Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World (Atlantic History)

Introduction
From the beginning of the European overseas expansion into the Atlantic in the 15th-century onward, Europeans had to figure how to govern the newly conquered lands and peoples across Africa and the Americas. Western European polities transplanted to their Atlantic territories forms of governance already tested within the European context, but institutions of colonial governance were built in fits and starts and constantly adapted to local demands and characteristics. American elites sought and sometimes achieved a relationship with the imperial center that could be similar to the one experienced by European local elites. However, Old World models of government were deeply transformed by distance, by environmental conditions, and, above all, by the variety of peoples that were under European rule. Atlantic governance involved the (often violent) seizure of substantial portions of the American and (in a much lesser scale) African lands, along with the transfer of people of European descent to settle the conquered lands. Local populations were often forced to labor for their new overlords and were gradually dispossessed of their lands and institutions, while sub-Saharan Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to work as slaves. As a result of racial prejudice and power relations, they were assigned a subaltern status that deprived them from many civic and political rights, becoming a subaltern majority. This posed new problems that transformed templates brought by European colonizers, such as the patterns of government developed in the Iberian Reconquista and in the English domination of Ireland. All empires dealt with similar problems in the Atlantic: the need to establish its own authority, to defend the settlements, and to produce enough revenue to pay for it all. A high level of flexibility was needed at first because European authorities had little knowledge of Atlantic realities. Afterward, the slowness of communication and the need to obtain local cooperation to achieve any goal, from the conquest itself to defense and taxing local production, required collaboration, not only from colonists of European descent but also from Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and the multiethnic populations that grew throughout the Early Modern era. Colonial governance should not be understood, therefore, as a top-down imposition from Europe to Africa and the Americas, but as a contested struggle between many opposing groups and factions. Recent historiography has been increasingly cognizant of temporal and spatial differences, but there is still need for a deeper engagement between different linguistic traditions. Atlantic expansion was a multinational endeavor, and so should be its study.

General Overviews
There is no account that both covers the whole Atlantic world and brings together all themes that can conceivably be thought of as colonial governance. Nevertheless, many syntheses are available for each empire, as well as comparative studies. One of the most precocious surveys focuses on the South Atlantic: Boxer 1969 is a classic to be consulted by specialists. Canny 1998 and Marshall 1998 can be profitably used in the classroom to study the British imperial endeavor. The collective volume Bowen, et al. 2012, far more recent and updated, is useful for the same purpose. Elliott 2006 is a major work that weaves together two empires (the Spanish and the British) and contrasts them at every turn. Beyond its many qualities, Lockhart and Schwartz 1983 merits applause for not subsuming the Brazilian experience under the better-known Spanish case. Fragoso, et al. 2013 goes beyond the Portuguese Empire to insert Brazil in a wider Atlantic picture. Cardim, et al. 2012 is a useful introduction with short articles on Iberian Empires, above all for its effort to connect the conquest of the New World with European political and constitutional culture. Other Atlantics—such as sub-Saharan Africa and its inhabitants—have been neglected for a long time, but Havard and Vidal 2014 offers a compelling and complex picture of French North America, while Goslinga 1971 and Klooster 2016 (cited under Ruling from Afar) are two excellent starting points to understand the Dutch Atlantic.

Bowen, Huw V., Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds. Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Featuring some of the most recent scholarship on the British overseas rule in the Early Modern period, this collective volume examines the imperial endeavors in the Atlantic and in Asia in an interconnected way. This comprehensive book is divided into four main parts (natural conditions, governance, diplomacy and military interactions, commercial relations) and has the additional advantage of covering the period that goes from the mid-16th century to the mid-19th century.

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Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

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Though outdated, as it was written before the Portuguese Empire received sustained scholarly attention, it remains a useful introduction to the subject. Its political bent puts colonial governance in the spotlight, though in a traditional fashion that rarely recognizes subaltern agency. Also noteworthy is its precocious insistence in the connection between colonial Brazil and West-Central Africa.

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Canny, Nicholas, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Apart from its comprehensive character, another advantage of this collective volume—thoughtfully edited by Nicholas Canny—is the fact that among its contributors are many of the historians responsible for renovating the field of Atlantic history. Featuring a variety of approaches (from political history to cultural analysis, economic history, network analysis of trade, and so on), this particular volume is mostly devoted to the Atlantic, and regards in an interconnected way developments in Europe and across the Americas.

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Cardim, Pedro, Tamar Herzog, José Javier Ruíz Ibañez, and Gaetano Sabatini, eds. Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic, 2012.

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A collection that gathers Ibero-American, French, and Italian historians that emphasize the relevance of the Iberian empires in the early modern world. Collectively, their main innovation is the conceptualization of the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies as a network that connected various centers that collaborated in the making of empire.

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Elliott, John H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

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As Elliott is one of the major historians of early modern European politics, colonial governance is one of the main topics of the book. Thanks to Elliott’s deep knowledge of the European political culture, this book demonstrates that the history of metropolitan territories and the trajectory of the overseas lands are deeply imbricated. He focuses, though, much more on the relationship between Crown and colonists than on the subaltern majorities.

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Fragoso, João, Thiago Krause, and Roberto Guedes. A América Portuguesa e os Sistemas Atlânticos na Época Moderna: Monarquia Pluricontinental e Antigo Regime. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2013.

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A recent overview of colonial Brazil that puts the Portuguese Empire in an Atlantic perspective, comparing it with the British and Spanish cases and emphasizing connections, similarities, and distinctions.

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Goslinga, Cornelis C. The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971.

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Goslinga’s book focuses on the history of the Dutch colonization of the area that spans from the Caribbean to the Guianas. It is one of the first overviews of the Dutch presence in that part of the Atlantic. Its follow-up volume (The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Guianas, 1680–1791 [Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1985]) is also useful.

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Havard, Gilles, and Cécile Vidal. Histoire de l’Amérique Française. 4th ed. Paris: Flammarion, 2014.

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Originally published in 2003, this work of synthesis offers a full and nuanced portrait of colonial governance that includes metropolitan administration and its American representatives, but also deals extensively with slavery and interethnic relationships.

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Lockhart, James, and Stuart Schwartz. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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Despite being published in the early 1980s, it remains the sole work that gives Portuguese and Spanish colonization the same level of attention. Though more focused on economic and social history, political institutions are also expertly analyzed.

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Marshall, Peter J., ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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This collective volume presents a comprehensive overview of the British imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution to the early 19th century. Although a few contributions are somewhat outdated, the ensemble of the book continues to be effective for instructors.

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Document Collections
Many document collections pertaining to early modern Atlantic empires have been published in the last two centuries, and most contain documents relevant to the study of colonial governance. The French and Dutch Atlantics have been sorely neglected, though, as their national identities did not depended on any meaningful way on their early modern empires, and their historiographies preferred to focus on other sections of the overseas empires, such as the Dutch empire in Asia; on later periods; or on Europe. On the other hand, the Iberian and British Atlantics offer many options. Parry and Keith 1984 is an excellent documentary introduction to the beginning of Iberian colonization. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series is an essential starting point for students of British America. Konetzke 1953–1958 is very useful, as it is not solely concerned with elite politics. The Documentos Históricos are available online and allow the researcher to browse through tens of thousands of administrative documents, mostly originated from royal officers in Brazil. Schwartz 2010 is a better starting point for nonspecialists though, as it was designed for classroom use. Brásio 1952–2004 is an important collection, for it covers a time period and a geographical area that still merits much more scholarship: early modern Africa. It also is essential to the understanding of religious dimension of colonial governance, as is Thwaites 1896–1901. Even though they concern different hemispheres and opposite sides of the Atlantic, they are complementary, as both collections put the central role religion played in the relationship with subaltern majorities in the spotlight.

Brásio, António, ed. Monumenta Missionaria Africana. 22 vols. Lisbon, Portugal: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952–2004.

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One of the major collections of published primary sources on Atlantic Africa, it covers the period from 1342 to 1699. Despite its name, it is not only composed of religious documents but also many administrative sources that are very useful to probe themes connected to colonial governance, mostly in West-Central Africa.

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Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: North America and the West Indies, 1574–1739.

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Abstracts and transcripts of over forty thousand administrative primary sources originally published in forty-five volumes from 1859 to 1994 from the originals deposited at the National Archives of Britain. It can also be consulted in the Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations for the period 1704–1782.

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Documentos Históricos. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Biblioteca Nacional, 1928–2012.

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The main collection of administrative primary sources for colonial Brazil, it was transcribed from the archives of the general government in Bahia, the first capital of Portuguese America. It covers the whole colonial period and offers glimpses into many different subjects, though the subaltern majorities only come up when they were fighting the colonists. 111 volumes.

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Konetzke, Richard, ed. Colección de Documentos para la Historia de la Formación Social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810. 3 vols. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953–1958.

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A careful selection of administrative documents that covers the whole colonial period and most areas of Spanish America. It focuses on the interaction between the Spanish Crown and colonial society.

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Parry, John, and Robert Keith, eds. New Iberian World: A Documentary History of the Discovery and Settlement of Latin America to the Early 17th century. 5 vols. New York: Times, 1984.

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A wide-ranging collection of translated administrative sources and chronicles, towering 2,600 pages, mostly of those dedicated to Spanish America, though there are some one hundred pages pertaining to colonial Brazil.

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Schwartz, Stuart, ed. Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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An excellent selection of primary sources by the foremost historian of Colonial Brazil that covers many different topics, such as the donatarial system, royal government, French and Dutch presence, religious interactions, and the war against the great maroon of Palmares.

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Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. and trans. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. 73 vols. Cleveland, OH: Burrows, 1896–1901.

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This rich trove of translated primary sources serves as an excellent starting point to reflect upon the relationship between French and Native Americans in North America, as well as upon the crucial role played by religion in government and alliance with the subaltern majorities. Creighton University has digitized this material and made it available in a homonymous website.

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Contemporary Accounts
Most travellers’ accounts and official reports featured descriptions of political institutions and of the relationships between colonists and the subaltern majorities. Bradford 1981 is one of the few narratives that focus on the first years of settlement of any given territory. Van Baerle 2011 is one of the only works on Dutch expansion that has been translated into English and an essential source for the study of the brief existence of Dutch Brazil. Lopes Sierra 1979 is an exceedingly rare book that offers a fascinating glimpse of the many sides of colonial governance, from war against unconquered Amerindians to civic rituals and the relationship with colonial elites. Ulloa 2011 is an important account of Spanish America before the beginning of the so-called Bourbon reforms that helped to inform perception of the problems that afflicted the Spanish Empire both in Spain and in England. Long 1970 offers a broad picture of the late-18th-century British West Indies colonial society.

Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647. New York: Modern Library, 1981.

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This classic narrative of the American canon can be read as a history of polity making. It offers a lot of material to reflect upon the establishment of colonial governance by the colonists themselves, including alliances and wars with Native Americans and the contentious dealings of the Puritans with the mother country.

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Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica; or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on Its Situations, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws and Government. London: Cass, 1970.

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Authored by a Jamaican planter and slave owner with a juridical background and first published in 1774, this account provides a broad overview of the British West Indies colonial society, including many details about the social, economic, and political life. Particularly noteworthy are Long’s reflections on racial discrimination of the population of African descent. The first edition can be easily found online, such as in Google Books.

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Lopes Sierra, Juan. A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil: The Funeral Eulogy of Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonça. Edited by Stuart Schwartz and translated by Ruth E. Jones. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979.

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Through the eyes of a Spanish letrado that lived in Salvador, this tribute to a governor-general that died in office touches on many interesting themes, such as the relationship between royal officials and the local elite and wars against Native Americans. Schwartz’s introduction offers the reader an excellent overview of the context.

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Ulloa, Antonio de. A Voyage to South America: Describing at Large the Spanish Cities, Towns, Provinces, etc. on that Extensive Continent. Translated by John Adams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Originally published in 1748, this traveller’s account was extremely popular both in Spain and abroad. It was first edited in England in 1758, and this is a reproduction of the fourth edition, published in 1806. It provides detailed description and analysis of social and political institutions of mid-18th-century Spanish South America.

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van Baerle, Caspar. The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Count Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644. Translated by Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011.

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Originally published in 1647, this work was commissioned by Nassau himself. It offers an excellent introduction to Dutch expansion and colonization in the Atlantic. Though the narrative focuses on government actions and warfare, it also includes some valuable reflections on slavery and the alliance with some Native Americans groups.

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Imperial Thoughts
The conquest of lands across the Atlantic stimulated the reflection about the meanings of empire. MacMillan 2006 shows that the revival of the imperial ideology was primarily the outcome of the urge to assert—vis-à-vis European competitors—the possession of the American (and African) lands that had been seized. In parallel, and as the colonizing process evolved, European rulers felt the need to legitimize in moral and juridical terms the violent appropriation of indigenous lands and the forceful domination of massive numbers of Amerindian peoples. Beginning in the first decades of the 16th century, debates on the status of Amerindians, thoroughly studied in Pagden 1982, and sub-Saharan Africans, analyzed in Zeron 2009 and Marcocci 2014, proved critical for the shaping of institutions responsible for governing the large number of persons of Amerindian and African descent who lived within colonial areas. The establishment of European colonial rule across the Atlantic coincided with the strengthening of royal power in Europe. Pagden 1995 and Kermelle and Lavallé 2008 explore the increasing presence of imperial tropes in the contemporary political language and throw new light on how Atlantic colonialism influenced the understanding of royal government not only in the New World, but also across Europe. In an age of fierce rivalry between the various European powers, imperial tropes were employed as a means of political self-fashioning, as Schmidt 2001 clearly shows in the Dutch case. Armitage 2000 examines the link between Atlantic colonialism and key subjects of the history of political ideas, such as the interplay between religion and politics; processes of identity formation; ideas of nation and race; theories of property; the emergence of the political economy; and, last but not least, debates about liberty and freedom. Gil Pujol 2016 surveys the semantics of vexed terms such as “empire,” “monarchy,” “conquest,” and “colony.” More recently, the scholarship on Native American and African experience in the Atlantic World drew attention to a wider gamut of historical actors who thought about the empire. Parallel to questioning Eurocentric views of the Atlantic world, this scholarship underscored that many of those who were colonized by European powers also produced knowledge about the Atlantic empires. Curto 2009 shows that individuals and groups from the lower lawyers of colonial society also took part in these debates. Beginning in the early stages of the European colonial rule in the Americas, they discussed—and contested—European colonial rule, and went so far as to propose alternative models of social, economic, and political order.

Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511755965Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Armitage’s book is a groundbreaking analysis of imperial ideologies across the British world. This erudite study of intellectual history traces the development of conceptions of empire from the 16th to the 18th century. Particularly significant is the fact that this is one of the first works that systematically takes into account the interaction between thinkers and proposals coming from England, Scotland, and Ireland. This work also addresses the link between imperial rule, identity formation, and state building.

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Curto, Diogo Ramada. Cultura Imperial e Projetos Coloniais (Séculos XV a XVIII). Campinas, Brazil: Unicamp, 2009.

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This volume focuses on projects of Portuguese colonial domination forged between the 16th and the 18th centuries. Curto is a leading expert in political culture and takes into account a wide variety of actors, from the elites to the lower groups and people of all kinds of ethnicities. He underscores that all of them participated—in metropolitan Portugal, across the Atlantic, and in Asia—in the formation of Portuguese imperial culture.

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Gil Pujol, Xavier. La Fábrica de la Monarquía: Traza y Conservación de la Monarquía de España de los Reyes Católicos y los Austrias. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2016.

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An in-depth analysis of the Spanish monarchy by one of the leading experts in early modern political culture and governance. Although focused on the Iberian Peninsula, this book—together with many other erudite articles and book chapters Gil Pujol has authored—is indispensable to the understanding of the complexity of Iberian politics, in particular the link between political debates and institutional formation across the 16th- and 17th-century Iberian Atlantic world.

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Kermelle, Nejma, and Bernard Lavallé, eds. L’Amérique en Projet: Utopies, Controverses et Réformes dans l’Empire Espagnol, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Harmattan, 2008.

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In this collection, prominent French and Latin American historians of colonial Spanish America reflect upon colonial designs from the beginnings of colonization to the end of the 18th century. The projects discussed in the book include the structuration of colonial administration, evangelization, education of the Native American elites, Bourbon reforms, and colonial reactions to metropolitan impositions.

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MacMillan, Ken. Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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This work analyzes one specific dimension of the English colonizing process: its intellectual-doctrinal component. Through an erudite analysis of many sources produced in England, MacMillan demonstrates that the Crown systematically claimed and defended a Tudor-Stuart empire in North America. This work also shows that the English Crown kept constant track of the developments in its colonial territories throughout the first half of the 17th century, thus ensuring its sovereignty over English overseas holdings.

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Marcocci, Giuseppe. “Conscience and Empire: Politics and Moral Theology in the Early Modern Portuguese World.” Journal of Early Modern History 18.5 (2014): 473–494.

DOI: 10.1163/15700658-12342426Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A groundbreaking work about the role played by Catholicism in shaping the Portuguese colonial ideology, in particular regarding Amerindian and sub-Saharan African populations. Marcocci conducts many erudite analyses of the debates on slavery and imperium throughout the whole 16th century. This article summarizes a book first published in Italy in 2011 and subsequently translated into Portuguese in a greatly extended edition in 2012.

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Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of the Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

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This highly influential book is a pioneering analysis of the debates on the status of the Amerindians in 16th-century Spain and Spanish America. Pagden’s erudite survey covers both doctrinal sources (the so-called School of Salamanca) and some of the first accounts of the American lands and peoples. He effectively demonstrates that the concept of Indian that emerged from these debates ended up influencing government institutions across colonial America in the following centuries.

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Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c. 1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

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This book contrasts Spanish, British, and French ideologies of empire. Though it does not deal directly with colonial governance, its analysis of how dominion of the Americas was conceived in Europe offers an essential starting point. He emphasizes the imperial legacy of Rome as well as the role of religion in the justification of imperialism. Pagden also underscores the growing role of commerce and economic development, along with the enlightened criticism of imperial rule.

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Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Schmidt’s book is devoted to the impact of the American world in early modern Dutch culture. Focusing on the link between expansion in the Atlantic and Dutch national identity, this study explores a vast array of sources (textual and visual) in order to explain how American landscape and peoples were imagined. Particularly noteworthy are the sections where Schmidt compares the Dutch imperial ideologies with Iberian colonial imagination.

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Zeron, Carlos. Ligne de Foi: La Compagnie de Jésus et l’Esclavage (Brésil, XVIe–XVIIe siècles). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009.

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This work is a groundbreaking analysis of the debates within the Society of Jesus about slavery. Zeron’s erudite analysis takes into account both the discussions that took place in European universities and at the ground level, in Brazil and Angola. Another significant aspect of this book is the section devoted to the impact of these debates on royal and ecclesiastic legislation regarding slavery. It was translated to Portuguese in 2011.

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Ruling from Afar
Early historiography on empire focused on imperial governance and put the projects and institutions of the metropolis front and center and often implicitly assimilated early modern colonial governance to modern empires. From the 1960s onward, though, decolonization and a new historiography on the early modern state slowly chipped at the state- and metropolis-centered consensus. Therefore, new works were published that focused on private interests, flexibility, the conflicts that permeated the building of governing metropolitan institutions, and the flow of information across the Atlantic. It came to be understood that policy was not dictated by metropolitan interests but was made according to unforeseen circumstances and imperfect knowledge. Steele 1986 was a pioneering work on information flow in the English Atlantic, highlighting the intensity of unofficial transatlantic communication, and Banks 2002 is a parallel analysis for the French Empire, though focused on royal officials. Brendecke 2016 focuses on the early building of administrative structures in Castile to manage this deluge of information, such as the Council of Indies and its archive. There is need of more studies on metropolitan institutions in the spirit of these new historiographical trends, but Cruz 2015 is a model case study for the Portuguese Overseas Council, as is Amadori 2013 for the Spanish Council of Indies (cited under Fiscal Governance). Beaumont 2015 is one of the few recent studies on the British Board of Trade (cited under 18th-Century Reforms). Costa 2002, Klooster 2016 and Roper 2017 are insightful analyses of merchant-state interaction and the relevance of companies of commerce in the 17th-century. All these works closely follow metropolitan debates on colonial governance, but Swingen 2015 focus on these discussions to highlight divergent conceptions in a moment of consolidation and expansion of English imperialism. Both Swingen and Roper emphasize the central role played by labor in these debates, which may have feature more prominently than in other empires. Information relevant to colonial governance was mostly generated overseas, so the relevance of the colonial population is obvious, even if most informants were administrative personnel or local elites. But their importance was not restricted to the production and interpretation of information, as Benton 2002 stress that the law, long thought as created at the center and then applied (successfully or not) at the colonies, was actually created by interaction, with relevant input by the many peoples with whom the European interacted. Herzog 2003 shows the relevance of work that compares local institutions in both shores of the Atlantic, in order to avoid interpretations anachronism and exceptionalism.

Banks, Kenneth J. Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.

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Banks focuses on 18th-century French Atlantic possessions (Quebec; New Orleans; and Saint Pierre, Martinique) and underscores the importance of transatlantic information and communication in colonial governance. He argues that the French government was not able to implement an effective system of transatlantic communication, and that resulted in the failure of the first French colonial empire.

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Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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This influential book offers a plethora of insights on legal pluralism and its role in colonial governance. Benton presents a series of case studies that underscore the variety of agents—European, African, Amerindian, and Asian—playing an active role not just in institutional creation and change but also in the interpretation of Western law. Therefore, this work highlights the role of local agency.

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Brendecke, Arndt. The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016.

DOI: 10.1515/9783110369847Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Originally published in 2009, this work is a comprehensive and innovative analysis of the role played by information management in transatlantic governance. The book underlines how critical the flow of information was for the proper functioning of the imperial apparatus. Additionally, it also takes into account the role of archives in the management of the colonial lands and peoples.

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Costa, Leonor Freire. O Transporte no Atlântico e a Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil (1580–1663). Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2002.

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A comprehensive survey about the (failed) Portuguese attempt to follow the example of its Northern European rivals to defend transatlantic trade and transportation. Costa analyzes the company’s role in the organization of the transatlantic fleet system, as well as its contribution to the war against the Dutch in Northeast Brazil. The connections between the company’s board and Portuguese government institutions, both in Lisbon and across Brazil, are also extensively examined.

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Cruz, Miguel Dantas da. Um Império de conflitos: O Conselho Ultramarino e a Defesa do Brasil Colonial. Lisbon, Portugal: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2015.

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This recent book on the Portuguese Overseas Council covers the period between the last quarter of the 17th century and the mid-18th century. It analyzes in an in-depth way the role of this courtly council in the management of the military forces operating across the Atlantic. The book also includes a detailed analysis of the council’s personnel and its decision-making procedures.

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Herzog, Tamar. Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300092530.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

An important work on the meanings of vecindad (citizenship) and naturaleza (nativeness) that calls attention to the fact that belonging was locally produced by municipal institutions and was always based on the exclusion of some groups. Therefore, the colonial demand to reserve local offices to creoles was a practice with deep Iberian roots, not manifestations of proto-nationalism.

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Klooster, Wim. The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.

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Klooster forcefully argues for the importance of Dutch intervention in the reshaping of the Atlantic world from 1620 to 1670. His imperial perspective focused on the Dutch West Indies Company provides the better available general account of the First Dutch Atlantic, and a follow-up volume that takes the story to 1815 is expected, coauthored with Gert Oostindie.

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Roper, Louis H. Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

DOI: 10.1017/9781316340493Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

An analysis of the origins of the English Empire that focuses on the aristocrats and merchants that pushed the expansion forward and their relationship with the Crown. London-based private interests increased the extent of English overseas presence in all continents outside and even in spite of the state and its limited fiscal capability.

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Steele, Ian K. The English Atlantic: An Exploration of Communication and Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Steele focuses on the role of seaborne communication in colonial governance. This book examines in an in-depth way the materiality of communication, from shipbuilding to the speed of information exchange, and argues that it deeply influenced Atlantic politics. According to Steele, and in spite of all difficulties, transatlantic communication contributed to bind together the various parts of the British Atlantic world.

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Swingen, Abigail. Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300187540.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Swingen integrates English political developments with the quest to provide labor to the colonies, above all islands of the Caribbean. She shows that bonded workers featured prominently in debates on colonization and that the option for the enslavement of Africans was directly connected to the difficulty of providing enough European migrants. These debates crossed the Atlantic, as colonial elites and governors advocated for free trade so that they would be able to buy unfree laborers.

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Administrative Structures at the Ground Level
Because of the vast distances between European centers and their imperial peripheries, a lot of the business of governance was necessarily done by officials on the ground. Administrative sources are abundant in many archives in both Europe and the Americas, and they have served as basis for a multitude of historical studies of colonial governance since the 19th century. Nevertheless, the most influential works since the late 1960s have probed the social networks of royal officers, emphasized collaboration with local elites, and unveiled the political culture that underpinned colonial governance. Phelan 1967 is a path-breaking work that can be profitably read together with Schwartz 1973, Ruiz Medrano 2006, and Bertrand 1999 (cited under Fiscal Governance) to delineate the extent in which Iberian colonial officials were tightly linked with local magnates by economic and social ties. This phenomenon certainly happened in other imperial contexts, though it is not as well studied yet. Cañeque 2004 is a tour de force that links political culture and local practice to understand how the viceroys governed the New World. It can be read together with Merluzzi 2010 in order to see the differences between New Spain and the more unstable situation in the Andes. Historiography pertaining to other empires is scarcer, but Dawdy 2009 offers a novel take on the French Empire, focused on the unwitting agents of colonialism, stressing the messier elements of governance. Jacobs 2009 is one of the few works that presents the Dutch as more than savvy merchants but also as polity makers that tried to reproduce their institutions in the Atlantic. Bushman 1985 and Greene 1994 can be read together as two important works in the historiographical tradition that studies Anglo-American governance in the light of negotiation and autonomy, principles powerful enough that when they were ignored by the British ministry, they gave rise to the first Atlantic revolution. Bicalho 2001 also approaches the subject of colonial governance from the angle of colonial elites, highlighting their collaboration with royal government in defense of their own interests. It was influenced by Greene 1994, which shows the importance of historiographical dialogue across imperial lines and the relevance of colonial agency in all empires.

Bicalho, Fernanda. “The City of Rio de Janeiro and the Articulation of the South Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Mediterranean Studies (2001): 143–155.

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A work that puts collaboration between local political institutions—such as the municipal council—and royal government as a central element of Portuguese colonial governance. It also highlights the relevance of major colonial ports such as Rio de Janeiro in imperial politics. It summarizes the main arguments of her book A Cidade e o Império (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira), published in 2003 and translated to French in 2015 as La Ville et l’Empire (Aix-en-Provence: Le Poisson Volant).

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Bushman, Richard L. King and People in Provincial Massachusetts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

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According to Bushman, the colonists’ loyalty to the Crown was a given, but they tried to co-opt royal officials, whose power was limited because it lacked a social base in a society composed mostly of freeholders. There were constitutional conflicts throughout the 18th century while many local groups resisted the extension of the Crown’s power. It was these matters—such as parliamentary taxation—that would galvanize colonists to fight directly against the British ministry in the 1770s.

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Cañeque, Alejandro. The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico. New York: Routledge, 2004.

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Viceroys could wield significant force, but collaboration with other authorities (such as the church, the municipal council, and the high court) was paramount. Gift giving in the form of royal offices was essential to ensure support, as was baroque imagery. Nevertheless, conflicts were quite common because power was dispersed among many bodies. Only the Indian majority was subjected to governance that was distinct from what was usual in the Old World.

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Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

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Early New Orleans was a failure from an imperial point of view, and that is why it exemplifies the fact that colonialism often was experimental and decentralized, the result of negotiations between a center that encountered many limits to its power and local actors. Smuggling and corruption were integral parts of this “rogue colonialism” that was created from below and not by the mercantilist designs of a distant metropolis.

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Greene, Jack P. Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial, Political and Constitutional History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994.

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A collection that synthetizes Greene’s contributions to the understanding of colonial politics since the late 1950s. Influenced by recent historiography on the early modern European states, he argues that early modern empires, the British Empire most of all, depended on colonists’ collaboration. This arose from the limited coercive power of the center and the empowerment of local elites, who in Anglo-America developed powerful assemblies that resembled the English Parliament.

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Jacobs, Jaap. The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

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Originally published in 1999, this wide-ranging overview of the Dutch origins of New York shows that colonists replicated many institutions of their home country in the New World, including religious ones. Nevertheless, colonial conditions such as the growth of African slavery required adaptations.

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Merluzzi, Manfredi. La Pacificazione del regno: Negoziazione e Creazione del Consenso in Perù (1533–1581). Rome: Viella, 2010.

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This analysis of the conflictive first half-century of Spanish dominion over the Andes emphasizes that royal government in the new colony needed to engage in negotiations with powerful colonists and indigenous elites in their attempt to pacify the region that remained beset by violence until the 1570s. Merluzzi notes that many diplomatic initiatives and administrative measures adopted to strengthen the power of the Crown have parallels to those employed to shore up the Spanish domination in its Italian possessions.

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Phelan, John L. The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.

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A foundational book that studies the audiencia (high court) of Quito in order to understand Spanish colonial administration. Phelan was one of the first to emphasize the extent in which colonial governance was determined by local pressures. Therefore, flexibility was one of the main characteristics of Spanish imperial governance, not rigidity and absolutism as it was commonly thought at the time.

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Ruiz Medrano, Ethelia. Reshaping New Spain: Government and Private Interests in the Colonial Bureaucracy, 1531–1550. Translated by Julia Constantino and Pauline Marmasse. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006.

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Originally published in 1991, this study of the first decades of colonial governance in New Spain lays bare the link between the need to direct some of the wealth being extracted in the Americas to the Crown and the installation of royal government. Nevertheless, royal officials used their power to pursue wealth, sometimes aligning themselves with colonists, usually to the detriment of the native population.

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Schwartz, Stuart B. Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609–1751. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

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A major prosopographical study of the Brazilian colonial judiciary, it emphasizes social relationships between judges and local elites and their commonality of interests, limiting royal power. Nevertheless, Schwartz also notes that many judges aspired to be promoted by the Crown to more elevated offices in Europe. Therefore, they worked both to strengthen royal government and to reinforce the power of local magnates, acting as intermediaries between Crown and colonial elites.

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Fiscal Governance
Taxation is inherently political, as it is a dispute regarding the distribution of scarce resources. Its study is more developed in the Iberian empires, as the tax burden was heavier in Spanish and Portuguese America. Most recent works emphasize formal and informal negotiation instead of metropolitan imposition, even though conflicts were inevitable. Klein 1998 offers a useful general overview of royal taxation in Spanish America, while Pedreira 2007 is a similar contribution, though it is focused on the European shore of the Atlantic and is much less comprehensive, as it is a work of synthesis based on secondary sources. Mello 2007 is a masterpiece of Brazilian historiography that can be profitably read together with Amadori 2013: both put colonial elites front and center to understand the political meanings of taxation. Their roughly coincident timeframes allow for interesting comparisons between the different effects of warfare and taxation in the Portuguese and Spanish overseas dominions. It is interesting to compare the Iberian cases to Gwyn 1984 in order to see how local elites had much more liberty to fashion their tax systems in British America, and to highlight that war meant everywhere an increase in taxation that required tense negotiations between Crown and colonists. Bertrand 1999 emphasizes the extent in which fiscal agents integrated themselves in colonial society. Marichal 2007, Graham 2017, and many works pertaining to 18th-century reforms analyze the growing impact of taxation in the late colonial period, above all in the most profitable colonies such as Mexico and Jamaica.

Amadori, Arrigo. Negociando la Obediencia: Gestión y Reforma de los Virreinatos Americanos en Tiempos del Conde-duque de Olivares (1621–1643). Seville, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Universidad de Sevilla and Diputación de Sevilla, 2013.

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This major contribution to the understanding of Spanish colonial governance emphasizes the importance of negotiation and patronage. Though the Spanish valido Count-Duke of Olivares is often portrayed as an authoritarian ruler, this book clearly shows that tax revenues were determined mostly by the relationship between Crown and elite colonists: only consensus could yield higher revenues.

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Bertrand, Michel. Grandeur et Misère de l’Office: Les Officiers de Finances de Nouvelle-Espagne, 17éme–18éme siècles. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999.

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A prosopographical study of royal Treasury officials in New Spain from 1660 to 1780 that emphasizes their strong connections with local elites despite royal prohibitions. Nepotism and clientelism were the rule, weakening metropolitan control over local administration, despite attempts of reform in the 18th century. Nevertheless, this social integration was important for imperial cohesion, as it minimized conflicts between local and European-born elites in the Americas. It was translated into Spanish in 2011.

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Graham, Aaron. “The Colonial Sinews of Imperial Power: The Political Economy of Taxation in Jamaica, 1768–1839.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45.2 (2017): 188–209.

DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2017.1294787Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Graham shows the increase of local taxation in Britain’s most profitable colony after the Seven Years’ War to pay for its defense against foreign invasion and slave revolts. White elites agreed to heightened taxation because it was approved by their own assembly and spent in ways that suited their interests. Nevertheless, the tax burden was still much lighter than in Britain, and taxes were levied in a different manner than in Great Britain.

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Gwyn, Julian. “Financial Revolution in Massachusetts: Public Credit and Taxation, 1692–1776.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 17.33 (1984): 59–77.

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An early work on taxation in Anglo-America in a province that spent an inordinate amount of money on war, thanks to its proximity to French Canada. This increased the power of the provincial government over the towns and financed an expansive imperial policy, but up to 1764 Massachusetts was dependent from metropolitan subsidies. Various different mechanisms were tried to raise taxes, underscoring the local and ad hoc character of taxation in the British Atlantic.

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Klein, Herbert S. The American Finances of the Spanish Empire: Royal Income and Expenditures in Colonial Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, 1680–1809. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

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This analysis of an enormous amount of data has quantified not only the heavy tax burden of Spanish America in comparative terms, but also that a significant share of the revenues was spent in the New World, mostly on defense, from the mid-17th century to the end of the colonial period.

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Marichal, Carlos. Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars between Spain, Britain, and France, 1760–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511551024Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Originally published in 1999, this book shows that the Bourbons greatly increased tax revenues in New Spain in the second half of the 18th century. This helped finance Spanish participation in the wars of the time and was essential to fund colonial defense. This contribution remained important until 1811, even after the Napoleonic invasion of Spain.

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Mello, Evaldo Cabral de. Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654. 3d rev. ed. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora 34, 2007.

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Originally published in 1975, this work shows that the warfare that raged in the Brazilian northeast in the mid-17th century was financed through the taxation of sugar production. Therefore, the costs of the conflict were borne by colonial society, and the colonial elite would use it as a crucial argument to demand greater autonomy in the following years, as Mello has demonstrated in A Fronda dos Mazombos (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2012, 3rd revised edition).

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Miller, Joseph. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

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A monumental work on the Luso-Brazilian slave trade that reveals its fiscal relevance to Angola’s survival and pays a lot of attention to the influence the monarchy, royal officials, and contractors had on the commerce of enslaved Africans. It can be thought, indeed, as the main preoccupation of colonial governance in Portuguese Africa until the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

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Pedreira, Jorge. “Costs and Financial Trends in the Portuguese Empire.” In Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800. Edited by Diogo Curto and Francisco Bethencourt, 49–87. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Building on the work of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Pedreira shows that the Portuguese monarchy was uniquely dependent on colonial taxation from the end of the 15th century through the beginning of the 19th. For most of the Early Modern period, more than 50 percent of the Portuguese Crown revenues came from overseas.

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Religious Interactions
Religion played a major role in colonial governance across the Atlantic, as historians have lately begun to acknowledge and explore. Far from being apart from social and political hierarchies, religion was strongly embedded in most power relations. Christianity quickly established itself as the law of the land in all territories conquered by Europeans, but many recent studies have searched for subaltern agency in order to fully understand Atlantic religiosity. Taylor 1996 and Feitler 2007 show that both the Spaniards and the Portuguese used Catholicism and ecclesiastical institutions to subdue, discipline, and oversee colonial societies, in particular in the Americas. Castelnau-L’Estoile 2000 and Marcocci 2014 (cited under Imperial Thoughts) demonstrate that the imbrication of Catholicism in colonization was particularly intense in the case of Portugal, and the same could also be said about Spanish America. Gruzinski 1993 shows that indigenous peoples resisted the imposition of Catholicism and only accepted it after adapting both themselves and the new faith to colonial society. This was true in an even greater extent in Canada where Leavelle 2011 shows that the French authorities also demonstrated a strong Catholic zeal in their government initiatives in North America, in particular from the 1630s onward, but they faced a situation where they had much less power over their converts than in Mexico or Peru. As for the English and the Dutch, the governance of their possessions relied considerably less on religious institutions. Nevertheless, Pestana 2009 underscores the fact that various forms of Protestantism played a major role as a driving force of colonization. On the other hand, Beasley 2009 and Goetz 2012 highlight the role Christianity played in the erecting of boundaries that separated colonists from the subaltern majorities in the Anglo-American world, legitimizing European domination. As for Amerindian and African religions, they both proved to be particularly resilient, and Pompa 2003 and Stern 1982 (cited under Ruling the Subaltern Majorities) demonstrate that local religions could play a major role in the resistance against the colonial rule.

Beasley, Nicholas. Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

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Through a detailed analysis of Anglican rituals in South Carolina, Barbados, and Jamaica, Beasley emphasizes the role religion played in reinforcing a sense of Englishness in societies quite different from the metropolitan ideal. Christian rituals became symbols of European elitism, above all when they were privatized and taken away from church control to be performed at home. The racial divide become a central characteristic of Anglicanism and reinforced social hierarchies and elite power.

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Castelnau-L’Estoile, Charlotte de. Les Ouvriers d’une Vigne Stérile: Les Jésuites et la Conversion des Indiens au Brésil; 1580–1620. Paris and Lisbon, Portugal: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2000.

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An account of the role played by Jesuits in the governance of Colonial Brazil, in particular regarding the Indians who were under Portuguese rule. It is an in-depth study of the strategies developed by the Jesuits to convert and control the Amerindian population. In addition, it also pays attention to the contested character of religion, and focuses on Indian agency and on the various strategies Amerindian employed to resist against Christianization. It was translated into Portuguese in 2006.

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Doll, Peter. Revolution, Religion and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000.

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A work that encompasses both Canada and the thirteen British colonies, Doll’s book emphasizes the polemics regarding the appointment of Anglican bishops in America in the tumultuous second half of the 18th century. Regarding Canada, London equivocated to avoid irritating French Catholics, while in the British colonies opposition came mostly from dissenters. After the American Revolution, bishops were finally sent to Canada in order to foster loyalty to Britain and the Crown.

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Feitler, Bruno. Nas Malhas da Consciência: Igreja e Inquisição no Brasil; Nordeste, 1640–1750. São Paulo, Brazil: Alameda, 2007.

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Authored by one of the main experts in the Portuguese Inquisition, this book is a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the role played by the Catholic Church in colonial Brazil. It analyzes the mechanisms of social control implemented by Catholic institutions as well as resistance against the imposition of Catholic orthodoxy.

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Goetz, Rebecca. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

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This is a deeply researched study on Virginia’s racial system, encompassing both enslaved Africans and Native Americans. Goetz examines the key role played by the Anglican Church in the colonizing process, namely by encouraging the slave trade and by forging the idea of race. Goetz also demonstrates that racial thinking deeply influenced Anglo-Virginian Christianity.

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Gruzinski, Serge. The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th–18th Centuries. Translated by Eileen Corrigan. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1993.

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Originally published in 1988, this major work emphasizes the role religion played in the westernization of the Americas. Nevertheless, this process was not a top-down imposition, as the colonizers did not possess enough power to coerce millions of natives to follow Catholicism to the letter. Therefore, in the long run, indigenous populations were able to adapt Western religions and mores to their needs.

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Leavelle, Tracy Neal. The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

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Focusing on the Illinois Indians and their interactions with Jesuit missionaries, Leavelle puts issues like imitation, cultural translation, syncretism, and contestation at the center of this cross-cultural survey. Leavelle demonstrates that the end result was a series of culturally hybrid religious practices. Apart from emphasizing Indian agency, this book also shows that all those who participated in those interactions experienced significant cultural changes, including Europeans.

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Pestana, Carla Gardina. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

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Pestana argues that religion was a powerful driving force in the British colonizing process, but the encounter of various—European, African, and Amerindian—faiths generated a series of “hybrid” religious cultures across the Anglo-Atlantic. She also argues that the various British Protestant churches, in spite of their weak religious hierarchy, succeeded in creating a sense of belonging to an ensemble based on confessional diversity.

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Pompa, Maria Cristina. Religião como Tradução: Missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil Colonial. Bauru, Brazil: Editorial da Universidade do Sagrado Coração, 2003.

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This book is one of the best studies on the contested role of Catholic missionaries in the colonization of Brazil. Noteworthy is the fact that a substantial part of this work is devoted to Tupi and Tapuia agency. Pompa’s analysis is strongly multidisciplinary and effectively combines ethnohistory with anthropological interpretative tools. It shows, in a particularly clear way, how complex the interaction between the Amerindians and the Catholic missionaries was.

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Taylor, William. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

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Taylor comprehensively examines Bourbon reforms in Spanish America through the prism of the clergy and the parishioners from two dioceses in New Spain: Mexico and Guadalajara. The book presents a thorough account of regalist policies and the secularization of parishes in late-18th-century Mexico. The last part of the book focuses on the involvement of parish priests in the first Mexican independence movements.

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Ruling the Subaltern Majorities
Too long neglected by historiography, Native Americans, Africans, African Americans, and a plethora of mixed-race historical actors began to be studied in a more in-depth way thanks to scholarly developments in fields like archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, and literary theory. Also important was the rise of social and cultural history, along with the influence of postcolonial studies after the decolonization wave that followed World War II. All these contributions led to an increasing interest in race, gender, and religion and provided sophisticated conceptual frameworks with which to examine the agency of individuals and groups from the lower levels of colonial societies. Scholars specialized in Amerindian history, as well as in African and African diaspora history, put multidirectional influence at the center of their work and focus on the mutual, although asymmetrical, effects of the interaction between colonists and indigenous peoples. The Atlantic world thus came to be regarded as the setting of a myriad of dynamic processes of intercultural exchange, conflict, and transformation. Additionally, these studies demonstrated that colonialism continued to shape postcolonial societies, including the present-day academic milieu. Colonial domination did not happen, though, only through coercion. In the beginnings of colonization or at times of imperial conflict, European powers had to find allies among indigenous groups, as Morrissey 2015 shows. Empires needed allies to extract labor and maintain order, as can be seen in Stern 1982 and Yannakakis 2008. The courts could legitimize colonial rule at the expense of widening the space for subaltern action, as Owensby 2008 aptly demonstrates in a study of the Indians of Central Mexico. Africans and their descendants could employ the law in the same manner, as the work on the Code Noir in Ghachem 2012 shows. Nevertheless, the law also was an arena to assert power over all subaltern groups, above all where local elites had legislative prerogatives, as we can see in Brown 1996. Spear 2009 focuses on the difficult task of ruling a growing population of free people of color and how racial and social codification ensued to make sense of changing societies. Alencastro 2007 notes that the full understanding of New World slave societies requires the comprehension of the mechanisms of colonial governance in West Central Africa and the slave trade. Langfur 2006 underscores the persistence of indigenous peoples in the backlands of 18th-century Brazil, as well as their interactions—frequently violent—with settlers and colonial authorities.

Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de. “Brazil in the South Atlantic: 1550–1850.” Mediations 1.23 (February 2007): 125–174.

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Originally published in the Annales in 2006, this article summarizes the book O Trato dos Viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlântico sul (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 2000), a major interpretative history of Brazil in the 16th and 17th centuries that argues that Portuguese colonization in America is deeply intertwined to Africa, and in particular with Angola, thanks to the slave trade. Alencastro emphasizes the multiple commercial connections that linked many places of the South Atlantic. Alencastro’s work includes many reflections on the main government institutions and agents operating across the Atlantic.

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Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

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An analysis of the rise of slave society in Virginia. It explores the interplay between gender and race in the domination of subaltern majorities: the poor, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans. Racial boundaries were constructed as a way to reinforce English identity and superiority, and gender played a crucial part in defining the subordinated position of blacks and the hereditary character of slavery. The Virginia colonial assembly plays a central role in this process.

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Ghachem, Malick. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139050173Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A legal and social history that explores how the French Code Noir of 1685 was interpreted in practice by masters, slaves, and officials, specially its provisions regarding manumission and punishment of slaves. Ghachem argues that these century-long struggles echoed in the Haitian Revolution.

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Langfur, Hal. The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

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In this deeply researched book about colonial Brazil, Langfur analyzes the implementation of the Portuguese rule in the backlands of 18th-century Minas Gerais. This is a work about internal frontier history, in which the protagonists are Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, and a series of seminomadic indigenous peoples resistant to the colonists. Particularly noteworthy is Langfur’s ability to include in his account the agency of poorer settlers and not just of elites of European descent.

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Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

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Martínez analyzes racial discrimination in New Spain, tracing its roots to the Spanish exclusion of converted Jews and Muslims. Through its mechanisms, elites in both sides of the Atlantic reinforced their position. Interestingly enough, this discourse could also be wielded by indigenous elites. Religion, class, and racism motivated the consolidation of legal discrimination that was harsher with the mixed and black people of New Spain. The role of gender is also a central theme of the book.

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Morrissey, Robert. Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

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A sophisticated multicultural history that highlights how the French could only extend their empire to the North American interior through close and conscious collaboration with Native Americans, covering the period from 1670 to 1770. The Illinois people were powerful enough to alter French imperial designs, often in accord with colonists themselves.

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Owensby, Brian. Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

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An important work of legal history that shows how Indians developed a refined understanding of Spanish juridical concepts and employed them in court to defend their land, communities, and freedom. A central strategy in these legal struggles was Indian self-fashioning as wretched subjects that required the protection of their benevolent king.

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Spear, Jennifer M. Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

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This ambitious book studies the codification of racial hierarchies in New Orleans from its foundation as a French colony to its incorporation into the United States in the 19th century. Spear shows that each empire quickly attempted to install its own classifications, but that the population of New Orleans maintained their own intimate practices for a long time, ensuring a high degree of continuity.

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Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

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This classic work studies the first century of colonial governance in a region of the Andes through the Andean point of view. Stern shows how the Spaniards employed Inca precedents to control Indian labor, how native peoples reacted through the embrace of a millenarian movement in the mid-16th century, and how Spaniards responded through increased repression and reorganization of their models of labor extraction as well as the economic and social consequences of colonization for the Andean of Huamanga.

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Yannakakis, Yanna. The Art of Being In Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

DOI: 10.1215/9780822388982Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Covering the period between 1660 to 1810, this work highlights the central role of native brokers in the governing of colonial possessions, as coercion alone could not sustain imperial rule. Indigenous elites had to thread a narrow path in their alliance with the Crown in order to preserve some measure of cultural and political autonomy. They were not always successful, and in the 18th century, reforms curtailed their power.

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Asian Parallels and Connections
The Portuguese Crown rapidly developed a complex government apparatus in Asia. Although somewhat outdated, Thomaz and Subrahmanyan 1991 is a good starting point to the scholarship devoted to this process. Flores 2015 shows that the repertoire of power first tested by the Portuguese across Asia was subsequently adapted to Atlantic governance. Xavier and Županov 2015 draws attention to the fact that it was in Asia where the Portuguese first had to deal with a critical issue in colonial governance: coping with large numbers of indigenous populations that lived inside areas controlled by Portugal. As for the Dutch, the English, and the French East India Companies, Stern 2011 and Ames 1996 demonstrate that the apprenticeship of colonization and trade in Asia influenced the way Northern European operated across the Atlantic. Mention should also be made to the many imperial agents (including a myriad of military men, royal officers, clergymen, and merchants) who circulated between Asia and the Atlantic. As Games 2008 has shown, these individuals transplanted their Asian experiences to places across the Americas, the Caribbean, and West Africa.

Ames, Glenn. Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.

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Ames’s book offers an informative analysis of the measures taken by the French government during the initial years of Louis XIV’s reign. The book effectively connects European politics and colonial strategies during the second half of the 17th century, and shows that the aim of such measures was to strengthen French royal authority in South Asia.

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Flores, Jorge. “The Iberian Empires, 1400 to 1800.” In The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE. Vol. 6 of The Cambridge World History. Edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, 271–296. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139194594.012Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A brief though insightful comparative analysis of the two Iberian empires, authored by one of the leading experts in the Portuguese empire in Asia. Flores highlights the specificities of both imperial formations, as well as the repertoire of power that each one of the two Iberian Crowns developed in order to cope with colonial governance.

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Games, Alison. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335545.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A provocative study about a series of Englishmen who circulated across the globe between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. Through their movement, they transplanted from one continent to the other a vast ensemble of information and knowledge. These figures therefore decisively contributed to the English apprenticeship of colonization.

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Marshall, Peter J. The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Marshall emphasizes the commonalities of British policy in Asia and America, including dependence of local elites. While American elites expected that an integrated empire would respect their freedoms, their Indian counterparts had different expectations and accommodation became the rule. Therefore, the British Empire diminished in America and grew in Asia because of the opposite reactions of local elites, but colonial governance would radically change in Asia as assimilation would become untenable in the face of markedly different colonial populations.

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Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393736.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

This is an important book about a corporation that, in spite of its initial mercantile purpose, ended up becoming deeply involved in colonial governance. Stern shows that the company’s activity across Asia involved many tasks that we nowadays associate to the state. Far from just dealing with mercantile affairs, the company played a major role in the governance of the first English settlements across Asia.

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Thomaz, Luís Filipe, and Sanjay Subrahmanyan. “Evolution of Empire: The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean during the Sixteenth Century.” In The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750. Edited by James D. Tracy, 298–331. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511665288.009Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

This study is a good example of Thomaz’s and Subrahmanyan’s seminal contributions to the history of the Portuguese imperial enterprise. This book chapter emphasizes colonial governance in Portuguese Asia as a network bound together by commerce, not as a territorial empire. This view has influenced a variety of historians who study the Portuguese overseas empire.

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Xavier, Ângela Barreto, and Ines Županov. Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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An innovative survey about the Portuguese colonial initiatives in South Asia, with a particular focus on Goa, religion, and the subaltern majority. Xavier and Županov clearly demonstrate that a substantial part of the measures implemented in India, from the early decades of the 16th century onward, ended up shaping developments elsewhere, both across the Atlantic and in metropolitan Portugal.

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18th-Century Reforms
The growth of the population and wealth of the New World boosted Atlantic commerce spectacularly. Consequently, empires competed more and more to defend and expand their dominions, as the navigation between America and Europe became ever more important to economic prosperity and geopolitical preponderance. This triggered a wave of reforms in both sides of the Atlantic, above all after the Seven Years’ War, either because victorious Britain had to face the challenge of ruling its expanded empire or because the losers—France and Spain—had to contend with failure and the reality of British might. Those reforms have been much more studied for the Spanish Empire, as can be seen in Stein and Stein 2003 (which is representative of the historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, as it does not engage with current historiography), Paquette 2008, Kuethe and Andrien 2014, and Taylor 1996 (cited under Religious Interactions). Maxwell 2004 and Raminelli 2008 analyze the Portuguese Empire. The latter can be paired with Brendecke 2016 (cited under Ruling from Afar) to highlight continuities and differences in knowledge production throughout Iberian colonization. Angola, the most important European possession in Africa, was also transformed by the arrival of new ideas and projects, as Santos 2010 has deftly shown. In its first chapters, Adelman 2006 (cited under Colonial Governance in the Age of Revolutions) offers a useful comparison of reform in the Iberian empires, emphasizing the growing relevance of commerce and merchants (as did the Steins before Adelman). Many of these reforms intended to increase tax revenues to pay for the burgeoning costs of war, and some were very successful, as Marichal 2007 and Graham 2017 clearly show (both cited under Fiscal Governance). These reforms affected Native Americans in a myriad of ways, most of them negative, as can be seen in Weber 2005 and Calloway 2006, as well as Yannakakis 2008 (cited under Ruling the Subaltern Majorities). Most studies on British reforms approach them as preludes to the American Revolution, but recent studies that started in the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). Beaumont 2015 adopts a London-based perspective, Marshall 2005 (cited under Asian Parallels and Connections) takes a global approach that connects Asia and America, and du Rivage 2017 (cited under Colonial Governance in the Age of Revolutions) focuses on political ideologies in both shores of the Atlantic. These latter two books emphasize the importance of the relationship between Crown and local elites in the whole British Empire in order to understand the imperial crisis. Reforms in the French Empire are much less studied, but Garrigus 2006 is an excellent starting point, even more so for its focus on the subaltern majority.

Beaumont, Andrew. Colonial America and the Earl of Halifax. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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A study of the leadership of the First Lord of the Board of Trade and Plantations between 1748 and 1761 that examines the increasing importance it assumed in these years. It is a valuable study of the first wave of centralizing reforms in the British Empire that intended to strengthen royal governors and implement directives from London in America, reminding readers that efforts to change the relationship between Crown and colonies began before the Seven Years’ War.

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Calloway, Colin G. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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This short synthesis examines the effects of British policy changes in 1763 through the perspective of Native American peoples. Their struggle for autonomy intersected with colonists’ desire for land, and British efforts to assert their dominion would lay the ground for the American Revolution in the next decade. He also showcases French and Spanish actions and their attempts to exercise authority in the vast North American interior through the relationship with Native Americans.

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Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

DOI: 10.1057/9781403984432Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

One of the best analyses of 18th-century Saint-Domingue, focused on the experience of the free people of color. Its fourth and fifth chapters examine French reforms after 1763 that intended to strengthen royal power, curb colonists’ autonomy, and revert the ascension of the affranchis.

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Kuethe, Allan, and Kenneth Andrien. The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107338661Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

This book, the work of two experienced historians, explains the Bourbon reforms not as a consequence of French enlightened influence, but as a necessary adaptation to the many wars of the 18th century. They were determined by disputes between factions in Spain, and as conditions changed in the Atlantic, the reformers changed their minds. Therefore, there was no monolithic Bourbon reform, but a constant struggle for adaptation to a changing international scenario.

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Maxwell, Kenneth. Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808. London: Routledge, 2004.

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Originally published in 1973, this classic study puts the conspiracy of 1788–1789 in Minas Gerais in imperial perspective through the analysis of reform and adaptation in the second half of the 18th century. It shows that the attempts to stimulate the economy and improve tax collection were done in collaboration with local elites, not against them, and that colonists were often able to employ their newfound powers and offices to further their own interests.

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Paquette, Gabriel. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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According to Paquette, reformism began in an effort to widen state capabilities in order to promote the happiness of the people, but powerful resistance forced reformers to turn to empire. They were successful mostly in peripheral areas where their ambitions dovetailed well with those of local elites. Paquette returns to earlier interpretations, emphasizing the program’s coherence. He has also edited an important collection: Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).

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Raminelli, Ronald. Viagens Ultramarinas: Monarcas, Vassalos e o Governo a Distância. São Paulo, Brazil: Alameda, 2008.

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An important work that focuses on the development of scientific knowledge in Portugal and its role in colonial governance. It shows that “natural philosophers” worked through all the Portuguese Empire in the late 18th century, and that they expected to be rewarded with honors and offices as any other vassal that had faithfully served their king. Therefore, knowledge was produced not in institutions conducive to its “modernization,” but in an Old Regime framework that limited is development.

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Santos, Catarina Madeira. “Administrative Knowledge in a Colonial Context: Angola in the Eighteenth-Century.” British Journal for the History of Science 43.4 (2010): 539–556.

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087410001275Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A sophisticated work that shows that reformist impulses informed by enlightened ideas reached Portuguese Africa where they were adapted to be applicable to the colonial context. She has also published an important article in French that is more representative of her work: “Entre deux droits: Les Lumières en Angola (1750–v. 1800),” Annales 4 (2005): 817–848.

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Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H. Stein. Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

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The second volume in a tetralogy, it emphasizes the limitations of the Bourbon reforms, above all in Europe. Therefore, the monarchy tried to implement its plans in the Americas to cope with international competition, but even there, the Crown had to compromise with local elites, above all mercantile groups. It should be read together with the next volume in the series, Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

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Weber, David. Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

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This book analyzes the many Spanish colonial policies regarding unconquered Native Americans in the late colonial period, which ranged from gift giving to the occasional war. Despite new enlightened sensibilities, it was power relations on the ground that determined how the Spaniards would deal with Amerindians: when colonists could and wanted to, they violently took Native land. Nevertheless, the contact and commerce between Spaniards and Native Americans increased everywhere, negating oversimplifying views of this relationship.

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Colonial Governance in the Age of Revolutions
Far from rendering colonial governance moot, the revolutions that swept the Atlantic world from 1775 to 1825 made it even more important for metropolises that wanted to keep at least part of their overseas possessions. Recent studies have looked for connections and comparisons between areas in order to understand imperial policy in this uncertain juncture. The Atlantic perspective has been useful both to insert specific places in a wider context and to inspire other historians to paint with broad strokes in a multi-continental canvas. O’Shaughnessy 2000 highlights the importance of the Caribbean for the British Empire and the need to include the other thirteen colonies in the telling of the American Revolution, while Mancke 2005 takes the reader north instead of south and tries to explain the permanence of Canada within the empire. Dubois 2004 can be read as a similar corrective, as the French Empire was not solely composed of Saint-Domingue. Ferrer 2014 is a striking example of the interaction between empires, especially strong in the Caribbean, and it recognizes enslaved agency for Cuba as Dubois did for Guadeloupe. Echeverrí 2016 connects law, state action, and subaltern agency in a novel way that can open new research paths. Marquese, et al. 2016 highlights the importance of the expanding institution of slavery in colonial governance in Brazil and Cuba, in a world deeply influenced by the Industrial Revolution. It can be profitably read together with Adelman 2006, as it deals with much of the same themes, though pairing Brazil with Spanish South America. Paquette 2013 focuses on the strong connections between Portugal, Brazil, and Angola before and after Brazilian independence, while Stein and Stein 2014 does the same for Spain and New Spain, though in much greater detail, as it focuses on the two uncertain years after the fall of the Spanish Bourbons in 1808. Many of these books are relevant for the study of the beginnings of the national period in the Americas, but it is even more essential to remember that colonial governance—if understood as the rule of subaltern nonwhite majorities—remained a central part of the political structure of the new nations for a very long time, even up to the early 21st century.

Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

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Adelman offers a sophisticated interpretation of independence that integrates Brazil and the Spanish South Atlantic. He emphasizes the political relevance of great merchants in an age of rising capitalism. The book highlights that the central question of colonial governance in the age of revolutions was of sovereignty: Who wielded legitimate authority? Until they collapsed due to external competition, empires did, which reveals the enduring power of colonial governance to deal with internal contradictions.

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Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

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Dubois’s work throws light upon the case of Guadeloupe, often ignored in favor of the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue. He emphasizes enslaved struggle for freedom and citizenship. When they finally achieved it in 1794, though, colonial officials hurried up to impose new forms of coercion and exclusion. After abolition was reversed in 1802, slavery became the law of the land again until a new republican revolution in 1848.

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du Rivage, Justin. Revolution against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

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A bold new interpretation that puts ideology at the center of its story. Du Rivage opposes “authoritarian reformers” that wanted to strengthen the monarchy and tax the empire to provide military security and mercantile prosperity to radical Whigs that were sympathetic to Enlightenment ideas and more reliant on debt in order to fund government. The imperial crisis was, then, a struggle between these two factions and not a war of national liberation waged by an oppressed colony.

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Echeverrí, Marcela. Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316018842Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

This study of Popayán in modern-day Colombia is exceptional in its carefully researched treatment of the micro-politics of slaves and Amerindians. To explain their royalism, Echeverrí shows that Bourbon reforms widened spaces of negotiation between these subaltern groups and the Crown through subaltern interpretations of the law and direct military action. Monarchism was a rational political strategy for slaves and Amerindians, as was the Crown’s reliance on their support.

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Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139333672Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

In this prizewinning book, Ferrer forcefully unveils the quotidian links between the rise of slavery and sugar in Cuba and emancipation and revolution in Saint-Domingue. Slaveholders and royal officials unsuccessfully attempted to curb information about Haiti in Cuba and developed strategies of colonial governance to repress the terrifying possibility of slave rebellion. This work also highlights the connections between Cuba’s royalism, Spain’s support of slavery, and fear of the Haitian example, made flesh in the Aponte rebellion of 1812.

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Mancke, Elizabeth. The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830. London: Routledge, 2005.

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This book compares the experience of two small communities, connected by emigration and trade: one that separated from the British Empire and another that remained loyal. According to Mancke, the reason was divergent imperial governance: while Massachusetts kept its local governments with origins in the 17th century that could organize and mobilize together, Nova Scotia developed while the British state was already going through a process of centralization, and it had less autonomy and a more direct relationship to London.

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Marquese, Rafael, Tâmis Parron, and Márcia Berbel. Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850. Translated by Leonardo Marques. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016.

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Originally published in 2010, this comparative and connected history shows the importance of parliamentary debates on slavery and slave trade in the remaking of empires in the first half of the 19th century, in the midst of political and industrial revolutions. The expansion of slavery at the time was entwined with state formation, even in a new, supposedly liberal age.

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O’Shaughnessy, Andrew. An Empire Divided. The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

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O’Shaughnessy offers a valuable counterpoint to widely disseminated explanations for the outbreak of the American Revolution, noting, for instance, that West Indies assemblies also grew stronger, but that did not lead Caribbean elites to declare independence because they were dependent of the British Navy for the islands’ defense and feared the “Black Majorities.” He also emphasizes that the West Indies featured prominently in British strategy, hampering the metropolis’ effort to subdue the rebellious colonists of North America.

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Paquette, Gabriel. Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139237192Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

The author looks through the eyes of an often-forgotten colonial power to emphasize continuities in an age of disruption. Therefore, Paquette draws attention to the enduring links between independent nations and their erstwhile metropolises. The chapter on Africa is especially valuable, as it illuminates that a new form of colonialism started to take form in Africa soon after the independence of the New World.

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Stein, Stanley, and Barbara Stein. Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

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The final volume of a tetralogy, this is a massively detailed political history of the two years after the French overthrew the Bourbons in 1808. Their analysis jump from one shore of the Atlantic to the other, emphasizing the metropolitan struggle to hold on to New Spain, as its silver was one of the main lifelines of the Spanish Empire. It also reveals the many conflicting interests that warred for control of colonial policy in America and Europe.

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