While scholars of traditional imperial history see the formation of the larger British Atlantic world as a consequence of competing European powers' efforts at nation-building, Atlantic historians see the transatlantic empire shaped more by the motives of a wide variety of subnational groups. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas have compiled a volume that reflects these different viewpoints concerning the transatlantic experience during Britain's rise to world dominance between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the book's opening chapters, contributors consider the effect of transatlantic emigration, discussing European and African migration and slave trade; the enslavement of Native American peoples; and the ways individuals adapted their national and religious identities in a world of expanding cultural influences. The second section addresses the roles played by trade, religion, ethnicity, and class in linking the Atlantic borders.
The chapters in the final section address the increasingly complicated legal relationships between the British sovereign and colonial charterholders; the simultaneous establishment of a British colonial government in East Florida and the Royal Gardens of Kew; the popularity of imperial landscape art in eighteenth-century Britain; and the British roots of Pennsylvania Quakers.