The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640 1661

Carla Gardina Pestana's book is an exemplary study in Atlantic history...Pestana provides an innovative recasting of English colonial history, framing new questions for subsequent study and reshaping our understanding of the English Atlantic in its earliest and formative decades. [She] argues that the English colonies were transformed between 1640 and 1660 and that the transformations can be explained by the events of the civil war and revolution...It is impossible to overstate Pestana's accomplishment. -- Alison Games Journal of British Studies Throughout this original contribution, Pestana demonstrates both the vitality and the potential of Atlantic World scholarship for better understanding the total history of England's colonial empire. -- J. Mercantini Choice 20050925 Carla Gardina Pestana's The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 fills a surprising gap in the scholarly literature...For its scope and complexity, Pestana's argument is brief, lucid, and persuasive...This nuanced vision of Atlantic history places imperial and metropolitan actors at the center of the narrative (and rightly so) while stressing the diversity of the English Atlantic and the importance of local circumstances to the history of empire. -- Michael LaCombe Common-Place 20050401 Carla Gardina Pestana is the first scholar to attempt to integrate the story of the entire English Atlantic with that of the three kingdoms of the British Isles. To achieve this goal she has mastered an impressive amount of secondary literature, printed documents, and manuscript materials...This is a book that demands the attention of anyone who is interested in the history of seventeenth-century England or the colonies that made up the first British empire. It should provoke new interest in the stories of hitherto neglected colonies and suggest new ways of understanding the relationships among the colonies themselves and the between colonies and the mother country. -- Francis J. Bremer Journal of American History 20051201 This book will remain for a long time on the historian's shelf by virtue of its own strength. -- Luca Codignola International History Review 20060301 [An] ambitious analysis of transatlantic politics...The provocative analysis in The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution challenges scholars to develop a more expansive and inclusive view of the colonial Atlantic world: a view that accounts for the international and global trends that influenced Anglo-American relations and a view open to the possibility that poor, unfree, or female colonists may not have been limited to the outlooks, experiences, or ideas articulated by politically active men. -- John Wood Sweet William and Mary Quarterly 20051001 Carla Pestana's new book marks a significant step in the re-imagining of colonial America. Instead of focusing on a particular colony, her work spans the English Atlantic--the series of colonies, some rather small and soon forgotten, that ranged from Newfoundland to the Caribbean. Her theme is an important one that has lain dormant for too long: the transformation of England's Atlantic colonies by the revolutionary events of the 1640s and 1650s. The result is a powerful account of how an event generally overlooked in American histories played a crucial role in the development of colonial American society. -- Evan Haefeli Business History Review 20050701 Pestana is the first to attempt to integrate the story of the English Atlantic with that of the British Isles. -- Francis J. Bremer Journal of American History 20051201 [A] meticulous and highly detailed book...Novel and clarifying. -- Linda Colley New York Review of Books 20060622 This book will be welcomed by research specialists and students alike. It contains an appendix discussing population estimates for colonies in 1640 and another listing pamphlets about New England published in England during the 1640s. The endnotes fill eighty-nine pages of close type...There is a detailed map of the English Atlantic World at the outset, and throughout the book Pestana does not assume that her reader has a command of the narrative details of either the English Revolution or the early phases of English colonialism. The book would therefore lend itself to courses dealing with early modern England, colonial America, or the Atlantic world...Pestana's book is therefore a most welcome addition to the field. -- Joseph P. Ward Seventeenth-Century News