Aurélia Aubert Atlantic History and Beyond (euh 5934) Dr Harland-Jacobs February 6, 2012 Alison Games

Alison Games started her career in history studying early America. However, she now focuses on migrants, as vehicules of ideas and the central driving force of empires. To her, as she wrote in her introduction to Migration and the Origins of the Atlantic World, “Migration secured, created, and ultimately defined the English Atlantic world.” ¹

Games is therefore interested in movements, but she does not take for granted “the static nature of relocation” and turn migrants into “settlers” and “colonists” as previous historians did.² She examines how people sometimes moved freely from one culture to another and thus uses historiographies of other regions.³ In The Wed Of Empire published in 2008, she examines the lives of “cultural brokers” from Europe to America and Asia. Doing so, she escapes the frame of imperial ideology when she examines the British early colonial endeavor and explores the practical conditions in colonies that surpassed any type of ideology. Games’ research and writing method seems to be that of a zoom lens, zooming in and out to get the full picture of a situation. She often focuses on narrow elements, such as individuals, and expands her focus in a 2^nd stage as she “delineate[s] both the varieties of colonial societies and the common processes by which they were formed.” ⁴ In a sense, Games practices social history and micro-history on a large scale to recreate this web of the Atlantic world, identify these convergences, she is fascinated by.⁵ Thus, as she focuses on a short period of time and individual stories in Migration, she examines a wide geographical area. She adds to the traditional thirteen colonies the Caribbean and borderlands where Britain contested the authority of France and Spain.

According to Armitage’s concepts, Games therefore practices Circum-Atlantic history. Actually, at Georgetown, where she has been teaching since 1995, Games leads classes in global history. To her, Atlantic history is a “slice of world history.”⁶ It is “a way of looking at global and regional processes within a contained unit.”⁷ Games therefore strongly advocates interdisciplinary approaches. Archeology, anthropology, art history, demography, economic history, environmental history, material culture, literature, are all fields that Atlantic historians can benefit from.⁸ “Fortunate to work within one of academie’s most integrative disciplines,” she argues, “historians would be foolish to limit themselves to a single methodology instead of trying whatever works best to make sense of the problem under study.” She further encourages us to “take all sorts of books off our libraries, to dip into new journals, to sample unfamiliar disciplines, to talk to colleagues in other departments, and to enjoy […] discovering what we can see more clearly or entirely differently as a result.”⁹ Thus, Games deplores that historians studying the Atlantic often do it from a vantage point; from one national or imperial historiographic tradition. “They [historians] bring the historiographic conventions of a number of subfields to Atlantic history, thus reinforcing the heterogeneity of the field itself.”¹⁰ The way that students are trained, that departments are organized and hiring takes place sadly prevents historians to be specialized in Atlantic history.

Games also criticizes the predominance of a few vantage points in Atlantic historiography as it sacrifices regions that are left very little room in the literature. “Atlantic history,” she argues, “may deal with European dominion but it should not be Eurocentric” or americanocentric.¹¹ Indeed, while she argues for a wide-encompassing Atlantic history, Games is perfectly aware of the complexity and variety of the Atlantic space. It is impossible to talk about an “Atlantic” style of interaction, or a single “Atlantic” culture, or even, as Pieter Emmer has argued, an Atlantic “system.”¹² As a result, she recurrently deplores the lack of Atlantic studies on Africa. Despite the labors of Africanists for some forty years, little is known on the lived experiences of African captives who were, with three times as many migrants as Europeans over the same period, “the dominant human face of Atlantic history for over two centuries, and the cultural hearth for much of the Americas and the Caribbean.”¹³ Thus, to Games, “the most urgent and immediate challenge is to restore Africa to the Atlantic.”¹⁴ However, this conviction involved her in a “professional disagreement” with her former professor Bernard Bailyn when she reviewed his Atlantic history: Concepts and Contours. By granting little interpretative weight to Africa in his study, Games implied that Bailyn sadly contributed to historical imperialism. Both historians then retorted to each other via notes to the review editor.¹⁵

Alison Games is part of a younger generation of historians who emerged in the 1990s and continue asserting Atlantic history as a field. ¹⁶ She has indeed written several articles to define it and with Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, some have argued that she took the succession of Bernard Bailyn and his Voyagers to the West published in 1986. Indeed, his book examined the peopling of America between 1773 and 1776, while Games' monograph turns the clock back a century and a half by focusing on 1635. It is maybe following the natural order that she defied her elder.

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  Ph.D. (1992) University of Pennsylvania, History
  
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  A.B. (1985) Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, History
  

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  Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History; Acting Director of Doctoral Studies, Director of the Institute for Global History, at Georgetown (since 1995)
  
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  Grinnell College, Iowa (1992-1995)
  

Publications:

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  Witchcraft in Early North America, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).
  
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  The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660, (Oxford University Press, 2008).
  
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  With Douglas R. Egerton, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888, (Harlan Davidson, 2007).
  
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  Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, (Harvard University Press, 1999). (This was her Ph D dissertation)
  

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  "Anglo-Dutch Connections and Overseas Enterprises: A Global Perspective on Lion Gardiner’s World" Early American Studies 9.2 (2011): 435-461.
  
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  "Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches" The William and Mary Quarterly 65 (2008): 165-168.
  
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  "Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches" Early American Literature 43.1 (2008): 187-190.
  
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  "England’s Global Transition and the Cosmopolitans Who Made It Possible" Shakespeare Studies 35 (2007): 24-31.
  
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  "Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections" The William and Mary Quarterly 63.4 (2006): 675-692.
  
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  "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities" American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 741-757.
  
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  "Atlantic Constraints and Global Opportunities" History Compass 1 (2003).
  
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  "Whose Atlantic History?" International Journal of Maritime History 13 (2001): 198-203.
  
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  "The Accidental Empire" Reviews in American History 28 (2000): 1-10.
  
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  "Teaching Atlantic History" Itinerario 23 (1999): 162-171.
  
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  "“The Sanctuarye of our Rebell Negroes”: The Atlantic Context of Local Resistance on Providence Island, 1630-1641" Slavery and Abolition 19 (1998): 1-21.
  
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  "The English Atlantic World: A View from London" Pennsylvania History 64 (1997): 46-72.
  
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  "History without Borders: Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context" Indiana Magazine of History 41 (1995): 159-178.
  
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  "Survival Strategies in Early Bermuda and Barbados" Revista/Review Interamericana 22 (1992): 55-71.
  

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  "The Atlantic Framework of Seventeenth-Century Colonization" The Caribbean: An Illustrated History. Ed. Palmié, Stephen, and Francisco Scarano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011: 191-204
  
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  "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities" Teaching American History in a Global Context. Ed. Carl Guarneri and James Davis. London: M.E. Sharpe, 2008: 43-51
  
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  "Migrations and Frontiers" The Atlantic World 1450-2000. Ed. Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008: 48-65
  
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  "Conclusion: The World of 1607" The World of 1607: Special Exhibition. Ed. . Williamsburg, VA: Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, 2008: 249-255
  
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  "Adaptation and Survival" Major Problems in Atlantic History. Ed. Alison Games and Adam Rothman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007: 176-182
  
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  "The Atlantic Ocean" Europe 1450-1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. Ed. Jonathan Dewald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 2004.
  
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  "Migration" The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Ed. David Armitage and Michael Braddick. London: Palgrave, 2002: 31-50
  
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  "Opportunity and Mobility in Early Barbados" The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion. Ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996: 165-181
  

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  With Adam Rothman, ed. Major Problems in Atlantic History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
  

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  "Showtime in Washington," Perspectives 45, no. 8 (November 2007): 28-29.
  
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  Guest editor, The OAH Magazine of History, special issue on the Atlantic World, 18, no. 3 (April, 2004).
  
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  "Oceans, Migrants, and the Character of Empires: English Colonial Schemes in the Seventeenth Century," online at The History Cooperative, 2003.