Building Creole Identity in the African Atlantic: Boundaries of Race and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Cabo Verde

Abstract

The Atlantic may be a vast ocean for the most part devoid of human life, but that is not how historians see it. As the historian of the British Atlantic world David Armitage put it, “we are all Atlanticists now.” Not a little of the excitement of the historical profession has turned on the need to construct broad and transnational perspectives for the exchanges of peoples and goods which have constructed modern worlds.This is, as every reader of this journal knows, a process in which Africa played a fundamental part. Conceptualizing an Atlantic space in the early modern era requires the inclusion of African contributions to revolutions in ideas, agriculture, and global capital brought about by the forced African diaspora produced by Atlantic slavery. And yet historians of African societies have not joined their colleagues working on the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe in the leap to embrace “Atlantic” history. While there have been some attempts to construct an African sphere of the Atlantic world, a general attempt to achieve this on a systematic basis remains lacking.Part of the reason for this is the current general decline in research in early modern African history. While the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s saw many highly distinguished monographs, such research is no longer so easy to come by. Shunning the externalized, European perspectives on which many traditional histories of Africa were based, post-colonial students of Africa have rightly interpreted African history from the viewpoint of African societies. As this has required primarily a cultural engagement with material, practitioners have moved towards contemporary histories, which may explain the present dearth of studies reaching farther back.