August 2005 marked the tenth annual gathering of Bernard Bailyn's Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard University. This book is a gift from the convener of the seminar to all who have participated over the years, a kind of festschrift in reverse. Bailyn has not only organized the seminar and obtained the funding for it but served as its doyen. Although he may not have invented the phrase “Atlantic history,” he certainly propagated it. His is one of the names that will forever be associated with the concept's florescence, just as he is one of the vanguard that made the subject of early American history in all its facets a prominent part of the discipline of history in the twentieth century. Thus it is only fit that he take this opportunity to sum things up so far.

For readers of this JOURNAL it needs be remembered that Bailyn is not only an authority on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of colonial America but also an especially important contributor to the study of its economy. His doctoral dissertation, subsequently published as The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), is still to be read with profit and is still in print 50 years on; one of his first articles appeared in the pages of this JOURNAL (“Communications and Trade: The Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century” 13, no. 4 [1953]: 378–87); his second book, written with Lotte Bailyn, has a claim to being the earliest venture into computerized, quantitative economic history (Massachusetts Shipping, 1697–1714: A Statistical Study. [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959]); he has published one of the most important books on eighteenth-century immigration history (The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986]); and he was a force behind a major conference staged in Williamsburg, Virginia, in October 1980 that identified Needs and Opportunities for the Study of the Economy of British America. Thus his summary thoughts on the subject of early modern Atlantic History have more than passing interest for economic historians.

Bernard Bailyn, as might be expected, scores a point or two in this short, insightful, and exciting book. In the first part he traces the origins and development of the concept of the “Atlantic world,” locating its beginnings at the start of the twentieth century with the appeal at the time of the First World War for a greater awareness of the Atlantic community. One important element in the post–World War II growth of the idea was, he points out, the development among economic historians of a comparative, transatlantic, and ultimately world-wide orientation in their studies of the early modern era (pp. 44–48). As Bailyn argues even the most local of developments takes on a different coloration, a more subtle hue, when viewed through an Atlantic lens.

Thus in his second chapter it is the economy that Bailyn identifies as one of the more formative elements when the Atlantic world emerged from its long, initial period of barbaric warfare into a phase of “development,” “integration,” and “stability” (p. 81). He considers the dynamic Atlantic commercial economy as the chief integrating force of that Atlantic world: “When tobacco and sugar prices rose in European markets, production expanded in plantations 3,000 miles away, new areas of cultivation were opened up, and the need for plantation labor, slave and free, increased accordingly.” Integral to the tobacco and sugar industries, arguably the key enterprises in the New World, was their need for steadily larger numbers of slaves, making enslaved Africans and the trade that provided them “fundamental to the entire Atlantic economy” and thus fundamental to the Atlantic world (pp. 93, 94). Creole leaders—“American-born, of European ancestry”—enriched by the developing economy, grew proud, powerful, restive, and revolutionary in their thinking about every aspect of their world. Sharing in the enlightened vision of the Atlantic community, they sough to throw off first the chains of colonial status for themselves and, eventually, the chains of enslavement for their black fellow creoles.