Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches

Author(s): Alison Games

Source: Early American Literature, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2008), pp. 187-190
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
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Alison

games

Department

ofHistory, Georgetown

University

Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary

Approaches
Eric Slauter has taken an inventive approach to two difficult and
important questions: how do historians and literary scholars make sense of
and how can we spark more satisfactory conversations
among ourselves? I am grateful to him for the thoughtful analysis he has
supplied and for encouraging me to consider what interdisciplinary work
each other swork,

may contribute to the study of the Atlantic world.

scholarship, Slauter has
Carrying on a long tradition of early American
a
one
in
field
which
constructed a declension
thesis,
formally reliant on
literary approaches has fallen off. He asserts, for example, that "Atlantic
history as awhole is apparently moving away from a focus on text-centered
evidence." Yet was the field ever so text centered as he suggests? Slauter
identifies Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagdens Colonial Identity in the
as a crucial,

"agenda-setting" text for comparative studies

and points to this collections
literary and cultural approach. I am a big
fan of these essays, but we should acknowledge
that the volume s strengths

Atlantic World

examining colonial elites in the western Atlantic. It does not have

much to say about Africa or early modern Europe (apart from Ireland), nor
does it take us deep into the structure of colonial societies. And though
lie with

it is certainly true that in the 1980s many historians,

inspired largely by
the scholarship of cultural anthropologists
such as Clifford Geertz, turned
to cultural approaches, it was also still an era of social history, as Atlan
tic studies that preceded Canny and Pagdens collection indicate. Atlantic
I
strands of inquiry. When
history s origins reflect the period s multiple
as
I
think of works such
consider the field's beginnings,
Philip IX Curtins
heroic effort to calculate

the scope of the Atlantic slave trade in The Atlan

or
tic Slave Trade
his powerful synthesis The Rise and Fall of the Plantation
Another
crucial text came from the field of historical geogra
Complex.
phy: D. W. Meinigs

The Shaping of America}

These books mapped

out?in

{187

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188}

EARLY

AMERICAN

LITERATURE:

VOLUME

43,

NUMBER

different ways, from different perspectives, and with different methodolo

a panoptic or integrated
gies?what
history of the people and the places of
the Atlantic world might look like.
Atlantic

history

by practitioners.
Slauter presented

requires, first and foremost, a geographic reorientation

I had trouble connecting
this Atlantic with the evidence

in his essay. As their readers know, the two journals Slauter

has analyzed specialize in the history or literature of early North America,
with occasional forays into places further removed from this geographic
on North American history may produce
in scope, but it is just as likely that they will not. The
William and Mary Quarterly no more reflects trends in Atlantic history
than any other journal that looks at one region on a continent around the
home base. Scholars who work

work

that isAtlantic

Studies or the Journal of Southern Afri

can Studies or the Colonial Latin American Historical Review.

Atlantic, whether

French Historical

Just as important as the different questions that historians or literary

scholars might pose of the primary sources Slauter sampled are questions
about what these primary sources might look like if examined in an Atlantic
context. Take, for example, the Jesuit Relations. They are wonderful
sources
but, if we

are thinking about the Atlantic world,

why not look at Jesuit
accounts from Africa and
writings more broadly and consider missionary
the Americas, as well as the abundant activities of Jesuits in Europe, in tan
dem? There are ample opportunities for such comparisons, especially since
so many missionaries
and
(Jesuit, Dutch Reformed, Quaker, Moravian,
wrote
moved
around
the
Atlantic
and
their
about
Anglican)
experiences
in different

locations

Likewise,
among different indigenous populations.
not
we
cannot
canonical
narrative
Rowlandsons
(if
put Mary
why
finally
dispense with it altogether in favor of less familiar texts) alongside other
captivity narratives, including accounts of redemption written by Euro
tales of Africans carried into captivity
pean captives in theMediterranean,
in all directions, or any number of others, that would take Rowlandsons
text out of its place within early American history and set it instead in a
tradition. In other words, the literary questions Slauter
will
ask of these teaching materials may indeed deepen our
hopes scholars
but casting these sources in a new geographic framework
understanding,
might transform it by putting together texts that have previously been con
different-narrative

sidered separately and seeing what

into play.

new

issues and problems

then come

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Forum:

History

and Literature

Slauter's essay evoked two different possibilities as I considered the re

lationship between interdisciplinary work and Atlantic history. First, are
specialists in other subfields of Atlantic history more inclined than schol
ars of North America to employ interdisciplinary methods?
I suspect that
had Slauter examined reviews in the Journal of African History or the Colo
nial Latin American Historical

Review, he might have noticed that different

fields of history have their own conventions
regarding their competence
in other disciplines and the centrality of those disciplines
to their field.
Glottochronology
thropology

in African

among historians

interest in an
history and the long-standing
of colonial Latin America are two obvious

examples.

Second,

is indeed best approached through interdisci

are some disciplines more useful than others? Iwonder

if the Atlantic

plinary methods,
whether
literary studies might ultimately be one of the least satisfactory
for approaching the Atlantic. Focused as they are on the
methodologies
literary approaches could distract historians from the ex
vast majority of those who inhabited the region, even if
of
the
periences
scholars deploy all of their skills to read these texts sensitively and imagi
natively in search of the experiences of the powerless and illiterate. More

written

word,

over, given the linguistic limitations that many scholars, especially Ameri
canists, labor under, privileging
literary sources risks limiting us to the
experiences of a tiny fraction of people. In terms of making sense of the
Atlantic

as a whole,

of its varied collisions

and contestations,

of its asym
metrical power relations and its violent labor regimes, of the forced migra
tions that created and sustained it, any number of other approaches look
equally if not more fruitful: anthropology, archaeology, art history, demog
raphy, economic history, environmental history, material culture. Slauter's
that have been
essay brought to mind some of the works by nonhistorians
helpful to me, especially inmy teaching: art historian Barbara E. Mundy's
TheMapping of New Spain, for example, or anthropologist Laura A. Lewis's
Hall ofMirrors?
are interested in the Atlantic must pair a geographic per
that
spective
requires them to gain some familiarity with multiple fields of
to sample varied disciplinary approaches. Fortu
history with awillingness
nate towork within one of academias most integrative disciplines, histori
Scholars who

ans would be foolish to limit themselves

trying whatever works best tomake

to a single methodology
instead of
sense of the problem under study. That

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190}

EARLY

AMERICAN

LITERATURE:

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might well be literary studies, and itmight well be something else. Slauter
has done a great service in reminding all of us how essential it is to reach
out to other disciplines,
to take all sorts of books off our libraries' new
shelves, to dip into new journals, to sample unfamiliar disciplines,
and to enjoy the pleasure of
to talk to colleagues in other departments,
discovering what we can see more clearly or entirely differently as a result.

book

NOTES
i. Nicholas
1500-1800
indicated
ing Peggy

Canny

and Anthony

(Princeton,
by Atlantic

N.J.,
studies

K. Liss, Atlantic

Pagden,
1987). That

eds., Colonial
social

that preceded
Empires:

in the Atlantic World,

Identity
was prominent
in the 1980s is

history

and Pagdens

Canny

The Network

of Trade

collection,

and Revolution,

includ
1713

1826 (Baltimore, 1983); JohnRobert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain:
Louisbourg

and Havana,

1700-1763

(Chapel

Hill,

N.C.,

1985). For pioneering

works

inAtlantic history, see Philip D. Curtin, TheAtlantic Slave Trade:A Census (Madi
son,Wis., 1969);D.W. Meinig, The Shaping ofAmerica: A Geographical Perspective
on 500 Years ofHistory (NewHaven, Conn., 1986);Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the
Plantation Complex: Essays inAtlantic History (Cambridge, 1990).
2. Barbara E. Mundy, TheMapping ofNew Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the
Maps of the Relaciones Geogr?ficas (Chicago, 1996); Laura A. Lewis, Hall ofMir
rors: Power,
Witchcraft,

and Caste

in Colonial

Mexico

(Durham,

N.C.,

2003).

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