The British and French in the Atlantic 1650-1800 provides a comprehensive history of this complex period and explores the contrasting worlds of the British and the French Empires as they strove to develop new societies in the Americas.

Charting the volatile relationship between the British and French, this book examines the approaches that both empires took as they attempted to realise their ambitions of exploration, conquest and settlement, and highlights the similarities as well as the differences between them. Both empires faced slave revolts, internal rebellion and revolution as well as frequent wars against one another, which came to dominate the Atlantic world, and which culminated in the eventual failure of both empires in North America: the French following the Seven Years War in 1763 and the British twenty years later in the war against American Independence.

Delving into key themes, such as exploration and settlement, the creation of societies, inequality and exploitation, conflict and violence, trade and slavery, and featuring a range of documents to enable a deeper insight into the relationship between the colonising Europeans and Native Americans, The British and French in the Atlantic 1650-1800 is ideal for students of the Atlantic World, early modern Britain and France, and colonial America.

Peter Rushton is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Sunderland. He has published widely on aspects of the personal and social relations of early modern England, from witchcraft, welfare, to problems of marriage and family life.

Gwenda Morgan, formerly Reader in American History and American Studies at the University of Sunderland, is now Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Durham. She has published on law and society in colonial America and the young republic, a monograph on Richmond County, Virginia, and The Debate on the American Revolution (2007)

Together, they have published Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: the Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (2003) and Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Rebels and Slaves (2013)