The history of Atlantic science : collective reflections from the 2009 Harvard seminar on Atlantic history

For the purposes of this review essay, which seeks to capture the spirit of those early conversations in Cambridge, we propose calling the assemblages and interactions of the peoples, objects, institutions, and techniques that resulted in and from colonization during the early modern period ''Atlantic science.'' We recognize, of course, that not all colonization was bounded by an Atlantic frame. However, in terms of timing, scale, and scope, no other cluster of imperial enterprises can be compared with the conquest and colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. What made colonization in the Atlantic unique was that it involved the voluntary migration of more than two million Europeans, the forced migration of more than ten million Africans, the creation of a vast network of interconnected centers, and the political incorporation ofmuch of the hemisphere into the Western world, all between 1500 and 1825. Nothing of this scale has happened anywhere else in the early modern period. The Atlantic Ocean, rather than Europe, became the center of that world. And so, we see the Atlantic world as an outcome of this colonizing process.