The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888

by Douglas R. Egerton, Alison Games, Kris Lane

Before the voyage of Columbus in 1492, the Atlantic Ocean stoodas a barrier to contact between the people (and their ideas andinstitutions), plants, animals, and microbes of Eurasia and Africaon the one hand and the Americas on the other. FollowingColumbus's voyage, the Atlantic turned into a conduit fortransferring these things among the four continents bordering theocean in ways that affected people living on each of them.

The appearance of The Atlantic World marks an importantachievement, for it stands out as the first successful attempt tocombine the many strains of Atlantic history into a comprehensive, thoughtful narrative. At the core of this ground-breaking andeloquently written survey lies a consideration of the relationshipsamong people living in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with afocus on how these relationships played important roles--oftenthe most important roles--in how the histories of the peopleinvolved unfolded. The ways of life of millions of people changed, sometimes for the better but often for the worse, because of theirrelationship to the larger Atlantic world. And unlike existingtexts dealing with one or another aspect of Atlantic history, TheAtlantic World does not subjugate the history of Africa and SouthAmerica to those of the "British Atlantic" orEurope.

With historians and other scholars beginning to reconceptualizethe Atlantic World as a dynamic zone of exchange in which people, commodities, and ideas circulated from the mid-fifteenth centuryuntil the dawn of the twentieth century, the interconnectionsbetween people along the Atlantic rim create a coherent region, onein which events in one corner inevitably altered the course ofhistory in another. As this book testifies, Atlantic history, properly understood, is history without borders--in whichnational narratives take backstage to the larger examination ofinterdependence and cultural transmission.

Conceived of and produced by a team of distinguished authorswith countless hours of teaching experience at the college level, this thoughtfully organized, beautifully written, and lavishlyillustrated book will set the standard for all future surveysintended as a core text for the new and rapidly growing courses inAtlantic History.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

530 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2007

About the author

A specialist in the history of late 18th and early 19th-century America, Douglas Egerton is Professor of History at Le Moyne College.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Douglas Egerton, Alison Games, Jane Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald Wright's The Atlantic World manages to achieve the daunting task of cramming nearly five hundred years of the history of four continents into about five hundred pages. The purpose of Atlantic history, as outlined in the Introduction, is the study of the convergence and conflict of numerous African, Caribbean, European, North American, and South American cultures following Christopher Columbus' arrival in the "New World" and the subsequent collapse of many indigenous societies and their displacement by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English. Africans soon appeared as well, forcibly transported from their homeland to prop up the economies of Europe's American holdings. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes from John Gabriel Stedman's "Narrative of a Five Year Expedition" (1796), that depicts Africa and America personified as two women literally supporting a third, identified as Europe, between them.

Now clearly, the Americas have always been a diverse place, as Ronald Takaki has asserted in his book A Different Mirror, which discusses the detrimental effects the exclusion of other cultures has had on the teaching of history: "What happens, to borrow the words of Adrienne Rich, 'when someone with the authority of a teacher' describes our society - and 'you are not in it'?" In its efforts to highlight all of Africa, Europe, and the Americas as equal contributors to the Atlantic world, I think a book like this is vital in today's educational environment. For one, it does a wonderful job covering West African history of this period, especially given the criticism of Molefi Kete Asante's highly influential The Afrocentric Idea in Education, which argues that American schools have traditionally presented Africans as merely passive victims of European aggression and exploitation rather than as active agents in their own right. Atlantic history is perhaps an effective answer to these issues of multiculturalism, as it emphasizes not only the history of myriad cultures in the present-day United States, but also necessarily incorporates the story of other nations and other parts of the world as well. In an era where the Atlantic is now only one aspect of a truly global society, Americans need to understand the rest of the world now more than ever, and The Atlantic World will certainly help them do that.

[Marren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent wealth of information on the new world before and after Columbus.