Cristina Soriano, Villanova University, United States
Review
Oceans and seas have been pivotal for the Atlantic World historiography since the 1990’s. Up until recently, historians have engaged in thought-provoking debates about the contradictory visions of the sea as either a neutral space that served as a conduit of exchange or a place that required significant international regulation of the people and materials traversing it. One pioneering work that centered on the sea as a crucial unit of analysis was Julius Scott’s 1986’s PhD dissertation, recently published as The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (2018). Scott focused on the Caribbean Sea as a cultural space, a masterless one, that was simultaneously shaped and controlled by Spanish, British, French, Dutch, African, and Indigenous interventions.