Firsting in the early modern Atlantic world For centuries historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery invasion conquest and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting a discourse that privileges European and settler colonial presence movements knowledges and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world 1492 1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro settlers dominate Native Americans while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un firsted in scholarship on this time and place.