I: Three worlds meet -- On the eve of conquest -- Many voices -- Creating a militant Atlantic world, 1500-1625 -- II: The contest for seventeenth-century settlement -- Smoke and greed on the tobacco coast, 1607-1660 -- Cities on a hill -- Sugar, slaves, and profits -- From commonwealth to restoration -- Toleration, commerce, and settlement -- Glorious revolution and international realignment -- III: Provinces in a contested empire: the eighteenth century -- Empire of guns and goods -- Shifting borderlands -- The anglicization of provincial America -- Slavery and African American cultures in the colonial British Atlantic -- Contesting rule in a commercial empire.
