The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History is a reference work that seeks to synthesize the growing corpus of research on the field of Atlantic history. After a relatively brief introduction of just over fifty pages, the bulk of the book consists of approximately 120 entries, in alphabetical order, that deal with what the volume’s editors deem to be the most significant topics related to the history of the Atlantic world. The introduction (Part One) is broken up into sections: a prologue on the “Historical Dynamics of Change” and an essay on the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, both by Joseph C. Miller, and essays on the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Vincent Brown and Laurent Dubois, respectively. Miller, Brown, Dubois and Kupperman, along with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, are the volume’s editors and they have brought together the expertise of a wide range of well-known Atlantic scholars who authored the essays in Part Two. As a result, The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History is quite comprehensive in its coverage of eras and significant topics in the field. The focus is on larger themes and issues: the alphabetical list of entries includes “Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade”, “Blended Communities”, “Diasporas”, and multiple entries for topics related to “Economic Strategies” and “Economies”, “Law”, “Literature”, “Religions” and “Wars”.

This book will be of particular use to graduate students given the breadth and disparity of topics, methodologies, eras and geographical regions encompassed in Atlantic history. Readers less familiar with Atlantic history will especially appreciate the bibliographies that follow each entry. These bibliographies are brief—usually between five and ten works are cited—but they provide a good starting point for further investigation. The burgeoning scholarship in Atlantic history can be intimidating even to more experienced scholars and instructors, not the least because of the diversity within the field and simultaneous interconnections. Take the topic of “blended communities”, discussed in a cogent essay by David Wheat. Blended communities could be found all over the Atlantic world, meaning that Wheat’s essay must traverse all sorts of geographical, linguistic, chronological and ethnic boundaries. It also requires knowledge of slavery and abolition. By cross-referencing the essays and their bibliographies, readers can get an excellent introduction to the sub-fields and major themes in Atlantic history and the basis for a solid bibliography. The editors also include a set of five excellent, two-page maps that show the evolution of trade routes and cross-cultural contacts in the Atlantic Basin from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Although this is a reference work, there is a distinct interpretation of the Atlantic World that runs through both parts of the book. The editors state in their preface that their goal is a work that will “mediate” among the disciplines and regions that comprise Atlantic history. They hope to “integrate” Atlantic history “as a coherent and distinctive field of knowledge and understanding” (vii). The explosion of scholarship on Atlantic history, while still dominated by scholars and paradigms from the Iberian and, especially, British historical traditions, is increasingly interdisciplinary and geographically and ethnically inclusive. This is a positive development as it has created a richer understanding of the complex movements of peoples, cultures and commodities that shaped the Atlantic World. But it also has made it ever more difficult to find coherence in Atlantic history, even to define what the “Atlantic World” was, when it arose, and when, or if, it ended, blended into an increasingly global world by the close of the nineteenth century as Laurent Dubois asserts. The breadth of the topics covered in Part Two of this volume attests to this problem of integrating without “streamlining” all of the depth and colour out of Atlantic history. Most of the integration and coherence toward which the editors strive derives, therefore, from the central themes that Miller elucidates in his “Prologue,” and that then re-emerge regularly in both introductory essays and the topical entries.

The first of the two themes that consistently runs through this volume is the contention that “militarization” and “commerce” were fundamental forces shaping Atlantic history. Miller states quite baldly in the “Prologue” that “civilization in Western societies is based on militarization and material wealth” (5), a sweeping conclusion that some scholars, Europeanists especially, are likely to find overly simplistic. Miller does acknowledge that neither “militarism” nor “trade” were exclusively European but nonetheless asserts that, in his view, these two forces played a much more prominent role in “Western societies” (he’s not specific regarding what he means by “Western” here) than in the other societies of the Atlantic Basin. Miller is on firmer ground when he contends that the European intrusions into Africa and the Americas led to the expansion of both forces throughout the Atlantic Basin, with profound and often negative impacts on the peoples from whom Europeans appropriated land and extracted resources and labour.

The second theme is the resilience and creativity with which the peoples of Africa and the Americas adapted to the development of an Atlantic economy and European military conquest and colonization. The editors and contributors make a concerted effort to balance the history of empire, which traditionally has dominated the scholarly discourse of early modern global interactions, with information about “blended communities”, “local knowledge”, and cultural adaptation. The Atlantic history in this companion is not a story of European expansion and the construction of empires but emphasizes the contingent, dynamic, yet also fragile commercial partnerships, colonial societies and cultural adaptations that developed in an increasingly militarized Atlantic World between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.