Test 17-Apr-2015
As historian C. A. Bayly and others have shown, the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of a nascent “international civil society” and the rise of transnational “networks of information and political advocacy which, though less obvious than the rising national and imperial state, [were] no less important.” Abolitionists experienced these realities in their everyday lives thanks to revolutions in transportation and communications technology that knit the Atlantic World together and astonished their contemporaries. By the end of Garrison’s life, one American abolitionist marveled to the Irish abolitionist Richard Davis Webb about the incredible “wilderness of waters” over which their letters always crossed. Yet “our regular, constant, almost daily intercourse by steam mail-vessels” had led these distant friends to “accept it as a matter of course!”1
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2004), 118; SMJr to RDW, March 26, 1871, BPL, Ms.B.1.6.11.9. On the transportation revolution in the United States during this same period, see Howe, What Hath God Wrought. For overarching surveys of the persistence of the Atlantic World into the nineteenth century, especially as a zone of cultural and economic exchange, see Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 1–27; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, “The Transformation of the Atlantic World, 1776–1867,” Atlantic Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 5–28; Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 57–80; José C. Moya, “Modernization, Modernity, and the Trans/formation of the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2007), 179–98; and Thistlethwaite’s still useful The Anglo-American Connection. [actual footnote continues ...] ↩
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