This ground-breaking history of the "Torrid Zone" offers a comprehensive and powerfully rich exploration of the Anglophone world from Carolina to Suriname and around the Caribbean. Drawing on decades of work with thousands of overlooked and underused manuscript sources, author Sarah Barber overturns the accreted British and American historiographies of the early colonial Americas, offering instead a vernacular history that skillfully negotiates diverse locations, periodizations, and the fraught waters of ethnicity and gender. The result is a history of lived experience that, while focusing on the years before systematized Empire, has significant implications for the broader history of the Atlantic world.