The Atlantic Ocean, transcending national boundaries as it does, has long been seen as a pivotal site for understanding the way in which local and regional economies and cultural frameworks gradually became integrated into a global system during the early modern era. A key concept that has brought new insight to the study of transnationalism is that of brokerage. Brokers are people who link up different worlds and are at ease in a variety of cultural settings; they have flexibility of outlook and cultural identification. Brokerage can explain and add nuance to the multiple cultural worlds and...

The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolization the formation of mixed cultural communities in the era of plantation societies to argue that preceding social patterns in both Africa and Europe...