"Atlantic history is a newly and rapidly developing field of historical study. Bringing together elements of early modern European, African, and American history - their common, comparative, and interactive aspects - Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to the independence movements and the globalizing industrial revolution. In these essays, Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study." "He first considers Atlantic history as a subject of historical inquiry - how it evolved as a product of both the pressures of post-World War II politics and the internal forces of scholarship itself.…
"There are two essays in the book. In the first, I describe the external circumstances, political and cultural, that shaped the historical awareness of the Atlantic world as a subject in itself. The circumstances just before, during and after World War II had a great influence on historians’ thinking about the Atlantic as a region, as did the increased exchanges of scholars among different regions in the postwar years. The Atlantic became formulated as a field of historical study in the early 1990s, though there had been important antecedents. In a way, it was Roosevelt and Churchill who defined the Atlantic region through their collaboration, and then after the war, with NATO and other intergovernmental agencies developing, that sense became more pronounced. But it isn’t those external political forces, important as they were, that shaped the field so much as the developing scholarship on transnational migration and economic interdependence. It became obvious, for example, that Portugal’s development of Brazil depended as much on London bankers as it did on tribal wars in Africa. Many such discoveries came together to create a sense of unity within this vast region of the world, independent of politics. To say what shapes your thinking is very hard. I suppose to some extent I was more keenly aware of a very broad Atlantic world because of the war than I would have been otherwise, but that approach came as much from my own study and thinking about history. My first publications, in the early 1950s, were explicitly about Atlantic history, before I tried to formulate the subject. My first large book was about the transfer of ideas from Europe to America and how those ideas fared here, the force they gained in these political and cultural circumstances. All this developed from basic research. In specific terms, influences are very hard to trace."
