New Geographies of the Atlantic, 19-20th centuries
The Editors of The Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics, History and Political Science are calling for proposals for a monographic issue on New Geographies of the Atlantic, 19-20th centuries, to be published in 2020.
In the last three decades, scholars working in the field of Atlantic history have demonstrated the explanatory power of this geographic region as a unit of analysis. Restoring the connections and exchanges between Africans, Europeans, and American Indians, Atlantic perspectives have deepened our understanding of transformations over a period of several centuries, casted old problems in an entirely new light, and illuminated connections hitherto obscured. More importantly, privileging a history beyond national or imperial borders, Atlantic history has broken down not only old regional barriers and paradigms, but also modes of analysis based on modern cultural and political hierarchies. In this light Euro-American relations, once seen as the core of “Western civilization”, are reconsidered as part of a wider, multicentered transnational space.
The coherence of the Atlantic does not mean however that the region was hermetically sealed off the rest of the world. Since 1492 the Atlantic space had been drawn into global ties that intensified in the 19th century thanks to three major developments: (1) revolutions and independences in the Americas, (2) the end of the Atlantic slave trade, (3) the expanded European colonization of Africa, (4) the transportation revolution and its impact on the circulation of people, goods, and ideas across the Atlantic basin. Even though the region is no more characterized by the coherence of the previous centuries, these developments configure the Atlantic as an important laboratory within which to examine regional and global transformations. After the revolutions, the end of the transatlantic slave trade, and the expansion of European colonization in Africa, the encounters among Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans have not ceased, but they had been fundamentally transformed.
Drawing on these findings and considering the limited impact that the Atlantic history is still having in certain European countries, this thematic dossier intends to focus on the new or alternative geographies that the Atlantic paradigm has created in the 19th and 20th centuries. With the term “new geographies” we refer to specific or discrete spaces that, thanks to this approach, have gained a new political and social place in the Atlantic or global context, such as Saint-Domingue/Haiti during the Age of Revolutions and the 19th-century emancipation process. We also refer to commercial routes or markets that had been consolidated after the Atlantic revolutions or the end of the transatlantic slave trade and that eventually opened up new global connections.
In particular, this call invites scholars to propose papers that reflect on the following themes or lines of inquiry:
– Atlantic connections after the collapse of transatlantic empires;
– the transformation of the Atlantic space and the creation of global connections;
– the emergence of new political and commercial Atlantic networks;
– the role of technology and infrastructures (steamship, canals, cables etc.) in re-shaping the Atlantic space;
– the impact of the emergence of the Atlantic space on other world-regions (the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, etc.);
– the emergence in the XX Century of an Atlantic economic, political, and strategic space, and the contextual formation of new Atlantic networks and elites.
Submission procedure
If interested, please submit an abstract (300 words, 3 to 5 keywords) by January 31, 2019, to editors@annalsfondazioneluigieinaudi.it
The abstracts will be reviewed by the editors of this special issue, namely Mario Del Pero (SciencesPo, member of the Editorial Board of The Annals), Marco Mariano (Università di Torino), and Federica Morelli (Università di Torino). Authors will be notified of the review results by February 20, 2019.
The special issue will include around approximately 6 contributions which will be selected by the editors through peer review procedure. Final papers (about 8000 words) will be due on June 30, 2019. Please note that the acceptance of abstracts does not necessarily imply the acceptance of the paper for the special issue.
For further information (including aim and scope), please visit the Journal’s website.
Mario Cedrini