The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850

This collection of compact biographies puts a human face on the sweeping historical processes that shaped contemporary societies throughout the Atlantic World. Focusing on life stories that represented movement across or around the Atlantic Ocean from 1500 to 1850, the book explores transatlantic connections by following individualsbe they slaves, traders, or adventurerswhose experience took them far beyond their local communities to new and unfamiliar places. Whatever their reasons, tremendous creativity and dynamism resulted from contact between people of different cultures, classes, races, ideas, and systems in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. By emphasizing movement and circulation in its choice of life stories, this readable and engaging volume presents a broad cross-section of peopleboth famous and everydaywhose lives and livelihoods took them across the Atlantic and brought disparate cultures into contact.

Karen Racine is associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Guelph, Canada. Beatriz G. Mamigonian is professor of history at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil.