An analysis of the role of the study of the African Diaspora within the field of Atlantic history

Abstract

This article is a quantitative study of the percentage of recent Atlantic World scholarship that focuses on the African Diaspora. This is accomplished by analyzing monograph, article, and PhD dissertation production in the fields of Atlantic and African Diaspora history. The article begins with an overview of the origins of Atlantic History and African Diaspora History and concludes with some thoughts on what the data reveal for both fields.

Keywords:

• Atlantic studies
• African diaspora
• comparative history

Notes

1. Armitage (2002, pp. 11–27).

2. Jack Greene and Philip Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (2009) is a new critique of the various areas of Atlantic History. Donald Yerxa's Recent Themes in the History of Africa and the Atlantic World: Historians in Conversation (2008) focuses on the role of Africa in the field of World History. The numerous essays by Pieter Emmer and Willam Klooster, Silvia Marzagalli, Carla Phillips, David Hancock, Deborah White, David Eltis, and Alison Games collected as ‘Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History’, in Itinerario, 23 (2) (1999), critique different aspects of the Atlantic model as does another forum consisting of essays written by Alison Games, Philip Stern, Paul Map, and Peter Coclanis entitled ‘Beyond the Atlantic’, in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 63 (4) (October 2006), 675–742. Peter Coclanis's ‘Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History’, Journal of World History, 13 (1) (Spring 2002), 169–182 and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's ‘Some Caveats about the ‘‘Atlantic’’ Paradigm’, History Compass, www.history-compass.com, offer appraisals and suggestions. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman, ed., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (2007) is a fascinating collection of essays that provide fresh approaches to nearly every aspect of Atlantic History.

3. Pier Larson, ‘African Diasporas and the Atlantic’, in Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman, ed., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (2007), 129–147, presents a good overview of these developments in an essay that is otherwise critical of the extent to which historians of the African Diaspora have spent too much energy focusing on the Atlantic World and have neglected the African Diaspora elsewhere in the world.

4. The emergence of Atlantic History is examined in David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, ed., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London, 2002), 11–27, Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (2005), Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20 (1) (1996), 19–44, Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American Historical Review, 111 (3) (2006), 741–757, and William O'Reilly, ‘Genealogies of Atlantic History’, Atlantic Studies, 1 (2004), 66–84. A critique of Bailyn's model of Atlantic History can be found in Ian Steele, ‘Bernard Bailyn's American Atlantic’, History and Theory, 46 (1) (2007), 48–58.

5. The examples appear in both Bailyn, Atlantic History and Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’.

6. George Shepperson, ‘The African Abroad or the African Diaspora’, in T. Ranger, ed. Emerging Themes of African History (1968), 152–176, is credited with introducing the term. Reference also found in Larson (2007, p. 129).

7. The American Historical Association also offers the Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History.

8. I have counted Forums as one article.