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[First paragraph]Shaping the Stuart World 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection. Allan I. Macinnes & Arthur H. Williamson (eds.). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xiv + 389 pp. (Cloth US$ 135.00)Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. Kenneth Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x + 221 pp. (Paper US$ 32.00)Although an important debate continues about the concept itself, the use of "the Atlantic" has embedded itself in scholarly vernacular. The scholarly output directly spawned by an engagement with the concept continues apace. That ocean, and the peoples who lived and traded along its edges, and who finally moved across it, have provided an important geographical focus for some major reconsiderations of modern history. Prompted by the Macinnes/Williamson volume, I returned to my own undergraduate and graduate notes and essays from courses on Stuart Britain: the Atlantic was totally absent – not even present as a distant speck on our intellectual map. We studied, and debated, the formal histories of migrations to the Americas (i.e. Europeanmigrations) but there was no mention of Africa or Africans. And no sense was conveyed that the European engagement with the Americas (in their totality – as opposed to North America) was a two-way, mutual force: that the European world was influenced, indeed shaped in many critical regards,by the Americas: by the land, the products, the peoples, and by the markets of that hemisphere. At its most obvious in the ebb and flow of peoples, even that eluded the historians I encountered as a student. It was as if we were talking about a different cosmos; few moved beyond the conventions of European migrations westwards and little attention was paid to that most dominant of migrations – the enforced African migrations to the Americas.

The present state of Atlantic history / Philip D. Morgan and Jack P. Greene -- The Atlantic Ocean and Its contemporary meanings, 1492-1808 / Joyce E. Chaplin -- The Spanish Atlantic system / Kenneth J. Andrien -- The Portuguese Atlantic, 1415-1808 / A.J.R. Russell-Wood -- The British Atlantic / Trevor Burnard -- The French Atlantic / Laurent Dubois -- The Dutch Atlantic : from provincialism to globalism / Benjamin Schmidt -- Indigenous America and the limits of the Atlantic world, 1493-1825 / Amy Turner Bushnell -- Africa and the Atlantic, c. 1450 to c. 1820 / Philip D. Morgan -- Europe and the Atlantic / Carla Rahn Phillips -- From Atlantic history to a continental approach / Peter H. Wood -- Hemispheric history and Atlantic history / Jack P. Greene -- Atlantic history and global history / Nicholas Canny -- Beyond Atlantic history / Peter A. Coclanis

When I was invited to participate in the conference marking the twentieth anniversary of Leiden's Centre for Overseas Expansion and to contribute to the conference's retrospection of recent scholarship on the history of overseas expansion, I happily agreed. And I agreed specifically to contribute a paper on what was rather casually, I think, called 'The Atlantic in the Ancien Régime'. Since I had been working, one way and another, in that area for a long time, I expected no difficulty in writing up a reasonable paper. But the more I thought about the subject, and the more I reviewed what had been done in recent studies of 'the Atlantic in the Ancien Régime' the more mysterious and interesting the question became and the more strongly I was led back to earlier antecedents in the literature. I had a growing feeling that something strange had happened, something that, oddly enough, I had myself been involved in without knowing it, something that I was in fact attempting to formulate in connection with an international seminar on Atlantic history that I will be directing over the next few years.

Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connections among Africa, the Americas, and Europe transformed world history-through maritime exploration, commercial engagements, human migrations and settlements, political realignments and upheavals, cultural exchanges, and more. This book, the first encyclopedic reference work on Atlantic history, takes an integrated, multicontinental approach that emphasizes the dynamics of change and the perspectives and motivations of the peoples who made it happen. The entries-all specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of l

Abstract
The field of Atlantic history initially focused exclusively on the Anglo-American North Atlantic, largely ignoring the South Atlantic and Africa. This approach, dominant after World War II, portrayed a "Western civilization" based on North Atlantic liberal values, akin to a postwar Mediterranean. Over time, historians of the Anglo-American Atlantic criticized this narrow focus, recognizing the broader interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Recent decades have seen a shift, with more historians acknowledging the Atlantic as a complex, interconnected space involving four continents. Particularly notable is the rise of studies on the South Atlantic, especially regarding science and empire in the Iberian world. These studies highlight the significant role of Spain and Portugal, challenging the previously North Atlantic-centered narrative. This research has revealed that the Atlantic world was as much, if not more, shaped by Spanish and Portuguese influences as by English ones. The reviewed works exemplify this shift, focusing on the South Atlantic's imperial entanglements and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.