Soundings in Atlantic History

"It is an effort to show the underlying structures that unite parts of the Atlantic world, and the intellectual currents that run through all of it. It’s by various historians, and some of the essays are unique, imaginative, and revealing of what unified the Atlantic region below the surface. The book as a whole was an attempt to get at fundamental things that are not self-evident. For example, the first essay by Steve Behrendt is on the effect of the slave trade on ecology and seasonality. That’s not evident, but he dug it up and wrote an exhaustive, refined analysis. Wim Klooster wrote a splendid essay tracing smuggling. Smuggling is by definition clandestine so it’s hard for a historian to trace, but it’s extremely important because it created a whole illegal economy and it pervaded the entire system. Another essay is on the Jesuit network. Jesuits are everywhere in Canada and throughout Latin America. An essay by Martinez-Serna isolates and examines the administrative connections among the Jesuits in the various parts of the western world, which underlie the Catholic Atlantic world. The book is about these latent elements in the Atlantic world and the way in which they unified this whole vast area. The historiography I inherited as a student was designed almost entirely in nationalistic terms. It was the British world doing this and that, or the Spanish or the Portuguese. But there are common elements to Atlantic history as I have mentioned. A very good young historian named Lara Putnam put it this way: “Events we explained in terms of local dynamics, are revealed to be above-order fragments of submarine unities… As once submerged transnational structures and large-scale patterns are perceived, the outlines of the immensely complex but coherent Atlantic region come into view.” That says it pretty well I think."