Panel discussion

Building on his article in last June’s AHR forum, Eliga Gould will discuss the problem of com­par­ability in Atlantic history, especially the “comparative” tendency to think of the field as a set of distinct and equivalent narratives.  Not only did the basin’s main demographic groups — Afri­can, Amer­in­dian and European — come from widely divergent societies, with each demographic possessing its own considerable diversity in matters of religion, culture, economics, and politics, but the boundaries between and within the Atlantic world’s various national and ethnic communities were fluid and porous.  As Gould will suggest, the inexorable but uneven power of the “state” holds one key to under­standing this fluidity and diversity.  Although the European Atlantic empires were all subject to the authority of states in Europe, that authority was neither uniform nor absolute.  In Africa and the Americas, Europeans repeatedly had to contend with indigenous polities that were as powerful as their own.  Furthermore, the Euro-Atlantic empires were all “composite,” quasi-federal polities, with weak central governments and bureaucracies, and the distribution of state power between them was fundamentally asymmetric.  Creoles in each lived in chronic fear (often with good reason) of being conquered and absorbed by rivals.  Because some Atlantic communities weathered this dynamic better than others, bringing the state back in underscores the problems in thinking (for example) of the French or Dutch Atlantic worlds as “comparable” to those of Britain and Spain.  And emphasizing the limits of state authority reminds us that even at the height of their powers, the European Atlantic empires all remained entangled in deep and profound ways with the histories of their neighbors.