Atlantic History

[ U.S. History Survey to 1877 ] [ Global History of Piracy ] [Colonial America] [American Revolution]
[Social/Cultural History] [Atlantic History] [Early American History] [Marx and Engels]

History has long been the captive of the nation-state. As J.G.A Pocock has written, "historiography originates as the memory of the state and develops as the critical study of the processes that have brought the state into being." Historians have thus until quite recently focused most of their attention on the activities of the state: war, diplomacy, politics, administration, and government. Even today, when the subject matter of history has expanded far beyond this original conception, the vast majority of historians and scholars in other disciplines still make the nation-state the essential, often unquestioned framework of analysis.

This course is organized as a challenge to nationalist histories. Taking the north Atlantic as its point of reference, it seeks to connect and combine the various and hitherto artificially separated histories of Europe, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, and to demonstrate how the most important processes of change can be understood only through an international frame of reference.

The course is designed to introduce students to work in Atlantic history both old and new, ranging from R.R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution, which provided some of the intellectual underpinnings of NATO and the alliance of the west during the Cold War, to newer scholarship that approaches the Atlantic world "from the bottom up," from the perspectives of social and cultural history. We shall link the four corners of the north Atlantic in order to study the movement of peoples, cultures, politics, and ideas in a broader, more illuminating context. Our emphasis will be on the popular classes - on craftsmen and women, apprentices, wage laborers, sailors, indentured servants, slaves, farmers, peasants, cottagers, villagers, domestics, and vagabonds, of both genders and of many races, ethnicities, and nationalities. We shall study how the activation of these masses of people during the Atlantic's age of revolution changed global politics in decisive, irreversible ways. We shall seek to discover connections within the multicultural experiences and histories of working people, most of which have been either denied or ignored by historians. We shall explore the various conceptions and paradigms of Atlantic history. In doing all this and more, we shall try to build upon and extend the specializations and interests of the members of the class.

The following books are available at the University of Pittsburgh Bookstore:

Harriet Applewhite and Darline G. Levy, eds., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution.
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: Sugar in Modern History
R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, volume I only.
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680.
Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the Modern World Economy
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

All reading materials are on reserve at Hillman Library.