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Nicholas Canny, The Creation of the British Atlantic World, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 1, June 2006, Pages 181–182, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486079
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The popularity of Atlantic history is proven by a stream of publications in recent years, but few have attained the quality of this excellent collection of thirteen essays fronted by a robust introduction. Despite the wealth of publications (or perhaps because of it), there is no common agreement on what Atlantic history involves or where it was born. On the second issue, contributors to The Creation of the British Atlantic World stake a claim for Johns Hopkins University since Jack Greene is general editor of the series in which this volume appears, Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World, and both editors and twelve of the fifteen contributors to this particular volume hold their doctoral degrees from that university.
While the focus of this book is the British Atlantic world, the contributors agree that the place exploited by British people in the Atlantic basin can be comprehended only when allowance is made for two factors. The first is that interactions there must be compared with those in the spheres of influence of other European groups, particularly the Spanish, Portuguese, and French. These, it is contended, sometimes provided models to be mimicked but at other times threatened British interests. At yet other times, they provided settlement communities with whom British settlers could trade, even when doing so contravened the wishes of metropolitan governments. The second factor accepted as a common premise is that those who principally influenced how human interactions proceeded within the British space were a diverse group, extending from English merchants, government officials, and naval commanders to the African traders, the African and Native American slaves, and the plenitude of European peoples—Irish (both Protestant and Catholic), Scots, French Huguenots, German speakers of various religions and states of origin, and English and Welsh people from many locales, including royalists and parliamentarians, Anglicans, Puritan nonconformists, Catholics, and Quakers—who together constituted the population of this sector of a wider Atlantic world.
