Given Atlantic history’s vast compass, collaboration among scholars is essential. Some of the best works in the field are edited volumes, where the whole can be greater than the sum of the collected scholars’ specialized interests. An impressive entry in this category is the book under review here. Emerging from a conference held in 2007 by Harvard University’s Atlantic History Seminar, the twelve original essays are of uniformly high quality: learned, engaging, broadly significant. But, as is often the case in volumes of this sort, the authors don’t directly interact with one another. Bernard Bailyn attempts to remedy this in his introductory essay, where he argues that the chapters fit together to ‘exemplify something of the broad coherence of this evolving early modern world’ (p. 3).
Bailyn’s introduction might surprise some readers. Rather than rehearse the themes of his Atlantic history: concepts and contours (2005) and offer a history of the field, he sticks closely to the essays at hand as he argues for their collective coherence. If there is one theme that holds the introduction together, it is a polemic against challenges to Atlantic history from global historians. Bailyn takes on Peter Coclanis and other globalists who argue that it makes little sense to separate Atlantic history from the rest of the world in which it was embedded. He admits that the Atlantic was ‘never entirely autonomous, never wholly discrete’ (p. 3); but in the early modern period ‘there was no global system’ (p. 42). Experiences in the Atlantic were fundamentally different from those elsewhere, Bailyn asserts, and therefore the region deserves to be examined on its own terms. He may not convince self-identified globalists, but he makes a strong case for the value of an Atlantic perspective.
The essays begin with two that demonstrate that Africa played an important role in shaping the emerging Atlantic world. Stephen D. Behrendt shifts our focus away from New World demand for slaves and instead towards African factors governing supply, particularly ecological constraints such as rainy seasons, winds, and currents, and the agricultural calendar. Likewise, Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton offer a valuable comparison of Kongo and Dahomey in shaping slave identity in Brazil. Heywood and Thornton show that Kongolese identity remained strong, owing to the powerful impact of the Kongolese state on its subjects, as opposed to the shallower Dahomey identity that resulted from a state with a shorter history and less legitimacy in the eyes of some of its subjects.
The next two essays engage with the history of business and commerce. David J. Hancock offers a sweeping discussion of changes in the organization of commerce during the long eighteenth century, centred on a single figure: George Frey, a storekeeper in Middletown, Pennsylvania. Marked by the extraordinary research for which Hancock is renowned (the location of one source is given as ‘Blue Sea Chest, Blandy’s Head Office, Funchal, Madeira’ (p. 493)), the chapter demonstrates the power of individuals to shape events in this period. Wim Klooster covers even more geographical and chronological ground in his entry, ‘Inter-imperial smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800’, which shows just how vital smuggling between empires was in the early modern Atlantic.
Next come six chapters that examine religious and intellectual networks, all of which demonstrate the increasing integration of the Atlantic world over time. J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna highlights the crucial role played by Jesuit procurators – administrators who dealt with the temporal affairs of the Society of Jesus – in knitting together the Jesuits’ Atlantic missionary network. In a study of Mennonite, Quaker, and Pietist communication networks, Rosalind Beiler demonstrates how confessional identities emerged outside state institutions. Beiler’s important contribution is to show how religious connections sustained by communication networks ‘intersected with the colonizing impulses of their participants’ (p. 235). Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra offers an example of the kind of trans-imperial history for which he is rightly celebrated. Focusing on typology, ‘the Christian tradition of reading contemporary events and actors as the fulfillment of older biblical episodes’ (p. 237), Cañizares-Esguerra shows that similar intellectual traditions undergirded the thought of Spaniards and Englishmen alike. Neil Safier presents an especially well-written account of Hipólito da Costa, a ‘courier between empires’ (p. 265). Hipólito, as Safier calls him, was born in Portugal in 1774, lived in Philadelphia in the turbulent late 1790s, and published the provocative monthly Correio Braziliense in London from 1808 to 1822. Like Cañizares-Esguerra, Safier’s interests are in ideas that crossed imperial lines. In contrast, Londa Schiebinger focuses more on knowledge gained within single-nation imperial traditions: the ‘bioprospecting’ of Europeans who gained useful medical knowledge from African and Amerindian sources (p. 296). Mark A. Peterson rounds out this impressive section by using Jonathan Belcher and Cotton Mather to show how strongly Boston was connected to an important part of the Protestant world outside the British empire: the Netherlands and the German states.
The collection concludes with two chapters linking elites and the Atlantic world. Beatriz Dávilo argues that intellectuals in Buenos Aires built on North American models of constitutionalism, in contrast to most historians, who focus on the French sources of these men’s political ideas. Finally, Emma Rothschild uses the life of David Hume to illustrate just how deeply Atlantic processes penetrated into late eighteenth-century Scotland and England.
This is an important volume, beautifully produced by Harvard University Press, with wide margins, numerous attractive illustrations, and the text and notes set in a large, readable font. The chapters are all significant but, given that they are ‘soundings’ in Atlantic history rather than essays specially commissioned to cover complementary topics, they do not add up to a comprehensive account of the subject. The volume is thus not quite as useful as Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan’s edited collection, Atlantic history: a critical appraisal (2009). Soundings in Atlantic history will probably not be taught or consulted as a whole; specialists and instructors will instead seek out individual chapters in their own fields. This is but a minor critique, however, of a volume that provides a high-profile launching point for twelve insightful essays.
