Across the early modern Atlantic world, there were commodities just as valuable as sugar, tobacco or cotton: news and information. However, crossing an ocean beset by wars, pirates and bad weather made transoceanic communications irregular at best, posing significant challenges to the weekly European news cycle. With infrequent access to information, publishers had to navigate between speculation and confirmation, printing everything they could without losing credibility or customers. Michiel van Groesen explores this 'culture of anticipation' across the Atlantic world in Spain, Portugal, France, the Low Countries and England and also in the urban information centres of Renaissance Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. He argues that news from the Atlantic world underpinned all transatlantic exchanges, giving newspapers their rightful place in Atlantic history, and the Atlantic world its place in the history of news.

‘How did people in the early Atlantic world know what they thought they knew? Michiel van Groesen answers this question through painstaking multilingual research in diverse national and imperial news cultures across the long seventeenth century. An essential work in Atlantic history, An Ocean of Rumours charts a new chronology for the rise of an integrated Atlantic news culture.'

Alison Games - Georgetown University

‘In An Ocean of Rumours Michiel van Groesen provides us with a remarkable comparative and transatlantic history of the making and reading of news. Through the rise of the printed periodical newspaper between 1570 and 1720 he reconstructs a world where editors, printers and readers from London to Lisbon and Augsburg to Amsterdam attempted to navigate the swells, eddies and storms of commercial, military, diplomatic, and geopolitical information from Africa and the Americas. He reveals a turbulent world of both uncertainty and anticipation as the new shape of the Atlantic world emerged on the printed page.'

Miles Ogborn - Queen Mary University of London