Beyond Empires: The Importance of Viewing Transatlantic Development as a Multi-Cultural Effort

Beyond Empires:

The Importance of Viewing Transatlantic Development as a 

Multi-Cultural Effort

 

Jim Rogers

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. . .

 

     Until recently, the development of the Atlantic World was viewed as the sole product of European ambitions in North and South America. The exclusion of the influential roles played by the Amerindian and African peoples once suited a Eurocentric world, but as historians have since discovered, this interpretation of European dominance is little better than rhetoric. Traditional history books often highlighted the peaks of European success while leaving out the side-effects of inter-cultural policies between persons representing multiple nationalities. In addition, scant details concerning the fallout of pandemic outbreaks provide a woefully inadequate portrait of the multi-faceted interactions that truly shaped the New World. The broader perception of the Atlantic World, provided here by Bushnell and Karras, is critical if students are to ever understand the process of imperial expansion that ultimately created the modern world. The study of the Atlantic World as a unit helps to reestablish the importance of innovations, trade relationships, inter-imperial conflict, disease, and cultural transmission among the three cultural hearths of the period; characteristics that have long been downplayed in favor of a limited, nationalized, historical interpretation.

In Alan Karras’s The Atlantic World as a Unit of Study, the author details the importance of regional developments in establishing the history of Atlantic settlement. In contrast to the nationalized approach that European historians have purported for centuries, Karras’s research provides an inclusive “systems” approach to the geopolitical entity that came to be known as the New World.  As much a product of cultural fusion as cultural assimilation, from 1492 forward, the ambitions of Europeans, Africans, and the Amerindians worked in tandem to construct the varied settlements that would eventually become the Atlantic system. The exploration of North America was directly related to the expansionist policies practiced by European nations, which largely consisted of conquest, disease, and domination. However, rather than constituting a literal war between "Old" and "New" ideologies, the emergence of the Atlantic World was a coalescence of pre-existing territories, cultural values, and products that expanded trade, technology, and innovation between previously unacquainted and independently sovereign nations. This cultural convergence served as the catalyst for the eventual rise of the settler republics, and European empires that would redefine the boundaries of world powers like Great Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, as well as contributing to the formation of Mexico, and Argentina, and many Amerindian nations.

Bushnell’s research in Old Worlds and the Atlantic provides a multicultural and improvisational approach to New World development that saw Amerindians influencing Atlantic history through their own subordination, interaction, and opposition to European forces (Bushnell, 194).  The Eurocentric rhetoric that divided most Amerindians into camps of diseased victims, or European assimilates, was overly simplistic in its valuation of cross-cultural interactions, rarely considering the cultural fusion that occurred in borderlands or colonial peripheries. Amerindian innovations were as critical to European success as their own, and the exchange of tech between these two cultural entities was far from one-sided. Moreover, the persistence of autonomous Amerindian groups throughout the existence of the Atlantic World displays the lack of a universally monopolizing power among the national entities that vied for resources within North and South America. Ultimately, the cultural alignment and territorial ownership of Amerindian groups dictated much of the success, or failure, of European expansion into the Atlantic World. Whether for fur, food, or land, the establishment of relations was largely dependent on the Amerindian reception of Europeans.

This is an important feature of Bushnell’s work: the attribution of European decision-making to the sustained influence of Amerindian groups over North American territory. This influence was most directly felt as the proliferation of firearms, horses, and cattle, among Native peoples, increased; a bi-product of European interests in the fur trade and pastoral expansion. As European products contributed to the destabilization of traditional power structures in Amerindian culture, new groups such as the Iroquois, Comanche, Apache, Karajas, and Guaycuruans grew increasingly dominant in their regions, subduing smaller Native tribes, as well as enforcing their demands upon European trade agreements. The relationship that developed between the French and Algonquian tribes, which led to the distribution of firearms among Amerindians resulted in a full-blown arms race, in which French, Dutch, and English traders all vied for profitable returns, and in so doing, enabled the efficacy of Amerindian resistance to European expansion.  The eventual battles between Spain, France, Britain and Portugal were largely based upon the determination of superiority among European nations that closely bordered one another across the Atlantic, and thus, reveal the impact of Amerindian culture upon Old World entities, all of which had eagerly engaged in some form of trade, warfare, or settlement with Native peoples.

The rise of inter-imperial warfare across North and South America left few regions untouched. In the 70 years that followed the French-Indian War, a general state of flux could be observed among all European-controlled territories, exacerbated by the presence of Creole populations who sought to expel European oppression from North America.  In 1776, thirteen British colonies famously revolted against the tribunal regime that had enforced rounds of exploitative taxation upon them. In addition, revolutions soon followed in Haiti, Mexico, and Argentina, revealing the strains that Spain and Britain had enforced upon their tributaries. In their ever-expanding desire to gain valuable surpluses of extractive products, the two powers alienated themselves from their own emigrants. By the end of the Atlantic World in 1825, migrants, who now identified themselves as natives of North America, were staunchly divided between two dogmatic views of European dominance. Royalists and settlers, the latter of which often represented a person akin to creole culture, held great enmity for one another. However, despite their division, they both agreed upon the idea that the New World was now theirs. As such, the previous period of empire-driven expansion came to a close, replaced by a new era of settler expansion that would eventually eradicate many of the autonomous Amerindian groups that had gained power via European trade and political ties.

Alongside socio-political tensions, waves of pandemics laid waste to human settlements, with outbreaks of malaria, yellow fever, cholera, dysentery, and Variola smallpox, spanning the entire transatlantic timeline. Smallpox and yellow fever were the most well-documented of these diseases, with severe outbreaks crippling European exploits from South America, to the Caribbean, to Puritanical settlements in the New England territory. In Bushnell’s essay, she details the North American smallpox epidemic, which raged across the entire continent from 1775-1782, spread via continental soldiers from Europe, religious missions, Amerindian horse nomads, and an assortment of traveling traders. The first New World pandemics had taken root following the inflow of Spanish traders into South America and the Caribbean (prior to English, French or Dutch exploration). As diseases killed off many native peoples, Spain resorted to the adoption of slave labor out of West Africa. The reasoning behind acquiring African slaves resulted from anecdotal assessments by the Spanish concerning the immunity of African peoples to diseases like smallpox and malaria. Considering these human imports to be immune or at the very least expendable, slaves were put to work in agricultural plantations and precious metal mines where diseases continued to spread rampantly, further devastating native populations. Originating in West Africa and traveling to the New World via slave and trade vessels, Old World pathogens drastically altered the daily life and productivity of all who encountered them. Slavery would eventually become one of the most influential political aspects of the post-colonial world, helping to reshape and redefine the definition of personal liberty. However, during the transatlantic period, societal views about racial differences were deeply ingrained. Regardless of personal prejudice, the spread of deadly pathogens breached all cultural boundaries, killing wantonly with disregard for status or ethnicity.

Through the analysis of Karras’ and Bushnell’s seminal works on the development of the Atlantic world, historians can peel back the layers of causality and cultural interaction that bred a wholly new geopolitical entity in the world. Rather than being a Eurocentric history that represents a singular vision of New World conquest and domination, their research shows that multi-cultural influences contributed to by Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans alike were the true catalyst for transatlantic expansion and synthesis. The contributions of Amerindians, long muted to serve a nationalistic interpretation of events, were as critical to the establishment of North and South America, as the peoples of West Africa. The tendency to oversimplify history, for the sake of generality provides a limited interpretation of the impacts that cultural interaction, situational improvisation, and inter-imperial trade disputes produced. In truth, it is impossible to understand the origins of the Atlantic World, or the United States, without first considering who the active participants were, and any historical narrative that seeks to highlight European dominance at the cost of omitting the side-effects of exploitative policies towards colonists, Amerindians, and Africans, is only capable of illuminating a small piece of the larger picture. By adopting a broader, and more inclusive view of the Atlantic World, historians will be able to more fully understand the process of empirical expansion that ultimately created the modern world.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Karras, Alan L. The Atlantic World as a Unit of Study. EBSCO. Accessed June 18, 2020.

 

Bushnell, Amy T. Indigenous America, and the Limits of the Atlantic World, 1493–1825. EBSCO. Accessed June 18, 2020