As its title suggests, Entangled Empires is a book about how the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires engaged with each other over the course of the early modern period. Edited by the renowned historian of the Hispanic world Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the volume reflects the connected history approach that has characterized the latest publications of the esteemed historian. However, rather than merely cataloging instances and patterns of interimperial interactions, the volume in question was written with a bolder proposition in mind. In a nutshell, Entangled Empires suggests that it is impossible to understand properly any of these empires without considering their entanglement, for they all belonged to a common hemispheric system.Part 1, titled “Severed Histories,” focuses on uncovering how, in an effort to assert England's imperial authority, English officials and actors rendered interimperial entanglement invisible by hiding their debt to Spanish and Portuguese precedents. The chapters in this section show that, in spite of deliberate silences in the archives, early modern merchants often led itinerant lives across imperial frontiers and often relied on Africans to achieve their goals. Moreover, the section shows that the early modern drug trade was directly dependent on how these merchants circulated commodities and natural knowledge across the Iberian and British worlds.Part 2, titled “Brokers and Translators,” focuses on how thinkers and go-betweens stimulated Anglo-Iberian interactions. Ranging from intellectual to social and political history, the chapters in this section highlight how Iberian achievements in the New World served as a fountain of knowledge for the British imperial project, both in terms of the imperial imagination and in terms of the people who circulated across imperial lines, particularly Iberian conversos. Moreover, the late Christopher Schmidt-Nowara shows that influence also went in the reverse direction, especially through the many Irishmen who played important roles in the transformation of Spanish political culture from the 1760s to the 1820s.Part 3, titled “Possession, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy,” demonstrates that, in spite of contemporary rhetoric, Iberian and English discourses and strategies of possession over New World territories had more in common than previously thought. From comparing Catholic and Calvinist discourses of possession to reconstructing the shared ways in which the British and Spanish empires interacted with indigenous peoples, part 3 convincingly demonstrates that the English built on the discourses and tactics that Spain pioneered in its efforts to assert its authority over the New World.Finally, part 4, titled “Trade and War,” focuses on the ways in which trade, diplomacy, and war entangled the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic and Pacific worlds. From reconstructing cross-imperial trade in the Caribbean to detailing how warfare in the Pacific remade Spanish and English hegemony in the Philippines, part 4 takes the reader through the messy, on-the-ground reality of trade and war, which no single empire could control according to its own whims.Entangled Empires is certainly a welcome scholarly contribution, especially since it has demonstrated how connected histories allow us to understand the Atlantic world in new, exciting, and more comprehensive ways. I can only hope that this work will inspire new synthetic accounts that also take into consideration the French and Dutch Atlantics.In the spirit of constructive scholarly discussion, I should mention that I have two minor quibbles with the book. First, the volume vacillates between two main contentions. Sometimes the chapters suggest that Britain consistently drew on the pioneering Iberian example to design its own Atlantic imperial project. At other moments, the chapters simply show that the Iberian and British empires consistently drew on each other to assert their authority in the Atlantic world. Most of the chapters support the former perspective, but a few actually prove the latter. The distinction might be subtle, but it is important nonetheless. I wish the authors had made a greater effort to underscore which of the aforementioned arguments more closely aligns with the evidence.Second, and perhaps most importantly, the introduction claims that the ultimate goal of the book is “to bring into focus the centrality of the Iberian-Latino past to the very constitution of the history of” the United States (pp. 3–4). While I am sympathetic to the effort, I do not think that this volume actually proves this assertion. Of course, the volume does clearly show that the inhabitants of the Iberian empires influenced the course of history in the Atlantic world and colonial North America. However, the stronger claim cited above, while plausible, requires a different set of tools and chapters to sustain it.These minor quibbles aside, this is an exciting and welcome addition to the historiography of the Atlantic world. The book can certainly be read alongside more conventional accounts as prompts for discussion in graduate and upper-level undergraduate seminars on the Atlantic world.
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May 8, 2020
Anne Mcnevin 
Open Access