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The article “The Three Concepts of Atlantic History” by David Armitage was a simple yet informative breakdown of the entire study of the Atlantic. I found the three concepts to be very broad and possibly a little too eager to put the entire Atlantic history into three distinct categories, but nonetheless, the article was a good finishing piece for this class.
The three concepts discusses essentially break down then relationships in the Atlantic by time period. I found myself thinking that not all countries in the Atlantic were on the same time scale. To me this made the argument difficult to fully accept because of the huge diversity present in the space. His argument was based primarily on the timelines of the largest countries in the Atlantic. The concepts he points are focus on the early Atlantic, the international period, and finally with the post civil war period that focuses on local areas.
The trans-Atlantic period that focuses on the international aspects of the space was the most interesting to me. This time period was the birth of the concept of the nation in the western world. It doesn’t consider the Iroquois nation that had existed hundreds of years earlier. It does however bring up a new point in the sense that this was the beginning of real, cross Atlantic politics between nations. Before this the Atlantic had been a dividing line between European power and American colonialism. Following this, there was a connection across the Atlantic that would shape politics for the rest of the foreseeable future. The best point I think Armitage made was his conclusion that Atlantic history is the sum of all the different cultures, people, nations that existed in the Atlantic. Tram referenced this in her blog post, and I think her analysis is correct.