This collection of twelve essays grew out of a 2014 workshop that explored interconnections between the early modern Portuguese, Spanish, and British empires, as well as their successor republics. Rather than viewing the Atlantic World as a zone of competing imperial systems, the contributors make the case that people, goods, and ideas transgressed imperial boundaries with a greater frequency than existing scholarship has acknowledged. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra argues in the introduction, and as Eliga Gould reiterates in a short afterword, studying imperial history through national frameworks is largely a product of archival organization and the tendency to think about empires from Europe outward. As a corrective to the latter in particular, a number of essays in this volume decenter our perspective by looking at spaces where the experiences of colonists, natives, government officials, soldiers, traders, and enslaved peoples were shaped by heterogeneous ideologies and commercial networks. For these individuals, lines on maps did not align with lived experiences.

The first of the volume's four thematic sections is titled “Severed Histories.” It begins with an essay by Mark Sheaves on two merchants of English origin who traveled to Spain, integrated into port societies, and built transoceanic commercial networks. Yet in surviving records, these men are recorded as being either Spanish or English; their hybrid identities, in other words, were collapsed into nationalistic categories. In his contribution, Michael Guasco also highlights the ability of English merchants to integrate into foreign economies by looking at how they collaborated with West Africans to enter into trading networks dominated by Iberians. This theme of engaging with non-Europeans on their terms in order to undermine rival empires runs throughout the book. In the section's final essay, Benjamin Breen shows how English merchants and apothecaries obtained knowledge from the Portuguese, particularly those who worked with drogas (drugs) from the East. Studying drogas demonstrates not only pharmacological and epistemological entanglements between Britain and Iberia, but also how this transnational history came to be erased in the historical record: by 1700, English apothecaries knew that being associated with Catholic suppliers or knowledge would render them suspect, and so deliberately suppressed the sources of their expertise.

Part two, “Brokers and Translators,” explores those individuals who facilitated or embodied Anglo-Iberian entanglement. Christopher Heaney studies how the mid-sixteenth-century writer Richard Eden strategically “translated” an earlier Spanish chronicle of discovery so as to entice English adventurers to seek in the New World their own version of Peru, a place filled with riches to be taken and souls to be converted. Holly Snyder shows how Jewish conversos expelled from Iberia who settled in Britain used their commercial connections and multiple identities to pursue trade in Atlantic markets that were inaccessible to other English merchants. Together, these contributions illustrate how Spanish success was central to both imagining and creating the British Atlantic. Jumping ahead to the age of revolutions, a posthumous essay by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara looks at the career of Irishman George Flinter Dawson. Dawson's conservative, antirevolutionary views took shape while serving as a junior officer in the British army in Curaçao, and led him to subsequently fight for the Spanish crown during Latin America's wars of independence and to champion slaveholding in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cameron B. Strang likewise focuses on slavery in the greater Caribbean by exploring the life of George J. F. Clarke, a native of East Florida who defended Spanish rule against incursions by the United States army and Latin American revolutionaries not for ideological reasons, but because Spanish policy allowed him to manumit two enslaved women with whom he had large families, and placed comparatively few legal restraints on his mixed-race children. For both Dawson and Clarke, experiences under one imperial power shaped attitudes toward other forms of imperialism.

Part three features a pair of essays that explore how British colonists modeled their claims of possession, sovereignty, and legitimacy in the New World on Spanish precedents. In the first, Cañizares-Esguerra contends that despite their rhetoric condemning the Spanish conquest, English Calvinists in New England in the 1620s and 1630s employed many of the same arguments used by Spanish theorists to justify their dispossession of indigenous peoples. In the second, Bradley Dixon illustrates how efforts by English officials in South Carolina to convert native leaders and to govern indigenous groups through these Christianized elites drew inspiration from Spanish tactics in the region.

In the book's final section, “Trade and War,” three essays challenge us to reconsider the familiar narrative of Spanish decline at the hands of an ascendant British Empire over the long eighteenth century. As April Lee Hatfield shows, petitions from English officials in the Caribbean complaining about the deference demanded of them by Spanish counterparts highlight how diplomatic standing did not always follow economic might. Also focusing on the Caribbean and its hinterland, Ernesto Bassi documents how, as trade between the rival empires and their possessions accelerated, so too did attempts to legitimate and regularize it. In the book's final essay, Kristie Patricia Flannery looks at the British occupation of Manila during the Seven Years’ War, demonstrating that many of the entanglements that characterized the Atlantic World also played out in other spheres of inter-imperial competition. Themes of the collection revisited here include the porousness of boundaries, the borrowing of ideas and strategies among colonizing nations, and how non-Europeans exploited imperial rivalries for their advantage.

Though some contributions are more developed than others, Entangled Empires on the whole succeeds in highlighting how Atlantic empires were heterogeneous entities in which it was rarely possible—and often not even desirable—to prevent entanglements. Using case studies to demonstrate how British imperialism was never a strictly British undertaking, a number of essays would fit well on undergraduate syllabi in British, Atlantic, and early American history. For specialists in these areas, though, the focus on transcending nationalistic frameworks is not as novel as some contributors make it out to be. Showing how and why interconnected histories came to be elided in the historical record, identified in the introduction as a central aim of the book, is little explored after the first section. Further, the composition of the essays raises interesting questions about the nature of Anglo-Iberian entanglement that go largely unaddressed: what does it tell us that only one of the twelve essays focuses on Anglo-Portuguese relations, that two deal with Asia rather than the Atlantic, and that some time periods get significantly more attention than others? The selection of authors and topics of course reflects who participated in the workshop that preceded this book, but the failure to grapple with aspects of the volume's unevenness prevents it from adding up to more than the sum of its parts.