Over the last 20 years, Atlantic historiography has come to dominate the study of slavery in the colonial Americas. The central goal of the Atlantic paradigm is to push against national and imperial boundaries to demonstrate that most histories of the African diaspora need to be situated in multiple historical sources and contexts. While most scholars tend to endorse the approach, most only pay lip service and remain restricted to the primary sources particular to national and imperial archives. Jane Landers’s Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions is a welcome exception and deserves to be read widely. Through diligent and skillful mining of national, regional, and local archives in the United States, Spain, and Cuba, Landers provides an engaging model of how to recover and insert individuals into the overlapping histories of the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions.
As the...
