Craig Gallagher is a PhD candidate in History at Boston College. His dissertation analyzes Scots and their religious and economic networks in the late seventeenth century British Atlantic World.

Atlantic history has always had at its heart a simple enough goal: to connect the histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas so that historians can better understand each in relation to the others. Scholars have disagreed about how best to realize this goal, and about whether it is a goal worth realizing at all, but few have denied that Atlantic history as a pursuit has enriched our understanding of the early modern world. Although this has been particularly true for historians of the British and Spanish empires in the Americas, it is a more recent development among scholars of the French empire. By convening the “Early Modern France and the Americas: Connected Histories” Symposium (Program; #FrenchAtlantic on Twitter) at Boston College on May 2-3 – an event co-sponsored by the Institut des Amériques – the organizers, Owen Stanwood (Boston College) and Bertrand van Ruymbeke (Université de Paris VIII), sought to showcase those historians of France and French North America whose work, either in print or in progress, has extended an Atlantic perspective to the history of France and its early modern empire in the Americas.

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