‘The Atlantic was a European invention’, declared David Armitage in his opening chapter of the 2002 edited collection The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. He argued that Europeans were the first to connect the four sides of the Atlantic into a single entity, both as a natural place, and as a system. Echoing Braudel, he explained how they ‘integrated’ disparate physical parts to ‘invent’ a geography, one in which most of the action happened on land, but which was bestowed an identity based on the ...
‘The Atlantic was a European invention’, declared David Armitage in his opening chapter of the 2002 edited collection The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. He argued that Europeans were the first to connect the four sides of the Atlantic into a single entity, both as a natural place, and as a system. Echoing Braudel, he explained how they ‘integrated’ disparate physical parts to ‘invent’ a geography, one in which most of the action happened on land, but which was bestowed an identity based on the ocean — itself a contemporary unification — which links together its components on terra firma.
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