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.
Introduction Agnès Delahaye, Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, L. H. Roper & Bertrand Van Ruymbeke Part I: Tensions within imperial projects 1 Global trade and its benefits for ‘the nation’: the examples of early modern France and Britain Susanne Lachenicht 2 Comparing and criticising early modern imperial policies in the Age of Revolution: Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes François Brizay 3 Global pursuits: English overseas initiatives of the long seventeenth century in perspective L. H. Roper Part II: The limits of imperial control 4 The limits of royal control over migration to Spanish America in the sixteenth century Eric Roulet 5 Imperial struggles, colonisation and the Dutch slave trade in seventeenth century New Netherland Anne-Claire Faucquez 6 The control of unfree labour across the Dutch empire in the eighteenth century Elisabeth Heijmans & Rafaël Thiebaut Part III: Local adaptations and developments 7 Settler colonialism and early American history Trevor Burnard & Agnès Delahaye 8 Colonising the Cape of Good Hope: company policy and settlers’ interests in a contested space of European occupation in Southern Africa Marilyn Garcia-Chapleau 9 Shipping mules in the eighteenth century: New England’s equine exports to the West Indies Charlotte Carrington-Farmer Epilogue: Perspectives on the mechanisms and impacts of overseas colonisation in the early modern era – then and now Bertrand Van Ruymbeke -- .
Delahaye is Associate Professor at Lyon 2 University, Peyrol-Kleiber is Associate Professor at Poitiers University, Roper is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York-New Paltz, Van Ruymbeke is Professor of American History at Paris 8 University.
