Life and religion at Louisbourg, 1713–1758. By A. J. B. Johnston. London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984, paperback edition, 1996. Pp. xxxii+227. ISBN 0-7735-1525-9. £12.95.

The New Orleans Cabildo: Colonial Louisiana's first city government, 1769–1803. By Gilbert C. Din and John E. Harkins. London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+330. ISBN 0-8071-2042-1. £42.75.

Revolution, romanticism, and the Afro-Creole protest tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868. By Caryn Cossé Bell. London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+325. ISBN 0-8071-2096-0. £32.95.

Hopeful journeys: German immigration, settlement and political culture in colonial America, 1717–1775. By Aaron Spencer Fogleman. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Pp. xii+257. ISBN 0-8122-1548-6. £15.95.

Britannia lost the war of American independence but still reigns over the historiography of colonial North America. This is a problem now that historians of early America have embarked on an attempt to apply an Atlantic world perspective to colonial development. The complex web of human, cultural, economic, and political encounters and exchanges among Europe, Africa, and the Americas spreads well beyond the familiar terrain of Britain and its thirteen mainland colonies. While the histories of Indians and enslaved Africans are beginning to find their way into the historical narrative of early America to challenge the British hegemony, non-British Europeans remain virtually invisible, except as opponents in the imperial wars that punctuated the colonial era. These four books illustrate obstacles that must be overcome to remedy this gap and offer glimpses of the rewards to be gained by drawing the history of continental Europeans previously treated as peripheral into the centre of the major debates currently shaping early American history.