I decided to juxtapose Philip Curtin's Atlantic Slave Trade (1969) against Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West. (1986) because they highlight ways historians used quantitative data to begin telling a story of how the the Americas, and especially the United States, were shaped. Obviously, the way this is set up, this is really a European-American Atlantic World, so it could use development by including literature on French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers.
Beginning with a base of knowledge of the land and peoples occupying it prior to European settlement is also important. For the moment, I will be relying on textbooks that offer a wide reach as well as the books on Native Americans in this section. This is a key area of work I need to do, as well.
The inclusion of a "slavery" category within the Colonial Period is troublesome. While all of the categories reveal some sort of power differential, where enslaved people are concerned within the context of a U.S. History course can give the impression that slavery was the only thing that African people's forced to cross the Atlantic experienced. Eventually, I would like to meld all three of my lists together to get a better sense of how all of these pieces fit together.
In Bailyn's case, he uses census data to disaggregate different socio-economic groups from England on the eve of the American Revolution. This is a story led by economics and push and pull factors, with largely single and young craftsmen moving from the South of England and responding to massive recruitment to the middle colonies, while intact farming families from the North, fleeing economic insecurity, moved to the frontier. Bailyn's invocation of the dissonance between "civilization" and "savagery" is repeated in many places and in many ways. While I would not use this book as a model for how to theorize modernity, it is helpful for asking oneself questions about gender, class, and specifically for getting rid of the idea of the British as monolith.
Philip Curtin synthesizes decades worth of secondary literature on the importation of enslaved people, arriving at an estimate very near what the most recent data has shown (http://www.slavetrade.org/). In emphasizing the huge quantities of people who were forced to Brazil, he encourages a reckoning with slavery as a worldwide and multi-national institution, while also asking researchers to think more deeply about what in time and place makes that form of enslavement significant. Interestingly, Curtin's work was printed long before Ira Berlin's field-changing article on the necessity of looking at time and space when studying the history of slavery (1986). Reactions to Curtin's work have been mixed, evincing a desire for scholars of slavery to do more than account for numbers, but to be held accountable to their historical subjects. A more recent trend in using quantitative data has been led by scholars such as Calvin Schermerhorn, Daina Ramey Berry, and Edward Baptist.
One book I would probably add to this group as far as Atlantic history goes is John Tutino's Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (2011). If we consider accumulation of capital a necessary prerequisite to Capitalism, then Tutino finds it in Mexican silver mines, enriching Spain and providing Chinese currency with stable specie.