Death in the Atlantic World

Death studies emerged as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry in the 1970s. From the beginning the field was animated at least in part by presentist concerns. Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963) had, by the 1970s, led to a thorough critique of the funeral industry and the “high cost of dying.” At the same time, the public was also concerned about the increasing “medicalization” of death. Employing the social history methods then current, pioneering historians such as Philippe Ariès, Pierre Chaunu, and David Stannard contrasted the mortuary practices of the past—which they claimed to be simple and community oriented—with the allegedly bloated, overpriced, individualistic rituals of the late twentieth century (see citations under Continental Europe and Euro-Americans). They also argued that past societies had been in touch with the reality of death, as compared unfavorably to the supposed “denial of death” in the modern West. More recent works have moved away from this original orientation, choosing instead to take the past more on its own terms. The emergence of Atlantic history in the 1990s was likewise shaped partly by a presentist agenda. Frequent discussions of globalization in the news media created a climate in which transnational approaches gained favor in numerous scholarly disciplines. Moreover, an Atlantic perspective seemed to promise a more multicultural approach to the history of colonial North America. The history of the Atlantic world, as it has developed since the 1990s, focuses on the exchange of peoples, ideas, and commodities among the four continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Cross-cultural encounters are therefore a central concern. Although some authors have called for histories of the Atlantic world that extend through the twentieth century, most Atlantic histories continue to be written for the period from 1492 through the Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article, therefore, focuses on that time period for its discussion of “deathways”: mortuary practices, including deathbed scenes, funerals, burials, mourning, and memorialization. “Death in the Atlantic World” resides at the intersection of death studies and Atlantic history. Whereas death studies has long been interdisciplinary, with important contributions in anthropology, history, literary studies, and sciences such as epidemiology, this bibliography concentrates on historical studies. Only a handful of histories discuss deathways in an explicitly Atlantic framework. This article goes beyond that small group to include works that can be brought together to construct an Atlantic history of death.