Cartographical Imagination: The Geographical Configuration of the Atlantic World

CARLA LOIS

The Atlantic World: 1400-1800

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2010;

The Atlantic World is one of those few objects that seem to be easily mapped or shown on maps[1]. Quite aside from debates on its limits[2], its place on a world map appears quite natural and clear. Moreover, any images, including cartographical images, of the Atlantic World are naturally centered on the geographical object that gives its name to this world: the Atlantic Ocean. In other words, the Atlantic World needs an Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, the idea of Atlantic Ocean itself and the process by which this ocean took its current shape require a more thorough investigation: the geographical nature of the Atlantic Ocean is not as obvious as it seems at first brush, and its historical existence is not ontological nor extemporal[3]. This chapter explores the process whereby the ocean has been progressively delineated, individualized, and identified through various configurations of its shapes, toponyms, and other geographic elements (islands, monsters, winds and currents, lines of demarcation, etc.). Together, these gave concrete form and meaning to what was otherwise an empty space in the geographical imagination. How did the “green sea of Darkness”[9] become the axis of an intensive Atlantic World? How the did “great frontier for expansion on the west” become the “inland sea of Western civilization”[10]? By raising these questions, this chapter intends to offer a geographical narrative for the historical process of configuration of the modern Atlantic world. [1] Note that most of the covers of books on the history of the Atlantic World display a map. See for instance, Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, 2007; Greenne and Morgan, 2009; Sandler, 2008. [2] The debate about the Atlantic world’s limits involve themes ranging from the individualization of “many thematic Atlantics” (according to nations, religions, trade’s routes, etc) to the acknowledgment of many links with a broader global context. Some of the methodological problems involved in those delimitations are presented for “tracing the contours of the French Atlantic” (Dubois, 2009: 138). Renate Pieper, who analyzes the limits of the Atlantic world in early modernity by considering the trade of handcrafts and luxury objects, describes redefinitions in these limits as the result of the dynamic of historical processes. [3] Even though most recent studies assume that “it was impossible for Europeans to consider the Atlantic as a full ocean, so much so that those who made the first recorded crossing had a different idea about their accomplishment” (Chaplin, 2009: 37), they easily succumb to the temptation to organize Atlantic history in stages which involve the assumption of a naturalized geographical conception of the ocean as an object retrospectively fixed as it is today: “The history of the Atlantic’s contemporary meanings occurred in three stages. In the first, Europeans thought of the Atlantic as a geographic space to get across, a rather belated idea that contradicted an ancient suspicion that the ocean was not a real space at all. In the second stage, the peoples in the post-Columbian countries that faced the Atlantic thought of that ocean as a space in which to make or imagine physical connections, both among different places and among different natural forces. In the last stage, people emphasized the Atlantic’s value as a route elsewhere, especially when the Pacific became a new destination for them” (Chaplin, 2009: 36). [4] From a similar perspective, Charles W. J. Withers asks “Where was the Atlantic Enlightenment?” and affirms that “a sense of the Enlightenment not as static, something fixed in space by national boundaries, but as something dynamic, a matter of enlarging knowledge about the world in ways that involved the production, reception and mobility of ideas and artifacts over land and sea” (Withers, 2008: 37). It is also symptomatic of the consolidation of this perspective the 2009 International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 headed by Professor Bernard Bailyn at Harvard University focused on“The Americas in the Advancement of European Science and Medicine, 1500-1830”. The author is especially indebted to Matthew Edney and Chet van Duzer for their insightful readings, and to Claire Gherini for crucial bibliographical recommendations. [5] “Like their Atlantic counterparts, scholars of the Indian and Pacific oceans have been, somewhat understandably, more inclined to see how “oceans connect” their own respective basins rather than how these oceans are linked to one another” (Stern, 2006: 694).  Among that large bibliography one could mention a few of them to emphasize the analogous approach. See, for instance, M. N. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800: Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot, Eng., 2005); Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Most of historiography agree on attributing some foundational mission to the Oceans Connect project headed by Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen at Duke University in the late 1990s. Some academic journals devoted special issues to oceanic matters. For example: “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 63 (October 2006); “Oceans Connect”, Geographical Review; vol. 89 (April 1999). Additionally, some recently published books faced comprehensive histories centered on oceans: Dominique Barbe,Histoire du Pacifique. Dès origins à nos jours. Perrin, Paris, 2008. [6] In the article titled « Un espace mondialisé : l’Océan Indien », Philippe Beaujard admits that “L’espace ainsi unifié débordait en fait largement l’océan Indien » (91). [7] Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contour s (Cambridge, 2005: 55). For some critical anaylisis against the Atlantic approach for considering that this perspective “is constricting interpretively and somewhat misspecified analytically, see the Coclanis’ article: “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?”. For some limits of this Atlantic stream in examining imperial processes which actually took place beyond the Atlantic basin, see Mapp, 2006. [8] The expression is taken from Connery, 1996. Many other authors remark the crucial importance of the spatial dimension in Atlantic World studies: “With the implementation of the historical concept of the Atlantic World in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a stronger consideration of the category of space as a constitutive element of historical action. This represented the correction of a process which had lead to a prioritization of time as opposed to space with the development of historiography in the nineteenth century, and in particular as a consequence of certain accentuations within historicism. This privileging of the temporal dimension has tenaciously held on until the present, as the chronologically-based division of historical seminars and the naming of journals after epochs shows. As a rule, spatial perspectives were restricted to national history in the course of the nineteenth century” (Pieper and Schmidt, 2005: 16). [9] “The ninth-century Baghdad geographer al-Mas’udi called [it] the ‘green sea of darkness’” (Sandler, 2008: 7). [10] Expressions taken from Meining, 1986: 6.