The Plantation of the
Atlantic: Introduction
This is not a history of the Atlantic Ocean. People have written such things. Generally,
they’re about boats and geography, important subjects here. But I thought that
it was best to start with savage denial. Because what this is, is a history
against the grain, and there’s very much a reason to put an ocean in a starring
role in such a history.
It goes like this. In a German prisoner of war camp, long
ago, a French scholar named Fernand Braudel found internal liberation in a work
of defiance and denial. He defied his captors by making use of his time, notwithstanding his nation’s defeat, which
ought to have allowed the German Reich the use of his time. And he took his
research and his evidences and used them to create a history that denied and
repudiated his teachers. (More or less; I won’t argue the details if you know
them.) It is known in English as The
Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II,[i]and,
again, it would be off point to explain why
it was such an act of defiance. Take my word for it, and appreciate that
there are arguments that could walk the claim back. I’m being too neat, tying
up loose ends meant to be undone.
In the second act, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell
revisited Braudel’s concept, writing The
Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History.[ii]
The title brilliantly expressed the diffidence that Horden and Purcell felt as
they came to the end of their study. It’s a reference to what Horden and
Purcell call the common Roman observation that the ease with which people
communicated by sea was profoundly disruptive of good social order.[iii]
Their frontispiece, a Medieval map showing Africa and Europe as lovers, puts it
more neatly. The two continents that God has set apart are being brought
together by the Mediterranean Sea. The Strait of Gibraltar will be the site of
their fatal kiss, and their fall into worldly sin will end on the Levant shore.
Except that the whole notion is confused. Another way to look at it is that the
Mediterranean will be the marriage bed of a new social order. Hence this book: Atlantic
history, I modestly propose, has up until now been told by disapproving parents
looking on from the shore. I write as a friend of the couple, drunkenly
celebrating the chivaree. If I have a moral, it is that the grandparents-to-be
need to stop worrying about miscegenation, and start worrying about their
grandchildren’s college tuition. If I have a subject, well, it’s a little
raunchy.
Congratulations on laying the keel!
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