Constructing Early Modern Empires ─ Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750

Historians from England, France, the Netherlands, and the US explore how the colonialization around the Atlantic was meted out to commercial enterprises. One of their goals is to help illuminate to what degree and why the emergence of a commercial, individualistic society occurred in Europe during the period, and was then exported to new lands. Their topics include financiers, factors, and French proprietary companies in West Africa 1673-1713; the proprietorship of Lord Willoughby of Parham in the English Caribbean; and the long lived proprietary in New Jersey. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

L.H. Roper, Ph.D. (1992) in History, University of Rochester, is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York–New Paltz. He is the author of Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Ph.D. (1995) in American Civilization, Universite de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle is professor at the Universite de Paris 8. He is the author of From New Babylon to Edenm, The Huguenots and their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (2006) and co-editor of Memory and Identity. The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (2003).