what had been done in recent studies of ‘the Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’ the more mysterious and interesting the question became and the more strongly I was led back to earlier antecedents in the literature. I had a growing feeling that something strange had happened, something that, oddly enough, I had myself been involved in without knowing it, something that I was in fact attempting to formulate in connection with an international seminar on Atlantic history that I will be directing over the next few years.

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Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution, by John Donoghue

The English Historical Review ◽

10.1093/ehr/cew161 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 131 (551) ◽

pp. 914-915

Author(s):

John Coffey

Keyword(s):

Atlantic History ◽

English Revolution ◽

History Of

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Introduction When the Levees Rose

Caribbean New Orleans ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469645186.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-42

Author(s):

Cécile Vidal

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Racial Formation ◽

Western Hemisphere ◽

Atlantic History ◽

French Empire ◽

Saint Domingue ◽

Urban Slavery ◽

History Of ◽

The Caribbean ◽

It Practices

The introduction presents the book’s argument according to which it is more accurate to view eighteenth-century New Orleans as a Caribbean port city than as a North American one, as its late foundation, its position within the French Empire, and its connections with Saint-Domingue explain why the interplay of slavery and race profoundly shaped its society from the outset. It situates the book vis-à-vis Louisiana and Atlantic historiographies on urban slavery, slave societies, and racial formation, arguing that historians need to move away from a comparative history of racial slavery in the Western Hemisphere that contrasts the Caribbean and North America as two distinctive models. Finally, the introduction discusses how the book draws on two methodological approaches in order to analyze how racial formation unfolded under the influence of global, regional, and local circumstances: it practices a situated Atlantic history and develops a microhistory of race within the urban center.

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Atlantic History

10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.981 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alison Games

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Historical Analysis ◽

The United States ◽

Geographic Region ◽

Atlantic History ◽

Modern World ◽

History Of ◽

Political Borders ◽

Early Modern Era ◽

Modern Era

The field of Atlantic history analyzes the Atlantic Ocean and its four adjoining continents as a single unit of historical analysis. The field is a style of inquiry as much as it is a study of a geographic region. It is an approach that emphasizes connections and circulations, and its practitioners tend to de-emphasize political borders in their interest in exploring the experiences of people whose lives were transformed by their location within this large region. The field’s focus is the period from c. 1450 to 1900, but important debates about periodization reflect the challenges of writing a history that has no single geographic vantage point yet strives to be as inclusive as possible. The history of the United States intersects with Atlantic history in multiple ways, although the fields are neither parallel nor coterminous. Assessing the topics of slavery and citizenship, as they developed in the United States and around the Atlantic, demonstrate the potential advantages of this broader perspective on US history. Although the field emphasizes the early modern era, legacies of Atlantic history pervade the modern world, and individuals and institutions continue to struggle to understand all of the ways these legacies shape legal, social, economic, cultural, and political practices in the first decades of the 21st century.

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