Empire in All Shapes, or, the Campaigns of Oceanus: An Atlantick History

Hancock’s presentation looks at the formation of the Atlantic Ocean community from the perspective of the islands in it.  These settlements were far more numerous than the mainland settlements that rimmed it and, he argues, more valuable, both economically and culturally.  Atlantic historians have studied the latter most intensively, but their focus on mainlands and empires distort as much as they offer.  Hancock here critiques the dominance of such a gaze.  Looking at such widely dispersed and divergent settlements as Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, the West Indies, St. Helena, Sao Tome, Principe and the several sets of Wine Islands reveals alternative, more compelling explanations of community evolution.  Chief among them were underemphasized forces, tearing empires apart and spurring extra-imperial cohesions:  radical decentralization, multi-sectored, multi-tiered interconnectedness, and dominant self-organization, to name only three. Hancock’s analysis subtly explicates the operation and force of an imperium absque império, illuminating the social, political, economic contexts in which it evolved in the several island settlements and tracing the sometimes uneasy relations within and between empires.