Review
Author(s): Trevor Burnard
Review by: Trevor Burnard
Source: The International History Review, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 880-881
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40108529
Accessed: 28-07-2016 19:42 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
International History Review
This content downloaded from 132.236.27.217 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 19:42:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Reviews of Books
Paul Butel. The Atlantic, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London and New York:
Routledge, 1999. Pp. xin',330. $65.00 (us).
The Atlantic is not the biggest ocean in the world. It is probably the most
important, certainly so for the last half-millennium. Paul Butel has taken on the
daunting task of trying to capture the historical importance of this great sea and of
the nations in the continents of the Americas, Europe, and Africa that border the
Atlantic and whose histories have been enormously shaped by being close to it.
After briefly outlining its particular geography (too briefly in my opinion), Butel
traces the Atlantic of the imagination - legends of the great western sea held by
Europeans who knew little about it - before narrating the ways in which the
Atlantic was opened up by European explorers in the aftermath of Columbus's
voyages to the Americas. The bulk of the book deals with Atlantic history in the
early modern period, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with
some attention paid to the nineteenth century. He concludes as he began, with the
importance of the Atlantic as a construct of the imagination, which he argues is as
true in the age of rapid air travel over, rather than across, the sea as it was in the
days of antiquity.
Butel is a knowledgeable guide to the Atlantic and to the societies that border it.
The book is packed with interesting facts and figures that highlight the intrinsic
importance of the ocean in the expansion of Europe and in the incorporation of all
of the world in increasingly dense global interactions. He shows that the Atlantic
was not an obstacle hindering contact between dispersed peoples. Rather, its particular geography made it a highly efficient highway that allowed for remarkably
rapid dissemination of goods and ideas across continents. The Atlantic, in short,
was less forbidding than welcoming.
Butel approaches the Atlantic from the vantage point of Europe. His Atlantic is
entirely a European construct, with the peoples of the Americas and Africa being
acted upon rather than having any real agency. This relentless European focus
greatly reduces the usefulness of the book and gives it a distinctly old-fashioned
air. In short, Butel's book is another version of the rise of the West, even if it is
implicitly assumed rather than explicitly stated. Moreover, this rise is unexamined.
One waits in vain for discussions of why only Europeans and not Americans ventured across the Atlantic. Nor is there any attempt to examine how Africans and
xxii. 4: December 2000
This content downloaded from 132.236.27.217 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 19:42:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Reviews of Books 881
Americans might have viewed the Atlantic from their shores, or what they thought
about the invaders who violated their Atlantic space. It is hard to discern a thesis
in the book, besides his intention to 'understand more vividly the dreams and the
realities that inspired the development of a Western civilization that deserves the
name "Atlantic"' (p. 4). Outlining the contours of a transatlantic civilization is
important, given that European culture was both transferred across the Atlantic
and was itself changed in the process, but it is not enough to look at it merely from
one perspective. As historians have known for some time, the Americas and Africa
were 'encountered' as much as 'discovered', and those encounters involved at least
two parties. If we don't look at both, then we get an incomplete understanding of
transatlantic interactions. Butel spends so little time on those encountered and
so much on those doing the encountering that his Atlantic story is seriously
unbalanced.
In short, the book is disappointing because Butel does not engage with recent
scholarship in which the primacy of Europe as the arbiter of Atlantic values is not
presupposed. This lack of engagement renders the book of limited usefulness,
more a reference work to European colonization in the Atlantic world than a contribution to the developing field of Atlantic history. His depth of knowledge about
the Atlantic over an enormous historical span is impressive. It is a pity that this
empirical breadth was not accompanied by a closer examination of the implicit
Eurocentric assumptions that informed the writing of the book.
Brunei University Trevor Burnard
Brendan Smith, ed. Britain and Ireland, goo-1300: Insular Responses to Medieval
European Change. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xv, 283.
$59-95 (us).
When Rees Davies edited The British Isles, 1100-1500: Comparisons, Contrasts,
and Connections (1988), he sought, as his own essay 'In Praise of British History'
made clear, both to transcend and to enrich national historiographies focused on
England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales by promoting an agenda that attempted to
identify and explain the interrelationships, as well as the similarities and differences, between - and within - the individual countries of medieval Britain and Ireland. That Brendan Smith has eschewed providing this very welcome collection of
ten essays under review with a comparable apologia reflects the strides taken by a
British Isles perspective over the past decade or so, thanks in large part to the
work of Davies (for example, in Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1100-1300, 1990), and that of Robin Frame, notably in
The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100-1400 (1990).
Overall, the essays edited by Smith are more concerned with exploring connections than with drawing comparisons between different parts of the British
Isles. John Gillingham's chapter is the most explicitly comparative, offering a
xxii. 4: December 2000
This content downloaded from 132.236.27.217 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 19:42:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms