Books in the The Early Modern Americas series

Forbidden Passages is the first book to document and evaluate the impact of Moriscos-Christian converts from Islam-in the early modern Americas, and how their presence challenged notions of what it meant to be Spanish as the Atlantic empire expanded.

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.

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.

From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the inebriating cannabis that East Indies merchants sold in coffeehouses, drugs have been entangled with science and commodification for five centuries. The Age of Intoxication explores the origins, and continuing impact, of the first global era of drugs.

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.

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.

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.