ABSTRACT
Given the last two decades of Atlantic Studies scholarship, the time is ripe for this volume’s question, ‘What does it now mean to revisit the cultural and ideological exchanges between Britain and New England since 1750?’ One answer is simply that we ask a wider circle of questions, including some that dislodge the centrality of the Britain/New England configuration. That is, in revisiting these exchanges, we would ask how the impact or presence of the British in what became New England, or of new Englanders in Britain, resulted from events elsewhere. We would follow the lead of recent historians to explore the ways that, for example, the failure of the Virginia Company partly enabled the successful colonization of New England. We would consider how the labours and rebellions of enslaved Africans and indentured workers throughout the Atlantic world affected trade, policy and diplomacy between Britain and New England. By the same token, we would give more attention to the ways that relations between Britain and New England shaped events elsewhere. We might, for instance, follow Gretchen Gerzina’s lead in her chapter here about the travels of African-Americans with their owners between England and New England to explore further how that involuntary travel ironically created an enabling conduit of information for African-Americans’ challenges to slave laws, including throughout the Atlantic world.
