Atlantic history has become fashionable in the last few years. Where once historians were content to study continents and countries in isolation, they have increasingly sought to study interactions on an intercontinental scale. This is particularly true of the early Atlantic, where the dramatic European navigations of the fifteenth century suddenly brought four continents into interaction where there had been little or no communication before. As a result of these navigations, the Atlantic became the scene of major intercontinental migrations. Thousands of European settlers moved from their homes to the Americas, and joining them was a still larger group of Africans.

On the whole, the European migration and its effects have received much more attention from historians than the African migration. This is true even though the African migration was larger, at least before the nineteenth century. This book is an attempt to assess this less well known migration of Africans to the Americas and to place this assessment in the growing field of Atlantic history.

When Fernand Braudel published The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in 1949, he pioneered, especially in France, a new way of looking at regional history. Braudel's approach changed the way regions were defined, introducing the concept of a history integrated by the sea. His approach was also noteworthy for placing economic and social factors at the center of things rather than in the background.