Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

In the years that followed the end of World War II and the emergence of Atlantic history as a subarea of historical studies, some scholars discussed the limits inherent in imperial history, world history, and Atlantic history. Whereas some historians suggested that Atlantic history truly constituted a new field, other scholars perceived Atlantic history as a different way to designate the study of specific interactions already being examined in well-established fields of the discipline.¹ Indeed, the development of Atlantic history was not unrelated to new forms of globalization that emerged in the post–World War II period. During the Cold War, conceiving the regions surrounding the Atlantic basin (especially the North Atlantic) as a unit also justified new forms of economic and cultural domination by the United States. Artificially envisioned as an entity, an Atlantic federation vindicated certain kinds of exchanges in which the Northern Hemisphere very often played the role of protector.²

Unlike imperial history, which privileges the perspective of the former European metropoles, Atlantic history required—and still requires—the use of multidirectional and transnational approaches in the analysis of the interactions among Europe, Africa, and the Americas, rather than the traditional examination of the relations between the center and the periphery, which tended to obey a hierarchical and dichotomous orientation. Indeed, not only did the center have an impact on the periphery, but the periphery itself exerted influence on the center (and on other peripheries, as well). The existence of multiple centers and peripheries generated the need to study diverse networks in constant interaction and transformation and also led scholars to reconsider the results of these interactions that gave birth to creolized and hybrid groups, cultures, and artistic forms on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The different areas of the Atlantic world, although marked by a common morphology, encompass a great diversity of peoples, cultures, and languages. Studying the Atlantic connections by considering at the same time its intrinsic diversity has been a challenge for historians who were often inclined to study the region as a homogenous unity. Several prominent Atlantic scholars, such as Bernard Bailyn, focused mainly on European migrations and essentially examined the North Atlantic