Longman / Prentice Hall

History

Browse available resources for U.S. History:



Atlantic in Global History, The: 1500-2000
Jorge Caņizares-Esguerra, University of Texas-Austin
Erik Seeman, SUNY-Buffalo

ISBN-10: 0131927140
ISBN-13: 9780131927148

Publisher: Prentice Hall
Copyright: 2007
Format: Paper; 288 pp
Published: 05/31/2006

Suggested retail price: $35.67
Buy from myPearsonStore

This reader, composed of original essays by leading authors, expands the category of the Atlantic chronologically, spatially, and methodologically.  It firmly places the Atlantic within global history and the coverage expands into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The essays present events that formed the nations and cultures of the Atlantic region and show their global roots and how they intertwine with non-Atlantic communities of the world.

  • Draws attention to the constructedness of the Atlantic as a unit of analysis. Some of the authors in this volume find the Atlantic to be a valuable unit of analysis for the questions they are trying to answer. Others, especially the authors in part II, "Beyond the Atlantic," see the Atlantic as a partial or limiting unit of analysis. But all of us are united in interrogating the concept and working to understand its strengths and limitations.
  • Uses global, regional, comparative, and transnational narratives. The nation lies at the very core of how modern historiography originated. Calls to break the shackles that national narratives have put on the historians' imagination are on the rise today. Globalization is making the nation obsolete as the dominant form of political community and the dominant organizational paradigm in historical studies. This volume contributes to this process.
  • Privileges transnational events and phenomena. Most studies of the early modern Atlantic are organized along national lines. There are therefore as many narratives of the Atlantic as there were empires: British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch. This book complicates these nation-driven narratives. Section I, "Comparing Atlantics," includes five essays that compare the experiences of different European empires in the New World. For example,
    • Allan Greer and Kenneth Mills set out to find a common "Catholic Atlantic," bringing Europe and the New World into a single narrative of shared historical processes. Greer and Mills suggest that the historiographies of early modern European Catholicism and colonial New France and Spanish America have oddly gone their own separate ways, as if the confessional age (of building both Catholic and Protestant churches and national states) and the age of overseas missions and religious colonial expansion were two different processes. Greer and Mills demonstrate that this is not really the case, that there is little that distinguishes the spread of Catholicism in the metropolis and the colonial peripheries in the early modern period.

    • Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra argues for a common Christian Atlantic. The notion that British America and Spanish America had very different ways of using religion to approach colonization does not withstand close scrutiny. Cañizares-Esguerra uses demonology to show that two very different communities, namely Puritans and Catholic Iberians, thought that colonization was about ending the absolute sovereignty that Satan had enjoyed for centuries over the New World. Puritan and Iberian clerics understood the conquest to be an epic struggle that pitted Christian heroes against Satan, bent on destroying the local polities by all means possible: storms, earthquakes, epidemics, pirates, foreign enemies, tyrannous crown officials, and Indians.

    • Erik R. Seeman also goes against the grain of nationally driven narratives of the Atlantic by focusing on one religious community, the Jews. By looking at the deathways of the Jews in the Caribbean islands held by the British and the Dutch, Seeman argues that variations in Jewish religious identities cannot be explained by any essentialist argument that posits national differences between the Dutch and British Atlantics.
  • Also calls attention to the importance of local conditions to the transnational Atlantic narrative. For example,
    • Greer and Mills also suggest that that all across the Atlantic local forms of Catholic religion sprang up and that similarities and differences had more to do with local conditions.  Local conditions, not essentialist arguments about the national character of each Atlantic empire, should be the focus of analysis.

    • Claudio Saunt likewise calls attention to the importance of local conditions to any transnational Atlantic narrative. All over the New World European powers sought to expand by pitting indigenous groups against one another and by recruiting Indians as proxy armies. “Borderlands” and “middle grounds” are two of the conceptual categories historians have devised to describe these spaces where struggles over imperial control took place. Using these categories, historians have sought to portray these Indians as cunning actors who played European empires against one another. Saunt maintains, instead, that outcomes in these hemisphere-wide struggles were the result of the local transformations brought about by the militarization of indigenous societies.  His focus is on the Choctaws caught in between French and English imperial rivalries over the control of what is today the southeastern U.S.

    • Patricia Seed shows the local always has the potential of transforming the global. Her chapter studies the ways sailors in the mid-fifteenth century took advantage of the uniquely hybrid intellectual culture of Portugal, where Arab and Jewish scholars devised mathematical and astronomical tools that allowed sailors to develop new forms of scientific navigation and thus to break the lock that winds and ocean currents had long had over navigating the Atlantic. Portuguese sailors managed for the first time to move in the Atlantic at will and thus to bring the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean and China Seas together, transforming global history. 

  • Section II, “Beyond the Atlantic” focuses on the global context in which Atlantic History unfolded. Even Atlantic perspectives can, on occasion, be distorting, for most of the early modern European empires were in fact global ones. 

    • Felipe Fernández-Armesto demonstrates that European empires are best understood in a global context.  It is only in light of other contemporary empires, such as indigenous ones in the Americas, or Russian and Chinese models on the Eurasian landmass, that the distinctive aspects of European empires may be seen.

    • Peter Coclanis demonstrates that since the eighteenth century parts of Asia and the various locations of rice production in the West have been locked into a well-integrated process of global supply and demand that cannot be separated analytically without doing violence to the larger picture. It is clear that we need to interrogate the power of geographical enclosures, be it the nation or the Atlantic. This book is an invitation for historians to imagine social worlds that unfold and interact in different geographical spaces (local, national, regional, global) at once.

    • Includes the Pacific in the geographies of the Spanish Atlantic, since the colonization of the Philippines was directed from and through Mexico, not Madrid.  The Portuguese and Dutch empires are also a case in point; their colonization of the Americas was marginal and subordinate to their adventures in the South and East Asia.  It was only after their displacement by Ottoman, Mughal, Japanese, and Dutch traders in Asia that the Portuguese merchants and bureaucrats turned to Brazil in the late seventeenth century, particularly after the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais.  This global perspective enriches much that is otherwise familiar. Pier Larson contributes to this globalization of familiar topics.  He makes evident the perils of reducing the African diaspora to solely its Atlantic dimensions, for the history of African slavery is a global one. Larson describes how millions of African slaves moved across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean. Just as important, millions remained in Africa and circulated through local kingdoms and polities. Larson shows that sex ratios and demographic patterns of Atlantic slavery, for example, cannot be explained without first understanding the dynamics and history of slavery in these other destinations. Moreover, it is only by looking at slavery in this global context that the uniqueness (or lack thereof) of Atlantic slavery can be understood.

    • Claire Schen also demonstrates the value of moving beyond the Atlantic to follow topics that did not adhere to oceanic boundaries.  She shows that the history of the English Atlantic cannot and should not be severed from the history of English interactions with the Ottomans in the Mediterranean.  The history of English imperial expansion takes on a new richness when the familiar Atlantic story is compared with the less familiar history of English interactions with North Africans.  Whereas English expansion in the Atlantic can seem almost inevitable, the English were chastened in their dealings with the sophisticated states of North Africa.

    • Section II closes where it began, with an analysis of the fundamental connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific.  Reed Ueda uses Hawaii as a case study of the profound linkages between the two largest oceans.  When the United States expanded westward to the Pacific shore in the nineteenth century, it linked the Atlantic and Pacific in new ways.  Hawaii’s population became increasingly heterogeneous as indigenous Hawaiians were joined by individuals from around the Atlantic (New England, the Azores, Puerto Rico) and Pacific (Japan, China, Korea).  Today, Hawaii’s unique culture represents its dual Atlantic and Pacific heritages.

  • Section III, "The Evolving Atlantic," aims to expand the Atlantic paradigm chronologically. In Section III,  four authors apply to the nineteenth and twenty centuries the insights and methodologies honed by historians of the early modern Atlantic. Historians of the United States and Latin America have been reluctant to think outside the boundaries of the nation when crafting narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    • Christopher Schmidt-Nowara deftly borrows the category of Atlantic Age of Revolution to describe an Atlantic Age of Emancipation. Emancipation, Schmidt-Nowara reminds us, cannot be explained solely within narratives that privilege the nation (for example, British abolitionism or the U.S. Civil War). Emancipation was a complex pan-Atlantic phenomenon experienced differently in each corner of the Atlantic. The various timings of emancipation make sense only when local, national, and Atlantic events are taken into account, including the degree of slave resistance, rivalries among European powers, the nature of the violence that shattered the European empires in the New World, the impact of the Haitian revolution, and the pace of the nineteenth-century global industrialization. All these factors combined help explain why societies like Cuba and the U.S. South first witnessed an expansion of slavery before they experienced emancipation. 
    • That the North and South Atlantics are powerful analytical categories for understanding not only colonial but also nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical phenomena lies also at the heart of Jose Moya’s essay. Global migrations carried cheap labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans in the nineteenth century.  But the Atlantic nineteenth-century migrations, Moya argues, were of a special kind. Migrants wove a dense fabric of shared everyday experiences linking large cities and small villages across the ocean, from Chicago to Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires to Sicily to  Krakow. Never before and never again has the local been so enmeshed with the global as in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
    • Jason Young shows how a Black “double consciousness,” originally hammered out in the crucible of eighteenth-century Atlantic slavery and abolitionism, has continued into the twenty-first century. The phenomenon of an Atlantic Black “double consciousness,” that is the experience of belonging both to “Africa” and  the “West,” drawing on both European and African inheritances, lies as much at the heart of eighteenth-century black Atlantic sources as it does in those of the late twentieth century.
    • Patrick McDevitt demonstrates the connections linking the Irish with Latin American Catholics in the twentieth century. According to McDevitt, liberation theology (which, along with dependency theory and magical realism, was a characteristically Latin American twentieth-century global export) helped inform reforms in the Irish Catholic Church from the 1960s through the 1980s.
  • Firmly places the Atlantic within global history and questions the use of the Atlantic to study only the colonial period.
  • Gives more attention to non-North American topics than is typical in Anglophone Atlantic scholarship. The essays bring the transnational story of Atlantic exchange into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And they point to areas where a global perspective may help enrich topics of interest to Atlanticists. In all these ways, the authors in this volume avoid the teleology of the creation of the United States.
  • Essays that are straightforward, sophisticated and all original.  These essays represent the cutting edge of the field and have not been published anywhere else.
  • Chronologically broad.  Coverage expands into the 19th and 20th centuries.
  • Impressive roster of scholars.  Offers students vast breadth of scholarship and perspectives.

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Thomas Bender, Foreword.

Introduction

 

Section I: Comparing Atlantics.

Allan Greer and Kenneth Mills.  A Catholic Atlantic.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. The Devil in the New World: A Transnational Perspective.

Erik R. Seeman. Jews in the Early Modern Atlantic:  Crossing Boundaries, Keeping Faith

Claudio Saunt. ‘Our Indians’: European Empires and the History of the Native American South

Patricia Seed. Navigating the Mid-Atlantic, or What Gil Eanes Achieved

 

Section II: Beyond the Atlantic.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Empires in Their Global Context, c. 1500 - c.1800

Peter A. Coclanis, ReOrienting Atlantic History: The Global Dimensions of the ‘Western’ Rice Trade.

Pier M. Larson, African Diasporas and the Atlantic.

Claire S. Schen. Piracy in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Reed Ueda, Pushing the Atlantic Envelope:  Interoceanic Perspectives on Atlantic History.

 

Section III. The Evolving Atlantic

José C. Moya. Modernization, Modernity, and the Trans/formation of the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Continuity and Crisis: Cuban Slavery, Spanish Colonialism, and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century.

Jason Young, Black Identities in the Formation of the Atlantic World.

Patrick F. McDevitt, Ireland, Latin America, and an Atlantic Liberation Theology.

Contributors

 

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at NYU. He is the author and editor of several book, including Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (1975); Community and Social Change in America (1978); New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1987); The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992); Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (1993); American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (1998);Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002); and The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (2002).

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the author of the prize-winning How to Write the History of the New World: History, Epistemology, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001) and has two forthcoming books with Stanford University Press: Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic 1550-1700, and Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World.

 

Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Professor of History and Associate Provost for International Affairs at UNC-Chapel Hill.  He is the author of The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (Oxford, 1989), which won the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians; The South, the Nation, and the World:  Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Virginia, 2003); and about ninety articles.  His current project is a history of the world rice trade between c. 1600 and 1940.

 

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the Principe of Asturias Chair at Tufts University.  His numerous books, which have been translated into twenty-two languages, include Before Columbus:  Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (Pennsylvania, 1987); Columbus (Oxford, 1991); and Millennium:  A History of the Last Thousand Years (Scribner’s, 1995).

 

Allan Greer is Professor of History at the University of Toronto specializing in colonial history.  His books include The People of New France (1997), Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740-1840 (1985), The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (2000) and, with Jodi Bilinkoff, Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500-1800 (2003).  These works have merited several prizes, including the John A. MacDonald Prize, the Allan Sharlin Prize and the Prix Lionel-Groulx.  His current research focuses on the emergence of property regimes in colonial North America, through the interplay of European and indigenous forms of possession.

 

Pier M. Larson is Associate Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University.  He is author of  History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement:  Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822 (Oxford, 2000).  His research continues along two tracks.  He is collecting personal narratives of enslavement and servitude in Africa as an entry to the continent's diverse experiences of slavery, and he is preparing a book on the translation of the Bible into Malagasy during the early nineteenth century.

 

Patrick F. McDevitt is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY-Buffalo.  He is the author of May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880-1935 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).  He is currently working on a history of progressive Catholicism in Ireland and the Atlantic world.

 

Kenneth Mills is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. His books include Idolatry and Its Enemies:  Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640-1750 (Princeton, 1997) and, with William B. Taylor and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (Scholarly Resources, 2002).

 

Jose C. Moya is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UCLA.  His book Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 (California, 1998) received five awards, including the Bolton Prize for best book in Latin American History from the American Historical Association.  The journal Historical Methods published a forum on Cousins and Strangers’ theoretical and methodological contributions in its Winter 2001 issue.  Recent publications include “Immigrants and Associations: A Global and Historical Perspective,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2004) and “The Positive Side of Stereotypes: Jewish Anarchists in Early-Twentieth-Century Buenos Aires,” Jewish History (2003).  Moya is currently working on an intellectual, social, and cultural history of the anarchist movement in Buenos Aires during the belle epoque, a project that has received support from the ACLS's Burkhardt Fellowship, the UC President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, the NEH, and the Fulbright Fellowship.

 

Claudio Saunt is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia.  His book A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge, 1999), won prizes from the Southern Historical Association and the American Society for Ethnohistory.  Race and the Graysons: Black and Indian in the South, 1780-1920, will appear from Oxford in 2005.

 

Claire Schen is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY-Buffalo.  She is the author of Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500-1620 (Ashgate, 2002); “Greeks and ‘Grecians’ in London:  The ‘Other’ Strangers,” in Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, eds., From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550-1750 (Brighton, 2001); and essays on women and piety.  She is currently working on a project about piracy and captivity in early modern Britain and North Africa and British relations with the Ottoman Turks in the seventeenth century.

 

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University and Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute.  He is the author of Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874 (Pittsburgh, 1999) and is currently working on a monograph entitled “The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century,” forthcoming from Pittsburgh.

 

Patricia Seed is Professor of History at the University of California Irvine.  She is the author of three books including, most recently, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minnesota, 2001).  She has received five prizes for historical writing on a variety of different subjects. She is currently writing “The Navigation and Cartography of the Atlantic from A.D. 800 to 1600.”

 

Erik R. Seeman, Associate Professor of History at SUNY-Buffalo, is the author of Pious Persuasions:  Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Johns Hopkins, 1999) and “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes:  Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches,” Journal of American History (2001).  He has received National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright fellowships to work on his current project, “Final Frontiers:  Cross-Cultural Encounters with Death in the New World.”

 

Reed Ueda is Professor of History at Tufts University and on the Steering Group of the Inter-University Committee on International Migration at the MIT Center for International Studies.  He is an associate of the New Global History Initiative directed by Akira Iriye of Harvard and Bruce Mazlish of MIT.  He has authored Avenues to Adulthood (Cambridge U. P., 1987) and Post- War Immigrant America (St. Martins, 1994), as well as edited books and written many articles on U. S. social history and global migration.

 

Jason Young received his Ph.D. from the University at California, Riverside, and is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY-Buffalo.  His current project, “Rituals of Resistance:  The Making of an African Atlantic Religious Complex in Kongo and along the Sea Islands of the Slave South,” explores the cultural connections between Africans captured in West-Central Africa and their progeny enslaved in the Lowcountry.

View a Sample Chapter PDF:

Give your students a choice! PearsonChoices products are designed to give your students more value and flexibility by letting them choose from a variety of text and media formats to best match their learning style and their budget.

Pearson Higher Education offers special pricing when you choose to package your text with other student resources. If you're interested in creating a cost-saving package for your students, see the Packages tab.

    CourseSmart Textbooks Online is an exciting new choice for students looking to save money. As an alternative to purchasing the print textbook, students can subscribe to the same content online and save up to 50% off the suggested list price of the print text. With a CourseSmart etextbook, students can search the text, make notes online, print out reading assignments that incorporate lecture notes, and bookmark important passages for later review. For more information, or to subscribe to the CourseSmart eTextbook, visit www.coursesmart.com.

     

  • 0132437554Atlantic in Global History, The: 1500-2000, CourseSmart eTextbook
    Canizares-Esguerra & Seeman
    © 2007 | Prentice Hall | Electronic Book; 288 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0132437554 | ISBN-13: 9780132437554
    URL: http://www.coursesmart.com
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

Pearson Higher Education offers special pricing when you choose to package your text with other student resources. If you're interested in creating a cost-saving package for your students contact your Pearson Higher Education representative.


Copyright ©2008 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Legal Notice | Privacy Policy | Permissions