Summer Academy of Atlantic History: Atlantic Worlds between the Global and the National

Twelve years ago, Prof. Dr. Susanne Lachenicht, Chair of Early Modern History at the University of Bayreuth, initiated the Summer Academy of Atlantic History. Christian Wißler asked her some questions for ubtaktuell.

What made you decide to make the tension between global and national orientations – and thus also between nationalism and globalisation – the focus of this year's Summer Academy?

Not least the current debates on this topic or the tense relationship that is evident in the Covid 19 crisis, trade wars, and the rise of populism. A cooperative project on this topic is also in the making, for which Prof. Dr. Volker Depkat (Regensburg) and I have submitted an SFB-transregio draft proposal to the DFG. We are dealing with the relationship between globalisation and the national, i.e. concepts of nation, nationalism, and (national) states, from the 16th century to this day.

In Atlantic history, the tension between globalisation, i.e. increasing interconnections between specific world regions and actors on the one hand, and various forms of nationalism on the other, is discussed very critically and intensively. It is undisputed that some forms of globalisation are closely linked to imperial expansion and the development of states and state systems, and are pushed by national competition. Phases of globalisation and nationalisms enable each other.

In many of the doctoral projects at our Summer Academy, this tension is often implicitly the metanarrative against which questions about specific regions and actors are then posed. One question we also discussed this time is whether this metanarrative, which occupies us so intensively today in society as a whole, does not push other historical developments too much into the background.

Numerous lectures and discussions focus on events and developments from the 17th to the 19th century. Could it be said that today’s much-vaunted “globalisation” is not a revolutionary new phenomenon at all, but rather a thread of historical development that runs – parallel to the formation of nation states – through the entire modern era?

Of course, this always depends on how one defines globalisation. Some assume that globalisation should only be understood as the integrated global market or the development towards it. Others see waves of globalisation and deglobalisation, in part even since early history or antiquity. From the perspective of Atlantic history, globalisation is a heuristic term under which one analyses the conditions, causes, processes, and effects of the increasing interconnectedness of people, regions, places, knowledge, production, distribution, and consumption, but also its limits.

For the early modern period, it is exciting to analyse the connection between the wave of globalisation in the early modern period and European expansion, state-building processes, and imperial competition, and the role played by concepts of nation or nationalism avant la lettre. From this position, it must then be clearly stated that all forms of globalisation are by no means a phenomenon of the late 20th and 21st centuries, but take place again and again, albeit with different scopes.

Where do the participants at the Summer Academy this year come from, are some countries of origin particularly well represented?

Since the aim of the Summer Academy is to facilitate a dialogue between different academic traditions and sub-disciplines of historical scholarship, we always make sure that there is as balanced a ratio as possible between doctoral students from North, Central, and South America and Europeans or Africans.

We always issue an international call for papers, but are ultimately dependent on the applications we receive. Most applications come from US universities, often from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, or Johns Hopkins University. Atlantic history is very strong here, as it is in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, i.e. from countries that formerly had colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean.

This year we have doctoral students from Johns Hopkins University, UC Davis, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Edinburgh, Monash University in Australia, Université Lyon-Lumière, Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and LMU Munich. However, the institutional affiliation conceals where the doctoral students originally come from, for example from Brazil or African countries. The tutors, i.e. our international experts, come from the University of Galway with the former member of the European Research Council, Prof. Nicholas Canny, from Pablo Olavide in Seville, from the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation in Hull, and from the Universities of Paris Diderot, Versailles-Saint Quentin, Rostock, Bremen, and Regensburg.

How should the plural “Atlantic worlds” in the title be understood? Does it mainly refer to different large regions – such as North America, Western Europe, the Caribbean, or South Africa – or at the same time also to the different imaginary worlds and world views that have historically developed on both sides of the Atlantic?

It means both, but also that we are dealing with a wide variety of historical actors who lived in sometimes more, sometimes less connected worlds and had very different, historically changing living conditions and opportunities. Atlantic history and thus Atlantic worlds also means, above all, the analysis of the construction of these worlds from different actors’ perspectives through imperial expansion, wars, forced or voluntary mobility, through production and consumption, through the forcible or voluntary exchange of knowledge, and the emergence of new cultures and societies.

What are the focal points of this year’s Summer Academy and how do they fit into the current discussion in historical studies?

There is no such thing as a single historical discussion, not even in Atlantic History. In the Summer Academy, we bring together experts with the most diverse research traditions and paradigms, not least in order to determine and discuss how strongly our research subjects are shaped by contemporary discussions. There are globally discussed topics, but also national, regional, and local particularisms. It is interesting to see how differently these things are handled in different countries and institutions, in different subfields of historical research. The biggest problem of research is our blinkers, that we fail to take note of research happening in other subfields which would be relevant to one’s own topics. We are trying to break this down, at least for research in Atlantic history.

This time, the content focuses on questions of globalisation and nationalism, which are discussed in all participating countries, economic systems, inter-imperial conflicts, slavery in various regions, and phases of the Atlantic world in the early modern period, urbanisation, knowledge, and archives, and a work on the Caribbean that critically examines the fact that we deal almost exclusively with the daytime in relation to colonial worlds and never ask what colonial societies actually meant for the respective actors at night.

What influence do the current debates around the concept of postcolonialism have on the Summer Academy? Occasionally, a distinction is made in this context between a “Global North” and a “Global South”. How can such a demarcation be justified in view of the diverse economic and cultural interconnections?

For decades, Atlantic history has been dealing with the emergence and effects of colonisation, locally, regionally, and macrostructurally, from different actors' perspectives, for different periods of time, with relationships, interconnections on different levels, locally, regionally, transregionally, and globally.

The topic of the enslavement of Africans and the indigenous population of the Americas is particularly well represented. We see this very clearly in the applications we receive from doctoral students in response to our calls for papers. Atlantic history thus deals with the depeupling of Africa, with the “racialisation of labour” as the basis of early modern economic systems and societies, and the local and regional variations of enslavement and freedom. It is currently discussing very "hotly" the extent to which the industrial revolution, actually one should speak of industrial revolutions, was made possible by the plantation economy based on slavery, the extent to which societies simply ignored the enslavement of people when they consumed products such as sugar, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee.

Prof. Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation in Hull, made it clear in his keynote lecture on Friday evening that this ignorance of the contexts and conditions of origin of our consumer goods is still present among many people today, despite a growing awareness of social and ecological grievances in many countries of origin, and of the inhumane working and living conditions on the ground.

The current debates around the concept of postcolonialism or movements like Black Lives Matter make it clear that our research should be taken into account in these discussions. Differentiated analyses of the ways in which colonialism functions are necessary in order to be able to have a proper discussion with each other and understand various points of view.

Constructions such as the “Global North” and the “Global South”, “Western Hemisphere”, and the “West” are critically questioned or the development of these concepts is analysed and problematised in their effects. Such categories are very essentialising for all involved and obscure complexity, interdependencies, but also mechanisms of how colonisation is possible at all. Good historical research must always be concerned with both macrostructures, but also with the specific, the individual, how these levels or scales are interrelated or mutually produce each other.

What role does the concept of the “West”, as a civilisational, cultural, and economic entity, play in historical research today? Is it considered obsolete or does it continue to be a viable concept for the formation of theory in history and the social sciences?

The notion of the “West” is a historical concept whose genesis and impact must still be grappled with. Atlantic History, as founded in the 1950s and 1960s by Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot in the context of the Cold War, was understood during this time as the history of the emergence of the West, characterised by freedom and democracy.

For some decades now, parts of Atlantic history have taken a very critical view of this. Empirical studies show instead that the rise of the so-called West was marked by lack of freedom, the enslavement and extermination of millions of people, violence and never-ending wars. Moreover, research into both Atlantic history and transatlantic relations in the 19th and 20th centuries has made it clear that this civilisational, cultural, and economic unity of the West does not even exist.