The combination of environmental history and Atlantic history seems like a natural one. After all, the process of forging the Atlantic World wrought vast ecological transformations on every continent bordering its oceanic basin, and environmental conditions helped shape the boundaries, success, and economies of post-Columbian Indigenous and European societies in the Americas. For many years, however, the scholarship of environmental history and Atlantic history developed largely in parallel rather than in conversation (with some notable exceptions).1 The question is not whether Atlantic history has environmental aspects that can be explored—it does, and scholars such as Alfred Crosby, J. R. McNeill, Keith Pluymers, Marcy Norton, Matthew Mulcahy, Judith Carney, and others have pointed these out—but whether an explicitly environmental perspective can shed light on the major questions that have traditionally driven Atlantic historians.2 Katherine Johnston shows that it can.
The Nature of Slavery uses a fine-grained analysis of...
