Atlantic History: Web Resources

Work in Progress

Instead of a European discovery of a new world, we might better consider it as a sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.
D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (1988)

Atlantic history concerns four continents--Europe, Africa, North America, and South America--and the islands between from the fifteenth century to the end slavery in the Americas in the nineteenth century. Its principal theme concerns the movement of peoples, flora and fauna, and ideas. The Atlantic world shaped the foundations of the modern world.

National histories have proven inadequate for understanding such transnational phenomena as slavery, colonialism, disease, the economic expansion of Europe, and environmental transformation.

Oxford Bibiographies asserts the field is "determinedly polycentric rather than monocentric." That is, Europeans are not actors to whom colonized peoples react. Rather, the Atlantic World was one in which diverse peoples interacted in complex and ever-changing ways.

This post lists websites that have value to students and faculty in college courses in Atlantic History (a course that I will teach for the first time in fall 2014). It will be updated. Suggestions are particularly welcome.

General Sites

"Atlantic History," Oxford Bibliographies, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/atlantic-history.

H-Atlantic Discussion Group, http://www.h-net.org/~atlantic/index.html.

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825, Harvard University, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/.

European Exploration

The European Voyages of Exploration, University of Calgary, http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya/index.html.

1492: An Ongoing Voyage, Library of Congress, http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/1492.exhibit/Intro.html.

Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-indians/essays/columbian-exchange.

Slavery

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia, http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database, Emory University et al., http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces.

The African Slave Trade and the Middle Passage (part of Africans in America), PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1narr4.html.

The Abolition Project, East of England Broadband Network, http://abolition.e2bn.org/index.php.

African History

African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, http://www.umes.edu/ajcjs/default.aspx?id=148.

"I Speak of Africa," King's College, London. Online Exhibit, http://www.kingscollections.org/exhibitions/specialcollections/i-speak-of-africa/.

Kingdom of Ghana, African Studies Center, Boston University, http://www.bu.edu/africa/outreach/resources/k_o_ghana/.

The Ouidah Museum of History, Department of Cultural Patrimony, Benin, http://www.museeouidah.org/accueil.htm

Timbuktu: World Heritage Site, National Geographic, http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/world-heritage/timbuktu/.

European History

Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.asp.

British History Online, Institute of Historical Research and History of Parliament Trust, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/Default.aspx.

North America

American Memory, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/.

The Plymouth Colony Archive Project, http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/index.html.

Latin America and Caribbean

Digital Library of the Caribbean, Florida International University, http://www.dloc.com/ufdc/.

Piracy

Piracy Trials, Library of Congress Law Library, http://www.loc.gov/law/help/piracy/piracy_trials.php.

"Sir Francis Drake: A Pictoral Biography by Hans P. Kraus," Rare Book & Special Collections Reading Room, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/catalog/drake/drake-home.html.

Products

Sugar in the Atlantic World, University of Michigan, http://www.clements.umich.edu/exhibits/online/sugarexhibit/exhibits-caseonlinesugar.php.

Sugar and Tea

History is what has happened, in act and thought; it is also what historians make of it.
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (2005)

I am reading a book that I bought three years ago on a discount table in London: John Griffiths, Tea: The Drink that Changed the World (2007). At the time that I bought it, I thought of it as connected to a spate of recent topical books concerned with basic foods. Tea, of course, is very British, and an appropriate book to buy in London. The appeal of the book was partly in its resonance with Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (2003); Bennett Alan Weinburg and Bonnie K. Bieler, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug (2000); Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (2001). I quoted from the last of these in "Death in Jamestown".

I started this book in London, or shortly after I returned home, but then set it aside as other priorities displaced it. Last week, after finishing the remodeling of our living room, we moved upstairs a bookcase that had been in our guest bedroom. This bookcase contains the books that I bought in London, including several concerned with Jack the Ripper and Griffiths's Tea. It seemed time to read one or more of those books. Then, I was asked it I could teach a new course at the university where I teach occasional courses. This course, The Atlantic World, is at the margins of my areas of expertise, and so requires quite a bit of preparation (thankfully I have several months).

I started anew on Tea: The Drink that Changed the World in full knowledge that it would do more to trace connections between Great Britain and Asia than the colonial worlds of the Atlantic. On the other hand, I considered also that tea and the taxes placed upon it in the eighteenth century were a central element in the long history of separation of colonies from their European founders. This process began in the Atlantic and later spread to other parts of the world. The Boston Tea Party is the subject of chapter four in Griffiths text.

Aside from a single program at Johns Hopkins University established in the 1960s, the institutionalization of Atlantic history as a distinct subject has been limited to less than the past two decades. Harvard's International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, spearheaded by Bernard Bailyn, began in the mid-1990s. Among the criticisms of this emerging field are that by highlighting connections across the Atlantic, it risks minimizing connections outside.

I was thinking about the relationship between trans-Atlantic connections and global ones when I fell upon this passage concerning tea and sugar in Griffiths's Tea.

During the eighteenth century the population of Britain nearly doubled from just under seven million to well over 13 million. During that time annual consumption of sugar from the West Indian colonies rose from 4lb a head in the 1690s to 24lb in the 1790s. Slavery provided the free labour that fuelled this growth, most of it on the back of tea drinking. Tea was taken without milk. so usually sugar was added to offset the bitter taste from leaves that had been processed many months before and were often ill-packed for their long sea voyage from China. (18)

Although sugar originated in the Pacific and spread across Asia and the Mediterranean before it became a staple in Europe, the history of sugar consumption in Britain is intimately connected to British colonies in the Atlantic, especially Barbados. Indeed, sugar may well serve as a topic around which I might build part of my course on The Atlantic World. But, where sugar and the English are concerned, there will often be a cup of tea.

Thomas Jefferson: Abolitionist?

In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), written during the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson identified slavery as a "blot" and "moral evil" upon the nation's existence.

Under the mild treatment our slaves experience, and their wholesome, though coarse, food, this blot in our country increases as fast, or faster, than the whites. During the regal government, we had at one time obtained a law, which imposed such a duty on the importation of slaves, as amounted nearly to a prohibition, when one inconsiderate assembly, placed under a peculiarity of circumstance, repealed the law. This repeal met a joyful sanction from the then sovereign, and no devices, no expedients, which could ever after be attempted by subsequent assemblies, and they seldom met without attempting them, could succeed in getting the royal assent to a renewal of the duty. In the very first session held under the republican government, the assembly passed a law for the perpetual prohibition of the importation of slaves. This will in some measure stop the increase of this great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature.
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 87.

His belief that slaves were treated mildly in America would form part of the foundation of the defense of the Peculiar Institution. This passage does not sum all of Jefferson's views, but is one piece that cannot be ignored. His statement that ending slavery is part of "emancipation of human nature" lends credence to the view that he may have considered the assertion that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence to include African Americans.

An exchange between Conor Cruise O'Brien and Douglas L. Wilson in the Atlantic Monthly in 1996 offers one entry into the complexities of Jefferson's legacy. O'Brien draws from statements of Jefferson's a few chapters later in Notes on the State of Virginia, as well as other texts. Wilson challenges O'Brien's reading of some of these texts.


My copy of the text is William Peden, ed., Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982 [1954]). The extract above also is available as hypertext at the University of Virginia's American Studies Crossroads Project.