Abstract
Reviewed by: Álvaro Caso-Bello, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA
Christoph Strobel’s The Global Atlantic invites the reader to consider the interconnected nature of Atlantic and Global histories. Strobel, a historian who has previously explored linkages between North America and Africa in the face of European colonialism, is an experienced guide for this type of exploration. Both ‘Atlantic’ and ‘Global’ are two of the most successful historical subgenres in recent times. The two are revealing of a tendency among historians to concern themselves with wider geographies and longer chronologies. As a work of synthesis, The Global Atlantic makes contributions and faces challenges, distinct from those of a research monograph.
The book’s contents include an introduction, four chapters, conclusion, and an annex chronology. The author argues that a series of episodes, topics, or processes, which scholars have deemed as specifically ‘Atlantic’ were ‘interlinked with the rest of the globe’. Strobel provides an account ‘of the interconnected nature of this system’, particularly evident between c. 1500 and 1800, which is the central period explored in the book (6).
Strobel makes a couple of noticeable conceptual interventions. The first one is the use of the expression ‘old world’ in the plural. In Chapter 1, Strobel explores the Eurasian, African, and American ‘old worlds’. Each of these spaces had distinct patterns of long-distance trade, as well as social, political and cultural structures that shaped the way in which each of them integrated into ‘Global History’. The author makes of the expression ‘Global Atlantic’ his second conceptual intervention. This expression has two purposes. It obviously designates the interconnectedness of the Atlantic to the world. Most significantly, it expresses that during the early modern period the interactions between peoples of Africa, Eurasia and the Americas ‘were often multi-directional, complicated, contested, and diverse’ (6).
The book features a series of case studies that the author deems exemplary of such interactions. For instance, ‘old worlds’ of Asian, European, and African peoples influenced each other in sugar cultivation in the Americas (65–71). The outpour of Spanish silver coin into the global market, the author says, was also the result of complex interactions. The Spaniards’ old world was present in the way that they approached the conquest and settlement of the Indies. The Native-Americans’ old worlds were present in the way the Spaniards adapted some of their institutions – such as the Andean mita – to create systems of coerced labour and tribute. Specifically, Asian old worlds were fundamental inasmuch as larger economies, such as the Chinese, determined the way in which money and goods flowed (95–6). Strobel shows the limitations of European endeavours in the Indian Ocean as another example of the frailty of European power outside their subcontinent and the persistence of non-European ‘old worlds’ (119–35).
By the book’s conclusion, it is evident that ‘the Global Atlantic’ is not just its title, but also a conceptual tenet. The ‘decline of the Global Atlantic’ circa 1800 (155) refers to the gulf created by ‘industrialization’ that changed an ‘old reality’. It is Strobel’s claim that in the early modern period ‘Europeans often had to temper their interactions’ and accommodate to the ‘old worlds’ of non-European peoples. In the nineteenth century, however, ‘power dynamics shifted more decisively in favor of Western nations’. At this point, it becomes clear that the author does not intend to write about the rise of the West. On the contrary, his approach to ‘the Global’ aims at retrieving ‘the trends and dynamics that had shaped earlier interactions’ (163).
Aligned with historians who decentre Europe and peoples of European-descent as the prime-movers of the early-modern period, Strobel destabilizes a certain idea of ‘the Global’ predicated upon integration and intensification. Authors have identified processes of globalization as tied to violent asymmetric integration and the hegemony of ‘Western powers’ (162). Strobel’s treatment of ‘the Global’, instead, is tantamount to more porous forms of integration that allowed for multi-directional interactions.
However, if ‘the Global Atlantic’ experienced a ‘decline’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there are some questions worth asking. Was the world, by the nineteenth century, less ‘Global’ and more ‘Western’? Is it possible that the ‘Atlantic world’ was less so after ‘the decline of the Global Atlantic’? How does the author’s conceptualization of sets of interactions ostensibly different between the early modern and the modern world, differ from other historiographical approaches to this transition?
These questions are possible because Strobel takes the extra step of writing beyond the purely synthetic approach. Even when the book is an approachable, clear and concise synthesis, the author introduces thought-provoking concepts to his narrative. Strobel is successful in showing a world of multiple vectors simultaneously acting to shape the early modern world. The question remains whether any of the authors whom Strobel cites would decidedly affirm the opposite.