Atlantic Virginia addresses the multiple roles played by colony residents living on the Eastern Shore, the Southside, and the Northern Neck during the seventeenth century. These colonists differed from their wealthier neighbors, the planters of the peninsulas between the James and the Rappahannock Rivers whose soils permitted them to specialize in raising sweet-scented tobacco for the luxury market in England. These men formed a separate and distinct interest group in Virginia's political economy, and their activities have dominated historians' visions of the colony. April Lee Hatfield seeks to call attention to the coastal and Caribbean trading activities and religious affiliations of those other Virginians.

The first and last chapters describe the boundaries and communication routes of various Indian tribal territories within and beyond Virginia, inter-Indian relations, and Indian-European relations at the beginning and end of the century. The contrast between the two time periods is striking, most importantly for the sharp decline in the power and numbers of the coastal Algonquians and the countervailing rise and expansion of the Iroquois Five Nations. The English empire in America followed a parallel track. Early in the century, the colonists were afraid of the Spanish; by the middle of the century, they were challenging the Dutch for mercantile dominance at sea; at the end of the century, they were fighting the French for half a continent.

Over the course of the same century, the ships and mariners of nonpeninsular Virginians did business with the Dutch of New Amsterdam, the Puritans of New England, and the merchants and planters of the sugar colonies. Missionaries of dissenting sects circulated through all the English colonies and found especially sympathetic audiences on the Chesapeake's Eastern Shore. The outlook of these Virginians was Atlantic-wide, not parochial, and their religious and economic interests focused less on England than on their trading partners in the other colonies, including those in Barbados and New England. Indeed, many of these maritime Virginians had immigrated from those places, especially Barbados, bringing dissenting values and the knowledge gained from their broader experiences to the insular world of tobacco plantations.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter of Atlantic Virginia concerns the rise of slavery in the English and Dutch colonies as an economic and political institution. Hatfield draws on the rich scholarship concerning the Atlantic slave trade that has appeared in the past few years to retell the story from Virginia's perspective. Insofar as published data permit, she attempts to track the geographical origins and regional distribution of the African population in Virginia over the course of the century. As has long been known, most were creoles who came in small lots from the Caribbean until the final two decades when the Royal African Company and its competitors began delivering entire shiploads from the coast of West Africa by way of Barbados. Although she offers no numbers to support her case, Hatfield argues that extensive contacts with Caribbean ports put nonpeninsular Virginians at an advantage for acquiring seasoned slaves when the supply of indentured servants began drying up in the last quarter of the century. The bottom was falling out of the market for low-quality tobacco at the same time that large cargos of Africans began arriving in the late 1680s, allowing growers of sweet-scented, for which demand remained high, to buy slaves directly off ship-board. Their wealth and influence expanded in the eighteenth century while Eastern shore residents found their proportion of intercolonial shipping falling as rival ports elsewhere on the continent expanded in number and capacity.

Although the overall outline of Virginia's rise as a slave society will not be changed by Hatfield's work, she has rightfully alerted historians to the importance of transatlantic and intercolonial bonds to that story. Without better data, however, readers will remain unpersuaded that external bonds superceded the internal forces described in Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975) or the area's persistent Englishness, as argued by James Horn in Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).