Western Europe and the Atlantic World (Atlantic History)

Introduction

Exploration, trade, and fishing expeditions had long tempted sailors and adventurers into Atlantic waters. However, in the 15th century the search for gold, spices, and the lucrative markets of the East led Europeans to extend their travels southward down the African coast and westward into the ocean. This intensification of Europe’s engagement with the Atlantic would have dramatic and transformative repercussions for the people and places affected by these explorations. Over the course of the next several centuries, the massive migrations (see the Oxford Bibliographies article on Migrations and Diasporas)—both forced and free—of people as well as the transfer of plants, animals, and microbes irrevocably linked North America, South America, Africa, and Europe. The complexity, diversity, and evolving nature of the Atlantic world that developed from these encounters defies concise and simple characterization. This article confines itself to an overview of the ambitions and experiences of major European powers who competed for access to the human, material, and territorial wealth of the newly connected continents. Thus it provides a bibliographic introduction to the Iberian, French, British, and Dutch Atlantic worlds. The relationship of distinct European regions and powers with the emerging Atlantic world varied depending on a variety of factors, not least among them their geographical position vis-à-vis the ocean (though the recent increase in studies of the German Atlantic, discussed in the Oxford Bibliographies article on Northern Europe and the Atlantic World, affirms that an Atlantic coastline was by no means a prerequisite). In spite of the variation that existed within Europe’s engagement with the Atlantic, all of Europe was transformed by the exchanges—demographic, social, cultural, ecological, economic, just to name a few—generated by this new contact zone. These European Atlantic worlds were diverse and changing spheres of activity, influenced by numerous factors within Europe and forged through intimate, extensive, and shifting patterns of contact with native inhabitants of the Americas and Africa. The reading suggestions provided here do not represent a comprehensive guide to the creation of this multifaceted Atlantic world. Scholars who are interested in pursuing questions related to specific spheres of Atlantic engagement (European, African, and American) or the multiple phenomena that crisscrossed them can find other relevant sources (including primary source guides) that offer a more detailed perspective on distinct but overlapping component parts of the complex Atlantic world.

General Overviews

The books and articles cited in this section all provide an introduction to the Atlantic world concept and approach, as well as to recent debates about the term’s limitations. Some of the more powerful critiques of the Atlantic approach object that the term “Atlantic world,” as capacious as the concept seems, has profound exclusionary tendencies. Among them, it privileges European impulse over African or American Indian agency, it has become a stand-in for British colonial North American history (a reflection of the scholarly focus of many of Atlantic history’s early proponents), and it artificially parses interoceanic and global phenomena. Recently, a series of leading journals dedicated scholarly forums to discussion of the term’s utility and limitations and its connections to other fields of history and historical approaches (see the Oxford Bibliographies Online article The Idea of Atlantic History). Greene and Morgan 2009 offers a critical overview of recent scholarship in distinct spheres of the Atlantic world as well as discussions of the concept’s limitations. Bailyn and Denault 2009 presents a discussion of the term’s analytic utility and coherence as well as recent contributions to topical themes within the Atlantic world. Games, et al. 2006 further considers the concept’s limitations in a series of four essays. Davis 2006 is a comprehensive survey of slavery and its role in shaping New World societies, while Pagden 1995 compares the ideological origins of Spanish, British, and French imperial policies. Klooster 2009 provides a comparative study of Atlantic revolutions. Canny and Pagden 1987 and Altman and Horn 1991 discuss aspects of European immigration and identity formation throughout the Atlantic. Elliott 2006 offers an extensive comparison of British and Spanish American endeavors

Altman, Ida, and James Horn. “To Make America”: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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A valuable essay collection on immigration to different parts of the Atlantic world. Two essays focus on French migration, two on Spanish, one on German, and one on English and Irish.
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Bailyn, Bernard, and Patricia L. Denault, eds. Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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A recent and wide-ranging contribution to Atlantic scholarship containing essays from numerous leading scholars in the field. In his introduction to the volume, Bailyn argues for the conceptual coherence of an Atlantic approach to a unified set of historical problems. E-book.
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Canny, Nicholas, and Anthony Pagden, eds. Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
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An excellent series of essays exploring the process of identity formation throughout the Atlantic world with an emphasis on the importance of Creole as opposed to national identity.
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Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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A masterful and eminently readable history of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. This synthetic tour de force covers slavery in the ancient world, the origins of antiblack racism, Africa’s involvement in the slave trade, the rise of the Atlantic slave system, slavery in the age of revolution, and abolition and endurance of the institution throughout the end of the 19th century.
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Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
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A magisterial comparative approach to the settlement of the Spanish and British Americas. Focused largely on mainland settlements as opposed to comparative Caribbean experiences, Elliott emphasizes the contrasting priorities of both empires (the British favored conquest through land ownership, while the Spanish sought to exploit natural and human resources.) E-book.
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Games, Alison, Philip J. Stern, Paul W. Mapp, and Peter A. Coclanis. “Beyond the Atlantic.” William and Mary Quarterly 63.4 (2006): 675–742.
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A provocative consideration of the state of Atlantic world scholarship, these four essays explore the utility of the term in global, Pacific North American, and South Asian contexts.
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Greene, Jack P., and Philip D. Morgan. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. Reinterpreting History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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An excellent recent overview of Atlantic world scholarship that examines numerous imperial Atlantic worlds and also offers critiques of the approach and its conceptual limitations.
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Klooster, Willem. Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
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This ambitious, brief, and readable comparative approach to the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions emphasizes the contingent and divisive nature of each war, paying equal attention to the international and national contexts in which each occurred.
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Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c. 1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
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An important contribution to the intellectual history of the Atlantic world. Pagden examines the contrasting imperial ideologies of Spain, France, and Britain and concludes that these ideologies shared little in common. However, in spite of their different ideological foundations, the inhabitants of all three empires came to have significant frustrations with their imperial masters by the late 18th century.
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Journals

As the field of Atlantic history has grown, an increasing number of publications have begun to dedicate significant space to the exploration of “Atlantic world” issues. The list in this section is by no means exhaustive. Atlantic Studies showcases interdisciplinary approaches to the field, while Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies publishes numerous important contributions on the role of the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic world. The Journal of Global History and Itinerario: European Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction privilege a global perspective but have recently begun to give more space to consideration of Atlantic issues. The William and Mary Quarterly, long the premier journal for scholarship on early British North America, has also emerged as an important forum for Atlantic scholarship.

Atlantic Studies. 2004–.
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Published by the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas, this relatively new journal approaches the Atlantic world from an interdisciplinary perspective with an emphasis on the term’s value as a critical space (as opposed to a historically bounded arena of contact) extending to the present day.
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Itinerario: European Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction. 1977–.
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Published by the Institute for the History of European Expansion (IGEER) at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Itinerario is the official journal of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI). Most articles focus on European involvement in early modern topics, often in an Atlantic context.
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Journal of Global History. 2006–.
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Published just twice a year, this journal’s primary focus is on global change over time. On occasion it includes pieces engaging with and critiquing Atlantic history.
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Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies. 1980–.
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Published by Routledge three times a year, this journal is devoted to all aspects of human bondage, including abolition and the legacy of slavery. Its focus is the Atlantic slave trade.
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William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 1944–.
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Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), the William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) extended its coverage of early America in recent years to include Atlantic world topics and has published many of the most important contributions to the field in recent years.
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Textbooks

Numerous recent textbooks covering the period c. 1500–c. 1800 now include a discussion of the emerging Atlantic world and its impact on European society. However, given the relative newness of the term and its introduction into undergraduate history curricula, there are still only a handful of textbooks dedicated solely to the emergence of the Atlantic world. Four excellent recent editions are listed in this section. Benjamin 2009 integrates primary source accounts of the transformation of the Atlantic Ocean from barrier to bridge uniting the peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Egerton, et al. 2007 offers a detailed and wide-ranging approach to the ideologies, people, places, and processes that shaped the Atlantic world. Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman 2007 is a wide-ranging collection of essays by leading scholars that explores different aspects of the Atlantic world over time. Games and Rothman 2008 focuses on primary source selections. All four volumes offer useful bibliographies for further reading.

Benjamin, Thomas. The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared History, 1400–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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This textbook, the first single-authored treatment of the Atlantic world, emphasizes the complexity and number of encounters and conflicts at the heart of Atlantic history.
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Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, and Erik R. Seeman, eds. The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.
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A useful reader consisting of fourteen essays by leading historians. This volume focuses primarily on the period from 1500 to 1800; the first two sections consider diversity within the Atlantic and the Atlantic world’s ties to distant regions and oceans, while the third and final section is devoted to its evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Egerton, Douglas R., Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007.
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A wide-ranging introduction to the concept of “Atlantic world” with a focus on migration and the human ties that bound together inhabitants of Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
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Games, Alison, and Adam Rothman, eds. Major Problems in Atlantic History: Documents and Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
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This introduction to Atlantic history forms part of a teaching series and contains numerous primary sources and analytic essays with an emphasis on patterns of migration and the formation of the Atlantic system. A useful primary source–focused supplement to Egerton, et al. 2007.
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Reference Resources

There are countless online resources for scholars interested in any aspect of the Atlantic world. The sites mentioned here are just a sample of some of the best websites available. Harvard University’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World and the Atlantic World Workshop at New York University provide scholars with funding opportunities as well as with conferences and seminars in which to present their work. The George Mason Center for History and New Media and the Library of Congress Global Gateway: World Culture and Resources offer online access to numerous teaching and resource tools for teachers and scholars of the Atlantic world. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database is an unparalleled resource for exploring this central aspect of Atlantic world history. For classroom use, Google Earth offers a compelling way of illustrating the vast and interconnected nature of oceans; when used in tandem with the Encompassing the Globe application, teachers of Portuguese explorations can meld material culture and artistic production with oceanic explorations. For those interested in new scholarship and debates within the field of Atlantic world scholarship, the online discussion group H-Atlantic is a first-rate resource.

Atlantic World Workshop at New York University.
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The Atlantic World Workshop (AWW) operates a listserv with information on relevant events as well as a regular workshop at which Atlantic world scholars present works in progress. The seminar also organizes periodic conferences.
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Encompassing the Globe.
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An excellent Google Earth application was developed in tandem with a Smithsonian Institution exhibit on the early modern Portuguese world. This clever program offers charts of key voyages as well as numerous embedded photographs of material artifacts with significance for the emerging global Portuguese world. A lavishly illustrated 2007 catalogue offers additional images of art and objects.
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George Mason Center for History and New Media.
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An immensely useful and sophisticated clearinghouse for online humanities research and teaching tools. Includes links to many websites on European, African, and American Atlantic world topics.
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Google Earth.
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For illustrating the connected nature of oceans and the geographic realities of a global Atlantic world, Google Earth is a superb teaching tool. It can be downloaded easily and for free.
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Harvard University. International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–1800.
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Founded by the eminent historian Bernard Bailyn, this seminar has generated numerous conferences devoted to various themes within Atlantic history. The Harvard Atlantic seminar provides opportunities for young scholars to present their ideas and research agendas. The seminar provides small travel grants, and the program’s website offers numerous helpful links to relevant syllabi, dissertation abstracts, bibliographies, and more.
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H-Atlantic.
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This international, interdisciplinary online discussion group includes logs of conversational threads on relevant themes, reviews, syllabi, bibliographies, and links to useful websites.
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Library of Congress Global Gateway: World Culture and Resources.
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A first-rate research and teaching resource. Consists of numerous links to primary source collections around the world as well as research databases, fellowship opportunities, and more. Includes links to various specialized digital libraries, including many focused on distinct European nations’ engagement with the Atlantic world.
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Transatlantic Slave Trade Database.
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This database provides detailed information on the forced migration to the Americas of approximately 12.5 million Africans and includes data on nearly 35,000 Atlantic slaving voyages. The website also provides numerous educational materials, maps, and supplementary essays. A collection of more than two hundred maps generated by the research that produced the database will be published in 2010.
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Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Though an interdisciplinary approach characterized scholarship on the Atlantic world from the earliest days of the concept’s articulation, historians have been the driving force behind the term’s increasing intellectual currency over the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, many Atlantic topics continue to be skillfully and insightfully explored by scholars working in different disciplines. This section includes a handful of such studies.

Anthropology

Abulafia 2008 and Boucher 1992 look at the cultural background of Atlantic and Caribbean islands prior to the voyages of the late 15th century. On the opposite side of the Atlantic, Earl and Lowe 2005 consider African and European encounters and impressions, while Schwartz 1994 offers a wide-ranging consideration of the nature of global encounters with unfamiliar peoples in the early modern period. Axtell 1992 considers Indian and European perceptions of their encounters in the New World and raises numerous issues about the nature of historical scholarship, while Merrell 2009 explores the successes and failures that characterized the Catawbas’ adaptation to the increasing presence of Europeans in North America.

Abulafia, David. The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
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A somewhat antiquated and Eurocentric approach to the early history of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean in the years immediately prior to the Spanish conquest. Incorporates archaeological evidence in its analysis of early encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans.
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Axtell, James. Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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In a series of essays, Axtell considers the Columbian encounter from a broad perspective that aims to recover Indian as well as European viewpoints. Arguing for history as one of the humanities rather than a social science, Axtell explores the nature of historical imagination, the insight offered by anthropology, and the role of morality and critical distance in historical interpretation.
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Boucher, Philip. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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This book examines French and English relationships with the Native inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles, focusing on inter-European rivalries and both imperial powers’ attempts to use the Native inhabitants of the islands against their own foes.
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Earl, T. F., and K. J. P. Lowe, eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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A multidisciplinary collection of essays examining the diversity of African experiences and representations in early modern southern Europe.
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Merrell, James H. The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
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This interdisciplinary study examines how Catawba society emerged from and adapted to encounters with Europeans from the 16th century through the 19th century. Twentieth anniversary edition, Institute of Early American History and Culture.
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Schwartz, Stuart, ed. Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era. Studies in Comparative Early Modern History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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A wide-ranging set of essays united by the belief that all cultures experienced their interactions with unfamiliar peoples and places through preconceived if shifting understandings.
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Art History

Blakely 1993 explores Dutch impressions and imaginings of Africans throughout the early modern period. Katzew 2004 considers identity formation in the Spanish Americas through an analysis of visual representations of colonial families in Mexico. Quilley and Kriz 2003 looks at the integration of imperial ambition and knowledge into the northern European visual imagination, while Kriz 2008 focuses on British images of the West Indies and their inhabitants.

Blakely, Allison. Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society. Blacks in the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
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An exploration of popular visual and literary images of Africans in Dutch society in the early modern period.
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Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
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This lavishly illustrated analysis of casta paintings from colonial Mexico explores how the meaning of the paintings shifted in response to colonial policies and examines the various factors at play in the construction of identity and self-image in the late colonial period.
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Kriz, Kay Dian. Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
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A beautifully illustrated book on historic visual representations of the West Indies and slavery with a focus on the depictions of gender and color and the relationship between artistic production in Britain and the circulation of people, goods, and ideas around the world.
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Quilley, Geoff, and Kay Dian Kriz. An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the North Atlantic World, 1660–1830. Critical Perspectives in Art History. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003.
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In a thought-provoking series of essays, a variety of scholars examine the formation and influence of visual imagery pertaining to race, imperial colonization, and Atlantic slavery in the French and British Atlantic worlds.
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Literary Criticism

Seed 1995, Greenblatt 1991, and Padrón 2004 explore the influence of European cultural and intellectual traditions on the experience and subsequent representations of the American conquest. Gilroy 1993 and Gruzinski 2001 both consider identity formation in the Atlantic world. Paul Gilroy focuses on the formative impact of the slave trade on a black Atlantic culture, and Serge Gruzinski centers his analysis on Creole identity formation in Spanish America. Sayre 1997 interrogates French and English colonial writings for what they suggest about European perceptions of themselves and the people with whom they came into contact, while Hendricks and Parker 1994 considers the intersection of race and gender in shaping European culture during the age of imperial expansion. Voigt 2009 examines the production and impact of New World captivity narratives. Slauter 2008 reflects on the failure of Atlantic world historical scholarship to consider the insights brought to the field by literature scholars.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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An important and dense examination of the emergence and impact of a shared black Atlantic culture.
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Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
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A difficult and provocative work that argues that Europeans’ ability to express themselves using conceptually rich languages in written form was essential to their conquest of the New World. Includes close readings of several classic accounts of the early years of explorations and conquest.
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Gruzinski, Serge. Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019). Translated by Heather MacLean. Latin America Otherwise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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Daring and unconventional analysis of iconographies of colonization and creolization. Unlikely to work in undergraduate classes but an interesting meditation on cultural production, modernity, and postmodernity.
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Hendricks, Margo, and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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An important interdisciplinary collection of essays that examines representation of gender and race in European texts of the 16th through 18th centuries. In arguing that representations of gender were contingent on racial identities, the authors put race at the center of early modern feminist studies.
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Padrón, Ricardo. The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
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This dense but intriguing book analyzes cartographic and literary sources to argue that European, particularly Spanish, representations of space were not fixed at the outset of the early modern period but rather evolved in tandem with the exploration and integration of the New World into the European mind-set.
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Sayre, Gordon M. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
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Sayre uses travel narratives and colonial writings to question the nature of Europeans’ perceptions of themselves and the unfamiliar people with whom they came into contact. He argues that considerable cultural overlap existed between Native Americans and Europeans in spite of European protestations to the contrary.
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Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1650. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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A dense, thought-provoking consideration of the influence of European national cultural traditions on the colonization of the Americas. Combines historical and literary approaches to analyze the distinct colonial approaches of five European nascent nation-states.
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Slauter, Eric. “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World.” William and Mary Quarterly 65.1 (January 2008): 135–166.
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An interdisciplinary critique of Atlantic history’s failure to incorporate the contributions of Atlantic literary scholarship. Includes an excellent bibliographic note of recent relevant works.
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Voigt, Lisa. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
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A literature scholar’s approach to the question of the New World’s impact on the Old. Voigt examines the emergence of a rhetoric of captivity that emphasized the different nature of diverse European and non-European “others” while simultaneously valorizing the knowledge to be gained through intercultural contact by giving credence to captives’ tales of their experiences.
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Knowledge, Science, and Geography

Meinig 1986 considers the emergence of the Atlantic world from a geographic perspective, focusing on regional patterns of development. Grove 1995 considers Europe’s expansion into the Atlantic and its impact on views of the environment, while Delbourgo and Dew 2008 offers an overview of evolving scientific practice within the Atlantic world. Barrera-Osorio 2006 and Portuondo 2009 focus on Spanish scientific practice and the transformative effects of the American encounter, while Drayton 2000 examines the relationship between British imperial aims and attitudes toward natural resources. Chaplin 2001 examines the development of English colonists’ view of Native Americans. Both Scott Parish 2006 and Safier 2008 turn their attention to the colonies, with Neil Safier examining Spanish and French cartographic expeditions and the resulting exclusionary geographies, while Susan Scott Parish highlights the diverse participants in the production of knowledge about the natural world in the British Atlantic.

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
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An argument for the importance of Spanish empirical practices developed in the New World in shaping the scientific revolution. Barrera-Osorio posits that the 1520s marked the beginning of the scientific revolution, when the exploration of the New World prompted the development of new practices of observation and information gathering and the elevation of personal experience as a key component in the creation of knowledge and the study of nature.
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Chaplin, Joyce. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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Chaplin examines how English colonists developed an increasingly racialized view of Native Americans based on Indians’ susceptibility to European diseases and Europeans’ ability to thrive in a New World setting. Bolstered by early modern scientific and medical ideas, English settlers came to view themselves as “natural” inhabitants of America, while Indians were destined to defeat by a perceived physical inferiority.
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Delbourgo, James, and Nicholas Dew, eds. Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. New York: Routledge, 2008.
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A study of the emergence of Atlantic scientific practice with an emphasis on the diversity of participants and on the importance of the contributions of scientific institutions to imperial claims to authority.
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Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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A compelling study of the relationship between science and government through a history of the idea of colonizing imperial natural resources for national, economic, and professional gain. Drayton explores the links between botany, gardens, Great Britain, and the British Empire with a focus on the 18th and 19th centuries.
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Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860. Studies in Environment and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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A pathbreaking work of environmental history. Grove locates the origins of European environmentalism in Europe’s early expansion into the Atlantic and emphasizes the Atlantic islands’ hold on the European imagination.
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Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America. Vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
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A foundational work of historical geography, this comprehensive and lengthy overview of the settlement of the Americas provides a conceptual approach to the various European and American traditions that shaped the emergence and formation of the Atlantic world. E-book.
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Portuondo, María M. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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Focusing on Spain’s royal cosmographers, this study of early Spanish scientific practice examines the work and impact of the scholar-servants of the crown who excelled at this practice of creating textual descriptions of the world using charts and maps.
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Safier, Neil. Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
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A well-written and engaging study of the production of knowledge and scientific “truth” in mid-18th-century France and Spain. Safier focuses on the practices of explorers, scientists, and editors who mapped and described South America to suit their own worldviews; while these European chroniclers described their written and visual renditions of American territory as objective, they, in fact, erased numerous actors and influences from the landscape.
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Scott Parish, Susan. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
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Challenging the notion of European hegemony in the production of scientific knowledge, this study examines colonial American scientific contributions with an emphasis on the diversity of participants (enslaved Africans, women, Indians) in the production and circulation of knowledge of the natural world.
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Material Culture and Commodity Trades

Jardine 1996 explores the cultural and commercial impact of European acquisitiveness in the early modern period. Greenfield 2005 and Norton 2008 examine how commodities native to the New World shaped European tastes and ambitions and how these in turn shaped Native American cultivation and use of these commodities. Vilches 2010 considers the nature of Spanish economic and cultural anxieties generated by the influx of American bullion, while Lane 2010 examines the contours of the trade in American emeralds. Hancock 2009 considers the formation of the Atlantic world and increasingly interconnected global markets through a detailed examination of wine production. Mintz 1985 and Schwartz 2004 trace the evolution of the sugar economy and its role in shaping the Atlantic world, while Viola and Margolis 1991 considers the impact of the exchange of five different “seeds of change” on both Europe and the Americas.

Greenfield, Amy Butler. A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
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A beautifully written and researched account of Spain’s pursuit of cochineal, and the European rivalries and scientific experiments generated by the hunt for this sought-after dye.
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Hancock, David. Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Organization of the Atlantic World, 1640–1815. Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
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An immensely detailed reconstruction of the networks of Madeira production, distribution, and consumption. This study reveals how this popular wine linked global markets throughout the Atlantic world and beyond.
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Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996.
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A highly readable examination of the roots of Renaissance culture, emphasizing the importance of material and commercial impulses in fueling cultural production.
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Lane, Kris. The Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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A compelling interdisciplinary exploration of the production and circulation of American emeralds. Lane provides detailed accounts of the techniques employed in emerald mining, the human and environmental costs of the labor regime that made them available, and the merchant networks that moved the jewel around the globe.
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Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.
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A fascinating and accessible book, this study of sugar by a leading anthropologist examines sugar production and consumption, emphasizing the social and cultural factors that influenced Europeans’ growing taste for this slave-labor produced good.
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Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
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A smart and provocative analysis of how Europeans developed a taste for this Mesoamerican delicacy in spite of the negative cultural associations that initially accompanied its use. Norton interrogates the nature of taste and of Europeans’ ability to appreciate and absorb American practices, eventually transforming them into their own.
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Schwartz, Stuart, ed. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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A revisionist analysis of the history of sugar cultivation in the Americas with a focus on the Atlantic islands as well as the Caribbean. This study argues against the concept of a “sugar revolution,” emphasizing differences as well as similarities across diverse areas of sugar production in the Americas.
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Vilches, Elvira. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
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Incorporating economic treatises, literary theory, and social history, Vilches argues that the flow of New World gold into Spain generated widespread anxiety about the nature of wealth and destabilized preexisting notions of power, worth, and civility.
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Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, eds. Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991.
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This collection of fifteen articles considers the impact on the New World and the Old of sugar, maize, disease, the horse, and the potato.
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Pirates, Captives, Sailors, Factors, Mosquitos, and Other Border Crossers

In spite of the centralization of authority in western Europe that began to take shape in tandem with the emergence of the Atlantic world, numerous forces acted to constrain, undermine, or generally ignore the reach of nascent nation-states and empires. The essays in Roper and Van Ruymbeke 2007 interrogate the role and importance of private governing enterprise in the early Atlantic world. Bolster 1997, Pérez-Mallaína 1998, and Rediker 2004 explore the nature of life on the high seas and illuminate the opportunities that maritime labor afforded free and unfree workers who sought to escape from the constraints of life onshore. Linebaugh and Rediker 2000 includes sailors in its analysis of the community of diverse disenfranchised members of the downtrodden who struggled against the economic and social injustices of the early modern Atlantic world. The contributors to Kagan and Morgan 2009 turn their attention to the Sephardic diaspora in the Atlantic world, while Games 2008 examines the experiences and influence of English globetrotters in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Colley 2007 explores the transoceanic wanderings of one unusual woman; McNeill 2010 documents the immense importance of one powerful bug and the deadly diseases it carried.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
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An investigation into the lives of enslaved and free blacks employed in maritime labor from the earliest days of Atlantic exploration through the 19th century. Bolster shows that black seamen formed an important and influential sector of the maritime labor force and that their waterborne experience often allowed them to straddle the line between slavery and freedom.
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Colley, Linda. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. New York: Pantheon, 2007.
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An excellent biography of the global travels of a possibly biracial daughter of an English man and a Jamaican woman. The records of Marsh’s transcontinental and transoceanic travels attest to the expansion of a British presence around the globe and individuals’ strategies for moving within and across increasingly interconnected 18th-century Atlantic and Asian worlds.
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Games, Alison. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Focusing on the men who traveled between the various outposts of English commerce and colonization, this book argues for their centrality to early English plans for Atlantic exploration and settlement. E-book.
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Kagan, Richard L., and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Papers presented at the first Lavy Colloquium “Atlantic Jewry in an Age of Mercantilism” on 25–26 March 2005 at Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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A first-rate essay collection that explores the role Jews and their descendants played in numerous spheres of the Atlantic world from 1500 to 1800. The contributors trace Atlantic Jewry’s role in shaping culture, religion, commerce, identity, and politics from 1500 to 1800. Papers were presented at the first Lavy Colloquium “Atlantic Jewry in an Age of Mercantilism” on March 25–26, 2005, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
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Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon, 2000.
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A lively exploration of the resistance offered to emerging merchant capitalism by diverse disenfranchised inhabitants of the emerging Atlantic world throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
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McNeill, J. R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. New Approaches to the Americas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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An excellent and accessible exploration of how ecology, warfare, and disease interacted in shaping the history of the Caribbean. The book’s primary concern is the crucial role played by disease-bearing mosquitos in transmitting yellow fever and malaria to vulnerable populations, such as invading armies and other unseasoned travelers and settlers.
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Pérez-Mallaína, Pablo E. Spain’s Men of the Sea: The Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century. Translated by Carla Rahn Phillips. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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A detailed and accessible study of 16th-century sailors on Spain’s Indies fleets, with vivid descriptions of the nature of their lives on ship and on land.
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Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon, 2004.
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An exploration of 18th-century piracy focused primarily on the Anglo-Atlantic. Rediker views pirates as socially enlightened and inclusive rebels who took a rational and principled stand against an increasingly coercive capitalist system. He chronicles the customs and concerns that gave order to pirate life and situates the activities in the economic, social, and political contexts of the time.
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Roper, L. H., and B. Van Ruymbeke, eds. Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1500–1750. Atlantic World 11. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004156760.i-425Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of thirteen essays devoted to the role of proprietorships, or private colonies, in the formation of the Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Portuguese Atlantic worlds.
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Regional Studies

Because Europe’s relationship to the Atlantic cannot be characterized in any meaningful way without further divisions that allow for additional specificity, this section is divided into regional categories, each with brief bibliographies designed to provide readers with an overview of distinct European powers’ aspirations for the emerging Atlantic world. Many of the regionally based “worlds” described here have lengthier entries of their own in Oxford Bibliographies Online. See for example the Oxford Bibliographies articles on the Iberian Atlantic World, 1600-1800, the British Atlantic World, the French Atlantic World, and the Dutch Atlantic World.

Iberian Atlantic

In the 14th century Christian rulers in Portugal, followed by their counterparts in Spain, successfully conquered the last Muslim kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula. Building on these domestic successes, both kingdoms extended their expansionary impulses into the Atlantic. Spain initiated the conquest of the Canaries and their Native inhabitants the Guanches in the first decade of the 15th century, and Portugal began exploration of the island of Madeira shortly thereafter. By mid-century nearly all of the Atlantic islands were under Iberian control, and rulers of both kingdoms continued to build on these early oceanic successes. Following Columbus’s accidental landfall on Hispaniola in 1492, Spanish rulers turned their attention to Atlantic America as an arena of tremendous potential religious and material wealth. The Portuguese meanwhile sailed southward down the coast of West Africa, successfully trading and proselytizing with coastal communities. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southernmost tip of Africa; a decade later Vasco da Gama built on these Atlantic successes to sail deep into the Indian Ocean. The African monopoly conferred by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 positioned the Portuguese to become the Atlantic’s leading slave traders, while Pedro Álvares Cabral’s unintended voyage to Brazil in 1500 gave Portugal a firm hold on Atlantic America. Russell-Wood 1998 and Elliott 1992 consider major themes and patterns in Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic expansion, respectively. Bethencourt and Curto 2007 offers detailed considerations of distinct aspects of Portuguese settlements worldwide. Newitt 2005 surveys Portuguese overseas endeavors with an emphasis on maritime engagement and the lasting impact of the kingdom’s medieval past, while Studnicki-Gizbert 2007 explores the identity and role of the Portuguese “nation” throughout the Spanish empire in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Stein and Stein 2000 examines medieval Spanish economic structures and the impact of the influx of American silver. Schwartz 2008 considers religious practice in the Iberian Atlantic, while Adelman 2006 explores evolving political identity and the paths to revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. McKnight and Garofalo 2009 offers an excellent selection of primary source readings concerning Afro-Iberian lives along with brief introductory essays.

Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
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Adelman examines the paths by which residents of Spanish and Portuguese America began to question their need for and responsibilities to the empire and replace them with a shared nationalism. Places an emphasis on the contingency and complexity of the path to independence.
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Bethencourt, Francisco, and Diogo Ramada Curto. Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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A geographically and topically wide-ranging collection of essays on the Portuguese Empire that examines settlement patterns, local and imperial power structures, cultural production, scientific and technological practices, and ecclesiastic and political structures across the global stage of the Portuguese world.
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Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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An excellent series of essays addressing the development of the Spanish Atlantic. Well-written and accessible.
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McKnight, Kathryn Joy, and Leo J. Garofalo, eds. Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812. Indianapolis, IN: Hacket, 2009.
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An excellent primary source reader with accompanying contextualizing essays. An invaluable source for scholars and teachers of the Iberian Atlantic and the African diaspora.
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Newitt, M. D. D. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668. London: Routledge, 2005.
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A study of the rise of Portugal as a maritime empire with special attention to the influence of Portugal’s medieval legacy and the factors that allowed Portuguese explorers and traders to establish far-flung settlements around the globe and fend off European rivals for more than two centuries.
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Russell-Wood, A. J. R. The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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A comprehensive general treatment of the Portuguese Atlantic world by one of the field’s leading scholars, emphasizing the diversity and complexity of the empire’s component parts, places, and people.
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Schwartz, Stuart B. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
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Based largely on evidence from Inquisition tribunals, this provocative book takes aim at long-standing stereotypes of Iberian religious fanaticism and intolerance by arguing for a tradition of dissidence and tolerance in the Iberian Atlantic.
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Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H. Stein. Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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The first of three works linking European and American economic and political developments, this book explores the medieval economic structures that preceded the commercial tumult generated by the influx of American silver. It goes on to trace Spain’s fortunes through imperial rivalries, economic decline, and 18th-century attempts at reform.
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Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken. A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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A history of Portuguese Jews and their descendents (a nação portuguesa) throughout the Iberian empires. This engaging study emphasizes the cultural, familiar, and religious ties that bound this diasporic community together throughout the Atlantic world and beyond. It also emphasizes the nação’s role in trying (unsuccessfully) to reform Spanish imperial economic policy in the early 17th century.
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British Atlantic

Although Atlantic shipping and fishing routes had long been central to British social and economic development, domestic tumult kept Atlantic exploration limited until the late 16th century. England’s first foray into Atlantic colonization and the extension of political and religious hegemony took place closer to home, in Ireland, where English authorities sought to impose a British national identity through plantation policies. English attention to the western Atlantic increased with the American successes of their Iberian rivals, and private British adventurers secured Crown support for westward voyages throughout the second half of the 16th century. An increase in state support for plans for colonization and commerce in the early 17th century allowed Britain to quickly match and eventually exceed its southern European counterparts in terms of Atlantic imperial expansion, population growth, and the slave trade. British expansion was hardly confined to the Atlantic (Asia, Africa, and the Pacific all played large roles in British imperial growth), and Britain’s relationship with the Atlantic must be considered in this wider context. England, Ireland, and Scotland each developed unique relationships with the emerging Atlantic world; detailed bibliographic guides to these distinct patterns of engagement can be found in related entries in the Oxford Bibliographies Online. Devine 2003 focuses on Scotland’s role in the emerging Atlantic world. Armitage 2000 considers the origin and expansion of the term “empire” from encompassing Britain’s united kingdoms to including British Atlantic America, while Games 2008 argues for the importance of English travelers’ global experiences in shaping imperial expectations. Canny and Low 2008 offers a broad overview of British imperial endeavors prior to 1700. Bailyn and Morgan 1991, Armitage and Braddick 2002, and Mancke and Shammas 2005 explore identity formation in culturally and geographically diverse regions of the British Atlantic. Eltis 2000 considers British participation in the slave trade in the context of the transatlantic trade’s development, while Hancock 1995 looks at merchant networks and Britain’s commercial foundations in the 18th century.

Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Ideas in Context 59. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511755965Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This dense but insightful study argues that the concept of the British Empire emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries as a way of describing the united kingdoms of Britain and Ireland and evolved, under pressure by Creole elites, to include North America and the Caribbean during the later 17th and early 18th centuries.
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Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
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An excellent essay collection that brings together a number of perspectives on defining themes in the development of the British Atlantic world.
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Bailyn, Bernard, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
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An informative and engaging series of essays that demonstrate that people and places considered marginal to the British Atlantic world were in fact central to the development of an Atlantic culture.
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Canny, Nicholas, and Alaine Low, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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An excellent resource containing essays on numerous aspects of early British imperial endeavors.
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Devine, T. M. Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815. London: Allen Lane, 2003.
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A survey of Scotland’s involvement in the growth of the British Empire with an emphasis on the domestic transformations brought about by Scotland’s Atlantic world ventures.
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Eltis, David. The Rise of Atlantic Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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This book interrogates the relationship between the rise of slavery in the Atlantic world and the simultaneous expansion of notions of freedom. Eltis focuses on the British Atlantic slave system and argues that its success reflected African strength rather than African weakness.
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Games, Alison. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Focusing on men who traveled between various outposts of English commerce and colonization, this book argues for the centrality of their global experiences to English imperial expectations.
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Hancock, David. Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785. New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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A brilliant study of wealthy transatlantic merchants living in London that illustrates how international commerce linked distinct arenas of the Atlantic world in the mid-18th century.
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Mancke, Elizabeth, and Carole Shammas, eds. The Creation of the British Atlantic World. Anglo-America in the Trans-Atlantic World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
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A thirteen-essay overview of the people and processes central to the formation of the Atlantic world with a focus on the tensions between imperial and state impulses and those of independent individuals and groups.
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French Atlantic

Although French Atlantic scholarship was late in joining the wave of 1990s-era scholarship on the Atlantic world and its major European players, French scholarship on non-French Atlantic themes played a foundational role in the concept’s development. No less than the British or Iberian Atlantic worlds, the French Atlantic was a world in motion. It also encompassed a tremendous geographic range, from European administrative centers and slave trading ports in West Africa to settlements in the Caribbean, South America, and the northern regions of Canada. Characterized by considerable state involvement from the outset, France’s expansion into the Atlantic began in the 16th century with a handful of attempts at settlement in North America and South America. However, it was not so much territorial possession that distinguished the French Atlantic (although France’s Caribbean holdings became tremendously economically and politically important in the 18th century) but rather the comparatively small number of French settlers and the range and number of encounters with American Indians and Africans. Traditionally, scholarship on the French Atlantic focused on regional rather than Atlantic patterns with an emphasis on the influence of institutional and political structures. Recent contributions have focused on the Haitian and French revolutions, on France’s shifting imperial alliances with rival European powers, and on indigenous powers throughout the Americas. Pritchard 2004 offers an overview of French American explorations. Cohen 1993 examines French views of Africans on three continents and in a variety of capacities, while Aubert 2004 considers the impact of racial mixture within the French Atlantic world on Continental French identity. Boucher 1985 surveys French imperial ambition in the Atlantic world, while Marzagalli 1999 compares French and British Atlantic endeavors. Banks 2002 examines the nature and power of communication practices in the French Atlantic. Dubois 2006 argues for the importance of enslaved peoples in shaping the Enlightenment. Vidal 2006 and Potofsky 2008 each consider the state of French Atlantic scholarship and the challenges and contributions that have characterized it.

Aubert, Guillaume. “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World.” William and Mary Quarterly 61.3 (2004): 439–478.
DOI: 10.2307/3491805Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of the challenges that French-Indian and French-African relationships posed to Continental French notions of citizenship and honor.
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Banks, Kenneth. Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communication and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002.
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This book focuses on the production and dissemination of knowledge in the French Atlantic world with a focus on both the logistics of communication and performances of imperial and colonial power through the communication of news and official announcements.
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Boucher, Philip P. The Shaping of the French Colonial Empire: A Bio-Bibliography of the Careers of Richelieu, Fouquet, and Colbert. Themes in European Expansion 6. New York: Garland, 1985.
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An impressively wide-ranging survey of French colonial ambitions in the 17th century with a focus on developments on both sides of the emerging French Atlantic world.
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Cohen, William B. The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
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This book explores French images of Africans in various capacities and places, whether in Africa, enslaved in America, or free in France.
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Dubois, Laurent. “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic.” Social History 31.1 (2006): 1–14.
DOI: 10.1080/03071020500424342Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this study Dubois argues that analyses of the Enlightenment must consider the intellectual influence and actions of the enslaved, particularly as expressed in the Haitian Revolution.
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Marzagalli, Silvia. “The French Atlantic.” Itinerario 13.2 (1999): 70–83.
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A comparative analysis of the French and British Atlantic worlds with an emphasis on population and political differences as well as distinct economic underpinnings.
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Potofsky, Allan. “New Perspectives on the Atlantic.” In Special Issue: The Idea of Europe in the Eighteenth Century in History and Historiography and New Perspectives on the Atlantic. Edited by M. Albertone and Allan Potofsky. History of European Ideas 34.4 (2008): 383–473.
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The seven essays and introduction in this recent forum focus primarily on the French Empire, questioning the nature of Atlantic communities and alliances and highlighting the ways Atlantic world scholarship continues to privilege certain people and places while neglecting the history and contributions of others.
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Pritchard, James. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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A detailed account of how French settlers came to America and attempted to settle there with a particular interest in why vast territorial possession did not guarantee the success of a French empire in the New World. Argues that French monarchs and ministers failed to grasp the significance of the colonial experience and undermined their relationship with the colonies through their attempts at regulation and control.
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Vidal, Cécile. “The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic History.” In Special Issue: Imagining the Atlantic World. Edited by Douglas B. Chambers. Southern Quarterly 43.4 (2006): 153–189.
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This provocative piece credits French scholars’ slow embrace of Atlantic world scholarship to their continuing focus on national histories and their resistance to attempts to integrate the history of Atlantic slavery and colonization into narratives of French historical development.
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Dutch Atlantic

The Dutch began to take serious interest in the profit-turning potential of the Atlantic around 1600, when supporters of oceanic expansion promoted the building of an alliance with inhabitants of the West Indies, whom they positioned as likely allies in a shared struggle against their mutual Spanish imperial foe. The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, sought to build on the profit-turning potential of theoretically benign encounters. Over the course of the next few decades, the Dutch expanded their Atlantic presence with tremendous success. They settled on the east-central coast of North America (the colony of New Netherland) in the 1620s and the following decade established control over significant swaths of South America (New Holland in Brazil). In 1637 they seized Elmina in West Africa from the Portuguese and shortly thereafter Luanda as well, positioning themselves to become major players in the Atlantic slave trade as well as in the trade in gold and ivory. Meanwhile, they settled the Caribbean islands of St. Eustatius and Curaçao and established many settlements on the Caribbean “Wild Coast” of South America (between the Orinoco and Amazon deltas), which would eventually become plantation colonies. However, by the mid-17th century this Atlantic power began to ebb. The failure of indigenous alliances coupled with constant attacks by imperial rivals led to the loss of the Netherlands’ leading Atlantic colonies. This, however, did not mean an end to a Dutch presence in the Atlantic. The Dutch emerged as the middlemen and brokers of the Atlantic world dominated by the territorial empires of their rivals. Israel 1989 offers a wide-ranging synthesis of the rise of Dutch power and the factors that contributed to the republic’s emergence as a center of global trade. Emmer 1998 and Klooster 1998 consider the Dutch contribution to the Atlantic economy with a focus on the Caribbean. Postma and Enthoven 2003 offers a wide-ranging survey of commerce in the Dutch Atlantic, while De Bruyn Kops 2007 examines the trade in spirits and the commercial networks linking the Dutch economy to Continental and transatlantic partners. Jacobs 2009 focuses on the Netherlands’ flagship North American colony. Both Schama 1997 and Schmidt 2001 explore the Dutch cultural imagination. Simon Schama examines the Dutch reaction to commercial wealth, and Benjamin Schmidt focuses on the symbolic role of America in Dutch conflicts with Spain.

De Bruyn Kops, Henriette. A Spirited Exchange: The Wine and Brandy Trade between France and the Dutch Republic in Its Atlantic Framework, 1600–1650. Northern World 32. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004160743.i-382Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A detailed examination of the intra-European trade in spirits, mainly brandy, in the first half of the 17th century with a focus on networks of community and financial networks responsible for keeping the trade functioning despite political and economic turmoil.
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Emmer, Pieter. The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery, and Emancipation. Collected Studies CS614. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998.
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A collection of Emmer’s essays on various aspects of Dutch Atlantic engagement. Wide-ranging and accessible with an emphasis on the Caribbean experience—an aspect of Dutch imperial history often deemed a “failure” in comparison to its experiences in Asia.
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Israel, Jonathan I. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. ACLS Humanities E-Book Project. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
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Israel explores the factors that propelled the small and sparsely populated Dutch Republic to its success as a center of world trade, finance, and shipping. E-book.
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Jacobs, Jaap. The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
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Although focused on a Dutch settlement, the Americas, Jacobs brings a transatlantic perspective to this detailed study, considering the Dutch West India Company’s changing views of the colony and the attempts of European bureaucrats and colonial administrators to create a settlement that would serve imperial needs.
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Klooster, Willem. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795. Caribbean Series. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 1998.
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This excellent and accessible study of the Dutch illegal trade with Spanish and French colonies (particularly the islands of Curaçao and St. Eustatius) argues that the Dutch transatlantic trade was far more valuable than commonly acknowledged and, if the trade with Africa is included, nearly equaled the value of Dutch commerce with Asia before the 19th century.
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Postma, Johannes, and Victor Enthoven, eds. Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Atlantic World 1. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2003.
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This collection of fourteen essays covers various areas of Dutch Atlantic engagement, including Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Guinea coast. There are also two survey essays that address the entire length of a Dutch imperial presence in the Atlantic, from the 16th century through the early 19th century.
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Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Vintage, 1997.
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A creative exploration of Dutch identity at the height of the country’s early modern power with an emphasis on the question of how the Dutch reconciled their worldly prosperity with their piety.
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Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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A thought-provoking study of representations of America in the Netherlands. Schmidt argues against an exaggerated view of America’s novelty in European eyes and focuses on the various ways the New World was pressed into the service of Old World rivalries.
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