Abstract
Islands attract or stimulate conceptual innovation. They have been and continue to be attractive as economic, political, ecological or social laboratories. For navigators of all times, they have been connecting posts -true oases in oceanic deserts- or ideal places to confine the sick or captives. Since the dawn of the 21st century, they have regained centrality as a location for studies where the idea of laboratory, microanalysis and also the trends of global and connected history intersect: they allow the study of the crossroads between geographical conditions and human actions; scattered all over the planet (both existing and “ghost” ones), they are points of passage of world traffic and also frequent devices in sovereign conflicts since long before the existence of nation states. This article notes their reappearance on the world historiographical agenda and asks about their heuristic value for the regional history of the American Southeast during the colonial period.
Keywords:
Islands; Historiography; Regional History; South Atlantic Ocean; Colonial Period
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