ABSTRACT
The Atlantic is a field of study and methodology that has gained popularity among historians, sociologists, and economists over the last two decades. Bernard Bailyn situates the origins of the concept back during World War I, when a transoceanic geopolitical consciousness emerged in the United States. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic not only enriches the history of modernity, but also represents a point of inflexion in Atlantic historiography. Besides illuminating how porous imperial borderlands transformed the New World into a stage for overlapping commercial projects, the Atlantic paradigm has also suited academics’ need to explore correlations between sovereignty, modernity, and the Enlightenment. The inter-American and trans-imperial nature of the Atlantic was not limited to transforming the early modern world into a stage for cultural and epistemological hybridities. Historians have examined the relationship between local and global forces from a truly inter-American vantage point.
