Suggested Reading and Media Resources

• Allen, Robert, et al., eds. Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe. 2004. Offers rich comparative perspectives on population growth and living standards among common people.

• Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. 2004. Explores the importance of domestic animals in the colonization of North America and the conflicting attitudes of English settlers and Native Americans toward animals.

• Bell, Dean Phillip. Jews in the Early Modern World. 2008. A broad examination of Jewish life and relations with non-Jews in the early modern period.

• Carpenter, Roger M. The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609–1650. 2004. Explores the culture and beliefs of two Native American peoples in the period of European colonization.

• Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. 2000. An overview of guilds and artisanal labor in early modern Europe.

• Gullickson, Gary L. Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750–1850. 1986. Examines women’s labor in cottage industry in northern France.

• Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. 1999. An excellent short synthesis on slavery in the Atlantic world.

• Morgan, Jennifer Lyle. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. 2004. Focuses on the role of women’s labor in the evolution of slavery in Britain’s North American colonies.

• Ormrod, David. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770. 2003. Examines the battle for commercial and maritime supremacy in the North Sea.

• Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. 2007. The horrors of the transatlantic slave trade from the perspective of the captains, sailors, and captives of the ships that crossed the ocean.

• Walsh, Lorena S. Motives of Honor, Pleasure and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763. 2010. A study of the economic and social rationales at work in the management of tobacco plantations and their enslaved labor force.

• Blackbeard: Terror at Sea (National Geographic, 2006). A documentary recounting the exploits of the most famous eighteenth-century pirate.

• Tales from the Green Valley (BBC, 2005). A television series exploring life on a British farm in the seventeenth century.

• Amazing Grace (Michael Apted, 2006). An idealistic Briton’s struggle to end his country’s involvement in the slave trade alongside allies Olaudah Equiano and a repentant former slave-ship captain.

• The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992). Set among the battles of the Seven Years’ War (known as the French and Indian War in the colonies), a man raised as a Mohican saves the daughter of an English officer.

• Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones, 1995). A Scottish Highlander’s effort to better his village by borrowing money to raise and sell cattle is challenged by the treachery of a noble lord and greedy bankers.

• Word and Utopia (Manoel de Oliveira, 2000). A Portuguese missionary struggles to improve the treatment of indigenous people in seventeenth-century Brazil.

• The Bubble Project. A Web site presenting historical and modern resources on the South Sea Bubble of 1720, one of the first major international financial crises. myweb.dal.ca/dmcneil/bubble/bubble.html

• Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life. Aimed at a diverse audience of scholars, teachers, students, and history buffs, with articles, blogs, and other resources on early America. www.common-place.org

• Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African. A Web site featuring material on the movement to abolish slavery and the career of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who published an autobiography in which he discussed his experience in bondage. www.brycchancarey.com/equiano

• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Presents the results of decades of research into the voyages of the transatlantic slave trade, interpretive articles, and an interactive database including ships, ports of arrival and departure, captains, and information on individuals taken in slavery. www.slavevoyages.org