How Wide Is the Atlantic Ocean? Not Wide Enough!

TWO RECENT BOOKS, WHEN JUXTAPOSED, ACCENTUATE THE demise of old-fashioned North American colonial history."We are all Atlanticists now", declares David Armitage in a key theoretical chapter of his and Michael Braddick's The British Atlantic World, "or so it would seem from the explosion of interest in the Atlantic and the Atlantic world as subjects of study among historians of North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa and western Europe". 1 Meanwhile Daniel Richter, in Facing East from Indian Country, spells out the interpretive consequences of taking a different vantage point: "If we shift our perspective to view the past in a way that faces east from Indian country, history takes on a very different appearance.Native Americans appear in the foreground, and Europeans enter from distant shores.North America becomes the 'old world' and Western Europe the 'new', [the Mississippian city of] Cahokia becomes the center and Plymouth Rock the periphery, and themes rooted in Indian country rather than across the Atlantic begin to shape the larger story". 2 With pressures being exerted from both eastern and western directions, the old certainty that there was a colonial period in North American history -and that historians should understand it primarily through the study of colonies and colonists -has come to seem antiquated and even naïve.Healthy and inevitable as historical revisionism is, however, in this and other instances it raises the difficult question of how to replace a worn-out interpretive model.Atlantic history offers a good first step, but without a close articulation with Aboriginal history it has limited explanatory power as an interpretive representation of eastern North America in the early modern era.Closer to the mark, in my view, is an effort to combine Aboriginal, colonial and imperial experiences and measure the results of interactions among them.Canadian history offers unique and revealing examples, as I will attempt to demonstrate.For convenience, I will take 1763 as an approximate cut-off date for the early modern era in the history of what is now Canada although this is, of course, an arbitrary and debatable dividing line.In the United States, the development of a historiography of the Atlantic world has been closely (and rightly) associated with the work of the Harvard University historian Bernard Bailyn and with the participants in the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World held regularly at Harvard since 1995.In particular, Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize-winning Voyagers to the West explored movement across the Atlantic during the mid-1770s, taking migration to Nova Scotia as a major case study.3 As an example of the collective force of the work of participants in the 1 David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History", in Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002), p. 11.An earlier version of this essay was presented at a workship entitled "How Wide is the Atlantic Ocean?" at Presence of the Past: A National Conference on the Teaching, Learning and Communicating the History of Canada, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, 24 October 2003. 2 Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2001), p. 8. 3 Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986).

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