REVIEW ESSAYS
BERNARD BAILYN'S AMERICAN
ATLANTIC
ATLANTIC HISTORY:
CONCEPT AND CONTOURS. By Bernard Bailyn. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 149.
No
one ever worked, prayed, fought, or died for an early modern multinational
Atlantic. However, a great wave of Atlantic studies is washing over early
modern history, and especially early American history. It has rescued this
subject from provincialism and from service as a states-rights antechamber to
the history of the American Republic. Atlantic history privileges the
cosmopolitan and multicultural, escapes the condescension of traditional
"Western civilization" or imperial histories, and concentrates new
light on some familiar subjects and first light on a few others. Those riding
this wave to major conferences, new jobs, and sympathetic publishers, like
those sputtering in futile resistance, are all asking exactly what Atlantic
history is, and where it came from. Atlantic History: Concept
and Contours proposes, in reverse order, rather surprising answers to each of these
questions.
Who could guide the
curious better than Bernard Bailyn, the most eminent living historian of
colonial and revolutionary America, and the leading maestro of Atlantic
history? In the two generations since publishing his The
New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, Bailyn has written and edited more than two dozen influential
collections of documents and essays, as well as sparkling monographs on a range
of subjects, including colonial shipping and education, The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, an outstanding biography of loyalist Thomas Hutchinson, and two collections
of thoughtful profiles of the revolutionary leaders of the United States.'
Bailyn published two books on immigration in 1986, the introductory The
Peopling of British North America and the monographic Voyagers to the West, and later co-edited a third, Stranger
in the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire.' It was only after 1986 that
1.
The New England Merchants
in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); with
Lotte Bailyn, Massachusetts Shipping,
1697-1714: A Statistical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1959); Education in the Forming of
American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Pamphlets
of the American Revolution, 1750-1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1965); The Ideological Origins of
the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson: Loyalism
and the Destruction of the First British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974); Faces of
Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (New
York: Knopf, 1990); To Begin the World
Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf,
2003).
2.
The Peopling of British
North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986); Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the
Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf,
BERNARD BAILYN'S AMERICAN ATLANTIC 49
Bailyn sensed the rising
popularity of Atlantic approaches, and went on to found, inspire, and lead
Harvard's "International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World,
1500-1800."3
Atlantic History is cryptic, but it offers
a clear sketch of Bailyn's very selective Atlantic. Bailyn begins his genealogy
of Atlantic perspectives very deliberately and precisely in February 1917, when
American journalist Walter Lippman exhorted readers of The New Republic to join World War I against Germany:
"We must recognize that we are in fact one great community and act as
members of it" (7). After an intervening
isolationist generation, the Atlantic Charter brought Lippman and others back
to the same theme; war and foreign policy once again roused Americans to
discover a justifying Atlantic history. Bailyn sees sustained American
commitments to western Europe after the war, from the Marshall Plan to NATO, as
finally prompting an Atlantic perspective in a few prominent American
historians. Ross Hoffman and Carlton J. H. Hayes, both Catholics anxious to
defend the unity in Western Christendom against Communism, are singled out
because they "clearly grasped the relevance for historical study of the
Atlanticists' underlying assumptions and implications" (12). Postwar
Europeanists, including Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Robert R. Palmer, Jacques
Godechot, and Charles Verlinden, pursued Atlantic perspectives from more
impressive, and more European, empirical bases.4 Academic resistance
to the views of Godechot and Palmer was even stronger than Bailyn suggests, not
only from prickly nationalists defending French and American exceptionalisms
but also from those who saw this Atlantic perspective as shamelessly serving
America's Cold War objectives, foreign and domestic.
It is easier for professional historians who are
not political activists to place deceased academic predecessors in the service
of their times than to specify how we reflect our own
not-yet-simplified-and-summarized context. From the late 1950s, Bailyn detects
"internal propulsions of scholarship" with "no other purpose
than its own fulfillment" (30) that began revealing a fresh Atlantic perspective.
Bailyn gathers an impressive array of "new history" under this label,
1986); Strangers within the
Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, edited with Philip D.
Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
3. Bailyn's "The Idea of Atlantic
History," Itinerario 20 (1996),
9-44 is remarkably similar to the first essay of Atlantic History. See also Alan Taylor, "The
Exceptionalist," in his Writing
Early American History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2005), 215-224.
Johns
Hopkins University pioneered a Program in Atlantic History and Culture in
1971-1972, and published a series of monographs as "Johns Hopkins Studies
in Atlantic History and Culture," edited by Richard Price and Franklin W.
Knight. In 1993 this center was transformed into the "Institute for the
Global Study of Culture, Power, and History." Daniel W. Howe, Rhodes
Professor of American History, announced an Atlantic focus for the Oxford
Institute of American Studies in his inaugural lecture American History in an Atlantic Context (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993). New York University launched a similar program in 1997-1998.
4. Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Seville et l'Atlantique, 1504-1650, 8 vols. in 11 (Paris: A. Colin,
1955-1959); Robert R. Palmer, The Age of
Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959-1964); Jacques Leon Godechot, France
and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770-1799 (New York:
Free Press, 1965); L'Europe et l'Amerique
a l'epoque napoleonienne (1800-1815) (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1967); Charles Verlinden, The
Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction, transl.
Yvonne Freccero (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970).
50 IAN K. STEELE
including
the explosion of interest in the history of the slave trade and African
Americans, the social and demographic histories of immigrants and Amerindians,
and ethnic studies of numerous significant and persisting minorities in
America, as well as new approaches to language and literary analysis.
Bailyn
emphasizes how economic historians have provided "the grout lines"
for "a pan-Atlantic mosaic" (44). Northern Europe's early intrusion
on Spain's imperial economy was a brazen confiscation of profits, one that was
often noted by seventeenth-century rivals who constructed mercantilist theories
and policies to avoid such an outcome within their own empires. He rightly
alludes to the religious and kin-based trading networks of refugee Puritans,
Quakers, Jews, and Huguenots who linked the imperial economies. More might have
been made of the recent growth of "demand-side" economic histories
that not only discuss investment and commodity production but include
marketing, shopping, and consumption. Histories of commodities have followed
Virginia tobacco to France and Russia, Carolina rice to the Mediterranean,
Madeira wine to Barbados, Boston, and Kentucky, and sugar everywhere.' Bailyn
is not convincing in arguing that the re-export of Atlantic colonial products,
or the direct foreign marketing of the most perishable ones, prove that the
empires did not work. Most Virginia tobacco was imported into London or Glasgow
exclusively in British or British colonial ships, was charged imperial duties,
and much was then re-exported to France and Germany. Tobacco and sugar consumed
within Britain generated major excise taxes that funded the state as well.
Bailyn's preference for a deliberately "international" Atlantic has
given wider significance to work on early modern smugglers, illicit and illegal
traders, pirates, renegades, and others who flouted imperial laws and
loyalties.
This historiography ends very abruptly in 1986, with a
quotation from geographer D. W. Meinig about "a sudden and harsh
encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into
a single New World" (56). By
5.
T. H. Breen's "An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America,
1690-1776," Journal of British
Studies 25 (1986), 467-499 and "Baubles of Britain': The American and
Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present 119 (1988), 73-104 brought the study of consumerism
to Colonial America, and has inspired a literature that Bailyn's survey does not
consider. Carole Shammas, The
Preindustrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990) and James Walvin, Fruits of Empire:
Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (New York: New York University
Press, 1997) are noteworthy.
On
tobacco: Jacob M. Price, The Tobacco
Adventure to Russia: Enterprise, Politics, and Diplomacy in the Quest for a
Northern Market for English Colonial Tobacco, 1676-1722 (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 1961); France
and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674-1791, and of
Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1973). On rice: Kenneth Morgan, "The
Organization of the Colonial Rice Trade," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 52 (1995), 433-452; Judith A.
Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins
of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001); David Hancock, "A Revolution in the Trade': Wine
Distribution and the Development of the Infrastructure of the Atlantic Market
Economy," in The Early Modern
Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 105-153. Recent work on sugar includes:
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The
Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985); J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: A Historical
Geography from Its Origins (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1989); and Tropical Babylons: Sugar and
the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1650, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
BERNARD BAILYN'S AMERICAN ATLANTIC 51
stopping in the year he
published Voyagers to the West, Bailyn modestly avoids discussing himself, then a recent convert
to Atlantic history, but unfortunately he offers no guidance to the impressive
wave of Atlantic history that he has done so much to catch, develop, and
channel since then.'
Bailyn's genealogy of
Atlantic history is deliberately American. He insists that Fernand Braudel's
famous The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II is irrelevant, though
French Atlanticists lead those who would disagree.' Bailyn boldly decides that
two of the largest branches of the Atlantic historiographical tree are entirely
illegitimate. Perhaps they were not part of Bailyn's own discovery and
conversion to Atlantic history. He discounts both the history of Atlantic
exploration and the histories of the empires of Spain, France, and Britain as
being, by 1945, without any "large unanswered questions other than those
that simply required more information" (6). This prompts two observations.
For historians still trying to understand early modern people on their own
terms, the limitations of some historians should not prevent further attempts
to understand perspectives voiced incessantly by early moderns themselves.
Second, Eurocentric assumptions about discovery and empire have been challenged
consistently, beginning with decolonization and continuing with fashionable
neocolonial, postcolonial, and globalizing perspectives. Anti-imperial and
post-imperial histories do not pretend the empires never existed.
The
history of exploration and discovery was certainly still thriving after 1945,
selling rugged, risk-taking individualism with every canoe that was guided and
paddled by anonymous Amerindians for their over-rated European tourists. Like
the explorers, this subject was never confined to the Atlantic Ocean, and much
of the story was about attempts to escape the Atlantic and find a profitable
ocean route to the Orient. The history of exploration, invigorated by
anthropology and linguistics as well as new methods in social, religious, and
scientific history, has evolved into the richer, more contrapuntal examination
of first encounters. Even as we mock European "discovery" of
Amerindian fields and hunting grounds, we cannot escape the significance and
inequality of these meetings between Europe and America. Knowing something
about both sides of the Atlantic, and being able to cross it, meant that the
first Atlantic would be European, not American.
Bailyn simply dismisses
imperial histories as moribund by 1945. Although he indulges in none of the
overt moralizing of the "Star-Wars" variety, where empires are always
inherently evil and federal republics invariably good, he claims that the
histories of imperial administrations, laws, policies, and religions were not
Atlantic history because "rarely do these formal designs reflect
reality" (61). What state, early modern or modern, is "real" if
reality requires that there are no smugglers, pirates, or illegal traders (even
in narcotic stimulants) and no
6. A thorough historiographical review of this new
area is overdue, and my "Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian,
Atlantic, and Global Perspectives," Reviews in American
History 26 (1998), 70-95
was only suggestive.
7. The first edition was finished in 1946 and
published in 1949 (Paris: Colin). The revised French edition appeared in 2
vols. in 1966 (Paris: Colin) and the English translation in 1972 (London:
Collins and New York: Harper and Row). Bailyn's strong dismissal of Braudel is
not sustained, for he returns to a comparison of "the Atlantic Ocean, like
Braudel's Mediterranean," on page 25 of Atlantic History, which also mentions Braudel's influence on
Godechot and Palmer.
52 IAN K. STEELE
reliance upon foreign
immigrant workers? More rigorous governmental enforcement was, and still is,
often impolitic, uneconomic, or impossible for empires, for kingdoms, or for
republics. No state enforces every law to the point where there are no
violators, passes no unenforceable laws that become mere exhortations, and
compromises no policies in the face of internal or external opposition.
The early modern empires were real enough to their
beneficiaries, victims, and enemies. The study of imperial history was renewed
after 1945, in British and western European universities, as well as those of
the British Commonwealth, the francophone world, Latin America, and the U.S.A.
The elaboration and questioning of new theories, like "turbulent
frontiers" and "empires of free trade," were part of the
process. New colonial nationalisms were stronger forces that were renovating,
refocusing, and rewriting these subjects. A few scholars of empire were still
as embarrassingly Eurocentric, triumphalist, and insensitive to egalitarian
impulses as were many of the imperial explorers, traders, soldiers, officials,
and settlers whom they studied. Those historians were deservedly criticized
then for what they did and failed to do, but they remain legitimate ancestors
of current Atlantic history. Since the 1960s, scholars of British, Dutch,
French, Portuguese, and Spanish exploration and empire have incorporated new
perspectives, questions, and methods.'
There was another postwar scholarly Atlantic that is not
part of Bailyn's historiography. The Atlantic divides very obviously, as
navigators in the age of sail knew well, into the North Atlantic and the
"Ethiopian Sea," separated by the equatorial calms that seemed cosmic
objections to the slave trade, which only added to its miseries. European or
colonial slavers had to rely on currents rather than winds to work their way,
twice, through those equatorial waters, and often without the festivities that
other crews used to mark this transit to or from "the beyond." Sugar
ships from Brazil, crossing those equatorial calms, took so long to reach
Europe that a Caribbean sugar industry was able to flourish. Seventeenth-century
empires seldom sublet power to trading monopolies within the North Atlantic,
but they routinely did so with more distant and exotic trades to the South
Seas, Africa, and India. When spreading peace, early modern European treaties
imposed a cease-fire within weeks for specified North Atlantic zones, while
accepting that peace would take months to arrive beyond the equatorial line.
British historians Gerald S. Graham, Ralph Davis, and K. G. Davies described
this North Atlantic in their respective Empire
of the North Atlantic, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies, and The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth
Century.9 From the first voyages of Columbus the overwhelming
majority of
8. A selection of scholarship
related to empires has been gathered in the thirty-one volumes of An Expanding World: The European Impact on
World History, 1450-1800, ed. A. J. R. Russell-Wood (Aldershot, Eng.:
Ashgate, 1995-2000); developments can be followed in 1tinerario: European Journal of Overseas History (Leyden,
Netherlands: Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1977—). A
"Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History" appeared in
volume 23 (1999), 48-173 and in the same year the American Historical Review published a forum on "The New
British History in Atlantic Perspective," AHR 104 (1999), 426-500. A conference held in Hamburg that same
year resulted in Atlantic History:
History of the Atlantic System, 1580-1830, ed. Horst Pietschmann
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). Some contributors to this last
volume, including the editor, favor Bailyn's deliberately international
definition of an Atlantic system.
9. Gerald S. Graham, Empire of the North Atlantic (Oxford:
Oxford University Press,1950);
BERNARD BA1LYN'S AMERICAN ATLANTIC 53
Atlantic shipping
operated within the North Atlantic, whether their home ports were Bristol,
Bordeaux, Seville, or Boston, Massachusetts. The fleet Bailyn analyzed in Massachusetts
Shipping was exclusively a
North Atlantic fleet. Only the Portuguese and Dutch slavers plied the South
Atlantic sailing circle regularly. Especially for those in the British and
French empires, Atlantic trade, war, and migration before 1775 was
overwhelmingly within the North Atlantic.
The
postwar United States still saw itself as proudly sharing a colonial and
revolutionary past with other new nations. That generation read American historians
of "colonial America" (a term now banned in a few quarters),
including C. M. Andrews, Herbert Bolton, Carl Bridenbaugh, L. H. Gipson,
Clarence Haring, Samuel E. Morison, J. H. Parry, Herbert Osgood, and Max
Savelle. These American scholars all studied the colonial Americas as part of
Atlantic empires. Influential American colonial historians of more recent
decades, including Tim Breen, Richard S. Dunn, Jack P. Greene, James A.
Henretta, Stanley N. Katz, John M. Murrin, Alison Olson, J. M. Sosin, and
Bailyn himself wrote and taught American colonial history in their broader Atlantic,
and primarily imperial, contexts. Jack Greene's pioneering center of Atlantic
history at Johns Hopkins, founded in 1971, does not even rate a mention in
Bailyn's historiography. By the early 1980s, some were referring to
accumulating new work as "The Empire Strikes Back" against American
exceptionalism. The origins of Atlantic approaches to American colonial history
were much richer and more continuous than Bailyn's selected historiography
would suggest.
Bailyn's
second essay is an equally revealing outline of his "contours" for
Atlantic history. It is a lightly penciled line of development over three
centuries, touching many societies on the four Atlantic continents. For all the
variety in pace and intensity, it begins as a savage Atlantic "marchland
of European civilization" (62), behind God's back where trade was
uncommonly ruthless, war and slavery were particularly ferocious, and the
cocktail of imported pathogens was overwhelming. This Atlantic is exclusively
about the Americas in the heyday of pri-vateering and piratical forms of
imperial expansion. This America was no refuge from Europe's suffering, and it
soon became a new hell for Africans. Amid this chaos, Bailyn sees Africans,
Amerindians, and European settlers as all struggling "to cling to, to
recover, the civility they had once known" (72).
The second part of
Bailyn's three-part Atlantic drama, again subject to wide variation in pace and
completeness, charts the coming of "stability and development."
Bailyn does not see this as linked to expansion of intruders' settlement beyond
beachheads, the realistic adjustments that exhaustion and calculation brought
to imperial diplomacy, the emergence of profitable transatlantic staple trades
that sometimes made peace more profitable than war, or to creole elites
cleverly exploiting their Janus-faced role as brokers of imperial governance,
law, trade, religion, and culture. Bailyn sees this stability as born of
imperial needs to negotiate authority with otherwise uncontrollable colonial
peoples; empires apparently survived as long as they did not work, and were
destroyed when
Ralph Davis, The
Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973); and
K. G. Davies, The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
54 IAN K. STEELE
they threatened to do
so. Bailyn is particularly interested in all unimperial and illegal aspects of
a "stable pan-Euro-Afro-American economy" (83), based on an
equally-broad labor system that was increasingly reliant upon African slaves.
Creole
elites, schooled in the politics of resisting anything imperial, emerged in
Bailyn's stabilized colonial marchlands and "their proud sense of
independence ushered in a final phase of early modern Atlantic life"
(101). As the British and Spanish empires attempted reform, the creole elites
led various kinds of resistance, achieving accommodation or independence. New,
liberating ideas of "self-government, freedom from arbitrary power, and a
sense that the world lies open for the most exalted aspirations" (111),
including the ideas of David Hume, Thomas Paine, and Cesare Beccaria, traveled
the Atlantic networks, to be widely adopted or adapted. In this overview, there
is little attention to the established notions of legitimate resistance to
tyranny that the English had twice used to oust the Stuarts.'° American
constitutionalism became an anti-imperial inspiration to many who would learn
from its strengths and weaknesses. The abolition of slavery was belated, but
the revolutionary generation is applauded for beginning to challenge that evil.
Nor is there mention here of the aggressive new republic's "Empire of
Liberty," which promptly drove Amerindians from their lands and
livelihoods in the midwest and then the southeast." Whatever subsequent
difficulties there have been in implementing the new American ideas of freedom,
the ideas themselves have survived "and continue to unify the cultures of
the Atlantic world" (111). This certainly sounds like the United States
was the pioneer, culmination, and exemplar of a teleological early modern
international Atlantic history.
Why not invite Americans
to discover their own U.S.-centered Atlantic history that deliberately excludes
the Eurocentric ones, and give it an equally exclusive American pedigree? It
awards new significance to colonial history, so often truncated in the story
that celebrates the American republic. It includes Afro-Americans and
Spanish-Americans in a needed multicultural founding myth, and escapes a
snobbish and demeaning Anglocentricity. An outward-looking America is seen as
receiving free and forced immigrants from the entire Atlantic region, as it has
continued to do. To draw Americans to this broader context for their story, it
might seem a small sacrifice to narrow the definition of an American Atlantic. Other
American centers of Atlantic history, and many of the scholars writing Atlantic
history in the United States, can continue to pursue less restricted agendas.
Eventually, scholars examining the surviving evidence will rediscover how early
modern people saw, and did not see, the Atlantic.
10. Bailyn's classic debate with Jack P. Greene,
"Political Mimesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots
of Legislative Behaviour in the British Colonies in the Eighteenth
Century," American Historical Review 75 (1969), 337-360, and their exchange, 361-367, regains significance
here. In that discussion, and in The Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution, Bailyn argued for
the centrality of the ideas of the early eighteenth-century English Whig
opposition.
11. On the "Empire of Liberty," see Robert
W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas
Jefferson (New York and
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Eric Hinderaker, Elusive
Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997),187-267.
BERNARD BAILYN'S AMERICAN ATLANTIC 55
In
Bailyn's version of Atlantic history, the advantages of the invading European
discoverers are minimized in over-reaction to earlier exaggerations, and this
leaves Amerindian opponents appearing weaker and less competent than they were.
Aztec or Inca could have echoed the shouts of the Quigualtam to the remnants of
De Soto's expedition retreating down the Mississippi in 1542: "If we
possessed such large canoes as yours . . . we would follow you to your land and
conquer it, for we too are men like yourselves."2
Bailyn
is right to suggest that fratricidal European imperial ambitions fueled the
violence of the early American marchlands, but white-settler intrusions upon
Amerindian lands and lives created turbulent frontiers of incessant provocation
that exhausted Amerindian tolerance and repeatedly brought war. Intruding settlers
are too easily portrayed as innocent victims rather than the vanguards of
invading empires; colonizers are too readily seen as the colonized. Like their
Amerindian and African servants, white settlers are presented as merely struggling
to survive the chaos and to establish their somewhat-European communities.
Bailyn's sketch does not concede that their victory was bound up with charters,
treaties, land claims, and wars, the continuing exploitation of connections
that were all ultimately imperial. Nor does Bailyn mention how endemic maritime
war throughout these centuries regularly vetoed his international Atlantic.
Navies and privateers captured enemy merchant fleets, importing interesting
foreign prize goods at cheap prices, but disrupting rather than building
international community. Privateers captured their own illicit/illegal
traders, or even posed as illegal traders to privateer more easily. Imperial
convoys shepherded imperial trade, and naval blockades interdicted
international traffic. Amerindian unity against the relentless intruders, like
the ethnic solidarity of German, Irish, or Scottish mercenaries, was routinely
destroyed by competing imperial allies and paymasters in America and Europe.
Bailyn's
American Atlantic need not include the history of four continents but could
consider more than what the Americas drew from, and contributed to, the two
eastern continents. The larger European seaports were major centers of
population, religion, trade, governance, consumption, and culture that are
neatly marginalized as being too imperial or even national. Were the merchant
fleets that graced Boston harbor more international than those that gathered in
the Thames at London or in the Ijsselmeer at Amsterdam? France, with at least
ten times North America's population in 1700 and still integrating marchlands
into its polity and economy (as was Britain), is not considered an Atlantic
subject, except for the migrants and traders who went to the Americas.
Intra-European international trades, including Atlantic coasting trades that
dwarfed the volumes of early modern transatlantic trades, are not part of
Bailyn's Atlantic. Africa is included as the source of millions of America's
slaves and the scene of slaving by Africans and Europeans, but there is little
interest in Africa beyond the slave trade. This Atlantic history, like
conventional American colonial history, does not include all of early modern
North America either. Amerindians enter the story marginally as
12. Quoted in First
Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States,
1492-1570, ed. Jerald T. Milanich and Susan Milbrath (Gainesborough, FL:
University of Florida Press, 1989), 98.
56 IAN K. STEELE
importers,
brokers, victims, or resisters to the Atlantic economies and societies
confiscating eastern North America. Bailyn's American Atlantic faces east from
a different longitude than does Daniel K. Richter in Facing East from Indian Country." The frontier that was once
seen as the zone of creative American hybridization by Frederick Jackson Turner
and his intellectual descendants once again becomes the savage and peripheral
marchland it was when "germ theories" were fashionable a century ago.
This American Atlantic might look like a new non-colonial history of the
origins of the U.S.A., but it is also a self-referential broader context,
potentially replacing the history of Western civilization.
Bailyn's third phase is a clever inversion of an isolationist
American consensus that was so popular half a century ago. There are no
Loyalist dissidents here, though Bailyn knows them well. His revolutionaries
were not simply separatists disrupting an Atlantic empire to preserve their
liberties; they were instead bold defenders of a long-incubating
internationalism that promised even more freedom to themselves and other
never-quite-subject peoples. These practical visionaries were not fomenting the
violent revolution that would engulf Latin America for more than a generation;
they were asserting their freedom, institutionalizing their version of
democracy, and inspiring all who could adapt the message.' There is, then, an
essential harmony between that Atlantic and Bailyn's latest direct appreciation
of leading founders of the U.S.A., aptly entitled To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American
Founders (2003). Bailyn's early modern Atlantic reaches its fulfillment in
a new international Atlantic, with the United States as inspiration and,
finally, as major player. For those who have long seen Atlantic approaches to
colonial American history as mildly un-American activities, challenging a
self-congratulatory American exceptionalism, Bailyn's American Atlantic is a
daring takeover bid.
There are more Atlantic
histories now than ever before, including black, white, red, and green
ones." David Armitage has catalogued three types: those that involve the
entire oceanic zone and its coasts; comparative histories within the Atlantic
zone; and the history of communities in relation to Atlantic interchanges.'
All these perspectives are creatively cross-cutting imperial and colonial
histories, escaping Eurocentrism and racism, denouncing the mighty, and
preferencing the creole, if not yet the metis.
Historians will not be
mesmerized for long by the international "grout lines"
13.Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
14.Peggy Liss explored the Anglo-Spanish
revolutionary connections more broadly in Atlantic
Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983).
15.Paul Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-century Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) (initially titled "The
White Atlantic: American Market Culture in the Making of Twentieth-Century
Europe"); David Armitage, "The Red Atlantic," Reviews in American History 29 (2001),
479-486; Kevin Whelan, "The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between
Ireland and America, 1776-1815," in A New
Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire,
1660-1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 216-238.
16.The British Atlantic
World, 1500-1800, ed.
David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (London and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002),11-27.
BERNARD BAILYN'S AMERICAN ATLANTIC 57
between
unmentionable empires that were the large multicolored tiles of the early
modern Atlantic mozaic. Particularly with social and cultural studies ascendant,
early modern Atlantic lives are understood as having been lived within
inherited or adopted cultures, languages, and religions that prevailed because
of applied European power. Migration itself, which brought many more Africans
than Europeans to the Americas, should have produced a very different result.
European migrants could maintain and exploit their origins and connections as
preferred colonial members of European empires; Africans and Amerindians could
not. The avalanche of surviving imperial records may be as biased as their
writers, but they continue to reveal unintended wonders. Recent approaches to
these subjects are often labeled with the adjective "Atlantic" to
sell books, and also to announce that they are multivalent, multicultural, and
are not celebrating European invasion or domination. The various Atlantics of
the English/British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Portuguese
continue to be explored, often with a retributive tendency that supports
victims and dissidents.
Bailyn
has done more than anyone to promote all types of Atlantic history. He provided
a preface for a collection of papers derived from the only one of his workshops
that concentrated upon "one nation's experience." He reasserted that
Atlantic history must escape the confines of Britain's Atlantic trading world
and emphasized that this world was broader than its empire, as was true of them
all. His formula is echoed by several of the contributing authors, but their
essays are about aspects of the first British empire. In this same preface,
Bailyn suggested that historical contexts need periodic revising to
"reflect the state of our knowledge, our public concerns, and our way of
thinking."7 This presentism and relativism is a little
surprising, coming from an accomplished and demanding empiricist,' but it links
well with his historiographical discussion of America's use of Atlantic history
between 1917 and the 1950s. It implies, as postmoderns would expect, that the
purpose of history is ultimately to understand ourselves, rather than an
attempt to understand early modern people within their contexts and horizons.
Bailyn does not discuss how his American Atlantic might suit present American
foreign or domestic policy.
Taken
as a deliberate, purposeful, high-altitude metahistorical construction, or as a
cultural context for American undergraduate history students, Bailyn's Atlantic
is no further from surviving evidence than are its major current rivals. The
Atlantic is competing very well in North American university curricula with
equally rarified rivals like Western civilization, the history of the Americas,
and world history. Western civilization is fatally vulnerable to accusations of
fostering Eurocentric condescension and for exclusions that are unacceptable in
17. Ibid., xiv, xix.
18.
In
1991 interviews at Dartmouth, published as On the Teaching &
Writing of History (Hanover,
NH: University of New England Press, 1994), Bailyn articulates the professional
belief that "Accurate historical knowledge is essential for social
sanity" (12) and "The correspondence to actuality in history, the
struggle to describe objectively what actually happened, however dimly we may
perceive it, is the essence of history" (73). He views presentism and
anachronism as serious and persistent problems in writing and teaching history
(50). At the same time he realizes that writing definitively on major subjects
"is impossible and should be impossible" (68), and both historical
questions and methods change over time.
58 IAN K. STEELE
multicultural America.
Bailyn comments directly on the ambitious "History of the Americas"
project of the 1950s and 1960s, which eventually succeeded in a narrow sense
but failed to reshape the teaching of history in the Americas. He concludes
that this failure was "mainly because the separation of the Western
Hemisphere from Europe was unrealistic" (22). World history has the
advantage of the clearest geographical boundary, and a vaguely imagined human
community that is of great antiquity. It encourages a self-consciously human
perspective that is encouraging, a timely concern for the ecology of the planet,
and has drawn new attention because of interest in economic
"globalization." With regard to research, it is difficult for any
scholar of world history to go beyond selective or comparative studies, or to
learn more than a few languages. As a teaching field, world history is
transparently disparate and selective, and it is usually offered to disoriented
freshmen rather than as a concluding integration of a broad undergraduate
history education.
Atlantic
history has notable comparative advantages for Americans. The African and
Spanish contributions to American life are rightly acknowledged. Western
civilization may have "owed more to NATO than to Plato," as Armitage
remarks,' but one consequence in North America has been the widespread study and
teaching of European history as a single general subject. The latter may have
been a geographical expression in 1945, but it now seems a prophecy becoming a
competing reality, a Eurocentric Europe. American Atlantic history essentially
rethinks and repackages much that is academically familiar in North America.
English-speaking students are stretched but not detached from the familiar in
accepting this multicultural invitation; fewer would take these courses if they
were more exotic. The languages of research are usually those long preferred in
modern Western higher education. The archives, libraries, and internet
resources provided to study American and European history serve most Atlantic
history very well. Even if they are not always ready converts, tenured faculty
in American and European history retain value in researching and teaching
Atlantic history.
Some of us will continue
to read the "international" in the title of Bailyn's seminars and
workshops as referring primarily to the wonderful range of younger scholars who
gather there, and the array of subjects they examine minutely. An Atlantic
community of scholars from four continents discusses what was shared, compares
what was similar, and discovers what was different in the early modern history
of the peoples who lived around the Atlantic basin. It is to be hoped that
seeking a variety of understandings of the early modern Atlantic, at Harvard
and elsewhere, will continue to drown out any restrictive or patriotic calls
from America's present. Atlantic History lacks the depth, breadth, and balance of scholarship we have come
to expect from Bailyn, but it explains why his appoach is making Atlantic
history more attractive to Americans.
IAN K. STEELE
University of Western
Ontario
19. Armitage, ed., The
British Atlantic World, 14.
