Europeans Engaging the Atlantic offers innovative perspectives on historical European knowledge concerning the "New World" and also on trade and commerce with it. In so doing, it enhances our understanding of how, when, and why early modern Europeans made sense of the Atlantic world, and how they tried to connect with Atlantic trade and commerce. Featuring case studies that discuss these issues from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this volume explores both the degree to which the Atlantic was (or was not) part of the European worldview-or just one part of a worldview with many centers of interest-and how European engagement with the Atlantic world evolved.