Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 2009; pp. 622. £44.95).
This review was originally published in the English Historical Review 125, no. 519 (Apr. 2011), 451-454.
Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830
Edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Once again, Bernard Bailyn has offered up a rich intellectual feast. Together with his co-editor, Patricia L. Denault, Bailyn has brought together twelve leading scholars and given us a collection of stimulating and sometimes breathtaking essays that, in Bailyn's words, 'probe' the complexity of the Atlantic world and 'search . . . beneath the surface of events for the latent structures and the underlying flow of ideas and beliefs that shaped the manifest world and bound it together' (pp. 41-2). That world was the Atlantic between about 1500 and 1830 - encompassing the evolving and increasingly interwoven history of the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas.
Each of the essays in this collection offers fascinating insights into this connected world. Some focus on the movement of people and goods: an illuminating opening essay by Stephen D. Behrendt, for example, reminds us of the crucial role played not just by winds and oceanic currents in t transatlantic slave trade, but also by local environmental conditions in Africa and the Americas. Annual rainfall and average temperatures affected seasonal crop cycles, and thus labour demands, differently throughout the Atlantic. Merchants and traders in the business of moving enslaved African labourers were obliged to negotiate these varied, complex and often unstable ecological constraints to marry supply and demand, and thereby maximise their profits. David J. Hancock and Wim Klooster complement this focus in their respective essays on the legal and illegal trade in goods across the Atlantic world. As Hancock points out, Atlantic trading grew almost organically to meet the many challenges of locality and scale of trade. It was thus necessarily de-centralised, self-organised and dependent on increasingly thick and complex networks of connections carefully threaded across the ocean and through the continents. Klooster s comprehensive survey of the astonishing extent of inter- imperial smuggling in the Atlantic only reinforces the fact that needs and opportunities - supply and demand - dictated patterns of trade far more than edicts issued from London or Lisbon, and that the geography of the Atlantic basin itself helped to shape the movement of peoples and goods in profound ways. Self-organised and increasingly complex networks of people also feature prominently in essays by Rosalind J. Beiler, on dissenting religious communications and their impact on European migration, and by J. Gabriel Martinéz-Serna on Jesuit procurators. Beiler regards carefully built epistolary communities of dissenters across England, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and German and Swiss territories as having been an integrative force in the latter half of the seventeenth century - a force that helped lay the basis for pan- European Protestant migration to the New World (a migration that gathered a momentum of its own even as those earlier communication networks began to disintegrate).
Martinéz-Serna charts the more formally-plotted growth of a network of Jesuit procurators responsible for administering to the Society's temporal affairs. Though this essay points to a centrally-directed Atlantic (and indeed, global) creation, the more familiar story of Jesuit adaptations to the challenges they encountered, and the local networks of communication they created, provides a complement to this story that would not be out of place in this collection. These last two essays also point to the volume s focus on the movement of ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Some ideas were literally carried and disseminated by those who moved from place to place. As Londa Schiebinger shows in a suggestive essay, African slaves carried valuable medical information from West Africa to the disease-prone Caribbean tropics where they influenced European physicians' approaches to cures and preventive measures. At the same time, Protestant Bostonian Jonathan Belcher carried New World dreams of a Protestant international to the highest courts of northern Europe in a series of serendipitous encounters. Throughout the collection, though, the Atlantic itself proved to be the living laboratory where ideas were forged, circulated, tested, and challenged. Across early modern Europe, for example, artists, intellectuals, and colonisers shared typological readings of European expansion across national and imperial borders. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra demonstrates, in trying to make sense of the New World, this eclectic group helped create a common, complex, and hybrid cosmology. At the same time, though Jonathan Belcher s countryman, Cotton Mather, never left Boston, Mark A. Peterson shows that he shared Belchers dream and strove to link his world with the intellectual currents of Atlantic Protestantism through his extensive library and correspondence with Europeans. Political ideas, too, travelled the waves and took on new meanings. During the revolutionary ferment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a young Hipólito da Costa forged increasingly subversive political ideas on his travels from Uruguay, to Portugal, to Philadelphia, and finally to London, where he edited the incendiary periodical Correio Braziliense which helped to undermine the Portuguese hold on Brazil. Political élites from the Río de la Plata also looked toward the newly independent United States of America and Britain for the values that might stabilise their polities even in the midst of revolution.
Finally, Emma Rothschild's long but thoughtful essay on the career and thought of David Hume shows just how implicated in, and influenced by, the Atlantic milieu' were Europeans. Though he never travelled farther than France, Hume drank deeply of the liberating intellectual currents produced by the creation of the Atlantic world even while he shared in the developing racism that undergirded it. The essays in the collection provide much food for thought, and in particular dazzling examples of the 'latent structures' and the intellectual connectedness of this early modern Atlantic world. Perhaps that is enough. But what is left out of the volume is worrying. Apart from brief references to slavery and dispossession, such as those in the essay on Hume, we get no real sense of the tragic underbelly - the less than latent structures - upon which the Atlantic world was predicated. In close to 450 pages of text, we only glimpse cargoes of enslaved peoples on the manifestos of slave-ship captains. We get several paragraphs on native peoples in an essay which emphasises the European physicians who exploited, and often ignored, their local knowledge before they disappear from view. Though Hancock quotes approvingly a merchant who explained that the Atlantic world extended from the 'forests of what we call Pologne to the banks of the Mississippi,' Bailyns Atlantic world does not encompass the vast numbers of the myriad peoples who directed the shape of that world - even from the banks of the Mississippi - in profound ways. Though individual essayists cannot be faulted for their contributions, the volume when taken collectively resembles a kind of old-fashioned top-down imperial history. This is not a world in which gender features prominently, nor does it draw on the extensive literature on indigenous peoples that has poured forth in recent years which makes a clear case for native influences on trade networks and intellectual currents, among much else. To be sure, the cast of characters populating this drama has dramatically expanded to encompass petty shopkeepers-cum-merchants, élite dissenting women correspondents, and the winds and currents of the Atlantic. But even a path- breaking essay by Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton on African political leadership in the era of the slave trade leaves us curiously distant from the peoples whose identities were supposedly fashioned by these different forms of governance. Though most of the contributors are aware of the limits of their studies - Mark Peterson, for example, provides a refreshingly honest definition of his 'Republic of Letters' - a problem arises in the assemblage of such studies as they inevitably come to serve as a stand-in for what should constitute Atlantic history.
Indeed, given Bailyn's dominant stewardship over the development of the field, the volume hints at a worrying narrowing of prospects for the exciting conceptual advances that Atlantic history first promised. In that respect, the essays do not move us much beyond the vision of the Atlantic world first mapped out by Bailyn in the early 1990s - a vision that might perhaps be summarised by the pithy dictum, 'they came, they organised, they established good government'. Many of the essays speak of 'filling in' the picture we have of the Atlantic world and discovering the 'inner mechanics' of known networks. Others rail against a centre-periphery framework for understanding imperial history that most historians have long discarded, or at least have come to view as deeply problematic. So, while the creative individual efforts of these authors will help ensure that we will have plenty of essays from which to draw for our existing courses, those looking for a truly new approach to Atlantic history will have to continue to wait.