Infinite Worlds: Eighteenth-Century London, the Atlantic Ocean, and Post-Slavery in S.I. Martin's Incomparable World, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes, David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress, and Thomas Wharton's Salamander

First of these common elements is London itself; the port city and international gathering-point not only presided over a global empire on which the sun shone ad infinitum, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries London was seen to contain, in Peter Ackroyd's words, 'the great world itself':4 the city Addison called 'an aggregate of various nations' included, it was imagined, 'no less than everything.'5 London's perceived infinitude was a function not just of its physical size and the variety of peoples it contained but of the economic and political power that the empire's intricate web of international affiliations brought to it; London was as global a city as the eighteenth century had to offer, and this idea of the metropolis as infinitely expansive, inclusive, and diverse has been a persistent trope ever since. Gilroy's organizing image of ships crossing the Atlantic stands for a mobile, mutable, hybrid, fluid black identity characterized by its infinitely variable 'double consciousness,' a concept he adapts from W.E.B. Du Bois as a legacy of 'the intimate association between modernity and slavery'.11 Also relevant is the work of Atlantic historians such as Bernard Bailyn, Thomas Benjamin, and many others who gather the Americas, Europe, and Africa into an integrated and mutually constitutive (if Europe-dominated) Atlantic World that began with Columbus, ended when slavery ended, and reached its peak of interconnection and cross-pollination in the eighteenth century.12 In the words of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, a 'many-headed hydra' of separate but intimately linked peoples emerged as a result of 'the circular transmission of human experience from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back again'; all this movement created, 'in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ... a new transatlantic economy'.13 In the same spirit, Felicity Nussbaum's The Global Eighteenth Century suggests adding to the established concept of 'a long eighteenth century' that of a geographically 'widened eighteenth century' in which the origins of contemporary globalization can be traced.14 In making her case for a global and less Eurocentric view of the century, Nussbaum lists 'the increased mobility of commodities and ideas, the unprecedented expansion of global trade, improved navigational techniques, and cultural and racial mixture' that included 'the period's well-known diasporas of the black Atlantic'.15 For Bailyn, such historic interactions are best under