Agents of European overseas empires involves contributors who specialise on often overlooked aspects of imperial endeavour: 'private' European interests, companies, merchants or courtiers, who conducted their own activities both with and without the benediction of polities. The chapters adopt intra- as well as inter-imperial perspectives and transport the reader to colonial America, the West Indies, the Cape of Good Hope, Batavia, or Ceylon, through the Dutch, English, French and Spanish empires. Agents of European overseas empires offers crucial insight on how these actors acquired profits and power and, in turn, laid the platforms for European global empires.

Introduction
Agnès Delahaye, Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, L. H. Roper & Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

Part I: Tensions within imperial projects
1 Global trade and its benefits for 'the nation': the examples of early modern France and Britain
Susanne Lachenicht
2 Comparing and criticising early modern imperial policies in the Age of Revolution: Abbé Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes
François Brizay
3 Global pursuits: English overseas initiatives of the long seventeenth century in perspective
L. H. Roper

Part II: The limits of imperial control
4 The limits of royal control over migration to Spanish America in the
sixteenth century
Eric Roulet
5 Imperial struggles, colonisation and the Dutch slave trade in seventeenth century New Netherland
Anne-Claire Faucquez
6 The control of unfree labour across the Dutch empire in the eighteenth century
Elisabeth Heijmans & Rafaël Thiebaut

Part III: Local adaptations and developments
7 Settler colonialism and early American history
Trevor Burnard & Agnès Delahaye
8 Colonising the Cape of Good Hope: company policy and settlers' interests in a contested space of European occupation in Southern Africa
Marilyn Garcia-Chapleau
9 Shipping mules in the eighteenth century: New England's equine exports to the West Indies
Charlotte Carrington-Farmer

Epilogue: Perspectives on the mechanisms and impacts of overseas colonisation in the early modern era - then and now
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

Editors

Agnès Delahaye is Professor of American History at Lyon 2 University
Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber is Associate Professor of American History at Poitiers University
L. H. Roper is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at New Paltz
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is Professor of American History at Paris 8 University (Vincennes Saint-Denis)