The Romani Atlantic
Open Access, September 2026, Cambridge University Press
Description
The Romani Atlantic is the first comprehensive look at Romani experiences in the Atlantic World. Together, the essays detail the Romani people's transatlantic circulations, interactions, connections, and exchanges, reinforcing the view that the Atlantic was a zone of contact where identities interlaced and transformed. The geographical points and flows covered include imperial Spain and Mexico, Lusophone Angolan slave trading ports, Ellis Island immigration controls, South-Eastern European villages, and Canadian community centers. Each case study illustrates the migratory flow and reflow of people, ideas, and processes, showing that Romani people have strategically engaged with state instruments, cultivated Romani distinctiveness, and built resilient communities. The Romani Atlantic traces the underexplored history of Romani migration and highlights the ways that Romani agency has shaped the modern world.
Reviews
Description
The Romani Atlantic is the first comprehensive look at Romani experiences in the Atlantic World. Together, the essays detail the Romani people's transatlantic circulations, interactions, connections, and exchanges, reinforcing the view that the Atlantic was a zone of contact where identities interlaced and transformed. The geographical points and flows covered include imperial Spain and Mexico, Lusophone Angolan slave trading ports, Ellis Island immigration controls, South-Eastern European villages, and Canadian community centers. Each case study illustrates the migratory flow and reflow of people, ideas, and processes, showing that Romani people have strategically engaged with state instruments, cultivated Romani distinctiveness, and built resilient communities. The Romani Atlantic traces the underexplored history of Romani migration and highlights the ways that Romani agency has shaped the modern world.
Reviews
‘This excitingly rich collection accomplishes a remarkable feat: It lifts Romani histories and experiences from their conventional framing, whether the nation-state, a singular empire, or a single region. It thus provides a truly global perspective on the colonial and inter-imperial context behind transatlantic Romani mobilities, diasporic connections, and how these shaped the modern world.’
Manuela Boatcă - University of Freiburg
‘This book demonstrates that the interconnected worlds of the Atlantic rim can be studied both microscopically and globally, over half a millennium, through unifying themes of migration, cosmopolitanism, exclusion, adaptation, and the maintenance of cultural identities. It introduces memorable individuals with remarkable stories, illustrating the mutabilities, ambiguities, entanglements, and perils of the Romani experience in different yet comparable situations.’
David Cressy, - author of Gypsies: An English History
‘This volume is a field-defining contribution to Romani history. Moving decisively beyond the Eurocentric frameworks that have long shaped Romani Studies, it reorients the field toward the circum-Atlantic world and demonstrates the centrality of Romani experiences to the histories of empire, state formation, and race in the region. Bringing together senior scholars and innovative emerging voices, the collection also demonstrates that Romani history is integral to Atlantic history. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars across Romani Studies, Atlantic history, and the broader histories of race, migration, and minority community building.’
Ari Joskowicz - author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust
‘The Romani Atlantic offers a groundbreaking new history of Romani lives across five centuries, tracing the migrations, circulations, and connections that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Bringing together vivid case studies from colonial empires to modern diasporas, this volume reveals how Romani people helped shape the Atlantic world as well as why their stories are essential to understanding modern history.’
Angéla Kóczé - author of Romani Women at the Edge of Neoliberal Europe: Discursive Emancipation and Structural Violence
‘Fotta and Ostendorf have assembled a carefully selected group of essays, by a wide range of scholars, to encourage readers to reconsider the roots and routes of Romani communities. By reinserting Romani histories within the framework of the Atlantic world, the volume underscores shared and interconnected histories with other marginalized groups whose cultures and experiences have also been deeply shaped by the Atlantic.’
Sunnie Rucker-Chang - The Ohio State University
‘This important new study asks that we think of Romani people as part of the Atlantic diaspora, both to offer insights into the diverse and distinctive historical experiences of these peoples, and, crucially to demonstrate how these must be understood as sitting as an integral part of broader trans-Atlantic, indeed global, histories. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities and richness of Atlantic world experiences.’
Becky Taylor, - author Darkness, Another Dawn. A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers