Entangled Empires

According to conventional wisdom, in the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal served as a model to the English for how to go about establishing colonies in the New World and Africa. By the eighteenth century, however, it was Spain and Portugal that aspired to imitate the British. Editor Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and the contributors toEntangled Empireschallenge these long-standing assumptions, exploring how Spain, Britain, and Portugal shaped one another throughout the entire period, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. They argue that these empires were interconnected from the very outset in their production and sharing of knowledge as well as in their economic activities. Willingly or unwillingly, African slaves, Amerindians,conversotraders, smugglers, missionaries, diplomats, settlers, soldiers, and pirates crossed geographical, linguistic, and political boundaries and cocreated not only local but also imperial histories. Contributors reveal that entanglement was not merely a process that influenced events in the colonies after their founding; it was constitutive of European empire from the beginning.