Readings on the History of the Atlantic World

Several months ago, Five Books published a list of 5 books on the Atlantic World, which included some notable omissions. While not exhaustive, the purpose of this reading list is to better capture the depth and diversity of the field and acknowledge the intellectual contributions of women and scholars of color. Several of the scholars included in this list have produced additional books that may be of interest, and we encourage readers to explore their work further. In organizing this list, we attempted to de-emphasize the structures of empire. We begin with contributions that focus on the Indigenous and African peoples of the Atlantic World, then follow movement across the Atlantic Ocean. We conclude with contributions that discuss connections between South America, the Caribbean, Central America, North America, and Europe and the Atlantic World. 

*The authors wish to thank Ana Lucia Araujo, Vanessa Ogle, Marissa Rhodes, Christian Ayne Crouch, Danielle Terrazas Williams, and Rebecca Goetz for their input.

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Indigenous Atlantic

• Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Informed Power: Communication in the Early South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
• Echeverri, Marcela. Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Gomez, Pablo F. The Experimental Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
• Hatfield, April. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
• Kopelson, Heather Miyano. Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
• Resendez, Andres. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. New York: Mariner Books, 2017.
• Thrush, Coll. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
• Weaver, Jace. The Red Atlantic: American Indigeneities and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

African Atlantic

• Bailey, Anne. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
• Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.
• Candido, Mariana. An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Christopher, Emma. Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Curtin, Philip D. Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press, 1997.
• Diouf, Sylviane A. Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Athens, Ohio : Oxford, England: Ohio University Press, 2003.
• Gomez, Michael A., ed. Diasporic Africa: A Reader. New York: NYU Press, 2006.
• _____________. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
• Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Hawthorne, Walter. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast,1400-1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
• Heywood, Linda M., ed. Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• _____________. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2017.
• Heywood, Linda M., and John K. Thornton. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Knight, Frederick C. Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
• Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

The Atlantic World

• Berry, Stephen R. A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life  and Atlantic Crossings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
• Burnard Trevor and John Garrigus. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
• Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: a Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
• Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. The Atlantic in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailers, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013.
• Mustakeem, Sowande M. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 2016.
• Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. New York: Cornell University Press, 2010.
• Smallwood, Stephanie E. A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

South America

• Aidoo, Lamonte. Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018.
• Borucki, Alex. From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Río de La Plata. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015.
• Bryant, Sherwin K. Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
• Bryant, Sherwin K., Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson, eds. Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora. University of Illinois Press, 2014.
• Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1999.
• Cook, Karoline P. Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Costa, Emilia Viotti da. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
• Echeverri, Marcela. Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Ferreira Furtado, Júnia. Chica Da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Lauderdale Graham, Sandra. Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Lane, Kris. Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
• McKnight, Kathryn Joy. “Blasphemy as Resistance: An African Slave Woman Before the Mexican Inquisition.” In Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, edited by Mary E. Giles, 229-253. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
• O’Toole, Rachel Sarah. Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
• McKinley, Michelle A. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Walker, Tamara J. Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Xavier, Giovana, Flavio Gomes, and Juliana Barreto Farias, eds. Black Women in Brazil in Slavery and Post-Emancipation. Brooklyn, NY: Diasporic Africa Press, 2017.

The Caribbean

• Barcia, Manuel. West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807-1844. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Beckles, Hilary McD. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
• Block, Kristen. Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
• Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Browne, Randy M. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
• Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1832: Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838. Kingston : Bloomington : London: Indiana University Press, 1990.
• Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Finch, Aisha K. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
• Garraway, Doris L. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2005.
• Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
• McNeill, J. R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Menard, Russell R. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados. University of Virginia Press, 2014.
• Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
• Newman, Brooke N. A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
• Reid-Vazquez, Michele. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.
• Schwartz, Stuart B. Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Sweet, James H. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
• Turner, Sasha. Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
• Vasconcellos, Colleen. Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788–1838. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
• Wheat, David. Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
• Winters, Lisa Ze, Professor Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Manisha Sinha. The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Central America

• Bennett, Herman L. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro- Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
• Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Díaz, Mónica, ed. To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
• Few, Martha. For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015.
• Lohse, Russell. Africans into Creoles: Slavery, Ethnicity, and Identity in Colonial Costa Rica. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014.
• Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
• Socolow, Susan Migden. The Women of Colonial Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Vinson III, Ben. Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

North America

• Block, Sharon. Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
• Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. NY: Vintage, 2012.
• Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, eds. The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States Histories, Geographies, and Textualities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
• Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
• Horne, Gerald. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in North America and the Caribbean. Monthly Review Press, 2018. 
• Johnson, Ronald Angelo. Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
• Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999.
• McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
• Scott, Julius. A Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of Haitian Revolution. NY: Verso Books, 2018.
• Tyler-McGraw, Marie. An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
• Winters, Lisa Ze. The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Europe

• Amussen, Susan Dwyer. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Brigden, Susan. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
• Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
• Edelson, S. Max. The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017.
• Games, Alison. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Greer, Allan. Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America. Cambridge ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Grimes, Katie Walker. Fugitive Saints: Catholicism and the Politics of Slavery. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.
• Livesay, Daniel. Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833. Williamsburg, Virginia : Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Luna, José Carlos de la Puente. Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018.
• Mancall, Peter C. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
• Mangan, Jane E. Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
• Premo, Bianca. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2005.
• Roberts, Professor Justin. Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Tortorici, Zeb. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018.

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Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Holden’s current book project, Surviving Southampton: Gender, Community, Resistance and Survival During the Southampton Rebellion of 1831 (University of Illinois Press), explores the contributions that African American women and children, free and enslaved, made to the Southampton Rebellion of 1831, also called Nat Turner’s Rebellion. In addition to her work on enslaved women and slave rebellion, Holden also co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Follow her on Twitter @drvholden.

Jessica Parr is an intellectual and cultural historian (ca. 1660-1860), with interdisciplinary interests in the print culture and the religious and political thought of the Black Atlantic. She also researches and teachings in the Digital Humanities. She is the author of Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (University Press of Mississippi, 2015). She is currently at work on a manuscript on the evolution of Black thought. Parr is a member of the Editorial Board of The Programming Historian and serves on the Executive Board of the New England Historical Association. She teaches at Simmons College in Boston. Follow her on Twitter @ProvAtlantic.

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