Many histories of empires have been written with the desire to mark the superiority of certain groups over others. As part of these processes, historians have built walls to separate experiences and practices in areas where, in earlier times, people of different origins interacted and coexisted, and the local, continental and global scales operated together. This book, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, is simultaneously a historiographical and political response to those visions that still reduce history to binary schemes and conflicts and make invisible the roles that Latin Americans, natives and Africans had within stories such as that of British expansion.

The book aims to demonstrate the great commercial, political and cultural interactions on the Atlantic coasts of the Americas, Africa and Europe between the British on the one hand and the Iberians and local groups on the other. The 12 chapters present this interconnection to us from three perspectives, namely those of intermediaries, trade and knowledge. The studies reveal both the exchanges and dependencies of the British with respect to Spanish, Portuguese and slave practices, as well as the knowledge transfers, including the complexities of translations and hybridisation among all these groups. The chapters put in tension the conceptions of the territorial limits and historical oppositions under which British imperial history has been considered since the sixteenth century. In this sense, the text makes it clear that the dynamics of British self-sufficiency, at both a commercial and a geopolitical level, that are understood from the nineteenth century onward, simply did not exist in previous centuries because many British actions in the Americas stemmed from Spanish strategies and Portuguese influence, based on their success in Africa and Asia.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first, titled ‘Severed Histories’, the texts by Mark Sheaves (‘The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? English Merchants Navigating the Iberian Atlantic’), Michael Guasco (‘Agents of Empire: Africans and the Origins of English-Colonialism in the Americas’) and Benjamin Breen (‘Empires on Drugs: Pharmaceutical Go-Betweens and the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance’) analyse how the information and experiences left by some intermediaries were used by the Spanish to create narratives that opposed the British, or that downplayed or obscured the alliances that the British had, for example, with the Portuguese or slaves on the eastern coast of the Atlantic. They also teach us about the insertion of the British within the deep-rooted social and commercial dynamics of the Iberians. The family ties and cooperative alliances that they had with African merchants and slaves stand out, for these became the bridges for the British to enter the Atlantic world. These chapters also show how the British had to assimilate some Iberian practices to achieve their goals, while in other cases, they had to de-contextualise knowledge and appropriate it, as in the case of the Royal Society of London with Portuguese medicinal advances.

Part 2 is centred on ‘the role of brokers and translators in either facilitating or obscuring Anglo-Iberian entanglements’ (p. 8). Christopher Heaney's chapter (‘Marrying Utopia: Mary and Philip, Richard Eden, and the English Alchemy of Spanish Peru’), which opens this part, deals with the English interpretations and emulations of the Spanish chronicles of the conquest of America (Peru), while the marriage of Mary and Felipe II lasted. In these English texts the interest in symbolically appropriating Peruvian wealth is reflected in the generation of an image of an English utopia, in order to motivate a British colonisation of the area. Holly Snyder's chapter (‘The Pegs of a Wider Frame: Jewish Merchants in Anglo-Iberian Trade’) gives an account of the importance of Iberian Jews in British imperial expansion. These intermediaries were vital to the process since they circulated in various regions and responded to the commercial and cultural interests of both parties. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's chapter (‘Entangled Irishman: George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-Spanish Imperial Rivalry’) tells how the Irish were connectors and translators of the stories and political debates that linked Iberians and British people, for example in connection with African slavery. This mediation was transacted in places like London and Venezuela, and is analysed through three characters from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cameron Strang's chapter (‘Planters and Powerbrokers: George J. F. Clarke, Interracial Love, and Allegiance in the Revolutionary Circum-Caribbean’) is the last study in this second part. Through the figure of George Clarke, a man of both science and business, the different tensions and differing ethnic visions between the Spanish and British are presented in the territory of Florida. The case shows the importance of family ties as one of the factors that justified the loyalty of British colonists to Spain. The author invites us to rethink the reasons for the revolutionary processes of the early nineteenth century that, many times, have only been associated with intellectual motives and not with life experiences.

Part 3 analyses the discursive and practical similarities and dependencies between the Spanish and British in the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cañizares (in ‘The Iberian Justifications of Territorial Possession by Pilgrims and Puritans in the Colonization of America’) analyses the British discourses regarding migration to Virginia and New England between 1620 and 1630. He shows that the arguments to transfer sovereignty and dominion to the colonists were not different from those used by the Spanish for the rest of the American continent during the period of conquest. Meanwhile, Bradley Dixon (in ‘“As the Spaniards Always Have Done”: The Legacy of Florida's Missions for Carolina Indian Relations and the Origins of the Yamasee War’) explores the way in which the British in South Carolina incorporated Spanish methods of governance in their treatment and conversion of the natives, especially their leaders.

In Part 4 the entanglements between Anglo-Saxons and Iberians are studied through the consequences of the wars between them. The ways in which governors, sailors, British officials and the Spanish authorities exchanged views are revealed in the chapters by April Lee Hatfield (‘Reluctant Petitioners: English Officials and the Spanish Caribbean’) and Ernesto Bassi (‘Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement: Empires, Sailors, and Coastal Peoples in the British-Spanish Caribbean’). Kristie Patricia Flannery's chapter (‘The Seven Years’ War and the Globalization of Anglo-Iberian Imperial Entanglement: The View from Manila’) places the importance of these conflicts on another scale. She analyses the Seven Years’ War to show that these entanglements were also due to the great inter-imperial mobility of soldiers during this conflict and to the adaptations of the rivals’ strategies in Asian lands.

Both at the beginning of the book (in the introduction by Cañizares) and at the end (in the afterword by Eliga Gould), the idea is reinforced that Anglo-Iberian Atlantic relations were a set of connections mediated by multiple actors and that the opposition between the groups was not always as significant as some scholars have tried to show, but were rather complementary and even dependent in some cases. The book is an invitation to think in new ways about how modern societies in the West were shaped by inter-imperial connections.