ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the experiences of Europeans, but among these we find French consumers of Newfoundland cod, English merchants forming families in Spanish Seville, Scots men and women establishing a close-knit community in Dutch Rotterdam and Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil making the English Caribbean island of Nevis their home. It also explains about most being travelers, traders, soldiers, sailors, and settlers, their activities in which they became involved, consider the adaptations which they made in new and unfamiliar environments and assess the extent to which they or the societies from which they originated, were changed by the encounter with the peoples, places, and/or resources of the Atlantic. The concept of Atlantic world of an interconnected Atlantic world formed by the kaleidoscopic movement across and around the Atlantic basin over a period of more than three centuries of peoples, products, practices, and ideas.
