edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault
contributions by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Neil Safier, Londa Schiebinger, Beatriz Dávilo, Emma Rothschild, Mark Allen Peterson, Stephen D. Behrendt, Linda M. Heywood, John Thornton, David Hancock, Wim Klooster, J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna and Rosalind Beiler
Harvard University Press, 2011
eISBN: 978-0-674-05353-3 | Cloth: 978-0-674-03276-7 | Paper: 978-0-674-06177-4
Library of Congress Classification D210.S68 2009
Dewey Decimal Classification 909.09821

ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK

These innovative essays probe the underlying unities that bound the early modern Atlantic world into a regional whole and trace some of the intellectual currents that flowed through the lives of the people of the four continents. Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, the essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and of commerce, legal and illegal, inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, the Protestant international that linked Boston and pietist Germany, and the awareness and meaning of the Atlantic world in the mind of that preeminent intellectual and percipient observer, David Hume.

In his Introduction, Bailyn explains that the Atlantic world was never self-enclosed or isolated from the rest of the globe but suggests that experiences in the early modern Atlantic region were distinctive in ways that shaped the course of world history.