This Introduction provides a condensed telling of five hundred years of Romani history within an Atlantic context. It illustrates that Romani people have been part of the modern Atlantic world and that the Atlantic world has shaped the Romani diaspora and Romani people’s sense of who they are. Stories of Atlantic circulations, interactions, connections and exchanges show how Romani people and ideas held about them, transcended empires, nations and borders. The Introduction specifically contextualizes three moments of visibility. During the early modern era, Romani people experienced (often forced) population movements as part of imperial expansions and prompted the translation of European antigypsyism in the context of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, Indigenous genocides and emerging racial thought. At the turn of the twentieth century, nationalistic immigration controls provoked a heightened recognition of Romani people that impacted their experiences, forms of sociability and strategies of mobility. After World War II, as transnational migrants and refugees, they garnered new attention and built diasporic communities in the face of novel and changing international circumstances. Adding Romani people to Atlantic history allows us to think differently about the Atlantic world and transforms our understanding of Romani lived experiences.

Romani people fundamentally shaped the development of early modern transatlantic racialized thought. They were considered, and considered themselves, in relation to the evolving web of beliefs that bound people from four continents together and that prompted new concepts and categories transformative to the lives of all Atlantic inhabitants. Their physical and ideological presence as familiar outsiders made them a referent and template for non-Romani Europeans and American colonists anxious to comprehend and control less-familiar outsiders encountered throughout the Atlantic world. Recent Romani arrivals to Western Europe had primed early modern Europeans to notice certain registers of difference when encountering new strangers abroad. The content of these tropes reproduced with each mention and retrenched with each experience creating a sense of timelessness that stabilized racialized thought. Examples from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries are drawn from Portuguese, Spanish, French and English Atlantic spaces to show how non-Romani Europeans viewed Romani people, Native Americans, Africans and themselves relationally.