Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire; Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire; and An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia.
Geoffrey Plank's Atlantic Wars offers an impressively wide-ranging synthesis and comparison of European, African, and indigenous American experiences of warfare, violence, and military culture over a period of four centuries. Perceptively highlighting patterns in the ways that communities all around the Atlantic basin experienced and responded to episodes of raiding, slaving, colonialism, or trans-imperial conflict, Plank carefully reminds us of the limits of European imperial power-and of early modern European military and naval technologies-as they evolved in broader Atlantic contexts. * David Wheat, author of Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 * A fascinating, innovative, and wide-ranging overview of how war and warfare shaped the Atlantic world. Plank folds in all the players-Indians, Africans, and Europeans-and puts them in lively interaction with the geography and changing technologies of their worlds. He rightly reminds us that much of this history was driven by violence, violence that sought to control people, places, products, and more. Highly recommended. * Wayne E. Lee, author of Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865 * At once comprehensive and nuanced, Atlantic Wars demonstrates how pervasive violence was in the Atlantic world. Warfare afloat and ashore was so important for its construction, its functioning, and its transformation in the age of revolutions that this book reads like a full-scale Atlantic history. * Wim Klooster, author ofThe Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World * This is not your grandfather's military history. Geoffrey Plank captures the cacophony of unplanned sea raiding, opportunistic violence, and indigenous military maneuvers that make Atlantic warfare so deeply fascinating. * Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University *