The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World

The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of Atlantic history from c.1450 to c.1850, offering a wide-ranging and authoritative account of the movement of people, plants, pathogens, products, and cultural practices-to mention some of the key agents--around and within the Atlantic basin. As a result of these movements, new peoples, economies, societies, polities, and cultures arose in the lands and islands touched by the Atlantic Ocean, while others were destroyed.

The team of scholars in this volume seek to describe, explain, and, occasionally, challenge conventional wisdom concerning these path-breaking developments. They demonstrate connections, explore contrasts, and probe themes. During the four centuries encompassed by this collection, pan-Atlantic webs of association emerged that progressively linked people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. Events in one corner of the Atlantic world had effects, reverberations thousands of miles away. The great virtue of thinking in Atlantic terms is that it encourages broad perspectives, unexpected comparisons, trans-national orientations, and expanded horizons; the parochialism that characterizes so much history writing and instruction today, as in the past, has a chance of being overcome.

Nicholas Canny is Academic Director, Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, and President of the Royal Irish Academy. He has published widely on the history of early modern Ireland, early modern Britain, and the history of European colonization more generally, including Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (2001) and (as editor) volume one in the Oxford History of the British Empire series, Origins of Empire (1998).

Philip Morgan is Harry C. Black Professor, Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (2009) and Black Experience and the Empire (2004), both also published by Oxford University Press.