Of late, scholarly journals in the discipline of history have been filled with arguments stressing the need to break with traditional historiographic boundaries. In particular, we are told that in this global age, we must move ‘beyond the nation’ in our research and in our teaching. In the early modern history of Europe and the Americas, these arguments for thinking ‘transnationally’ have of late coalesced around a call to focus on the Atlantic World as a new conceptual framework.

Yet, for all these exhortations and good intentions, and a proliferation of conferences and edited collections with titles evoking ‘transnational’ or more specifically ‘Atlantic World’ history, few scholars have yet been able to produce work that truly reflects or represents just such an approach. In part, this is because the conceptual insights of Atlantic History have not been matched by the development of appropriate methodological tools. But nationally-based historiographic traditions also make comparative or transnational approaches difficult and are only compounded by institutional barriers at the departmental, University and national levels that often curtail rather than encourage non-national approaches to research and teaching.

This chapter will examine the rise of Atlantic History in recent historiography and its apparent limits. I will argue that the fruits of Atlantic History can only be enjoyed to their full extent if we recognise these problems, begin to think beyond the often Anglo-American Atlantic World, and use the conceptual insights of Atlantic History to create narratives that extend beyond imperial and national boundaries, and across traditional chronologies that support the national narratives that sustain those boundaries.

The essay will conclude by looking at some of the ways in which we might do this by looking beyond the traditionally defined borders of race, nation, and empire, and examining the Atlantic World from different, and eastward facing perspectives, from the bottom-up, and across older imperial and newly created national borders. The challenges of doing so are substantial, but the potential rewards include the possibility of a radically revised Atlantic World history that dynamically fuses the best of recent historical scholarship to an emergent and exciting conceptual advance in transnational history.

A quick scan of new publications in the back pages of the American Historical Review, the conference calls on H-Net and the contents pages of just about any leading journal that deals with early modern European or American history will reveal the extent of the dynamic explosion of interest in Atlantic history over the past few years. Conferences, journals, seminars, book prizes, textbooks, courses, graduate programmes, and now, dedicated academic positions in Atlantic history have blossomed. Fired by the possibilities of a new kind of open, empirical agenda (and those jobs), and by encouragement from notable scholars such as John Elliott who wrote recently that Atlantic history was ‘one of the most important new historiographical development of recent years’, scholars young and old have redefined their own work in a collective effort to reconceptualise the early modern world of Europeans, Africans, and Americans. As David Armitage wrote in 2002 in his introduction to The British Atlantic World, it seems ‘we are all Atlanticists now’.^[1]

The pace of the increasing institutionalisation of Atlantic history has been matched only by the possibilities it has raised and the questions asked of it, particularly about what it encompasses. Atlantic history has, most obviously, something to do with the ocean itself. But is that the North Atlantic, or South, or both? Is it about the sailors and ships that plied that ocean, or about the myriad people who depended upon them to cross it – in chains or with chests, with fear or with hope – or is it about the people those ships connected? Is it about the places that the ocean connected – Lisbon, Madeira and Rio de Janeiro – or the goods that travelled between those places – the beaver pelts trapped by Ottawa Indians that ended up on the heads of wealthy Parisians, or the silver mined by drafted indigenous mit’a workers in Peru that fuelled European expansion in the early modern period?

And, where exactly does the Atlantic begin and end? Is it at the mouth of the St Lawrence River, or at the Nipigon River on the north shore of Lake Superior? Does it include the Niger River in sub-Saharan Africa along which raiders enslaved Yoruba peoples, or the colonial town of Quito, high in the Ecuadorian Andes, reached only via ports off the Pacific Ocean? Does it begin with the voyages of Columbus, or Portuguese raiding and trading along the West African coast? And did this Atlantic World come to an end with the independence movements that rocked the western hemisphere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or with the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil as late as 1888? Finally, is the Atlantic more about the old world or the new, or is it perhaps merely more a construction of European thinkers, or modern historians, than about the peoples who inhabited it?

Atlantic history is, of course, about all of this and potentially so much more. In summing up recent trends and setting an agenda for new work, Armitage cautiously and correctly chose to embrace an open-ended approach to Atlantic history, noting that it is best used as a field that ‘links national histories, facilitates comparisons between them, and opens up new areas of study’, ultimately pushing historians ‘towards methodological pluralism and expanded horizons’. Depending on how it is defined, Armitage concludes, the field is fluid, “in motion, and potentially boundless,” like the Atlantic itself. This is, Armitage concludes, ‘the most one can ask of any emergent field of study’.^[2]

The great promise of Atlantic history, then, is that it will lead us to think about all kinds of new connections, but above all, that it will be transnational in scope. Even for the pre-national early modern era, colonial historians, and particularly, though not exclusively, colonial American scholars, have been decidedly wedded to a teleological agenda that is designed to explain the emergence of the nation above all else. In a globalising world, Atlantic history has the potential to liberate us from more narrow, and mostly nationalist views of the past, and from an historical agenda that has at its heart the education of a patriotic citizenry dedicated to the principles and values of a single state. In this context, Atlantic history pushes us to examine the more fundamental glue that connected and held people together in pre-national communities, as well as the problems and conflicts that made people aware of their differences, and pulled them apart. In short, Atlantic History is about raising exciting new issues and questions about the interconnections between Africans, Americans, and Europeans – citizens of, quite literally, a new world – quite independent of the nations in which they may or may not have ended up.

As exciting as these new possibilities are, already there seem to be limits emerging, at least in practice. For one thing, despite all the exhortations and good intentions, and a proliferation of conferences and edited collections with titles evoking ‘transnational’ or more specifically ‘Atlantic World’ history, the actual steps taken by scholars thus far have seemed tentative, cautious, and circumscribed. In short, few scholars have yet been able to produce good empirical work that reflects or represents a truly Atlantic approach to the early modern period.

What scholars have so far produced tend to be what Armitage has called cis-Atlantic history – the study of particular places or locations in relation to the wider Atlantic World. Indeed, there has been a wonderful explosion of literature on topics ranging from the Atlantic-influenced political and legal culture of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, to the dynamic interactions between Natives, Dutch and English in the early New York region, and finally to the massive upheaval of the Haitian Revolution.^[3] But so far, with several important exceptions discussed below, there has been relatively little work so far that is truly transatlantic (comparative) or circum-Atlantic (that is, ‘the history of the Atlantic as a particular zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission’).^[4]

As Armitage notes, it may just be a matter of time before an accumulation of cis-Atlantic histories lend themselves to more expansive trans- and circum-Atlantic histories. In the meantime, though, there is a danger that such initial efforts might actually be limiting in the long run. For while historiographers thus far have embraced an open-ended definition of Atlantic history and run ahead of the pack to announce the possibilities that lie ahead, most historians have had to proceed from what they know. And what many ‘Atlantic’ historians know best is the Anglo-Atlantic World. Thus so far, with some important exceptions, the bulk of the work in Atlantic history has really been about the Anglo-Atlantic World.^[5] Armitage and Braddick’s path-breaking work, several recently published readers and many of the new and forthcoming books with ‘Atlantic World’ in their title are, on closer inspection, about the Anglo-American Atlantic World.^[6]

Now, the desire to place European colonies in an Atlantic setting is admirable, as is the push to integrate those colonies into histories of the metropole, but surely in the colonial context, this is what we should have been doing all along. Perhaps this historiographical turn is only natural given that the history of colonial British America is probably the field that has the most catching up to do when it comes to breaking down modern conceptual and political borders. As John Elliott has noted, Atlantic History in the Anglo-American world has been, when seen especially in a broader Atlantic context, and in particular, by Latin American historians, remarkably bifurcated. Whereas the history of Spanish America during the colonial period has conventionally been regarded as a ‘natural concomitant of the history of metropolitan Spain, and vice versa’, the same cannot be said of general histories of England, nor for that matter, of the British colonies in America, where historians of the latter have been strongly preoccupied with teleological and exceptionalist assumptions about the kind of society into which they were to evolve.^[7]

So, there is good reason to celebrate the recent outpouring of monographs and books on both sides of the Atlantic that have transformed Anglo-American history and that have already culminated in the publication of new textbooks such as T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall’s, Colonial America in an Atlantic World (New York, Nyand London: Pearson Longman, 2004), and Alan Taylor’s remarkably rich and Atlantic-minded American Colonies: The Settling of North America (London: Penguin, 2001). These books collectively enrich the history of colonial America while they illuminate transatlantic networks of exchange, migration, ideas and labour. They also tell us a good deal about Britain as well, and the impact empire had on the development of the British ‘nation’, ‘national identity’, and even newer ideas of empire too.^[8] In short, Atlantic history has thus far helped in telling a much more multifaceted, three-dimensional and integrated tale of the British imperial and the colonial American experience.

But at their worst, these ‘new’ Atlantic history books tend to replicate and enhance older teleological assumptions about the growth of the United States and the rise of Britain, albeit now with an enriched and broader Atlantic World context. Even the latest, and in many ways very admirable, attempt at placing the colonial American experience in a wider Atlantic perspective – Alan Taylor’s, American Colonies: The Settling of North America ­ fails to break from an ultimate adherence to explaining the origins of the United States. Presumably, this has much to do with publishers’ desires to fill a textbook market for University courses that still revolve around the rise of the United States, albeit a more multicultural United States. It is here that intellectual developments have run far ahead of departmental, institutional, and market forces, needs, and biases.

Quite apart from the inherent limitations in this more traditional approach, if we do not break free from these particular national, or even imperial paradigms, Atlantic history is in danger of becoming a neo-imperial form of history; one dominated by the rise of the British Empire, and the birth of the United States. Bernard Bailyn, for example, has been at the forefront of efforts to invigorate the field of Atlantic history. But in Bailyn’s own Atlantic World, Britain is clearly at the centre, and the British Empire and the Anglo-American world radiates outward – throughout the ‘entire inter-hemispheric system’. Suddenly British traders are crowding the ports of the Caribbean and British goods are flooding into French ports. And ‘England’s population moved about the Atlantic World as the people of no other European nation.’ Bailyn wants to place Britain and America into a larger Atlantic context, but seems only interested in reading that context through British eyes – the impact of Britain on the Atlantic, rather than the Atlantic impact on Britain. Atlantic history, for Bailyn, is about linking ‘European history with the history of the western hemisphere’.^[9]

A celebration of Atlantic history in this context suddenly sounds at best suspiciously like older notions of the ‘Western civilisation’ programme out of which, at least in part, Atlantic history grew. Bailyn himself traces those origins to Walter Lippmann’s influential essay in The New Republic in February 1917, when he argued for the preservation of the

And most proponents of Atlantic history recognise its ideological roots in the defensive posturing of the Cold War.^[10]

But at worst, this kind of approach also threatens to become something more than a rewarming of the Western civilisation programme. Most recently, Bailyn tipped his hand as to what he meant by Atlantic History when, at the end of an essay detailing the radiating influence of American constitutionalism through the Atlantic World in the early nineteenth century, he wrote of contemporary challenges to that ‘classic formulation for the world at large of effectiveness and constraint in the humane uses of power’ by people with ‘other values, other aspirations, other beliefs in the proper uses of power’ and by people who ‘emphatically challenge Jefferson’s belief that it is America’s destiny to extend to other regions of the earth what he called “the sacred fire of freedom and self-government”.’ What these ‘other’ values, aspirations and beliefs are, Bailyn leaves up to one’s imagination. But in this new era of post-September 11th fears, Atlantic history may yet become a casualty of a Western-oriented new political agenda.^[11]

With these caveats aside, and in the spirit of the idea that Atlantic history should be liberating, not limiting, let me suggest several possible directions in which we should think carefully about how best to use this conceptual tool: by thinking across borders, and especially imperial borders, by facing east as much as we face west, and by taking a bottom-up approach at least as much as a top-down approach. By using Atlantic history along with the best of other new methodological and conceptual advances, we have a real opportunity now of radically reframing Atlantic history and pushing it far beyond what R. R. Palmer and his intellectual heirs had in mind.^[12]

One of these is to really move beyond borders. It is of course extremely useful to think about the multicultural origins of the United States, or to reconnect the colonial experience with the European nations that spawned those colonies. And, Atlantic history has helped illuminate a great deal within the older imperial systems as a whole. But Atlantic historians need to look further than their imperial borders, too. We need more discussion of comparisons and connections across imperial systems. Relatively few scholars have begun to compare and contrast the labour systems of Spanish and English America, to take one example, or even to compare the cultivation of gentility in Portuguese Brazil and French St Domingue. As John Elliott has observed, Anglo-American historians are not the only ones who have focused on a single system; French, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish Atlantic history, is still usually ‘divided into neat national packages’ as Elliot has put it.^[13]

This requires everyone, of course, to undertake the rather difficult task of breaking free from the different systems they study, however large they are already. But once we have a more integrated view, and once we give equal weight to the voices of French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and even West Indian historians weighing into the discussion about the Atlantic, we can potentially radically reconfigure our narratives, rather than just incorporate scholarship on the so-called ‘borderlands’ in a sometimes tokenistic way. We can let, for example, the truly multicultural experience of New Spain drive the agenda of our interpretive framework as easily as American constitutionalism seems to drive the current agenda. Too many Anglo-Americans, myself included, too often try to ‘fit’ Spanish experiences into Anglo models, rather than the other way around, or comparing them equally.^[14]

Integral to this effort to move beyond borders will be the need to take up the call of Michael Jiménez and Marcus Rediker and others to completely ‘reframe the political and intellectual style of early Atlanticism’ and refashion Atlantic History – away from Robert R. Palmer’s male upper- and middle-class actors in national politics, and more towards a common and/or comparative social history – towards a new class history, for example. Indeed, as Jiménez and Rediker note, ‘we possess considerably more knowledge of previously ignored workers and peasants, women, and peoples of many nations, races, and ethnicities – in intensively studied regions, villages, and neighbourhoods throughout the Atlantic World’. This exciting research has put us in a unique position – not only to produce more enriching scholarship on the comparisons and connections, the similarities and differences, between ordinary people throughout the Atlantic World, but also to write a fundamentally new kind of history. The constellation of the emergence of the new Atlantic history with so many other ‘new’ histories – on gender, race, and ethnicity in colonial, imperial and postcolonial studies – means that we have a better chance than ever of breaking free from Palmer and others and writing even a new kind of political history, but one which involves a significant ‘reworking of the liberal and modernization paradigms which lay at the heart of the earlier Atlantic project’.^[15]

There are several very exciting developments in this direction. Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s own work, The Many Headed Hydra is of course one of these, but so too is Camilla Townsend’s fascinating comparison of early republic Baltimore, Maryland and Guayaquil, Ecuador, in Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America. And, of course, this is what many Africanists and historians of slavery are and have always been doing. From Philip Curtin to David Eltis and Paul Gilroy, Africanists have been the best Atlanticists, and pan-Atlanticists at that, and the outpouring of so many outstanding works on African slavery and the slave trade, especially over recent decades, has opened up what Elliott has called ‘exciting perspectives that suggest the dawn of a new era of Pan-Atlantic history’. Given this, it is perhaps no surprise that path-breaking work by scholars of the Black Atlantic have helped inspire significantly the proponents of Atlantic history.^[16]

Some fields, of course, lend themselves to a more pan-Atlantic approach.^[17] But surprisingly, other subjects that might have been at the forefront of such a movement have apparently been left behind. I’m teaching a new course this semester on natives and newcomers in the Atlantic World focused squarely on the experiences of indigenous peoples in the Americas between 1400 and 1800. I was astonished to find how little there has been published that pushes beyond the artificial national and imperial boundaries Europeans erected and which were often meaningless to indigenous peoples. There are in fact a bewildering array of survey texts on Native Americans in Canada, the United States, and sometimes of Canada and the United States, and many now regularly incorporate Florida and the south-west to accommodate the Spanish dimension to Native American experiences. But there are almost no books that make sustained comparisons and connections between the experiences of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas in the face of what was, by and large, a common experience to all. Atlanticists thus also need to pay attention to the insights of those in other fields, like the new Indian history, and ‘face east’ as much as they normally face west.^[18]

The important thing to note here, I think, is that we should strive to think as much about the peripheries as the centres in Atlantic history. We especially need to keep our eyes on the impact that the small politics of local communities had on the larger politics of imperial rule and nation building. The lines of force so often run in multiple directions, but few scholars in taking an Atlantic approach have put the so-called peripheries at the centre of the larger imperial story. But if we really want to think global, we need to watch the local. We need to tell stories from the bottom-up, facing east (as well as north and south), and from gendered perspectives as often, if not more, than we tell stories from the top-down, facing westwards from Europe, and from a single, usually, male-oriented perpsective. Only when we do this can we fully appreciate the real and highly contingent nature of the ‘negotiated empires’ – and their cultural, social, economic, and political dimensions – at the heart of Atlantic World.^[19]

Well, how do we do this? Not everyone can hope to emulate the brilliance of Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996), the virtuosity of Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), or the erudition and wide-reading of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000) – three works that have helped us believe that such truly transnational and circum-Atlantic histories are possible. And even if we had the creative imagination to offer such interpretations, there are some more mundane and practical problems standing in the way of producing solid empirical work on such topics. Comparative history requires a mastery of at least two or more discrete historiographies, archival systems, and often, and ideally, different languages. But circum-Atlantic history (like any good transnational history) demands even more – often and again, ideally, transcending national and imperial borders and boundaries and the traditional periodisation of the historical narratives that sustain those borders. How then, does one begin archival work on subjects that defy easy categorisation, that are elusive in the records, that ignore the border controls that now separate historical resources?

Some good edited collections have begun to push us forward in this respect. Most offer discrete essays that allow us to make some useful comparisons, such as Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), Michael A. Morrison and Melinda S. Zook, Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), Franklin W. Knight and Peggy Liss (eds), Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, The Atlantic World : Essays on Slavery, Migration and Imagination (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), Elaine G. Breslaw (ed.), Witches of the Atlantic World: An Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000), Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers (eds), Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World (Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass, 1994), and David P. Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).^[20] Moreover, a forthcoming volume edited by Bailyn and drawn from his Harvard-based International Seminar on the Atlantic World entitled Cultural Encounters in Atlantic History, 1500–1825: Passages in Europe’s Engagement with the West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), promises the same (though note the revealing and eastward facing subtitle).

So far, it seems, biographical or prosopographical approaches have worked with some success. Two recent path-breaking works, for example, explore the fascinating worlds of several Africans in the Atlantic World. Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) both demonstrate not only the extent to which Africans were enmeshed in this new Atlantic World, but also how vital they were in creating it. Such biographies help break down borders. In crossing colonial or national boundaries, researchers at least find themselves on less certain footing when making comparisons between diverse peoples or institutions across time and/or places. But while modern researchers may draw back from the uncertainties beyond their historiographic borders, their subjects rarely did.^[21]

Non-elite studies of these kinds of people have the biggest potential to transform the field. Communities like the Métis of the Great Lakes, for example, do not really fit into existing narratives and approaches. They were French, and Indian, after all, in an expanding Anglo-American world. But they lived lives that extended much further than the confines of nation-based narratives to which historians have long been bound. Their lives transcended the traditional periodisation to which nation-bound scholars adhere to give coherence to their own narratives. They crossed imperial borders with impunity and they slipped through and across the ethnic, racial, and linguistic categories we have so often imposed on the past. In short, they lived transnational Atlantic lives that defy easy categorisation. In effect, their stories have been fragmented and lost by historians who have been teleologically wedded to tracing the development of new nations.^[22] It may take a little more fleet-footed archival work to piece together such lives – from their origins in southern France and the northern Great Lakes, to their scattered communities across Wisconsin, Michigan, and southern and northern Ontario – but the potential rewards are enticing.^[23]

Of course, as exciting as all of this sounds, we also need to be aware that this might be difficult, and the task of synthesising such work virtually impossible. It seems hard enough to please a national audience without attempting to synthesise the histories of four continents bordering the Atlantic ocean over three centuries, and our unfamiliarity with so many aspects of the histories contained within the Atlantic World in the early modern period.^[24] And, as Atlantic history is a ‘history without borders’ – a story told from no one vantage point and about no single representative place; no nation states, no single narratives, but instead multiple and often conflicting narratives presented from different perspectives – it can be particularly confusing.

Moreover, in the end we might, as Jack Greene has noted, be not only taken aback at the difficulties of comparative history, but also by a sense of the often vast differences between the different imperial worlds. And not only between the Catholic Iberian-American polities and the Protestant Anglo-American polities established much later, but also within those sprawling entities – particularly between Spanish Peru and Mexico where huge concentrations of imperial indigenous populations combined with mineral resources to produce societies there like nowhere else.^[25]

Finally, such an overview, over such a long period, may not be entirely satisfactory – it’s a bit more like jet-setting rather than backpacking. We’ll see the broader outlines from the air, but rarely get sweaty exploring the forests up close; we’ll see patterns of mobility and analyse large groups of people who make up the Atlantic World, but not mingle enough with the locals to perhaps feel like we know what is really going on. And, like jet-setters, we might be in danger of over-emphasising the commonalities and continuities. As we explore the Atlantic World on the same planes, via similar airports, stay in the same luxury chain hotels, and drink coke and bottled water, we’ll see superficial differences in the countries we visit, but remark generally and pithily on the shrinking size of the global village.

But a truly Atlantic approach ultimately allows us to ask – and begin to answer – some significant questions, and to interrupt so many dominant Eurocentric and Anglo-centric historical narratives and trajectories. For example, an Atlantic approach makes it quite clear that the expansion of any kind of European concept of ‘liberty’ was quite literally and figuratively carried to the New World on the backs of unfree labour. An Atlantic perspective allows us to move beyond endless debates within colonial historiographies about the relative prosperity and opportunity of different colonists and put the system as a whole under the microscope. As David Brion Davis has noted, when put in that broader perspective, there can be no doubt that the history of the entire New World has been dominated by the theme of slavery and freedom. In the 320 years from 1500 to 1820, he writes, two African slaves for every European immigrant arrived in the New World: ‘It was African slaves and their descendants who furnished the basic labour power that created the dynamic New World economies and the first international mass markets for such consumer goods as sugar, rice, tobacco, dyestuffs, and cotton.’^[26] This seems an obvious fact but one which, if acknowledged properly, helps undermine a Eurocentric ‘rise of the West’ narrative particularly since the history of North America in particular, but also Europe and the West in general, has long since been predicted upon the idea of progress, of the march of liberal democratic ideas and ideals.

And, we may also be able finally to move beyond the deceit, usually implicit in many studies, but explicitly stated as recently as 1992 by J. R. McNeill that Europeans ‘created and controlled’ the Atlantic World.^[27] Certainly, from the perspective of London, Paris, Madrid, or even of colonists in Philadelphia, Mexico, or Rio de Janeiro, this might have seemed true, but when viewed from the perspective of the motley crew of privateers who shaped so much of the history of the Caribbean in particular, and the Atlantic in general, such a statement rings hollow. And, when viewed from the perspective of the newly emergent Araucanian nation in southern Chile, or the Six Nations of eastern North America, both of whom successfully limited European advances for centuries while in turn profiting from the newcomers, it becomes quite clear that the Atlantic World was a ‘negotiated’ world. From the start, most Europeans got a foothold along the coasts of western Africa and the Americas via a series of negotiations, invitations, and sought after alliances amongst African and Americans, and all new Atlantic identities were forged from an amalgamation of sustained and intense European, African, and American contact, conflict, and cooperation.^[28] If the Atlantic World is to be about anything meaningful, we must start, rather than end, with these premises.