Carla Gardina Pestana's book is an exemplary study in Atlantic history. It illustrates the advantages to historians of early America and early modern Britain of reaching out into the Atlantic to understand and explain events and transformations both in any single place and in the region as a whole. Pestana provides an innovative recasting of English colonial history, framing new questions for subsequent study and reshaping our understanding of the English Atlantic in its earliest and formative decades. Pestana argues that the English colonies were transformed between 1640 and 1660 and that the transformations can be explained by the events of the civil war and revolution. Indeed, she posits that “the English Atlantic world was, in a number of crucial senses, born in these decades” (3).

Pestana illustrates these changes in three crucial aspects of colonial development. Pestana is at her strongest in her discussion of religion. By 1660, she argues, the English colonies became both more and less like the English religious establishment. In 1640, the colonies were characterized by religious diversity, with little polarization within individual colonies but considerable differences in religious settlement from one colony to another. By 1660, English religious disputes had spread into almost every colony, with resulting internal polarization, at the same time that the colonies faced intense pressure to accept toleration. Pestana points to the ways in which religious trends in England achieved full and often unanticipated expression in the colonies. The English Atlantic, for example, exposed some of the contradictions within the Puritan revolution, which demanded the suppression of the church of England, the promotion of godly behavior, and toleration for most Protestants. Some colonies embraced toleration, while three supported liberty of conscience. Quakers and witches proved litmus tests of colonial settlements. Those colonies most committed to godly reform (such as Connecticut, Bermuda, or Massachusetts) and most averse to toleration were places that endured witch outbreaks and oppressed Quakers.

A second major change was the tightened relationship between England and the colonies. The Commonwealth government pursued more intrusive imperial policies than had the crown. Circumstances partially dictated this trend, as the government needed to move aggressively to secure the loyalty of all colonies after 1649. But the government also sought to regulate trade (through the 1651 Navigation Act). Cromwell's Western Design similarly placed demands on colonies and colonists to support his efforts with personnel and financial assistance. Colonists resisted encroachments on their previously unregulated trade by asserting their rights as freeborn English men, and Pestana argues that a sense of shared English identity emerged in this period as one of the new ties that knit the English Atlantic together.

The third major shift Pestana charts in the English colonies was a growth in the unfree population. The colonial population rose from fifty thousand in 1640 to two hundred thousand in 1660, and this population was less free and less ethnically English than had been true twenty years earlier. Free migration slowed during the war years, while the number of unfree migrants continued and increased. The government engaged in the forcible transportation of a wide range of people, including prisoners of war, dissidents, and Catholics. English participation in the slave trade similarly expanded. Pestana links the growth in government-sponsored forced migration with the ultimate downfall of the Protectorate. When Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle made it back to England from their exile in Barbados and petitioned Parliament for relief for all men transported in the wake of war, they made the English public (who could read their account) more aware of the brutal treatment of English men. They thereby encouraged the connection between the government and tyranny and contributed to the public's rejection of the Protectorate and support for the Restoration. The colonies shaped English developments as fully as English war and upheaval redefined the colonies.

It is impossible to overstate Pestana's accomplishment. Her book is based on prodigious research with difficult sources. Pestana has examined colonial records for all of the colonies of the 1640s and 1650s, in and of itself a remarkable achievement in a field in which historians tend to specialize on one colony or another. Each colony has its own separate historiography, and each has its own idiosyncratic records located in different repositories. For many colonies, records are nonexistent, but Pestana works well with the dearth of material. She reads back from the breakdown of religious toleration in the 1650s, for example, to suggest its practice in the 1640s. Pestana is similarly adept at the histories of each of the three kingdoms. As if all of this work were not sufficient, Pestana then deploys this mass of evidence to recast the period, making the most original and vigorous argument about changes in the English colonies in recent years.

Pestana rests a lot of interpretive weight on the events of the revolution, and she offers much persuasive evidence. It is, of course, impossible to determine what the colonies might have been like in 1660 without a civil war and revolution in England, Scotland, and Wales, yet it is also possible to appreciate other trends that might have shaped the colonies. Evidence of colonial developments in the 1630s, for example, suggests that the settlement and exploitation of colonial regions was in a stage of dynamic, unprecedented growth. The decade witnessed the establishment of several new ventures, while older colonies such as Virginia were the target of high numbers of new migrants. Without a war, would this trend have continued? Pestana argues that an important component in the creation of an English Atlantic was the detachment of colonial residents from their place of birth in England and their growing connection to other parts of the Atlantic. This shift, she argues, transpired in the 1640s and was a consequence of war—yet demographic trends, trade, family networks, and economic opportunities also help to explain these more tightly linked colonies in this period. Moreover, in what ways were the English colonies shaped by their presence in a competitive and multi-imperial Atlantic, by events in other colonies, and by regional challenges and rivalries? One final lament: it is a shame that “Atlantic” in this book is synonymous with colonial (e.g., “Atlantic elites” describes colonial elites). This strikes me as a missed opportunity to reject the association of “Atlantic” with “America” and to conceptualize the English Atlantic with the three kingdoms fully within it. But these issues in no way detract from Pestana's magnificent accomplishment. Her book should receive a lot of attention, and it would work well in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses.