Atlantic Wars

This is an exceptional book in many ways. It is superbly researched and beautifully written, as well as movingly reflective of Geoffrey Plank's humane values. Its topic is extremely challenging: the relationships among Europeans and between them and the Indigenous peoples living along and near the shores of the Atlantic Ocean between about 1450 and 1820. It discusses the people of western Europe, western Africa, eastern North and South America, and islands from Iceland to the Caribbean; the Baltic and the Mediterranean Seas are not included. It emphasizes the dark side of the European treatment of Native peoples, in particular highlighting war, slavery, racism, and injustice. (Although Plank does not discuss it, the Pacific Ocean was the scene of similar atrocities; for the treatment of the peoples of the Aleutian Islands and California by Russians and Spaniards, see Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 [2014].) Plank does mention the Quakers of Pennsylvania as an exception to this narrative of injustice. His earlier book An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia (2001) describes in detail another example, the doomed relationship of the Acadians and the Mi'kmaq, which even included intermarriage, unlike the Quakers and their Native American neighbors

Ancient history · Art · CONQUEST · Ethnology · Fifteenth · Geography · Indigenous · Injustice · Literature · Narrative · Plank · Political science · Racism · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law