Introduction

Summary

The introduction establishes seventeenth-century English ideas about the tropics, showing that they conceptualized the tropical or “torrid zone” as a coherent and distinct entity. The English thought of that region as both more abundant in resources and more deadly than the more temperate zones. This tropical zone was the focus of early English overseas expansion. The Atlantic World perspective may be too limiting as a geographical framework for understanding the rise of the English empire. Scholars should explore English colonization models across the tropics in the eastern and western hemisphere in a comparative perspective to better appreciate both the development of the early empire and the origins and rise of slavery within that empire. The introduction also argues that the distinctiveness of the variant of slavery that emerged in the English empire can best be understood through the broader framework of the global tropics, linking the Atlantic and Indian oceans.