Plumes, Quadroons, and Company Men: Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the field of Atlantic studies has risen to prominence as an alternative to national histories. Universities now maintain endowed chairs and academic centers to investigate the commercial, political, and cultural links that spanned that ocean from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. Scholars’ efforts have transformed old perceptions of the Atlantic from that of a barrier between the Old World and the New into a thoroughfare that connected four continents. Yet at times Atlantic historians produce what resembles the old wine of the Age of Exploration poured into the new bottle of an Atlantic world. As Sylvia R. Frey, one of the contributors to Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, notes, the field “still tends to break along national fault lines” (185). Books and articles on British and Spanish iterations of that “world,” populated by