The aim of Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion and Exile, 1550–1850 is to come to new understandings of the foundations of our interconnected world and of the families who contributed to it. During the era covered, 1550 to 1850, family networks transcending national ties and traditional boundaries relating to gender, class, religion, and race were central to the project of discovery, trade expansion, settlement, and ultimately empire building. It was a period of great flux, and roles and relations within and outside households were increasingly affected by travel. The essays in this collection investigate families where separations occurred in order to trade, or to maintain the maritime and military infrastructure and settlements that enabled that trade to flourish. While many individuals and family units chose to uproot, travel and labour in unfamiliar surroundings, others, such as slaves and convicts, were forced to do so. Moreover, while some travelled within their own countries, others went much further, crossing multiple oceans. Each of the eleven essays looks at how families and family businesses were kept going over distance and how relationships were maintained while dealing with change and separation. Some also reveal how individuals created new family after losing contact with their kin.

Keeping Family stands at the crossroads of two branches of social history: family and migration. Since the late 1960s historians have increasingly studied the practices, rituals and relationships that have given meaning to the lives of ordinary people. In 1996 M.E. Bratchel pondered whether the family should be ‘analysed primarily as a political, a social or an economic force’. Seventeen years later, the editors of William and Mary Quarterly's special issue ‘Centering Families in Atlantic Histories’ accepted that it could be both and were confident defining family as ‘cultural, economic, legal political, social – and even biological … an idea, an ideology, a strategy, an economic or political unit, and a lived experience’. The history of the family has continued to be challenged, enriched by discussions regarding the effectiveness of family networks and categories such as class, race and gender.