This survey, magnificent in scope and magnanimous in detail, is a synthesis of recent work on Atlantic history and represents a herculean effort to rethink the narrative, ‘heritage’ histories that underpin the modern nations bordering on the Atlantic Ocean. If the origins of Atlantic history may be found in the scholarly effort to demonstrate that Europe and the Americas (especially North America) share a common history, John Thornton's grand synthesis urges a more capacious understanding, stressing the interpenetration of African, Amerindian and European history in the making of the Atlantic world. Given Thornton's linguistic dexterity (the copious footnotes refer to texts in several European languages) and pioneering work as an historian of Africa and Africa's Atlantic connections, the book's range and foci are unusually broad and original in perspective. Most Atlantic histories are either monolingual or else privilege either European or American sources and contexts.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with the formation of the Atlantic world between 1250 and 1650. It is the shortest and most conventional of the four parts. It stresses forerunners of European navigation as well as formation of long-distance connections in the Mediterranean, North Africa and Eastern Atlantic that would become important precedents for subsequent voyages and enterprises on a larger scale. Part II shifts to the three central geographical zones – Europe, Africa and the Americas – prior to the intensification of the interactions and connections among them, the focus of Atlantic history. Part III is a deft re-working, chiefly due to its formidable breadth and original perspective, of the impact of the ‘encounter’ of America, Africa and Europe in the crucible of the Atlantic, focusing on contact, conquest and colonisation. Part IV, perhaps the most stimulating of the book, deals with ‘Cultural Transition and Change’, focusing on changes (and the limits of change) to language, aesthetics and religion as a result of the interactions generated by colonisation, migration, trade and the entrenchment of the slave system. He demonstrates how such cultural change is ‘erratic’ (p. 313), uneven and non-linear and how the nature of specific Atlantic processes either facilitated change or else muted its effects. He thus unites the study of cultural transformation inextricable from coercion and violence (e.g. slavery) with those relatively benign shifts that were impelled by more pacific interactions (e.g. trade). The book concludes with a conventional round-up of the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world, notable perhaps for placing the long-privileged British North American story in the context of Haitian and Ibero-American history.

Thornton's book is a major feat of synthesis in which his broad erudition is brought together with a career's worth of archival research. It was born from his experience as a university lecturer and, indeed, the book emerged gradually from several iterations of lecture notes. As Thornton announced at the outset, he hoped to encourage ‘Americans, living on both continents, [to] develop a new understanding of their past and heritage, one that was multicentered, complex, and interactional’ (p. 1). He hopes to ‘change collective memory though Atlantic History’, adding that an Atlantic Basin focus can augment and extend, instead of replace, the traditional approach to Western civilisation by making it ‘inclusive, multicentric, and multiregional’ (p. 2).

Not all readers will be satisfied with the final result. Thornton purposely eschews narrative and the book sometimes gives the impression of a pell-mell series of encyclopedic parts lacking the threads to pull these dazzling pieces together. It might be argued that if Atlantic history is distinguished for its attention to connections, Thornton's book is replete with parallel if homologous histories, born of a common set of processes but which thereafter failed to converge. Furthermore, simply due to its scope, length and exquisite detail, the book certainly would be daunting for an undergraduate reader, notwithstanding Thornton's considerable talent for explanation.

However, the appearance of Thornton's book in print is a major boon for the university teacher and researcher. Simply by placing the disparate pieces side by side, juxtaposing Caribbean, South American, West African and North American processes, broader patterns of Atlantic history come into sharper focus. Thornton's book is thus very useful for comparative enquiry, enabling hypothesis testing and assisting the specialist researcher to determine the general applicability of claims made on the basis of specialised, local research. In short, Thornton recaptures Atlantic history's anti-parochial promise by sheer dint of its linguistic, chronological and geographic breadth while its grounding in empirical and archival research serves as a justification for further, locally grounded studies.