North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492–1945

Abstract

The world became global in the sixteenth century. Europe became Europe in part by severing Latin Christendom from what lay south of the Mediterranean, but also through a westward move that made the Atlantic the center of the first planetary empires. As such empires overlapped or succeeded one another within the modern world system, they brought populations from all continents closer in time and space. The rise of the West, the conquest of the Americas, plantation slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the population flows of the nineteenth century can be summarized as ‘‘a first moment of globality,’’ an Atlantic moment culminating in U.S. hegemony after World War II. I argue here that a reevaluation of the density, speed, and impact of the global flows that constituted this first moment of globality unsettles now-dominant narratives of world history. Not only do these narratives emerge as convenient fictions of the North Atlantic, but the very terms and categories commonly used to frame the story—from older North Atlantic universals such as modernity to the more recent globalization—appear more problematic than once