Claude-Henri de Rouvoy, an officer of the Royal-Gatinais Infantry, had his insight regarding the world significance of the American Revolution at the tender age of twenty on the battlefield of Yorktown in 1781. Years earlier, at the beginning of the Revolution, Thomas Paine suggested as much: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” During the American Revolution a committee of founders created the Great Seal of the United States, which was finalized in 1782. On the reverse side of the seal is an unfinished pyramid and at the base the date MDCCLXXVI (1776) and the motto Novus Ordo Seclorum. Chosen by Charles Thomson and borrowed and rephrased from Virgil, the phrase was part of a prophecy about the fate of the Roman Empire. Thomson explained: “The date underneath [the pyramid] is that of the Declaration of Independence and the words under it signify the beginning of the new American Era, which commences from that date.” This sentiment was portrayed less cryptically than in the reverse side of the motto in the frontispiece of the Massachusetts Magazine in 1790.

My studies have taken me to very interesting places and pasts in the Americas, Africa and Europe. Like many Latin Americans, West Africans, Europeans and Americans today, I am something of a citizen of the Atlantic. That is, I have been crossing the Atlantic by sea and by air for many years to study, visit and live in Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean and, much less, West Africa – at least so far. The idea for this book came from my students when I was Professor of American Studies at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, in 1989–90. When I returned to Michigan I created a new course called “Atlantic World in the Age of Empire.” I taught this course throughout the 1990s and read as much of the abundant historiography and relevant printed primary sources related to these times and places as humanly (meaning matrimonially) possible. In 1999–2001, thanks to a sabbatical leave and a Research Professorship from Central Michigan University, I put together two years of uninterrupted research and writing. Research for and rewriting of this book continued for several more years, and I devoted entire semesters and summers to work on this book in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Some brief remarks on terminology are warranted. In this book, I often refer to Europeans, Africans and Indians or Native Americans. Rarely if ever did these peoples think or refer to themselves in those terms.

In the early 1790s, the English artist and poet William Blake provided sixteen engravings, illustrations for John Gabriel Stedman's book, Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America; from the Year 1772 to 1777. The last engraving in the book was an image conceived and drawn by Stedman and engraved by Blake entitled, “Europe Supported by Africa & America.” At the end of his Narrative, “after all the horrors and cruelties with which I must have hurt both the eye and the hear of the feeling reader,” Stedman explained, “I will close the scene with an emblematical picture of Europe supported by Africa and America, accompanied by an ardent wish that in the friendly manner they are represented, they may henceforth and to all eternity be the prop of each other.”

Stedman and Blake's emblematical picture has always been a controversial representation of the Atlantic World. As the title tells us, and the picture itself seems to show, white, bejeweled, modest and delicate-featured “Europe,” obviously superior, is physically supported by the women of color, “Africa” and “America,” wearing slave bracelets.

The making of the Atlantic World was an endeavor accomplished by men and women. Up to this point, few women have been mentioned in this history. This is because few women were sailors and explorers, conquerors and planters, traders, colonial officials, missionaries, and pirates. Women, however, participated in all of these activities and more. As colonists, servants, seamstresses, landowners, cigar rollers, tavern keepers, midwives, market women, and slaves, European, African and Indian women helped make the Atlantic World (literally) work. As the mates of male colonists, women were the irreplaceable partners of men. Founding fathers must have founding mothers. In the early stages of Atlantic colonization, European women tended to stay home. As a result, in many places the founding mothers were African and Indian women. They assisted and resisted Europeans, provided translations, entrée into alien cultures, counsel and guidance. They helped forge diplomatic alliances and business partnerships. African and Indian women in the new Atlantic World gave birth to mulattos and mestizos and thus were crucial in the genesis of new peoples and cultures. In time, European women left home and sailed the Atlantic. Far more moved to and settled in the Americas than in Atlantic Africa. European women became partners of their husbands in building farms, estates, businesses and in giving birth to new generations to pass on the hereditary culture. To many contemporaries, women were essential to the making of the Atlantic World.

The fifty years following the American Declaration of Independence constituted the Age of Revolution in the Atlantic World. There were many revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic and several different kinds of revolutions. Artisans, merchants and landowners, commoners and aristocrats, made republican revolutions to make colonies into independent nations and to overthrow absolutism, kings and nobility. Slaves, free blacks, mulattos and peasant villagers organized and fought popular revolutions to overturn deeply entrenched social and political orders. The revolutions had many different causes and many different outcomes but they were all movements of liberation. Liberty was the word on the lips of all revolutionaries, their great motivation and objective. No other region of the world has ever seen such a widespread and sustained period of organized disorder on behalf of an abstract principle. It was an extraordinary period of transformation and it began the dissolution of the Atlantic World. We live in a world still shaped by the principles of these late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century revolutionaries.

So much turmoil in such a compact epoch must have had some common origin or characteristics. Revolutionaries of the age generally shared a political language, democratic republicanism, which had roots in European history and European political thought. This was a radical ideology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the governing systems in most countries were monarchies and their social systems were aristocratic and authoritarian.

The empires and economies of the Atlantic World had been built to a great extent upon the slave trade and American slavery. By the late eighteenth century some sixty to seventy thousand Africans each year were dragged from their homelands and transported to the Americas. They joined the 2.5 million black slaves who produced the valuable commodities – sugar, tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, cotton and more – of the plantation complex. African slavery was ubiquitous throughout the Atlantic World. It was present in Europe, Africa and the Americas, it had expanded for hundreds of years and appeared to be everlasting. Beginning in the 1770s and 1780s, however, an international anti-slavery campaign attacked the morality and legitimacy of the slave trade and of slavery itself. During the course of about a century, the Atlantic slave system was destroyed by European, American and some African reformers and by the actions of the slaves themselves. The fall of black slavery and the Atlantic slave trade was a transformation as significant and dramatic as the destruction of the Atlantic empires.

The rise of anti-slavery sentiment in the eighteenth century was related to both a religious reevaluation of slavery and the rationalist questioning of tradition, which was an important part of the Enlightenment. Beginning in the 1770s, anti-slavery became part of the ideology and program of the Age of Revolution. The first official abolitionist legislation in the world came in the United States during the American Revolution.

“I do not see how we can thrive until we get into a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business, for our children's children will hardly see this great Continent filled with people, so that our servants will still desire freedom to plant for themselves, and not stay but for very great wages.” Like this seventeenth-century Englishman in North America, many if not most European colonists in the new Atlantic World did not see how they could succeed without some kind of coerced labor.

The New American World had an abundance of good land, and one could not imagine running out or filling it up with people. That was the problem or the opportunity: plenty of land and not enough people to work it voluntarily. With land everlasting but labor scarce, the returns to labor were relatively high. The labor of Native Americans was extracted through forced levies, tribute and outright slavery. Poor Europeans were contracted to work as indentured servants. However, in many tropical and semitropical regions white servants and native slaves proved to be unreliable or simply unavailable. Europeans then turned to Africans. As we have seen, more than ten million Africans were uprooted in Africa and unloaded in the Americas against their will to work in the plantations and workshops of the Americas. Most enslaved Africans, roughly two-thirds in fact, were given to the sugar plantation, an agricultural factory that specialized in the cultivation, harvesting and industrial processing of this one commodity for foreign markets and consumers.

The Pillars of Hercules, the twin rocks standing on each shore of the Strait of Gibraltar, was the symbol in classical geography of the edge of the known world. They marked the boundary between the “inner” (Mediterranean) and “outer” (Atlantic) seas. Beyond the Pillars and the great island of the earth was the “River Ocean” that encircled the continents. This is portrayed in a Latin map showing the Aluveus Oceani (Ocean Riverbed) surrounding the world. Claudius Ptolemy, the librarian at Alexandria and great second-century c.e. mapmaker, noted in his Geographia, “the known world extends in a continuous landmass from the western extremities of Europe to the easternmost limit of Asia, and between the two points lays an intervening ocean.” In the Medieval period, the idea of the River Ocean was superseded by the belief that a vast open sea lay beyond the Mediterranean. The traditional motto attached to the Pillars was Ne plus ultra – “Do not go too far.” The great ocean beyond the Pillars had many names over the years – the Great Sea, the Ocean Sea, the South Sea and the Western Ocean. As early as Herodotus its modern name was occasionally used: “the sea outside the Pillars, named Atlantic.”

To Arab geographers, the Atlantic was “the Sea of Darkness” and the “Great Green Sea of Gloom.” Europeans had a similarly bleak perception of the ocean due to biblical and classical influences. The Bible viewed the oceans as chaos possessed of monsters, like the coiled serpent Leviathan.

“To traffick in human Creatures, may at first sight appear barbarous, inhuman and unnatural,” wrote Captain William Snelgrave in 1734, “yet the Traders herein have as much to plead in their own Excuse, as can be said for other Branches of Trade, namely, the Advantage of it; and that not only in regard of the Merchants, but also of the Slaves themselves.” Snelgrave believed the slave trade benefited the merchant and the slave because enslaved Africans, in his view, lived better lives in their new American country than they did in their old African homeland. By the mid-eighteenth century, as the captain's comment suggests, some Europeans began to question the morality of the slave trade. However, from the fifteenth century into the eighteenth, for most Europeans who thought about the issue the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was no more immoral than the shipping of sugar, tobacco and silver. The Atlantic slave trade was simply a business – “the business of kings, rich men and prime merchants,” as Jean Barbot put it – that connected Europe, Africa and the Americas. This business was at the core of the Atlantic System, a dynamic commercial economy that connected the Americas, Europe and Africa through the movement of peoples, goods, services, capital and credit. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Atlantic System, more than anything else, defined and shaped the Atlantic World.

The Atlantic World was a bounded world, one limited in space and time. The collapse and disintegration of the fundamental structures that connected and defined the Atlantic World began in the late eighteenth century and required another century to complete. During this same period the economic, technological and organizational capabilities that Western Europe first developed in the Atlantic were unleashed across the globe. A fragmented world of more or less autonomous cultures, societies and states gave way to an increasingly connected, interdependent and uniform world. To put it simply, the fall of the Atlantic World and the rise of the modern world is one of the most important transitions in history.

The processes of dissolution and formation took place roughly at the same time. In this book, the demise of the key connections entwining the Atlantic World is shown to have taken place beginning in the 1770s and extending into the 1880s. In his history of the origins of the modern world, C. A. Bayly directs his attention to the period from 1780 to 1914. These large and complex transitions are very closely related, much like the two faces of a coin. The downfall of the European empires in the Atlantic took place as a new surge of European imperialism and colonialism swept over Africa, Asia and the Pacific.

Following Columbus' first voyage to America, the Spanish Pope Alexander VI, in his famous bull Inter caetera, confirmed Portuguese possession of West Africa and granted to the crown of Castile all “islands and mainland” to the west of an imaginary boundary in the mid-Atlantic. The monarchies were granted the exclusive right to, and possession of, lands not otherwise held by a Christian prince. Legitimacy of possession was further based on the conversion of native peoples to Christianity. Portugal and Castile adjusted the mid-oceanic boundary and confirmed their respective territorial claims in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Inter caetera and related bulls, collectively referred to as the papal donation, constituted the basic legal claim of the Portuguese and Castilian monarchies to the newly discovered lands of the Atlantic World. Other European monarchs and legal scholars later disputed the legitimacy of Portuguese and Castilian territorial claims. “Show me the clause in Adam's will,” proclaimed King François I of France (1515–47), “which gives the king of Spain dominion over half the world.”

The French and the English claimed a right to explore where the Portuguese and Spaniards were not settled, and to trade in any seas. In 1534, François I informed the Spanish ambassador that he had not renounced his rights to America. The French protested: “In lands which the King of Spain did not possess [the French] ought not be disturbed, nor in their navigation of the seas, nor would they consent to be deprived of the sea or the sky.”

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the emerging Atlantic World was Spanish and Portuguese. These innovators constructed the most impressive imperial structures in the West since the Romans dominated the Mediterranean world. For the first time, the Iberian empires connected the peoples of Europe, Africa and the Americas. This connection was commercial, social and cultural as well as political and administrative. Back and forth across the Atlantic in various patterns and networks flowed people, animals, plants, diseases, commodities, manufactures, customs, ideas and much else, which historians have termed the Columbian exchange. Both Spain and Portugal extended their commerce to Asia as well, but it was the Atlantic rim that was Europeanized, albeit a fragmentary and thin veneer overlaying deep African and Indian foundations. Their overseas realms were extensions of European culture but greatly modified extensions, sustained by African and Indian trade and labor and influenced by African and Indian customs. Nevertheless, the empires were inspiring. The Portuguese chronicler João de Barros wrote in 1540: “The Portuguese arms and pillars placed in Africa and Asia, and in countless isles beyond the bounds of three continents, are material things, and time may destroy them. But time will not destroy the religion, customs, and language which the Portuguese have implanted in those lands.”

The Atlantic World of the sixteenth century was but one arena of the relatively new dynastic superpower, the Habsburg Empire.

The opening of the Atlantic brought the Portuguese and Spanish into the lands of Africans and Native Americans. Before these encounters, Portugal and Castile had coexisted and made alliances with, and frequently struggled against, a people close at hand but different in ethnicity, culture and religion. They were the Moors of the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib. Alliances were made with Moorish states to gain temporary respite and advantage in fighting other Moorish and Christian states as conditions in the peninsula and the Western Mediterranean dictated. Conquest was also deeply ingrained in Portuguese and Spanish culture, as the Reconquista demonstrated. The Iberians entered the Atlantic World seeking partners and allies for conducting trade and making war and conquests. The Iberian “conquests” of indigenous states and societies in Africa and the Americas were incomplete and unfinished for centuries. “But many kingdoms and provinces were not totally or entirely conquered,” noted the Spaniard Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor in 1701, “and there were left among other provinces and kingdoms great portions of them unconquered, unreduced, unpacified, some of them not even yet discovered.” The conquests were also ambiguous in the way Iberians and indigenous peoples perceived these events. Spaniards and Portuguese took glory in the status of conquistador, but native people, for example, rarely saw themselves as “conquered,” and many viewed themselves as conquerors alongside their Spanish and Portuguese allies.

The idea of an Atlantic World has blossomed in recent decades as a way to encourage all of us in the Americas, Africa and Europe to examine, teach and write about our localities, provinces and nations from wider and comparative perspectives. This is a good idea but we need to remember that the Atlantic World is, in fact, a useful and interesting historical concept more than a self-evident historical reality. Cosmopolitans – that is, the well-traveled worldly type of the early modern era – never employed the term or viewed the societies and peoples perched around the Atlantic Ocean as a larger coherent whole. Yet as the saying goes, what we see often depends upon where we stand. The Chinese published a guide to the Atlantic Ocean in 1701 that described the peoples of Europe, Africa and the Americas as “the people of the Great Western Sea.” It is often strangers from afar who see a unity, however tenuous and feeble, that is indistinct to those within.

This book focuses on the connections, interactions and exchanges that crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean beginning in the fifteenth century. These attachments and engagements transformed European, West African and Native American societies and also created new peoples, societies, cultures, economies and ideas throughout the Atlantic littoral. The past that is under consideration here was vast, protracted, multitudinous and extraordinarily complex.