In her introduction to this volume, Carole Shammas declares that “Atlantic history is flourishing as never before” (1). The essays that follow her statement prove her case. A comparison to the similarly titled volume edited by David Armitage and Michael Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2002), is hard to avoid, and in many ways this might be seen as Johns Hopkins's response to Harvard's Atlantic World Seminar, which was largely responsible for the creation of the older volume. All but a couple of the impressive cast of contributors of The Creation of the British Atlantic World either attended The Johns Hopkins University as graduate students or have been on faculty there, and the editor of the series, Jack Greene, is the individual who served as advisor and mentor to many of them. But focusing on such comparisons would grossly underestimate the uniqueness and substance of this exciting work. Unlike the volume assembled by Armitage and Braddick, which offers a series of generally themed essays (“economy,” “gender,” etc.) that work in harmony to create a portrait of the British Atlantic world, The Creation of the British Atlantic World offers a collection of more independent micro studies of the cultures, peoples, and systems that created and connected the British Atlantic before 1800.

Following Shammas's introduction are thirteen essays divided into three formal parts—“Transatlantic Subjects,” “Transatlantic Connections,” and “Imperial Visions and Transatlantic Revisions.” “Transatlantic Subjects” opens with a particularly compelling essay from James Horn and Philip Morgan, who explore patterns of European and African Atlantic migration. Their work emphasizes the extent to which the migration was largely an African phenomenon in that Africans accounted for roughly 77 percent of the people who crossed the Atlantic before 1820 and in that African immigrants were much more attached to the Atlantic than were their counterparts in Europe—the vast majority of whose immigrants in this period went east rather than west. Their emphasis on enormous regional fluctuations in the patterns of immigration underlines the need for further examination of the roles of local factors. The subsequent four essays in this section offer more detailed studies of the experiences of specific groups and individuals. Joyce Chaplin offers a fascinating look at the historically neglected experiences of American Indian slaves. Mark Thompson explores the issues of authority and national identity through a microhistory of the feats of Captain James Yong, who in the 1630s took the Delaware River region away from the local Native Americans and the Dutch claimants. David Barry Gaspar investigates similar issues in the plight of a group of black Cape Verdeans in British Antigua during the 1720s, who successfully petitioned the colonial government to return them to their homeland on the grounds that they were Portuguese subjects. Ray Kea finishes the section with the fascinating account of Marotta, a Catholic woman from the Bight of Benin, who, after being enslaved and transported to Saint Thomas, ultimately gained her freedom and became part of the Moravian mission there.

Part 2 offers four essays that explore “the processes involved in linking both sides of the Atlantic” (10). A more disparate group of essays than in the other two parts of the book, they generally consider how people across the Atlantic conversed and shared news. The first is April Lee Hatfield's insightful study of the role that mariners played in disseminating information in the Atlantic world before the eighteenth-century explosion of printed news. She reveals how sailors facilitated communication throughout the Atlantic world not only as physical letter bearers but also as oral raconteurs during their lengthy port stays. William Offutt examines the process by which the diverse legal systems in seventeenth-century English America were increasingly harmonized with Common Law during the era of the Glorious Revolution, arguing that this was not so much the result of increased colonial commerce as it was a consequence of politics in England. Avihu Zakai and Wolfgang Splitter each consider transatlantic religious connections, with Zakai exploring the links between Jonathan Edwards and those fellow European clergy who also found the secular impulses of the Enlightenment disturbing and Splitter examining the shared experiences and cooperation of the Lutheran Church and the Church of England in America.

The third and final part shifts the focus more to eighteenth-century Britain and its strengthening imperial system. Through a scrutiny of the legal relationships between the British sovereign and colonies throughout the Atlantic world, Elizabeth Mancke problematizes historians’ tendency to accept the view of the disgruntled North American mainland colonists, who complained in the 1760s that Britain was suddenly increasing its central imperial authority. Robert Olwell investigates how imperial relationships facilitated science through a retelling of the journey of Floridian fauna to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. In an essay that places the Atlantic in the wider British imperial context, John Crowley examines eighteenth-century Britons’ visualization of the empire as depicted in imperial landscape paintings. Karin Wulf finishes the section and book with an excellent essay that studies the transatlantic connections of trade and family among the British Quakers.

As with all collections of essays, there are some problems of fit and continuity. For example, whereas almost all of the essays in the first two parts, which focus largely on the American side of the Atlantic, consider a wide variety of social classes and ethnic and racial groups, the essays that consider Britain itself are mostly confined to the white upper-middling and elite ranks. Such imbalance falsely, albeit inadvertently, portrays the Britain Isles’ engagement with the Atlantic as substantially less dynamic. The book also lacks a useful leading essay that makes the broader case for scooping out the Atlantic portion of the British world for special scrutiny. After all, hardly any contemporaries recognized its distinction but instead mingled and operated smoothly between the Atlantic, Asiatic, and Pacific portions of the empire. Shammas briefly addresses the importance of the Atlantic world as a unit of study in her introduction, but her remarks, which are confined to just a few pages, might seem too cursory a justification for linking such a disparate group of essays in the eyes of those not already persuaded of the value of the Atlantic approach. But these are minor quibbles about an outstanding volume that is sure to grace the shelves of scholars and students alike who are interested in not only the Atlantic world but also the wider historical contexts of Britain and its Atlantic colonies.