Preface

In 1995, Jack Fischel, the chair of the Department of History at Millersville University, asked me if I could develop a new class that would be interdisciplinary and multiregional in scope. Since I had already published a book that more or less met that requirement in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World in 1992, I thought that perhaps I could expand the ideas and methods of that book to include not just Africans but all the people of the Atlantic Basin – Africans, Europeans, and the indigenous people of the Americas. Like all such broad-based courses, it floundered at first, and it took me a good three years of teaching it to determine how I should structure the class, what organization it should have, and how such a vast field could be rendered intelligible to undergraduate students at a regional university.

From the very beginning of the course, I was determined that Atlantic history as I was conceiving it would not simply be anchored on the story of European expansion and conquest. Much as I admired the French “big histories” that were my initial guides to doing large-scale history, such as the work of Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu, or Frédéric Mauro, I wanted to include all the actors in the game, and on their own terms. I also decided that I would focus on cultural themes as well as political economy, which I felt had dominated the questions of contact and exchange to the detriment of other elements of human interaction.