Austen Saunders

The Atlantic, the ocean that made the modern world

Just as the classical world was built around the Mediterranean, the modern world was built around the Atlantic. The Romans called the Med ‘Mare Nostrum’ – Our Sea. The Atlantic, on the other hand, was a place of contest for centuries. European nations fought for supremacy and plunder upon it, traded for wealth across it, and scrambled for territory around it.

According to John K. Thornton, author of A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820, the creation of an ‘Atlantic World’ was driven by the hunger of European states for hard cash. Money was needed to support the fantastically expensive armies which, from the late Middle Ages onwards, European nations were obliged to maintain as they engaged in a prolonged arms race. The rewards of trading with West African nations (rich in gold and other things) and colonising Atlantic islands in order to grow valuable crops like sugar led governments to encourage daring voyages of exploration. Eventually European sailors mastered the peculiar currents of the Atlantic, which was amongst the last great bodies of water to be made navigable (long after people were travelling regularly over the Indian and Pacific oceans).

Once Europeans could cross and re-cross the Atlantic, previously isolated communities became drawn into interlocking political, economic and military systems. European ambitions drove the development of these systems, but they were not shaped by Europeans alone. The civilisations that evolved around the Atlantic were formed by the nature of the meetings Europeans had with other peoples. In Africa they found powerful states with strong armies used to fighting on horseback. With the exception of Portugal’s conquest of Angola, colonisation was impossible. The scramble for Africa would not begin until the 19th century. Until then, Europeans maintained precarious outposts and traded with African elites (entering the existing African slave trade soon proved particularly lucrative).

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