Books in the The Early Modern Americas series

Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds shows how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period.

Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills-swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing-to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

No Wood, No Kingdom explores the conflicting attempts to understand the problem of wood scarcity in early modern England and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies.

Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic reveals how Europeans and Native Americans devised ways to understand the environment. Drawing on paintings, oral history, early printed books, and other cultural artifacts, Peter C. Mancall argues that human understanding of nature played a central role in the emergence of the modern world.

A World at Sea sharpens and expands our understanding of how the maritime world contributed to global transformations in the early modern world, from inventing knowledge-making practices to pioneering new ways of organizing labor to legal experiments that spanned land and sea.

Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as simple economic transactions: rather, according to Herman L. Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics.

Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus trace how the plantation machine developed between 1748 and 1788 and was perfected against a backdrop of almost constant external war and imperial competition.

By the eighteenth century, personal networks bound together the widening British world. In The Opened Letter, Lindsay O'Neill argues that the British became an early networking society, relying on letters to maintaining necessary social networks that British global expansion and mobility threatened to disconnect.

Based on intensive archival research and the unique visual data of more than a thousand extraordinary watercolors, The Bishop's Utopia seamlessly weaves cultural history, natural history, art, and imperial politics into a cinematic retelling of the life of Spanish Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martinez Companon and northern Peru in the 1780s.

In this volume, leading historians reflect on the recent biographical turn in studies of slavery and the modern African diaspora. This collection presents vivid glimpses into the lives of remarkable enslaved and formerly enslaved people who moved, struggled, and endured in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

On July 21, 1578, a small Mexican town awoke to the news of a scandal. Nailed to the door of its church was a double-faced effigy denouncing a neighbor as a Jew who should burn at the stake. Nine trials over the course of four years revealed a story of dishonor, revenge, and the Inquisition's relentless determination to defend its symbols.

Michael Guasco traces the broad spectrum of ways slavery shaped the way Englishmen and Anglo-Americans thought about and interacted with the world even before the rise of plantation-based economies.

Examining five generations of marriages between African women and European men in a Gold Coast slave trading port, Daughters of the Trade uncovers the vital role interracial relationships played in the production of racial discourse and the increasing stratification of the early modern Atlantic world.

In The Black Urban Atlantic, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery.

Amsterdam's Atlantic puts Dutch Brazil back on the front pages and argues that the way the Amsterdam media constructed Atlantic events was a key element in the transformation of public opinion in Europe.

The Temptations of Trade reveals the opportunities and tensions of doing business in regions far from strict imperial control, where the actions of individuals could both connect empires and drive them to war.

Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas shows what happened to Christianity when Old World doctrine and belief crossed the Atlantic and collided with New World realities. Essays from across disciplines explore the impact of colonial contexts on the symbolic institutions of Protestantism and Catholicism.

A New World of Labor connects developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast and with the initial development of African chattel slavery in Barbados, whose labor system played a foundational role in defining how plantation slavery developed throughout British America.

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Dutch colony of Suriname-a place where Jews, most of Iberian origin, established the largest Jewish agricultural community in the world and enjoyed various liberties, including the right to convert their slaves to Judaism.