Bernard Bailyn's Reading List

"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."

"This is a comparative study of the British and Spanish colonial world from 1500 until the end of this 300-year era. John Elliott is a brilliant historian of Spain, and here he turns to New Spain and to the Spanish Atlantic world, comparing it to the British world on major elements. Some parts of it show the congruence between the two, the parallel way they developed. Other parts show the differences, the contrasts between the Spanish and the British colonies. For comparative history between the British and the Spanish in America, there’s no better book – it’s excellent. He’s talking about two empires simultaneously. He shows the different ways the Spanish and British imperial worlds developed and the ways they differed. It’s very different from a history that is basically national in its character, because his perspective is transnational. Atlantic history is transnational, it’s an effort to get away from narrowly nationalistic interpretations. And this book is a study in transnational comparative analysis, not just the narrative of an empire’s history. Elliott covers all of the major areas of economic and political and especially religious development, Catholic and Protestant, and contrasts them. It’s not a narrative history of exploration and conquest, it’s an analytic book about the characteristics of the two main Atlantic empires as they developed, in contrast to each other."

"This book encapsulates a huge amount of scholarship on the slave trade and slavery . The writing on slavery and the slave trade is so immense that it’s almost impossible to grasp it as a whole. David Eltis’s book is actually far more than an atlas – it is a compendium of all of the massive studies of slavery that have been made, many of them by Eltis himself, presented as maps, charts, and the flow lines of slave migrations from Africa to America. The cartography is a vivid way of getting hold of what the slave trade was. For that purpose it’s the best book written, and in its dozens of maps the most readable. Eltis and his colleagues in Britain and Canada put together a database tracing every vessel there is a record of carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas. The maps track, as far as possible, where the slaves came from, the duration of the journey, the death rate on the voyage, where the slaves ended up and all the characteristics of the trade itself, including the economics. All of this he put in visual terms. If you want to know how many slaves came to Boston in a 10-year period there’s a chart for it. There are maps showing where in Africa the blacks who came to Boston were from and where the slaves from specific places in Africa went. So it’s a combination of statistical description plus visual presentation. It’s a remarkable compilation based on the most comprehensive study of the slave trade ever made. That’s an immense subject. That’s a whole world I can’t begin to go into. Yes I think so. People knew much about the slave trade before, but they never knew about it in such detail. One did not know how the ethnic groups in Africa were recruited and where each of them ended up in the Americas. We did not know the real mortality rates, the sex ratios, the languages and cultures of the slaves. It took a great energetic collaboration for all of that to be understood. That’s what Eltis and his collaborators, among many others, have done."

"This is a collection of essays on the British Atlantic world in itself. It goes into excellent detail on many themes. The essays in it are on migration, on the economy, on religion, on science and then some more subtle things such as gender and civility. It covers a very broad range, and it has a preface by me and a conclusion by John Elliott. The book has excellent, penetrating essays on aspects of the British American empire in the colonial period. Each of the essays is written by an expert in the field. It’s an unusually good collection. The second edition of it is slightly different and expanded from the first edition."

"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."