Introduction: Centering Families in Atlantic Histories

Abstract

This issue of the William and Mary Quarterly originated with papers delivered at a 2011 conference, “Centering Families in Atlantic Worlds, 1500–1800,” cosponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Although both histories of family and histories of the Atlantic world have provoked considerable scholarly debate about the analytical coherence and utility of these terms, putting them together offers an important and fresh view of each. Certainly families were affected by economic, political, or cultural structures of many kinds, but they made choices and pursued strategies that, in thousands or tens of thousands of repetitions, shaped those same patterns. That is, their decisions, described as familial or made in the context of family relations, constituted micropolitics and microeconomics that cumulatively comprised critical elements in configuring the Atlantic world. Looking to Atlantic contexts also heightens our appreciation of the internal dynamics of family, in which those same decisions could be made by individuals either with or against collective family interests. And it asks us to attend to the definitions of family employed by the most interested parties, the people themselves, but also by external authorities who found the exploitation and regulation of family a critical instrument of imperial and other Atlantic powers.