This roundtable explores the ways that sources produced by different archival and legal regimes operating in the Atlantic era have shaped the scholarship on enslaved and free Native American, African and African-descended people. Historians who work on the Iberian and French Atlantic draw on the riches of ecclesiastical and notarial archives and a legal regime that allowed the enslaved to give testimony at trial, in some cases against Europeans. Scholars who study the English/British Atlantic rely on a different body of evidence, much of it produced or influenced by a distinctive legal culture of litigation that offers different apertures onto the experience of enslaved and free Native American, African and African-descended people. This roundtable's participants have led the way in exploiting difficult, often obscure archival materials to render visible the enslaved and free Native American, African and African-descended people of the Atlantic age. The session will take the form of a public conversation about what these scholars' sources allow them to do and how it differs from what colleagues with a home base in a different imperial Atlantic formation can do. What are the scholarly ramifications of the differences, and how can we engage this question more explicitly as we advance the larger history of Atlantic slavery and freedom?