Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
Series Editor:
Peter C. Mancall
Professor of History and Anthropology, University of Southern California, and Director, USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute
Staff Editorial Contact:
Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor rlockhar@upenn.edu
Captives of Conquest is one of the first books to examine the earliest indigenous slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean. Erin Woodruff Stone shows how upwards of 250,000 people were removed through slavery, a lucrative business that formed the foundation of economic, legal, and religious policies in the Spanish colonies.
An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery
Lindsay O'Neill
Price: $39.95
ISBN: 9781512827200
Pub Date: February 2025
Format: Hardcover
200 Pages
The Two Princes of Mpfumo brings to life East African individuals caught up in the eighteenth-century slave trade—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—and shows how their stories reveal an emerging global British empire, one in which competing organizations and interests created a chaotic situation on the ground.
Language, Body, and Conversion in Colonial Latin America
Caroline Egan
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9781512828467
Pub Date: November 2025
Format: Hardcover
272 Pages
Words Made Flesh is a comparative study of grammars, dictionaries, translations, and hymns produced in Indigenous languages in colonial Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. Examining keywords related to the body, the book demonstrates the significant role corporeality played in evangelization campaigns and the development of Indigenous Christianity.
Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World
Chelsea Berry
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9781512826494
Pub Date: September 2024
Format: Hardcover
272 Pages
Poisoned Relations illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic world. Examining more than five hundred investigations and trials in British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas, she brings historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas.
Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World reveals that Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers allied behind Spain’s colonial officials and missionaries to wage wars against pirates and argues that anti-piracy politics held Spain’s Asian empire together and ensured its surprising resilience and longevity.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and the Invention of New World Nature
Elizabeth Gansen
Price: $55.00
ISBN: 9781512824568
Pub Date: November 2023
Format: Hardcover
248 Pages
Natural Designs chronicles the life and work of the earliest and most influential Spanish historian of the New World, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557). Through a combination of biography and visual and textual analysis, Elizabeth Gansen explores how Oviedo, in his writings, brought the European Renaissance to bear on his understanding of New World nature.
Edited by Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner and Jesse Cromwell
Price: $55.00
ISBN: 9781512825015
Pub Date: October 2023
Format: Hardcover
248 Pages
Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery’s origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context.
American Colonization and English Society, 1580-1660
Misha Ewen
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9781512822991
Pub Date: August 2022
Format: Hardcover
224 Pages
The Virginia Venture is an innovative exploration of how a wider public of women, children, and men across English society contributed to the foundation of the first permanent English colony in America: Jamestown, Virginia. The book demonstrates how English archives can be used to illuminate this crucial period of American history.
Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds shows how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period.
From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the inebriating cannabis that East Indies merchants sold in coffeehouses, drugs have been entangled with science and commodification for five centuries. The Age of Intoxication explores the origins, and continuing impact, of the first global era of drugs.
