The big picture painted by the numerous contributors to The Princeton Companion is that rivalries among European powers generated a powerful drive to exploit new opportunities in their Atlantic neighbourhood. After Columbus, precious metals from the New World bankrolled various experiments in colonisation, trade, and agriculture. The sparsely populated regions between the tropics in North and South America were ideally situated for production of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton. What was lacking was labour. It just so happened that Africa had people to sell, lots of them, partly because of long-established slave raiding and trading systems – partly because the desiccation of the Sahara reoriented slaving toward the Atlantic seaboard.

As Africans grasped the profits to be made from selling people to European traders barred by disease and military weakness from raiding on their own account, they built military systems that delivered slaves in ever increasing numbers. The expansion of colonies on the other side of the Atlantic posed a mortal threat to indigenous people, to which they responded by arming themselves and forging alliances with rival European powers, which is why the Seven Years War was known in America as the French and Indian War. As the eighteenth-century struggle for military supremacy approached its exhausting paroxysm of violence in the Napoleonic Wars, the thirteen colonies of North America grasped the opportunity to shape their own destiny through revolution, a process repeated south of their borders from Mexico to Argentina. That did not, however, fracture the Atlantic World's system of production and exchange. Not until the final suppression of the seaborne slave trade did a broader set of international forces reshape the region.

Toussaint Louverture and General Thomas Maitland, Saint-Domingue, 1790s. (New York Macmillan, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Atlantic historians writing for this volume take as much interest in little pictures as in this big one. Many are intensely engaged with cultural inter-actions, borrowings, and innovations overlooked in older books. The general editor, Joseph C. Miller, is particularly dedicated to rescuing small-scale and stateless societies from the neglect they suffered back in the 1960s, when attention focused on the emergent big states on all four continents of the Atlantic World.

The book opens with five overview chapters that constitute about ten per cent of the text. Following a discussion of the historical dynamics of change a chapter is devoted to each century from 1500 to 1900. Readers interested in getting a quick grasp of what Atlantic history is all about can stop there. The remainder of the book comprises a series of encyclopaedic entries on specific topics. These do not attempt to cover specific regions, states, or societies. Rather, they concentrate on concepts, themes, and theoretical approaches employed by contemporary Atlantic historians. Specialists will find these useful; other readers will not know where to start. For example, who would dive straight into entries on Mami Wata, Patron Client Networks, Cornucopias, Blended Communities, or Political Systems, Collective Consensual?

Scholars and students already engaged with Atlantic history are likely to find the volume most useful as a guide to shaping their research. Judging from the long list of contributors, most of those are likely to be found in the United States. Only a handful live elsewhere, including a few Canadians, Europeans, Latin Americans, and Australians. On my reading, this represents the actual epicentre of scholarly activity in the field, rather than any conscious bias toward American academics. Atlantic history has been a great way to get African, Native American, African-American, and Hispanic material into undergraduate courses, which for a long time was weighted toward US and European history.

Are there similar insights and rewards to be gained from a Pacific World approach to historical studies? We hear a lot of talk today about Pacific Rim societies and Trans-Pacific partnerships, but applying the Atlantic World template to the other side of the globe does not look to be a feasible project. Nothing like the three-way interactions that characterise the Atlantic World began until the late eighteenth century when the voyages of British, French, and Russian navigators imported European military rivalries to the Pacific region. Nor was there an equivalent to the plantation agriculture that drew labour from distant lands. Schemes for importation of Chinese and Japanese workers foundered on the rocks of racial exclusion laws in British Columbia, California, Australia, and New Zealand. The blackbirding era ended in Oceania almost as soon as it began.

"Am I not a Man and a Brother?” (1787)

The great problem for Europeans in the Western Pacific was finding ways into the Chinese and Japanese markets. Trade in opium and fur seals produced nothing like the rewards reaped in the Atlantic triangular trade in manufactures, slaves, and plantation produce. Only the threat of force in Britain's Opium Wars and US Commodore Perry's black ships in Yokohama Harbour prised open the door to increased commerce. By the time of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, international relations were already being conducted on a global rather than a regional scale.

A more likely equivalent to Atlantic history would be Indian Ocean history, a still underdeveloped field. An Indian Ocean trading system extending from south-east Africa to Japan predated the advent of European naval/commercial intruders. The end of the slave trade brought on an Indian diaspora based on indentured labour that generated cultural political interactions whose reverberations are still being worked out in Malaysia, South Africa, and Fiji. People interested in pursuing the idea of Indian Ocean history may find inspiration in the ideas and concepts employed in Atlantic history.