ABSTRACT
Where did colonial Atlantic cultures come from? This question has animated many of the longest running scholarly debates about the history of the Americas. Historians of Anglo-America have written both of European ‘seeds’ shaping colonial cultures and of the transforming power of the frontier.1 Scholars of Afro-Atlantic cultures have pondered the enduring strength of African ‘survivals’ in the face of the horror that was plantation slavery.2 Latin Americanist anthropologists have examined how a Spanish ‘culture of conquest’ crystallized in a colonial order and how conquest ruptured the pre-colonial past and created a mestizo imaginary.3 These debates have waxed and waned, with scholars in each respective eld showing greater or lesser interest over time. Crucially, however, they have seldom talked to each other, con ning their arguments to interlocutors within their own area of specialty. This tendency – entirely understandable, given the immense complexity of colonial Atlantic history and the dizzying amount of scholarly literature produced on the topic – has unfortunately made it dif cult to see common themes across the whole. The big question – where did colonial Atlantic cultures come from? – has devolved into many smaller ones, to the detriment of scholars working in all sub elds of colonial Atlantic history.
