Preface
The Atlantic world is a concept used by historians to describe how the peoples of
the four Atlantic-facing continents—Europe, Africa, North America, and South
Amer i ca—became increasingly connected following the opening of sustained, reg-
ular contact between them in the fifteenth century. The pos si ble connections among
people runs the gamut of human experiences: exploration and conquest; trade and
commerce; migration, both voluntary and forced; the growth of new ideas, iden-
tities, politics, religions, and cultures; the introduction of new plants, animals, and
diseases; the circulation of information, money, and credit; and the intermingling
of peoples bringing forth new children, new families, and new peoples bridging
multiple worlds.
Given the scale of Atlantic history, the present work is necessarily selective rather
than exhaustive. It emphasizes on important individuals, the men and women who
connected empires and nations, and who drove the events that brought different
Atlantic regions together. The Encyclopedia of the Atlantic World 1400–1900: Europe,
Africa, and the Amer i cas in an Age of Exploration, Trade, and Empires highlights impor
tant groups, stepping back from the individual to show how peoples have developed
over time as they come in contact with others, often different from themselves. This
two-volume work also looks at the important ideas, objects, and commodities that
circulated through the Atlantic world, changing the lives of people who themselves
never left home. Important events are not neglected; they show history happening
and Atlantic relations changing as a result of how events, always contingent, turned
out. Important places feature prominently in the encyclopedia. Geography is vital
to understanding how a broad complex like the Atlantic world worked in practice.
Finally, the encyclopedia discusses concepts, such as the Black Atlantic, that scholars
of Atlantic history confront in their work.
The Atlantic world is defined by motion, how ideas, people, plants, animals, dis-
eases, and objects moved from one place, one continent, to another. In some cases,
the movement is easy to see. The slave trade, for example, forcibly removed people
from Africa, reduced them to a commodity, and transported them to the Amer i cas,
where they were sold and compelled to labor in the production of crops that would
then be harvested, processed, and transported to markets far away. From the Eu ro
peans, financing the slave voyages and sailing the ships; to the African slave dealers
selling humans into bondage to the slave markets of the Amer i cas; to the fields of
Brazil, Haiti, and Virginia and everywhere in between; to stalls of traders of tobacco,
sugar, coffee, and rum, in the Amer i cas and beyond; to the Eu ro pean counting houses
where the revenue and costs and the total return on investment was calculated—
the slave trade knitted together every corner of the Atlantic world.
