Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World is a collection of ten essays drawn from a 2005 conference held in Bristol which brought together historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, preceded by an introduction by the volume editor. The resulting volume is a welcome contribution to the ever-growing field of “Atlantic history.” Fortunately, the authors' Atlantic is by no means overly “English” or anglophone, as is too often the case – and as Williams rightly remarks (3). Indeed, the volume redresses the chronic geocultural imbalance of the field as the essays focus on hitherto neglected areas, not least Africa, always following a felicitous interconnected approach that ultimately draws a convincing picture of the complexity of what we call “the Atlantic.”
If each paper is self-sufficient, it also nicely echoes and complements one or several others, thus producing a collection of essays which, as may not always be the case, has a genuine coherence. The result, consequently, is not merely the sum of its parts, which makes Caroline Williams's enterprise an editorial success.
The diversity of the “Atlantic world” is reflected by the diversity of peoples and cultures covered, from French cod-fishers in Newfoundland to English merchants in Seville (the “gateway to the New World,” 58) and Dutch–Tupi relations in Brazil; from Scots in Rotterdam, Darien (Panama) and early nineteenth-century Venezuela to Africans on the Gold Coast, in Senegambia and Portugal; not to mention Sephardi Jews established in the (English) island of Nevis after fleeing (Dutch) Suriname once it had been recaptured by the Portuguese. The focus is always on ordinary people (albeit sometimes very wealthy ones), and how they travelled, interacted, changed and/or were changed by the circulation of products and practices – in the words of A. J. R. Russell-Wood, quoted in Williams's introduction, “the human dimension of a world on the move” (5). This is ultimately a history of the various small transformations around the Atlantic rim occasioned by all sorts of exchanges and interactions over three centuries. Unsurprisingly, then, the figure of the cross-cultural negotiator recurs, under various guises, highlighting similarities not otherwise obvious at first glance.
The volume is also useful for the sheer breadth of material, archival and secondary, covered by the contributors, in as many languages (apart from English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and Swedish) as appear in the (generous) footnotes as well as in the final, lengthy if not repetitive, bibliography (223–50). Its usefulness may be discussed as it lists all the works (books and articles) from the footnotes. This should serve as a reminder that Atlantic history, if it is to be more than the history of English America under another name, is a fundamentally multilingual history drawing on archival repositories such as those of the Portuguese inquisition in Lisbon, as recalled by Philip J. Havik (173), but also in Coimbra and Evora, used by James H. Sweet, as well as French toll and notarial records. Beyond the use of all sorts of archival multilingual material, the collection benefits from the insight provided by archaeological research both in present-day Bénin (Kenneth G. Kelly) and Darien (Panama, Mark Horton).
This, then, is a rich, successful and stimulating collection of essays in which specialists as well as nonspecialists, scholars and students will certainly find, at least, elements of interest.
