Atlantic Virginia places England's first permanent colony in the Western Hemisphere in a larger perspective. April Lee Hatfield focuses particularly on intercolonial connections, including Virginia's intercourse with neighboring colonies (especially New Netherland) and the impact of Barbados’ slave system on the development of labor institutions in the Chesapeake. Although the title claims an Atlantic framework, the book offers both more and less than an examination of maritime links. Her considerable and highly illuminating attention to overland trails adds another dimension, turning away from the sea; her focus on colonial connections almost to the exclusion of those to the metropole means that some Atlantic links are privileged over others. While Atlantic history enthusiasts might fault the failure to consider Old World precedents and ties (most obviously with regard to Ireland), placing the book in the context of early colonial histories helps us to appreciate its contribution. Despite the jacket claims to “extensive archival research,” Hatfield relies solidly on printed sources. These include seventeenth-century publications, later printed editions of surviving manuscript sources, and a sizable secondary literature.

Colonial American history was once exceedingly Anglocentric. It focused narrowly on one set of transatlantic connections—those between England and each particular colony. This approach posited that institutions, people, goods, and culture came from England to an American destination. If the United States differed from England it was because local American conditions altered this inheritance. The United States was understood as the child of England, a relationship captured in the common use of the term “Mother Country” to denote both the initially subordinate relationship and the eventual breaking away of a newly mature United States. This scholarship scarcely acknowledged other extracolonial influences, neither those emanating from Scotland and Ireland, nor from the rest of Europe, nor from other New World locations (much less from Africa). This Anglocentric orientation helped to account for the preponderance of attention to New England, which was seen as especially English in nature and therefore as contributing most to the evolution of American society and culture. The Anglocentrism of early American scholarship also explains the dominance of English history, seen as the necessary background to U. S. history, in the history departments and curricula of American colleges and university for most of the twentieth century.

Forty years ago, the transatlantic orientation began to diminished, as scholars embraced the social historians’ attention to local community and institutional development. At first the sense that English ties were primary was not so much rejected as set aside. The work of social and more recently of cultural history research has given us a new appreciation of the presence of non-English migrants and non-English cultural forms, of the significance of African influences, and of the centrality of interactions with Indians. A richer and more varied conceptualization of early American culture emerged as a result, but it was initially achieved through a series of narrow foci on specific localities. For years the first step to writing a dissertation in early American history involved choosing one's colony.

Atlantic history, which seeks to connect these isolated colonial stories into a larger framework, reacted to that narrow focus. Hatfield's book is very much in that emerging tradition, as it attends particularly to linkages. Many of the chapters typify the recently articulated central concerns of Atlantic history, examining trade networks and the movements of mariners, colonists, and slaves. Barbados, known to have contributed slaves, masters, and labor practices to the early Carolinas, influenced the growing reliance on slavery and the nature of the institution as it emerged in Virginia as well. Hatfield helps us to appreciate the multiethnic nature of the migrant population, even in the period prior to large-scale continental European migration of the early eighteenth century to the region north of the Chesapeake.

Hatfield is equally concerned to locate the colony on the continent itself. Her search for connections does not focus exclusively on the sea, and here some of the more interesting contributions of the book emerge. Depicting Virginia's hinterland as dominated by Native Americans and crisscrossed by their many well-established routes, Hatfield allows us to understand the early colonial reliance on waterborne travel and communication in a new light. While colonists used the sea and the rivers, Indians literally controlled the land, and the colonial struggle to capture those overland routes was drawn out and, for a long time, unsuccessful. Virginians were perched on the Atlantic rim but also on the edge of a vast continent, a continent that was firmly in the hands of (and readily traversed by) others. Hatfield further argues that access to overland versus sea routes embedded a colonist either in networks that were Anglican dominated and reliant on English indentured servants or in those that were “Dissenter” dominated and moving toward slavery. Looking inland challenges most prevailing definitions of Atlantic history, and it enriches our understanding of the colonial situation.

The book concludes by suggesting that Virginia would become less porous, less open to outside influences beyond the English-Virginia connection that imperial officials sought to emphasize, as it moved into the eighteenth century. Hatfield depicts this early period as unique in the extent of the intercolonial connections at work. This position is not so much proved as asserted, and further research will be needed to determine whether this was in fact the case. As colonists took more lands to the west, they had to become less reliant on water travel, a development that might point toward greater overland contact and less exclusive reliance on the link to England. Hatfield has given us much to think about by placing England's first successful colony in this context, as she helps to reintegrate early modern North America into the many worlds of which it was a part.