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Acknowledgments This book has taken the best part of a decade to research and write, and I am glad to be able to acknowledge the help and encouragement of family, friends, and colleagues. I began this work after receiving a Research Readership from the British Academy, and I set out to explore how participation in an Atlantic World exchange of goods and people changed labor around the British Atlantic. It was a wonderful opportunity, and in the National Archives and the British Library I became a student again, diving into primary and secondary sources to learn as much as I could about Caribbean and West African history. At times, however, it did feel like a somewhat illfated fellowship. During these two years both my wife and I were unwell, and first my father and then my mother fell ill and died. I am extremely grateful to Ken Emond and his colleagues at the British Academy for allowing me the time and the space to cope with life’s challenges. Thanks to research grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the Carnegie Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Eccles Centre at the British Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, I was able to pursue further research in Barbados, Ghana, London, and the United States, and slowly the largest and most challenging research project of my career began to take shape. A Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship has afforded me the time to complete this project, and I drafted the manuscript while in residence at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library, two particularly congenial research institutions. I am grateful for the expert support, assistance, and advice of numerous librarians and archivists, including those at the Balme Library of the University of Ghana in Legon; the Barbados Department of Archives; the Barbados Museum and Historical Society; the British Library; the Department of Public Records and Archives, Accra, Ghana; the Department of Special Collections of the University of London Library; the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library; the Folger Shakespeare Library; Lambeth Palace Library; the Library Company of Philadelphia; the National 326 Acknowledgments Archives in Kew; and the Rhodes House Library, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Thanks to the support of the History Department at the University of Glasgow , and of the University of Pennsylvania Press, I was able to secure the illustrations that appear in this book. I have presented earlier versions of this project in a variety of locations, and I appreciate the criticisms and the suggestions that I received from colleagues at two of the annual conferences of the British Group of Early American Historians; two of the Biennial Conferences of the European Association of Early American Historians; the Georgetown seminar in Atlantic World History; Mike Zuckerman’s wonderful ‘‘salon’’ in Philadelphia ; the community of early Americanists in Paris and their Réseau pour le développement européen de l’histoire de la jeune Amérique; the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; and the Early Modern History group at the University of Glasgow. Friends and colleagues have provided vital support and encouragement, by discussing, reading, criticizing, and supporting my research, and by writing letters of recommendation to support numerous grant applications. I am particularly grateful to Tony Badger, Hilary Beckles, Holly Brewer, Trevor Burnard, Richard Carwardine, Frank Cogliano, Max Edelson, Alison Games, Paul Halliday, Brendan McConville, Simon Middleton, Joe Miller, Kenneth Morgan, Phil Morgan, Marina Moskowitz, Peter Onuf, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Ty Reese, Liam Riordan, Justin Roberts, Alex Shepard, Don Spaeth, Peter Thompson, and Betty Wood. Frank Cogliano is one of my closest friends in this profession, and our joint graduate reading group and video seminar has invigorated my thinking about early America and the Atlantic World over far too many cakes, cookies, and scones. While walking on the hills at the southern tip of the Isle of Bute, Peter Onuf ‘‘conceptualized ’’ this project, and reinvigorated me, as only he can. Peter Thompson has always believed in this book, and it has been strengthened by his remarkable work on Henry Drax’s plantation instructions and by enthusiastic discussions over the occasional pint of bitter. Trevor Burnard and Roderick MacDonald, old and true friends, have finally won me over to Caribbean history, and Joe Miller provided timely advice and suggestions about African history over messy but delicious barbecue beef sandwiches. I have found the scholarship of Hilary Beckles invaluable, and we have presented our...

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