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Book Review: David Hopkins and Michael White (eds): Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada

To Miller, the Europeans subsisted in the sixteenth century on the historical dynamics of the populations they contacted in Africa and the Americans. As Kupperman points out, the significance of the Atlantic system ensured a growing accumulation of military and economic power among previously marginal people bordering the sea. Commodities, slaves, environmental stress and the accumulation of knowledge are all themes in her chapter. Brown pushes his interpretation a little too hard. ‘Militarised capitalism under the banner of free trade’ (p. 36), for example, is too simplistic a description. Moreover, his political slant is rather clear in his argument that ‘the processes consolidated in the eighteenth century mark the region’s imagined cohesion down to the present, a framing perspective on social and political change that still resonates in racial politics, increasing inequality, perpetual warfare, and the specter of revolution’ (p. 36). Modernity, however, is far more complex than Brown allows for. Moreover, Dubois’s brief contribution could be rethought in light of the lengthy and challenging book by Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century also published by Princeton. The individual entries are full of interest. Thus, in ‘Blended Communities’, David Wheat argues that they highlight the historical contingency of individual and group, racial, political and religious identities throughout the early-modern Atlantic era. There are conceptual and methodological entries, as when Amy Bushnell provides a brief history of ‘Center–Periphery Analysis’. Discussing ‘Navigation and Nautical Sciences’, Alison Sandman suggests that the Atlantic was the easiest of the oceans to cross since it was relatively small and had few hidden dangers, thus providing a relatively secure cradle for the infancy of European nautical sciences. Defining economic cycles in terms of capitalized production for integrated remote markets, Richard Salvucci argues that they had been impossible in 1450, whereas, by 1850, Atlantic markets displayed every characteristic of modern price series. The mobility of capital, the breakdown of mercantilist restrictions on commodity trades and the transatlantic slave trade are all held responsible for this transition. An impressive volume, at once varied and insightful.