Agents of European Overseas Empires - (Seventeenth- And Eighteenth-Century Studies)

About the Book

Agents of European overseas empires examines networks of trade and communication on a global scale whose activities enabled early modern European overseas empires.

Book Synopsis

Agents of European overseas empires involves contributors who specialise on often overlooked aspects of imperial endeavour: 'private' European interests, companies, merchants or courtiers, who conducted their own activities both with and without the benediction of polities. The chapters adopt intra- as well as inter-imperial perspectives and transport the reader to colonial America, the West Indies, the Cape of Good Hope, Batavia, or Ceylon, through the Dutch, English, French and Spanish empires. Agents of European overseas empires offers crucial insight on how these actors acquired profits and power and, in turn, laid the platforms for European global empires.

From the Back Cover

Agents of European overseas empires overhauls our understanding of early modern European imperial history and the extent of the participation of early modern polities in the conduct of European overseas trade and colonisation.

Contributions from historians based in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States focus on the 'private' interests that initiated the pursuit of overseas commercial and colonising interests during the early modern period. They track the networking of various colonisers, traders and thinkers who pursued early modern European global interests and who conducted their activities both with and without the approval of polities. These networks constituted the ligaments that bound these far-flung endeavours to the respective sovereigns, but also paradoxically exposed the laxity entailed in those ligaments in the form of smuggling and piracy, as well as endemic jockeying for economic and political advantage.

This collection relegates 'the state' to its appropriate secondary, reactive role in this history, but also avoids exaggerating the place of colonials, especially with respect to conflict with metropolitan interests, in the development of the Dutch, English, French and Spanish Empires.

Review Quotes

"Adds new perspectives and voices to the history of imperialism within the early modern Atlantic world... a powerful and convincing invitation to reimagine the early modern Atlantic." - Sixteenth Century Journal

About the Author

Agnès Delahaye is Professor of American History at Lyon 2 University
Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber is Associate Professor of American History at Poitiers University
L. H. Roper is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at New Paltz
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is Professor of American History at Paris 8 University (Vincennes Saint-Denis)