Geoffrey Plank, "Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2020)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Sep 29, 2020 · 29m

For the people of the Dawnland, they were floating islands. The sails resembled clouds, and the men gathered on deck looked like bears. When Europeans came ashore, whether Danes in what would become Newfoundland, English settlers in the land they named ‘Virginia’, their mastery of the oceans did not translate into supremacy on land. Small conflicts in colonial enslaves evolved into trans-Atlantic wars that transformed the political and social worlds of millions. Europeans were people of the oceans, fanning out across the globe in vessels that pursued and extracted natural resources while…