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When a general audience heard about Atlantic history, I imagine one of the first things they think of is the slave trade. For example, Diana Tran stated on her blog, “There are a lot of benefits and concepts that came from the Atlantic history. However, I believe that the most important was the influence it had on slave trade. It really changed and shaped the world differently. Slaves became the base of most productions, labor and land/crop cultivations.”
The slave trade, indeed is an important part of Atlantic history but it is also a very small part of the board and complexity of Atlantic history.
In his book The Idea of Atlantic History, Bernard Bailyn traced the emergence of the subject of Atlantic History. He studies the approaches of past and current historians on Atlantic history. Bailyn made a lot of critiques to Atlantic historians. For example, to historians who wrote about imperial history of the Atlantic, Bailyn wrote “They were describing the formal structure of imperial governments, not the lives of the people who lived within these governments, and they concentrated on the affairs of a single nations. (Bernard Bailyn, 5)”
In The British Atlantic World, David Armitage talks about what he believe are the three concepts of Atlantic history: the transnational, the international, and the national/regional history of the Atlantic world. Armitage, too concluded that Atlantic history is a part of multinational and Multicultural histories.
Laurent Dubois mentioned on his article Atlantic Freedoms about the challenges to write a piece of history. He reminds that us that the basic of every work of history is a question of positioning. Whose history are you telling? And from whose perspective? And that traditionally, the history of the Americas was written largely from perspective of Europeans. Although in recent decades, historians had come to aware of this fact and work to add perspectives and experience of Native Americans, slaves, and immigrants in the Americas. Dubois also warn us to be conscious when read or write a piece of history. He said, “Historians depend on texts to do their work. Although they are increasingly incorporating other materials into their analysis, archives remain largely textual. This lead to a kind of distortion: because we use texts to access the past.” We need to remember that these texts are small parts of much bigger conversations that did not get recorded. This lead me back to what Bernard Bailyn wrote in the preface of his book, “History is what has happened, in act and thought; it is also what historians make of it.”