As its title suggests, Entangled Empires is a book about how the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires engaged with each other over the course of the early modern period. Edited by the renowned historian of the Hispanic world Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the volume reflects the connected history approach that has characterized the latest publications of the esteemed historian. However, rather than merely cataloging instances and patterns of interimperial interactions, the volume in question was written with a bolder proposition in mind. In a nutshell, Entangled Empires suggests that it is impossible to understand properly any of these empires without considering their entanglement, for they all belonged to a common hemispheric system.
Part 1, titled “Severed Histories,” focuses on uncovering how, in an effort to assert England's imperial authority, English officials and actors rendered interimperial entanglement invisible by hiding their debt to Spanish and Portuguese precedents. The chapters in this section show...
