Agents of European Overseas Empires

Agents of European Overseas Empire overhauls our understanding of the early modern European imperial history as well as 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, as we would term them today, that initiated the pursuit of overseas commercial and colonising interests during the early modern period. They track the networking of various agents, be they 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 networksconstituted 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.