JCB Reads: Kenneth J. Banks, author of A Sea of Possibilities: The Revolutionary Atlantic World of Captain Thomas Allen

Launched during the 2024-5 academic year, JCB Reads offers former JCB fellows the opportunity to share their recent book publications. These online events are open to anyone who is interested. The link to the Zoom meeting will be published a few days before the event takes place on the individual event page.

Join us on Monday, October 1, 2026 at 12 p.m. EDT for a discussion of Kenneth J. Bank's new book A Sea of Possibilities: The Revolutionary Atlantic World of Captain Thomas Allen (The Revolutionary Age).

About the book

The story of a cunning sea captain whose tempestuous life charts new dimensions of the American Revolution.

This is the gripping tale of how ambitious sea captain Thomas Allen and his family navigated the gales of the American Revolution. Starting as a rogue and smuggler, Allen won and lost several fortunes before eventually establishing himself as a wealthy merchant with Loyalist leanings in Connecticut. Then, imprisoned by the Patriots during the War for Independence, Allen lost nearly everything and everyone. Rather than fleeing, he stayed and rebuilt, emerging from the crucible of revolution as an outspoken and influential champion of the new Constitution and new nation.

This telling of Allen’s experience captures the everyday lives, material circumstances, and values of a middling settler family working hard and scheming harder to gain respectability and wealth in the colonial Atlantic World. In vivid detail, Kenneth Banks shows that maritime life is as crucial to our understanding of the Revolutionary era as the debates over taxation in colonial legislatures, migration and violent agitation in the backcountry, or the rise of a market-driven society. Like the Revolution itself, Allen's story is one of reinvention in a rapidly changing world.

For more information about this title, visit https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10219/.