As Peter Mancall concedes in his introductory essay to this very fine edited collection, early Virginia was a small-scale, marginal, weak, and largely insignificant enterprise in its own time. Traditionally, the settlement of Virginia in 1607 is imagined as an epochal moment, the beginning of something new in the New World. Taken together, however, the contributors to this volume would challenge that view and instead assert that it is difficult to comprehend the long-term significance of Anglo-American colonialism without, paradoxically perhaps, recognizing its initial insignificance. As the deceptively simple title suggests, Virginia was a contingent enterprise, a small and dependent part of a much larger circum-Atlantic world. In order to understand Virginia, then, you have to break this world down into its component parts. The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, therefore, is a kind of erudite centrifuge that draws readers outward as a way of making sense of the inner workings of the complex indigenous, African, and European worlds out of which Virginia emerged.

The volume contains eighteen essays, many of which were written by preeminent scholars who first presented their work at an invigorating conference held in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 2004. Three essays, by Daniel K. Richter, Joseph Hall, and James D. Rice, constitute an opening section entitled “Native American Settings.” Together, these essays emphasize the vitality of indigenous political economies in which material, spiritual, and political matters were intertwined with one another. Whether in the Chesapeake or the Spanish Southeast, the trade in prestige goods was a source of both strength and instability. Native chiefdoms were complex entities that could integrate Europeans and their goods with greater ease than is generally appreciated. Yet, precisely because indigenous communities were polycentric and fluid, European invaders were able to exploit the locals in spite of the initial weakness of their garrison settlements.

Essays by E. Ann McDougall, David Northrup, Linda Heywood and John Thornton, and James H. Sweet make up a second section, entitled “Africa and the Atlantic.” As important and well done as they are, the articles in this section are the least well connected to the immediate history of Virginia. Rather, they speak collectively to the broader history of African peoples in the Atlantic world—as well as the impact of the Atlantic world on Africa—between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. To that end, Heywood and Thornton are interested in the distinctive ways Central African leaders appropriated Christianity, European diplomatic protocols, and literacy to serve their own ambitions. African familiarity with European norms, the authors contend, subsequently may have enabled Kongolese and Angolans in Virginia to adapt and, sometimes, prosper in the new setting. Sweet largely concurs in his essay, though he is quick to point out that it is a mistake to overemphasize either the cultural unity of Central Africans or the persistence of rigid corporate identities among Africans in the Atlantic world, including the often celebrated “Atlantic Creoles.” Perhaps the best evidence for this conclusion can be drawn from David Northrup's essay on the Gulf of Guinea. In what is one of the recurring themes of the volume, Northrup asserts that Europeans, specifically the English, willingly and necessarily conformed themselves to the peculiarities of the indigenous political and economic systems they encountered in Africa. African communities in the Gulf of Guinea, however, were often unstable as a result of political fragmentation and the absence of centralized religious and educational institutions. As Northrup and Sweet might have it, cultural flexibility and adaptability were not the result of African interactions with Europeans; they were an inherent characteristic of West African peoples and societies.

Part 3, entitled “European Models,” features essays by Marcy Norton and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Philip Boucher, Peter Cook, and Philip D. Morgan. Boucher and Cook are largely interested in the oft-ignored early modern French Atlantic. Boucher emphasizes that there were at least three constituencies (the crown, maritime interests in port cities, and Huguenots) that shaped French overseas policy to varying degrees. Together, these groups unsuccessfully attempted to profit by plunder, conquest, and small-scale trade in enterprises along the length of the western Atlantic littoral. The joint essay by Norton and Studnicki-Gizbert, as well as that by Morgan, returns more directly to the subject of Anglo-American colonialism. Norton and Studnicki-Gizbert's excellent contribution concerns the commodification of tobacco in the Iberian Atlantic world, partly facilitated by Portuguese merchants, and how its multinational character helped prepare the way for the crop that would eventually come to define the Chesapeake economy. If Norton and Studnicki-Gizbert are interested in preexisting English and Portuguese connections, Morgan is intrigued by the failure of scholars to recognize the ways English experiences in the Caribbean, writ large, shaped the settlement of Virginia and provided cover for the precarious mainland settlement during its initial years.

Andrew Fitzmaurice, David Harris Sacks, Benjamin Schmidt, and David Shields are the authors of the four essays that constitute the fourth part of the volume, “Intellectual Currents.” Fitzmaurice is concerned with matters that can be compared nicely with Peter Cook's work on the French in the previous section. Both authors are interested in colonial justifications, but they are more specifically concerned with showing how cross-cultural encounters and early colonial efforts led to changing conceptions of indigenous leadership (in Cook's case) and natural rights (in Fitzmaurice's). Sacks, Schmidt, and Shield each offer case studies of Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Captain John Smith, respectively. David Harris Sacks's essay is a particularly intriguing piece in which the author takes on recent scholars, such as the aforementioned Fitzmaurice and David Armitage, who have de-emphasized the great colonial promoter's Protestantism. Curiously, the relationship between religion and colonialism among European actors is only of passing interest to the contributors to this volume. To Sacks, however, the construction of an English empire cannot be fully appreciated without careful attention to Hakluyt's belief that overseas endeavors were divinely ordained and closely related to the broader themes of sin and salvation.

The broader significance of these essays is admirably summed up in the three essays that constitute the final section. James Horn returns readers, once again and with a fresh eye, to the story of Jamestown. In his retelling, appearing as it does in the wake of a body of scholarship that has scattered readers throughout the Atlantic world, it is impossible to miss the twin importance of uncertainty and contingency in early Virginia. That this English colony was not simply a product of the Atlantic world, but a distinctly Iberian one at that, is a point well made by J. H. Elliott. As he makes clear, Virginia existed because the way had been prepared by the Spanish and the Portuguese. It continued to exist, against all probability, because the Spanish assumed incorrectly (like many indigenous peoples themselves) that the colony would inevitably die of natural causes. That it did not do so, as Stuart B. Schwartz suggests in his summation, is less a testament to the ingenuity of Anglo-American colonialism, or even to the fortitude of English colonists, than a fitting example of the fluidity, vitality, and often unpredictable nature of the Atlantic world itself. The Atlantic World and Virginia is a rewarding read and an important reminder that the first permanent English settlement in North America survived and eventually prospered not because of the vision of colonial promoters or the heroic leadership of John Smith. Virginia, it seems, survived in spite of itself.