What is the Atlantic World? Interview with Professor Keith Pluymers
Tides of History
Audible / Patrick Wyman
4.7 • 6.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
he Atlantic World is one of the major concepts in academic history, a way of linking together all the various places around the fringes of the great ocean during a time of extraordinary change, the early modern period. Professor Keith Pluymers joins me once more to discuss the Atlantic World and how the concept is useful to us in trying to make sense of a massively important time in human history.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm your host, Patrick Wyman. |
| 0:15.6 | Thanks so much for joining me. When we try to understand the vast, interconnected, early modern world that tied together Africa, Europe, and the Americas, the best way to do this is by focusing on the ocean that lies between them, the Atlantic. |
| 0:28.4 | The concept of an Atlantic world has dominated scholarship on this region, but what does the Atlantic world even mean? |
| 0:35.9 | How is it useful as a way of understanding this time and place and |
| 0:38.8 | what made it distinctive? It's an important thing to grasp because it impacts everything from |
| 0:43.7 | how we understand the transatlantic slave trade to the birth of the modern capitalist world |
| 0:47.9 | economy to the American Revolution. Luckily, we have just the guy to help us understand this. |
| 0:54.9 | Our guest today is the returning champion on tides of history, our most frequent guest |
| 0:59.7 | over the past almost nine years. Dr. Keith Plymers is Associate Professor of History |
| 1:04.6 | at Illinois State University, the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and |
| 1:09.0 | a lovely book entitled No Wood, No Kingdom, |
| 1:12.1 | Political Ecology in the English Atlantic. His work spans the whole early modern Atlantic, |
| 1:16.7 | from Barbados to Ireland to Philadelphia, which is why he is the perfect person to explain this |
| 1:21.5 | huge world to us. He's also a dear friend, and I'm so excited to have him here with us today. |
| 1:27.0 | Keith, how you doing? |
| 1:28.4 | I'm doing great. Thanks for having me back. It is such a pleasure to be on Tides of History again. |
| 1:34.6 | Dude, this means that you are officially, our once and future and forever returning champion. |
| 1:40.8 | Nobody will ever take that title from you. I love it. Listeners can't see it, |
| 1:45.3 | but I am waving my fists like I've just won a title fight. Yeah, we're going to award you the |
| 1:51.3 | tides of history equivalent of a Roman triumph, which I think is going to involve something like |
| 1:55.5 | an 86 Ford tempo instead of a chariot and some sort of out-of-the-way place, like maybe Duluth in January. |
| 2:02.3 | How's that sound to you? |
... |
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