Mapping the 17th-Century Atlantic

“Mapping the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World” is a component of my dissertation, Cultivating Colonies: Tobacco and the Upstart Empires, 1580-1660. The larger project addresses a fundamental question: how did the English, French, and Dutch establish successful colonies and trade routes in the Iberian-dominated Americas? A typical explanation has relied upon a narrative of Spanish decline that assumes the inevitability of northern European ascendance. My project, however, shows that the English, French, and Dutch relied upon Iberian and indigenous knowledge and trade networks in a series of illicit commercial operations and failed colonies in South America and the Caribbean before they were able to establish themselves permanently in the Americas.

Maps of empire are often read backward into time, so that places that became part of the Spanish empire, like Venezuela, are seen to be so even in periods when it was in fact sparsely colonized and highly contested. Similarly, because Virginia was the first successful colony of the English, their efforts to colonize South America have been mostly forgotten. 

The Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World was a place of contingency and this project uses digital maps to demonstrate that. The presentation will offer a set of maps of the Americas that show European settlements, indigenous settlement and migration, and travel networks. Each map will rely upon a different set of data (culled from disparate colonial archives) and will thus offer viewers competing visions of the colonial Americas. The end result is not to advocate for one way of mapping the Atlantic over another, but rather to show how a change in perspective or in sources can tell a different visual history.