Paul Butel. The Atlantic. (Seas in History.) Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant.

932 Reviews of Books dealing with a vast array of literature, and she adeptly avoids the obvious trap of developing a Eurocentric analysis. In fact, Wiesner-Hanks shows a great ability to read and analyze the African, Asian, Latin American, and North American situations. Wiesner-Hanks divides her book into a series of chapters that focuses first on Europe (including the premodern development of Christianity, Judaism, and classical intellectual and religious life, followed by a discussion of early modern Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy), then on Latin America, Africa, Asia, and North America. She divides each chapter into sections that roughly correspond to what she calls "ideas, institutions, and effects." To Wiesner-Hanks, the production of early modern sexual regulation and practice were intimately linked with Christianity, a by no means obvious thesis. Scholars who have studied sexuality have sometimes failed to see this relationship and have assumed that regulation and practice have little to do with each other. Others have suggested that all practice is created by regulation or vice versa. Wiesner-Hanks ably navigates her way through this morass by reading reports of both practice and regulation as related to, but not necessarily dependent on each other. In an attempt to provide a clear story, WiesnerHanks avoids many historiographical controversies, sometimes to her detriment. For example, in her discussion of the Native American berdache, she posits these historical figures as "two-spirit people," a thoroughly modern interpretation of identity not supported, in this reader's view, by the early modern sources. Further, probably in an attempt to keep the book short, the author does not always provide sufficient detail on various topics. However, if she had attempted to deal with the historiographical controversies or provided us with more details, it certainly would have taken away from the story presented. In each chapter, Wiesner-Hanks is very careful to discuss a wide diversity of issues related to sexuality. If a student with little knowledge of religion reads this book, that student will come away with some knowledge of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations and the relationship between Christianity and colonization, as well as of indigenous religions in the various regions. In most chapters, Wiesner-Hanks discusses the intellectual history of sexuality within the region, followed by the influence of Christianity and its institutions. She then moves on to look at clerical sexuality, the family and heterosexuality among the laity, prostitution, sodomy, and sexual magie. Her inclusion of such a diversity of reproductive and non-reproductive sexuality makes the book both more interesting and more useful to a wide audience. Instructors will find this book useful at almost any level. Undergraduate students in courses in early modern world history (or even early modern European history) will be able to follow the argument, and they will discover a rich diversity of sexual practices and regulations. Graduate and undergraduate students be- AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW ginning to study the history of sexuality and gender will find the book extraordinarily useful, particularly the extensive annotated bibliographies included at the end of each chapter. Wiesner-Hanks has read extremely broadly, and she seems to have captured virtually every English-language publication that relates to early modern sexuality (the inclusion of some non-Englishlanguage sources would have been helpful). Finally, for the experienced scholar in the history of sexuality, the author's comparative framework provides an excellent way to refer to various areas of the world. Overall, this book will become a remarkable addition to the field. PETER SIGAL California State University, Los Angeles PAUL BUTEL. The Atlantic. (Seas in History.) Translated by IAIN HAMILTON GRANT. New York: Routledge. 1999. Pp. xiii, 330. $65.00. This book opens a welcome new series of volumes on "Seas in History." Previous syntheses of Atlantic history have been more limited in thematic or temporal focus. Paul Butel conscientiously sweeps through two and a half millennia of human interaction around and across the ocean. He begins with the imaginary lands projected by antiquity into the terrifying expanse of the Sea of Perpetual Gloom and ends with the era of air travel, containerization, and cruise hotels. The book follows familiar lines of exploration, appropriation and conflict, moving outward from the Mediterranean basin and Northern Europe. From start to finish, the author's perspective is the Atlantic "as seen from Europe" (p. 1). The first chapter quickly moves the reader through two thousand years of seaborne ventures from the Phoenicians to the Viking feats of conquest and exploration along the northern arc of islands between the British Isles and Newfoundland. The remainder of the book is devoted to the "New Atlantic," initially opened up by the Iberians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and subsequently dominated by the Northwestern European powers and the United States. The "Colonial Atlantic" has pride of place in Butel's account. Spain's aborted seaborne invasion of England in 1588 is allotted two wellwrought pages. The somewhat more successful and far more massive amphibious invasion of France in 1944 goes unmentioned. The author's most favored Atlantic moment is the seventeenth and the eighteenth century (colonialism's "golden age"). Four of the book's six tables deal with just fifty years, between 1761 and 1810, and more space is devoted to the late-eighteenth century "battle of the Atlantic" than to the combined battles of both twentieth-century world wars. The temporal phases identified are the familiar sequences of power and trade: Iberia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Northwestern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Euro-America JUNE 2001

Comparative/World during the past two centuries. Butel devotes ample space to transnational aspects of his story, including fundamental movements of technology and products. The ebb and flow of human migrations also receives considerable attention, especially the streams of Africans and Europeans before 1800 and the great European migration between the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and World War I. Butel's book is more of an introductory narrative than a scholarly monograph. The flow of events, goods, and people is uninterrupted by discussions of major historiographical disputes, and the reader's attention is rarely turned toward discussions of long-term change and large-scale comparisons. This is especially obvious in the way non-Europeans are fitted into Butel's account. The demographic disaster of the Euro-African encounter with the Amerindians is introduced only after the chapter on the eighteenth-century colonial Atlantic. The section on the transatlantic slave trade, although treated more fully, is similarly positioned. Readers are therefore unlikely to recall the first chapter's mention that the Vikings made use of enslaved Europeans on their first settlement of Iceland and reached the Western hemisphere at a time when Amerindians were less vulnerable to European domination, They are even more unlikely to ponder the significance of the fact that enslaved Europeans were not used in the settlement of the New Atlantic after 1400. There are likewise no discussions of the myths and seafaring technologies of Africans and Amerindians in the Old Atlantic, nor of their responses to European encounters in the New. Nineteenth-century European migrants are allotted a separate section on "Sufferings on the Atlantic." There is no analogous section on the Middle Passage of African slaves. The one reference to the African cultural heritage is a passing reference to the "African system of magic thought" as a possible explanation for the ability of the small European minority to sustain its dominance in the slave inlands. Comparative analysis is in short supply even within the Euro-American Atlantic. Ironically, in view of the book's European perspective, Butel accounts for the crucial difference between the magnitude of British and French colonial populations before 1800 primarily in terms of conditions in the New World. The most distressing aspect of this comprehensive history of the Atlantic has nothing to do with the author. In the English translation, Curaçao becomes Caracas (p. 69); Jamaica's sugar economy reaches its pinnacle in 1672 (p. 112), the "règne personnel" of Louis XIV becomes the "selfish reign of Louis XVI" (p. 120). A causal analysis of the ending of slavery that Butel considers to be dubious is transformed into a statement of affirmation (p. 160). For purposes of citation or quotation scholars are well advised to refer back to the author's original Histoire de l'Atlantique (1997). For the sake of the series, one hopen that AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 933 subsequent volumes will be more rigorously scrutinized. SEYMOUR DRESCHER University of Pittsburgh DARLENE CLARK HINE and JACQUELINE MCLEOD, edi tors. Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora. (Blacks in the Diaspora.) Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press. 1999. Pp. xxv, 491. $29.95. How best to understand the historical experiences and identities of peoples of African descent in the American is the common query in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod's edited collection. The eighteen essays, divided into four parts, explore how peoples of African descent have shaped and been shaped by the developing Atlantic world since the 1500s. Except for Earl Lewis's opening essay, "To Turn on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas" (which first appeared in the American Historical Review [June 1995]), the collected pieces represent revised papers from an international symposium that Michigan State University hosted in April 1995. In search of more serviceable paradigms to relocate Africa and its descendants from the periphery to the core of the modern Atlantic world, the broad themes of the parts—Comparative Diaspora Historiography; Identity and Culture; Domination and Resistance; Geo-Social History and the Atlantic World—suggest shared challenges and confrontations. Slavery and emancipation dominate, figuring in the titles of ten of the pieces. The second part, treating identity and culture, is the most coherent in the collection. Allison Blakely initiates the part by tracing Europeans' creation of the racial vocabulary of black identity. He concludes that culture, not color, has marked the real problem of the differential treatment labeled racism. Yet is not culture merely another trope, albeit one more complex than color? Is it not clear that the wars of the color line have been and continue to be culture wars? The battle in significant part has been for self-determination that begins with self-identification. Three pieces in succession after Blakely's localize the self-identity struggle. Dwayne E. Williams shows how Portuguese-speaking immigrants from the Cape Verde archipelago off the West African coast came to the United States in waves that brought differing self-identities and received differing identities. Kim D. Butler traces Afro-Brazilians' post-abolition struggle in the cities of Sáo Paulo and Salvador to undermine imposed identities and to construct their own from a shared African cultural heritage. Philip A. Howard further details the battle to control identity and to use it in a strategy to divide and unite peoples by color and caste in Cuba from 1878 to 1895. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's contribution closes the fiveessay second part. Using as examples Nancy Prince of JUNE 2001