Adam Nadeau
University of New Brunswick

In 1949, the French historian Fernand Braudel completed his first book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Piecing together a history of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean that transcended religious and national boundaries, Braudel ushered in the enduring trend of utilising sea and ocean basins as frameworks of historical analysis. Over the next few decades, a series of early American historians would likewise centre their work around maritime space, following European commerce and politics out of the Mediterranean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean to America, where, in the late eighteenth century, Florentine republicanism, English common law, and the European Enlightenment merged to create the United States, the New World ‘Empire of liberty’ that was to inherit global hegemony in the mid-twentieth century.[1]

Though quick to incorporate cultural, demographic, and social studies of the region, the Atlantic World was initially conceived as a political-economic project, a heuristic device that accounted for the continuity between European and American imperialism. As a result, twentieth-century American historians were very much the products of their time, constructing an Atlantic World that reflected the bifurcated international climate of the post-war era. In doing so, however, their stories tended to neglect the historical interconnectedness that existed between early modern Eastern and Western Europe.

Ironically, just as Braudel was writing to counter notions that the Mediterranean had been a backwater, Western Europe and North America were politically and militarily reorganizing themselves around the Atlantic Ocean. In 1949, the same year that The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World was published, twelve of the modern incarnations of the historical Atlantic powers in Italy, Iberia, France, the Low Countries, and Britain, along with their former colonies in Canada and the United States, formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an intergovernmental military alliance of collective defence against the Soviet Union. Turkey joined soon thereafter in 1952, followed by West Germany in 1955. In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, the Soviet Union spearheaded the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, institutions analogous to NATO and the European Common Market in the West.

In the wake of the post-war partition of Europe and the onset of the Cold War, the Atlantic Ocean basin was reconceptualised as an exclusively Western European space. And historians, in a sort of primitive accumulation, began to pull chapters from various Western national histories for incorporation into a larger Atlantic World narrative, one with its ultimate destination in the New World. It was during this period that the medieval Norse expeditions to northeastern North America gained widespread acceptance among American scholars, and it was Americanists with their careers rooted firmly in the Cold War who reframed the story of colonial America by emphasizing how migration from France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia was as central as that from the British Isles.[2] The emergence of Atlantic history, as David Armitage aptly puts it, thus ‘owed more to NATO than it did to Plato.’[3]

But for all of the benefits of a more inclusive history, as Peter Coclanis suggests, a strict Atlantic focus anachronistically tends to ‘give too much weight to the Atlantic Rim,’ artificially separating ‘Northwest Europe too sharply both from other parts of Europe and from Eurasia as a whole’.[4] The effect of this has been the orientalisation of early modern Eastern Europe and, especially, Russia. As Coclanis points out, however, some of early modern Europe’s most important commercial activity was ‘not the long-distance trades with the Americas or even Asia for that matter’. Rather, it was often the ‘less glamorous Continental trades … linking southern Europe to northern Europe, and eastern Europe to the west.’[5] One of France’s earliest external ventures, for instance, was Henry IV’s North Pole Company, which developed an Arctic whaling industry around Greenland and Spitsbergen, and, for much of the eighteenth century, Britain’s trade in flax, hemp, and linen from the Baltic was essential to the production of the woven materials that clothed slaves on plantations in the West Indies.[6] Even Richard Hakluyt, one of the earliest proponents of English settlement in North America, was connected by family to the Elizabethan Muscovy Company’s eastern trade.[7]

Not only was the interchange between the western Atlantic World and northern and eastern Europe merely economic, it was cultural and intellectual as well. David Hume, whose Essays could be found in American libraries from New England to the Carolinas and as far west as Kentucky, thought the Russian language ‘soft and musical.’[8] Catherine the Great’s Russia, moreover, was central to Enlightenment-era inquiries into the nature of government at the same time that the social and political theories of French philosophes informed Catherine’s understanding of her role as sovereign.[9] In fact, many turn-of-the-nineteenth-century thinkers viewed Russia in very much the same light as they did America, their both being primarily agricultural nations that had elevated themselves onto the world stage through cultivation of the arts and sciences.[10] Alexis de Tocqueville compared the United States and Russia as the ‘two great nations of the earth … advancing toward the same destination from different starting points’. ‘All other nations appear to have reached almost the upper limits of their natural development’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘whereas these two progress rapidly and comfortably on a seemingly unending course as far as we can see.’[11]

More importantly, though, it was through external ventures very similar to early Western European expansion that Russia projected itself into the New World. After occupying the eastern limits of the Eurasian continent in the late seventeenth century, between 1729 and 1741, the Russian Crown sponsored a series of expeditions around the Pacific Rim and down along North America’s western coastline with the intention that Russia could ‘extend its possessions as far as California and Mexico’. In the 1760s, the Spanish ambassador at St. Petersburg complained of Russian encroachments on Spanish settlements as far south as Baja California, and, in 1799, the Russian-American Company was chartered with a twenty-year monopoly over the Aleutian and Alaskan fur trade, the products of which went mostly to China in return for porcelains, tea, and silk.[12] The Russo-American and Russo-British Treaties of 1824 and 1825 subsequently recognized Russian claims above the parallel of 54º 40´ north, and Russia maintained a presence on the American continent until selling Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867. Russian activity in the northern Pacific was little different from that of Western European expansion into the Atlantic.

Imperial Russia’s external ventures were directed by the same Law of Nations that governed the foreign relations of early modern Western European monarchs. Influential members of the court of Peter the Great—such as Andrey Matveyev, one of Russia’s first ambassadors to England and the Netherlands, and Vice-Chancellor Peter Shafirov—owned copies of Hugo Grotius’s Freedom of the Seas (1609) and The Rights of War and Peace (1625), as well as Samuel Pufendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations (1672). Peter the Great’s son, the Tsarevich Alexei, was even taught the Law of Nations through Shafirov’s manuscript translations of those texts. Grotius’s work, in particular, remained central to the Russian study of international law well into the twentieth century. Friedrich Martens, the Russian diplomat who helped to organise the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, held a high opinion of Grotius’s work, and, in Soviet Russia, Grotius was esteemed as ‘a founder of the new progressive bourgeois legal science’ that was so necessary to the development of socialism. Although Grotius upheld the right of individuals to own, derive income from, and alienate private property, early Soviet jurists concluded that ‘these views reflected the requirements of the bourgeoisie in the historical period when it, as the leading class, united opposed elements of society for the struggle against feudalism.’ Insofar as the early modern bourgeoisie sought ‘to create the conditions for consolidating the capitalist order, it did not raise the issue of territorial conquests for itself and opposed, as a rule, feudal wars which were alien to its interest and onerous in their consequences.’ As such, ‘the domain of international law set out by ideologies of the bourgeoisie, including Grotius’, was deemed sufficiently progressive to be retained by the makers of Soviet foreign policy.[13]

By moving beyond the exclusionary Cold War paradigm of the Atlantic World and embracing recent trends in global history, then, historians can better contextualise the many and diverse European claims to the New World as part of an emerging system of international law. As the present crisis in Ukraine continues to strain diplomacy between post-Soviet Russia and the West, threatening a slide back into Cold War geopolitics,[14] scholars would do well to remind readers of the longstanding interconnectedness between these two regions, as well as of the vital importance of cultural and intellectual exchange between nations.

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[1] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York, 2009).

[2] David B. Quinn, “Norse America: Reports and Reassessments,” Journal of American Studies 22 (1988): 269–273; David Steven Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?” New York History 62 (1981): 43–60; Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (New York, 1993); Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York, 2012).

[3] David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 2nd ed. (New York, 2009), 16.

[4] Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13 (2002): 176.

[5] Coclanis, 176.

[6] David Hackett Fisher, Champlain’s Dream (Toronto, 2008), 70–71; Rusty Bittermann, Sailor’s Hope: The Life and Times of William Cooper (Montreal, 2010), 16–17.

[7] Lauren Benton, “The British Atlantic in Global Context,” in The British Atlantic World, 277.

[8] Mark G. Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester, N.Y., 2005), 301–423; David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1758), 125.

[9] Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments (London, 2008), 163–164, 177; Inna Gorbatov, Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Grimm (Palo Alto, Calif., 2006).

[10] Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), 217.

[11] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York, 2003), 484.

[12] Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001), 446–454.

[13] W.E. Butler, “Grotius’ Influence in Russia,” in Hugo Grotius and International Relations, ed. Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts (Oxford, 1990), 257–266.

[14] Robert Legvold, “Managing the New Cold War,” Foreign Affairs, 15 June 2014; Simon Tisdall, “The new cold war: are we going back to the bad old days?” The Guardian, 19 November 2014; Susan Richards, “The west talks about a new cold war. For Russians it has already started,” The Guardian, 14 May 2015.