The Atlantic World In The Age Of Empire

This secondary source reader centers around the age of exploration and its resulting encounters between cultures, particularly around the Atlantic Ocean. It examines the varying historical viewpoints on the extent of European domination in the Atlantic World and includes chapter introductions, essay introductions, timelines, and an annotated bibliography.

This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.

A first-of-its-kind reference resource traces the interactions among four Atlantic-facing continents—Europe, Africa, and the Americas (including the Caribbean)—between 1400 and 1900. Until recently, the age of exploration and empire building was researched and taught within imperial and national boundaries. The histories of Europe, Africa, North America, and South America were told largely as independent stories, with the development of individual places within each continent further separated from each other. The indigenous populations of places colonized by Europeans fit into the history even more uneasily, often mentioned only in passing. Encyclopedia of the Atlantic World, 1400–1900 synthesizes a generation of historical scholarship on the events on four continents, providing readers an invaluable introduction to the major people, places, events, movements, objects, concepts, and commodities of the Atlantic world as it developed during a key period in history when the world first started to shrink. The entries discuss specific topics with an eye toward showing how individual items, people, and events were connected to the larger Atlantic world. This accessibly written reference book brings together topics usually treated separately and discretely, alleviating the need for extra legwork when researching, and it draws from the latest research to make a vast body of scholarship about seemingly far-flung places available to readers new to the field.

Through a thoughtful consideration of the complexity of the religious landscape of the Atlantic basin, the collection provides an enriching portrayal of the intriguing interplay between religion, gender, ethnicity, and authority in the early modern Atlantic world.

Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany. But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving account of the abuses of indigenous Caribbean people and African slaves, Schiebinger describes how slave women brewed the "peacock flower" into an abortifacient, to ensure that they would bear no children into oppression. Yet, impeded by trade winds of prevailing opinion, knowledge of West Indian abortifacients never flowed into Europe. A rich history of discovery and loss, Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.

Introduction: Empires at war -- Civil war in the British Empire : the American Revolution -- The war on privilege and dissension : the French Revolution -- From prize colony to black independence : the revolution in Haiti -- Multiple routes to sovereignty : the Spanish American revolutions -- The revolutions compared : causes, patterns, legacies

From 1750 to 1800, a critical period that saw the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution, the Atlantic world experienced a series of environmental crises, including more frequent and severe hurricanes and extended drought. Drawing on historical climatology, environmental history, and Cuban and American colonial history, Sherry Johnson innovatively integrates the region's experience with extreme weather events and patterns into the history of the Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world. By superimposing this history of natural disasters over the conventional timeline of sociopolitical and economic events in Caribbean colonial history, Johnson presents an alternative analysis in which some of the signal events of the Age of Revolution are seen as consequences of ecological crisis and of the resulting measures for disaster relief. For example, Johnson finds that the general adoption in 1778 of free trade in the Americas was catalyzed by recognition of the harsh realities of food scarcity and the needs of local colonists reeling from a series of natural disasters. Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the eighteenth-century Caribbean.

From 1400 to 1900 the Atlantic Ocean served as a major highway, allowing people and goods to move easily between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. These interactions and exchanges transformed European, African, and American societies and led to the creation of new peoples, cultures, economies, and ideas throughout the Atlantic arena. The Atlantic World provides a comprehensive and lucid history of one of the most important and impactful cross-cultural encounters in human history. Empires, economies, and trade in the Atlantic world thrived due to the European drive to expand as well as the creative ways in which the peoples living along the Atlantic's borders adapted to that drive. This comprehensive, cohesively written textbook offers a balanced view of the activity in the Atlantic world. The 40 maps, 60 illustrations, and multiple excerpts from primary documents bring the history to life. Each chapter offers a reading list for those interested in a more in-depth look at the period.