Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the limits of a historiographical concept

Proponents of the increasingly prominent ‘‘Atlantic history’’ paradigm argue that oceancentered, transnational perspectives shed crucial light on connections which tied together Europe, Africa and the Americas in the early modern period, and which older forms of national and imperial histories obscured. In spite of these scholars’ calls for the construction of a truly inclusive history of the Atlantic basin and all its inhabitants, Amerindian peoples have received relatively little attention in the work of Atlantic historians. This article examines the place Amerindians have held in scholarship on the early modern Atlantic. It argues that it is precisely because Atlantic history has been constructed from fundamentally Eurocentric categories like transatlantic empire and commerce that it has accorded little space to Amerindians. It points to this absence as an important shortcoming of such approaches, and suggests that Atlantic history will have to be reconceptualized in fundamental ways in order to bring Amerindians fully into the picture as historical actors. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. § An early version of this essay was presented to the ‘New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic History’ workshop held at the Université de ParisVIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in January 2007. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 Influential institutional homes for Atlantic studies include the Program in Atlantic History, Culture and Society at the Johns Hopkins University, whose history is retraced by Jack Greene, ‘Diversity at Hopkins: Some Reminiscences’ and SidneyMintz, ‘The Legacy of the Atlantic Program’, in Crosscurrents 1, no. 1 (Fall 1993), available at http://web.jhu.edu/igs/newsletter.html, and the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–1825 at Harvard University, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/ atlantic/. Scholarly journals which today focus to a greater or lesser extent on the field include Atlantic Studies, Itinerario, Nuevo Mondo-Mondos Nuevos, and Transatlantica; Brill launched a book series on ‘The Atlantic World’ in 2003. The recent publication of two college-level Atlantic history textbooks confirms that the Atlantic is making a home in undergraduate history curricula: Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane and Donald R. Wright, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888 (Wheeling, IL, 2007), and The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Erik R. Seeman (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2007). 2 See for example the overviews in Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999), Pieter C. Emmer,WimKlooster, ‘The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: Expansionwithout Empire’, 48–69, SilviaMarzagalli, ‘The French Atlantic’, 70–83, Carla Rahn Phillips, ‘The Iberian Atlantic’, 84–106, andDavid Hancock, ‘The British AtlanticWorld: Coordination, Complexity, and the Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy, 1651–1815’, 107–26.