Description: Across the early modern Atlantic world, there were commodities just as valuable as sugar, tobacco or cotton: news and information. However, crossing an ocean beset by wars, pirates and bad weather made transoceanic communications irregular at best, posing significant challenges to the weekly European news cycle. With infrequent access to information, publishers had to navigate between speculation and confirmation, printing everything they could without losing credibility or customers. Michiel van Groesen explores this 'culture of anticipation' across the Atlantic world in Spain, Portugal, France, the Low Countries and England and also in the urban information centres of Renaissance Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. He argues that news from the Atlantic world underpinned all transatlantic exchanges, giving newspapers their rightful place in Atlantic history, and the Atlantic world its place in the history of news.
Brief description: Michiel van Groesen is Professor of Maritime History at Leiden University and author of Amsterdam's Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil (2017).
Review Quotes: 'How did people in the early Atlantic world know what they thought they knew? Michiel van Groesen answers this question through painstaking multilingual research in diverse national and imperial news cultures across the long seventeenth century. An essential work in Atlantic history, An Ocean of Rumours charts a new chronology for the rise of an integrated Atlantic news culture.' Alison Games, Georgetown University