Reading Highlight

Seen through the lens of what today we call the “Black Atlantic,” the arrival of this tiny band of Africans at Jamestown in 1619 symbolizes a complex process that drew every major European power, scores of colonial settlements, and hundreds of ethnic groups on three continents into an economic vortex that enriched both Europeans and African monarchs and merchants, helped spread both Christianity to Africa and Islam to the Western Hemisphere, and made the success of the fragile New World settlements possible.