Introduction

Beginning in the fifteenth century, people, plants, pathogens, products, and cultural practices — just to mention some key agents — began to move regularly back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. As the connections and exchanges deepened and intensified, much was transformed. New peoples, economies, societies, polities, and cultures arose, particularly in the lands and islands touched by that ocean, while others were destroyed. This book describes, explains, and, occasionally, challenges conventional wisdom concerning these path-breaking developments from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. It looks at European conquests of Native American populations (in North and South America), how some Native Americans contributed to the Atlantic trading world that flourished from the later seventeenth century onwards, the slave trade and importation of slaves from Africa, human settlement in America, and the re-segmentation of the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century into multiple polities.