Atlantic history

Atlantic history is a subdiscipline of history that involves the study of the Atlantic World in the early modern period. It is premised on the idea that, following the rise of sustained European contact with the New World in the 16th century, the regions of North America, South America, Europe and Africa which bordered the Atlantic Ocean constituted a regional system or common sphere of economic and cultural exchange that can be studied as a totality.

Practitioners of Atlantic history typically focus on the interconnections and exchanges between these regions and the civilizations they harbored. In particular, they argue that the boundaries between nation states which traditionally determined the limits of older historiography should not be applied to such transnational phenomena as slavery, colonialism, missionary activity and economic expansion. Environmental history and the study of historical demography also play an important role, as many key questions in the field revolve around the ecological and epidemiological impact of the Columbian Exchange.

In the last two decades Atlantic history has emerged as an increasingly popular alternative to the older discipline of imperial history, although it could be argued that the field is simply a refinement and reorientation of traditional historiography dealing with the interaction between early modern Europeans and native peoples in the Atlantic sphere.

Fernand Braudel's argument that the peoples who ringed the Mediterranean consituted a single Mediterranean World that could be studied as a totality offered an important precedent for the idea of an Atlantic history, but the formation of Atlantic History as a recognized area of study did not come until the 1980s. The noted historian of early modern America Bernard Bailyn and his Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard University played an important role in the establishment of the discpline.

Some historians who have written works dealing with elements of Atlantic history include Anthony Grafton, Felipe Armesto-Mestre Anthony Pagden, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, James D. Tracy, John Huxtable Elliott, Isaac Land, and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra.