Geoffrey Plank, Professor of Early Modern History, University of East Anglia

Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire; Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire; and An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize

"This is an exceptional book in many ways. It is superbly researched and beautifully written, as well as movingly reflective of Geoffrey Plank's humane values. Its topic is extremely challenging: the relationships among Europeans and between them and the Indigenous peoples living along and near the shores of the Atlantic Ocean between about 1450 and 1820.... Despite its disturbing subject, this book is a pleasure to read. Plank is particularly good at using anecdotes and short sketches of common people to add human interest. Indigenous people are not simple, passive victims; they often offer surprisingly effective resistance to European intruders....[A] magnificent contribution to Atlantic history, which I enthusiastically recommend both to professional historians and to general readers." - Jonathan R. Dull, Journal of American History

"Focused on a multitude of actors, this wide-ranging analysis of warfare in the early modern Atlantic world skillfully weds the exploration of warfare with a broad, easy-to-read synthesis... With its broad approach, subject matter, interesting examples, and clear and precise language, Atlantic Wars would be useful for novice readers just being introduced to this conceptual space, and for experts who work on military history and/or the Atlantic world. Summing Up: Highly recommended" - CHOICE

"This is not your grandfather's military history. Geoffrey Plank captures the cacophony of unplanned sea raiding, opportunistic violence, and indigenous military maneuvers that make Atlantic warfare so deeply fascinating." - Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University

"At once comprehensive and nuanced, Atlantic Wars demonstrates how pervasive violence was in the Atlantic world. Warfare afloat and ashore was so important for its construction, its functioning, and its transformation in the age of revolutions that this book reads like a full-scale Atlantic history." - Wim Klooster, author ofThe Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World

"A fascinating, innovative, and wide-ranging overview of how war and warfare shaped the Atlantic world. Plank folds in all the players-Indians, Africans, and Europeans-and puts them in lively interaction with the geography and changing technologies of their worlds. He rightly reminds us that much of this history was driven by violence, violence that sought to control people, places, products, and more. Highly recommended." - Wayne E. Lee, author of Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865

"Geoffrey Plank's Atlantic Wars offers an impressively wide-ranging synthesis and comparison of European, African, and indigenous American experiences of warfare, violence, and military culture over a period of four centuries. Perceptively highlighting patterns in the ways that communities all around the Atlantic basin experienced and responded to episodes of raiding, slaving, colonialism, or trans-imperial conflict, Plank carefully reminds us of the limits of European imperial power-and of early modern European military and naval technologies-as they evolved in broader Atlantic contexts." - David Wheat, author of Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640