ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the construction, coexistence, and confrontation of multiple Atlantics over time and space. Historically, an Atlantic World came into being from the fifteenth century onwards, connecting regions, people, goods, and ideas in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. From the 1400s onwards, Europeans entered ‘a maritime sphere without competition – without the adversaries of the eastern oceans: Arabs, Chinese, Malays, and other maritime traders and pirates’, and thus opened up a new Atlantic World. From the 1960s onwards, historians Bernard Bailyn and Jack P. Greene developed an approach to the Atlantic World with the aim to move beyond justifying Cold War connections and its historical predecessors. Multiple Atlantics emerged in the same period with studies on the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic empires and their economies, as well as with studies on African slavery. A closer look at Atlantic history reveals a set of six interrelated problems that have to be overcome.
