Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution by Geoffrey Plank (Oxford University Press) is shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2021.
The shortlist for the Wolfson History Prize 2021, the UK’s most prestigious history writing prize, was announced April 21st. Celebrating the best historical non-fiction titles from the past year, six authors have been shortlisted for annual prize.
The books shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2021 are:
- Survivors: Children’s Lives after the Holocaust (Yale University Press) by Rebecca Clifford
- Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (Allen Lane) by Sudhir Hazareesingh
- Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (Allen Lane) by Judith Herrin
- Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury) by Helen McCarthy
- Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack (John Murray Press) by Richard Ovenden
- Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press) by Geoffrey Plank
As part of the blog tour celebrating this year’s prize I am delighted to bring you all an extract from Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution by Geoffrey Plank, a book the judges describe as ‘a sobering and compelling study of Atlantic warfare which take pains to incorporate indigenous perspectives.’
[ About the Book ]
In a sweeping account, Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped the experiences of the peoples living in the watershed of the Atlantic Ocean between the late Middle Ages and the Age of Revolution. At the beginning of that period, combat within Europe secured for the early colonial powers the resources and political stability they needed to venture across the sea. By the early nineteenth century, descendants of the Europeans had achieved military supremacy on land but revolutionaries had challenged the norms of Atlantic warfare.
Nearly everywhere they went, imperial soldiers, missionaries, colonial settlers, and traveling merchants sought local allies, and consequently they often incorporated themselves into African and indigenous North and South American diplomatic, military, and commercial networks. The newcomers and the peoples they encountered struggled to understand each other, find common interests, and exploit the opportunities that arose with the expansion of transatlantic commerce. Conflicts arose as a consequence of ongoing cultural misunderstandings and differing conceptions of justice and the appropriate use of force. In many theaters of combat profits could be made by exploiting political instability. Indigenous and colonial communities felt vulnerable in these circumstances, and many believed that they had to engage in aggressive military action–or, at a minimum, issue dramatic threats–in order to survive. Examining the contours of European dominance, this work emphasizes its contingent nature and geographical limitations, the persistence of conflict and its inescapable impact on non-combatants’ lives.
Addressing warfare at sea, warfare on land, and transatlantic warfare, Atlantic Wars covers the Atlantic world from the Vikings in the north, through the North American coastline and Caribbean, to South America and Africa. By incorporating the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Africans, and indigenous Americans into one synthetic work, Geoffrey Plank underscores how the formative experience of combat brought together widely separated people in a common history.
[ Extract ]
Five thousand years ago fishermen on the coast of North America ventured into the Atlantic in large wooden canoes from Labrador, Newfoundland, and present day Maine to catch cod and swordfish, and hunt for walruses and porpoises. They gathered trophies from their expeditions and made tools from whalebones and swordfish bills. Communities buried their dead with prized possessions including the teeth of sharks and orcas. Then the seafaring declined and eventually it stopped. We do not know why these indigenous Americans withdrew from the deep water. For thousands of years, even as millions of people settled near the Atlantic in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, few ventured far out to sea. Prominent islands including the Azores, Bermuda, the Cape Verde Islands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Madeira, Saint Helena, São Tomé, and Principe remained unoccupied. As a consequence, contact between the peoples of the Americas and those of Africa and Europe was delayed. Two thousand years ago, the absence of people on prominent islands distinguished the Atlantic from the Indian Ocean, Polynesia, and the Pacific off Asia. The peculiarity of the Atlantic shaped the early history of European maritime expansion.
By the time European sailing vessels made transatlantic crossings, centuries of maritime conflict on the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Mediterranean had made them potent instruments of war. European colonists and soldiers often struggled when fighting on land in Africa or the Americas, but ships gave them advantages, allowing them to ferry men, weapons, and supplies great distances, and evacuate, retreat, and carry war captives away. Beginning in the eighth century when sailors from Europe began traveling progressively farther out into the ocean, they faced little competition on the deep water from Africans or indigenous Americans. With nearly exclusive control of sailing vessels on the ocean, Europeans and their descendants dominated vast, expanding stretches of water that by the late eighteenth century included most of the Atlantic and also the Pacific off the coast of the Americas at least as far north as California. These waters and the adjacent coastal regions constituted a distinct and increasingly integrated “Atlantic world.”
This book examines the ways warfare shaped human experience around the Atlantic world from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. Wherever colonies were established in the Americas, newly arriving colonial settlers faced armed resistance from indigenous American warriors or fighters from rival colonies and empires. No matter who the colonists were, and no matter what their original motivations may have been for crossing the ocean, their colonies became military projects. Armed conflict affected how and where people lived, who they associated with, how they perceived each other, how they structured their societies, and whether they survived.
Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution by Geoffrey Plank (Oxford University Press) is shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2021.
Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire; Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire; and An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia. A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, he has lived in Britain since 2010.
[ Details of the Event ]
The #WolfsonHistoryPrize 2021 winner will be announced on Wednesday 9 June at 6pm
– and everyone is invited to the virtual ceremony!
The winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2021 will be announced on Wednesday 9 June 2021 in a virtual ceremony. The winner of the Wolfson History Prize, the most valuable non-fiction writing prize in the UK, will be awarded £40,000, with each of the shortlisted authors receiving £4,000.
The Wolfson History Prize 2021 shortlisted authors will discuss their books and historical writing in a special edition of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, with details to follow at a later date. The shortlisted authors will also discuss their writing at an inaugural Wolfson History Prize event at Hay Festival on Wednesday 2nd June at 1pm, with further details to follow.
The Wolfson History Prize is run and awarded by the Wolfson Foundation, an independent charity that awards grants in the fields of science, health, heritage, humanities & the arts. The Wolfson History Prize 2020 was won by David Abulafia for his global history of humankind told through our relationship with world’s oceans, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans.
FULL DETAILS – https://www.wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk/
