Introduction: The Iberian Atlantic and the Making of the Modern World (original) (raw)
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Atlantic Paradigms and Aberrant Histories
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Theoretical paradigms based on Atlantic experiences pose a challenge for attempts to imagine anew histories of commerce and culture in the colonial and Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Foregrounding place origins of purportedly universal doctrines, this paper attempts provisionally and suggestively to explore this challenge by locating and dislocating in place some conventional frameworks for interpreting patterns of trade and mobility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It relates two connected arguments gesturing to the disruption and suppression of alternative, and potentially subversive, imaginings of worldwide spatial connections and cultural flows in the course of the north Atlantic hoisting itself atop a hierarchy of modernity and historical progress imagined to radiate outwards from it. The first is about the generalization through theory and history of a set of commercial relationships and institutional arrangements historically peculiar to the Atlantic, as being characteristic of the “world economy.” The second argument relates to the misrecognition of spaces of circulation in accounts of migration, and their compression into linear movements where the northern Atlantic world represented the ultimate destinations for the working poor belched out from the rest of the non-Western world.
This one-semester graduate reading course will provide you with an overview of the historiography of the new field of Atlantic History, through intensive reading by yourself and vigorous discussions in class, as well as through the presentations of book reviews by other students in the course.
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This introductory chapter offers a longue durée analysis of the formation and transformation of the Atlantic world from 1400 to the present. It first explains why the Iberian kingdoms dominated the first 240 years of overseas European expansion and how a type of ecological imperialism emerged in the Canary and Caribbean islands that came to typify what would latter occur in the rest of the New World and Oceania. It then examines how silver, sugar, and slaves allowed Atlantic trade to surpass that of the Indian Ocean and the related movements of free and bonded labor. The second half of the chapter shows how the 1840-1930 European migrations turned what had been the poorest colonies in the Western Hemisphere into its most developed countries, and the Euro-American Atlantic into the world’s hegemonic region, and how mobility and connections across the Atlantic have bourgeoned even as the region’s economic hegemony has waned in the past four decades.
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Itinerario, 2012
frameworks the editors believe are, at the very least, foreshadowed by the essays. They suggest, for example, that the essays show "how, over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, several Atlantic worlds, each with distinctive features but also sharing much in common, were fashioned" (2). Over time these worlds merged into a "larger unit of interdependency" by the eighteenth century but collapsed by the middle of the nineteenth (2). The suggestion that the more discrete micro histories of the British Atlantic, Spanish Atlantic and the like are useful in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but are less useful in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is interesting and will certainly provoke a healthy debate in undergraduate and graduate seminars.