Atlantic world history took off in the 1970s with Jack Greene’s program at Johns Hopkins, as scholars and students increasingly found that telling the story of the lands that bordered the Atlantic and the islands that were situated in it separately was not as interesting as telling a story that tied them together. Initially the primary actors were Europeans, and mostly men: explorers, ship captains, conquistadors, missionaries, colonial officials. But historians have increasingly emphasized the role of Africans and peoples indigenous to the Americas in creating an Atlantic world. The Afro-British cultural historian Paul Gilroy, for example, proposed the concept of a “Black Atlantic” in 1993 to describe a space that transcended nationality and ethnicity and was essential in the creation of the modern world, a space explored since by John Thornton and many others. Building on decades of scholarship on the significance of Native Americans in the Atlantic world, Jace Weaver adapted Gilroy’s idea to posit a “Red Atlantic” in 2014, and in 2023 Caroline Dodds Pennock examined “How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe.” The most recent issue (2025) of the Colonial Latin American Review, titled “Female Lives in Motion” focuses on transatlantic migrations and mobilities of women of color and Spanish women. Some historians, such as John McNeill and Molly Warsh, include non-human actors in their purview, extending agency beyond the human to insects and objects.

Such scholarship has led to the reconceptualization of several venerable fields. In what Matthew Restall has termed “The New Conquest History,” scholars highlight the role of African, Indigenous, and mixed-race people, including the women among them, as important agents. They stress connections, entanglements, accommodation, and blending rather than simply conquest or resistance. A similar “New Mission History” has moved away from viewing Indigenous people’s acceptance of Christianity as a “spiritual conquest” resulting primarily from missionaries’ actions to examining the ways people blended Christian ideas and practices with their existing notions of religion and spirituality, transforming Christianity in the process. Atlantic world history has also paid particular attention to certain topics, which are now approached very differently than they were several decades ago: voluntary and forced migrations (especially the slave trade), the movement of commodities, the spread and hybridization of ideas, and racial and ethnic hierarchies and relations. Topics such as the history of land use changes, military engagements, and cultural hybridization may include non-human agents, including animals, pathogens, and objects.

This roundtable builds on these developments to reflect on where we are now in terms of actors in a broader Atlantic world history, and where we might go. The participants are all active in world/global history, but have different geographic vantage points and home fields: Africa, Europe, North America, South America. In their remarks, they will use specific examples from their own research to discuss methodology, sources, conceptualizations, collaborations, and other issues.