Atlantic Exchanges is a scholarly workshop series designed to foster sustained dialogue among historians working on the Atlantic World, with a particular emphasis on interregional connections linking the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The central aim of the workshop is to bring together scholars whose research spans different regions, empires, and historiographical traditions in order to highlight interconnections, similarities, and contrasts across the Atlantic space, and to examine how historical processes unfolding in one region shaped developments elsewhere—both across the ocean and within continental interiors.

The workshop is grounded in an understanding of the Atlantic not as a collection of isolated imperial or national histories, but as a dynamic, interconnected arena shaped by circulation, mobility, negotiation, and conflict. It seeks to advance historical knowledge through dialogue among scholars working on trans-imperial, trans-cultural, trans-local, inter-ethnic, and borderland dynamics, encouraging comparative perspectives and methodological exchange. By placing different case studies and regional experiences in conversation, Atlantic Exchanges emphasizes processes such as commercial integration, non-state-sanctioned practices, cultural brokerage, and the social worlds that emerged from sustained contact across imperial boundaries.

Special importance is placed on three major zones of transimperial and cross-cultural interaction within the Atlantic World: the Greater Caribbean, West Africa, and the broader Río de la Plata region in the South Atlantic, as well as their respective hinterlands. These regions serve as key laboratories for examining how commerce, migration, political change, and imperial reform intersected over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, producing distinctive yet interconnected historical trajectories.

The workshop brings together scholars from different institutions and countries, and at different stages of their academic careers. A defining feature of Atlantic Exchanges is its commitment to incorporating the work of graduate students alongside that of established scholars, fostering mentorship, intellectual exchange, and the development of new research agendas within an international scholarly community.

The first edition of Atlantic Exchanges focuses on Commerce and Merchants in the Iberian Atlantic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thematic emphasis highlights the central role of merchants, commercial agents, and trading networks in shaping imperial economies, political transformations, and cross-cultural encounters during a period marked by reform, revolution, and the reconfiguration of Atlantic empires. The papers presented in this inaugural workshop will be published as a collective volume in Brazil by Editora HUCITEC, ensuring that the conversations initiated in the workshop reach a broader international audience and contribute to ongoing debates in Atlantic and global history.

For more information about the workshop, please contact Professor Fabrício Prado, Associate Professor of History, William & Mary. You can contact him at fpprado [at] wm.edu.