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  • The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years' War to the Age of Revolutions by Gabriel Paquette
  • Alan L. Karras
The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years' War to the Age of Revolutions. By Gabriel Paquette (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019) 312 pp. $35.00

This tidily argued and well-written synthesis contains no new archival research; it is, rather, an updated examination of European state consolidation at home and then creation and maintenance of overseas empires from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Deliberately framed as "an explicit, if critical, homage to seminal works bearing similar titles published in the mid-twentieth century by historians C. R. Boxer and J. H. Parry," Paquette pursues the themes in those works while updating their arguments and approaches with new scholarship that has appeared in the last four [End Page 306] decades or so (4–5).1 Geared to an educated general readership, the book largely focuses on European expansion to other parts of the world, but most especially in the Atlantic. Because the book is entirely focused on the European empires, it will be of limited utility to scholars and teachers of world history, where these storylines are already broadly familiar.

Paquette recognizes the book's limitations at the outset; he states that he "cannot deny or defend the book's inequality of proportions and lop-sidedness" (vii). This is not a fatal flaw by any stretch of the imagination, but the book includes much more material about the Iberian empires than any other. This area is clearly Paquette's research strength, but even so, the significance of the Dutch, French, and British Empires all coming to challenge and/or overtake their imperial rivals does not underpin the narrative of the book, as it would in a book more focused on empires in world history. Paquette does not offer a direct answer to the question of how European empires came to dominate not just global geopolitics but also an emerging global economy that shifted power away from Asia, though shrewd readers will be able to cobble together their own answers to this important question. Those whose historical expertise is greater outside the Iberian empires than within them will surely be familiar with articles and monographs that, if considered in this book, might have changed the author's presentation and narrative trajectory.

The book, which includes twelve chapters, begins with a definition of empire before proceeding to consider Western Europe in global context, which would have been more useful had this theme been more systematically carried through the book. It then considers the creation of the Iberian empires, the challenges to them from northwestern Europe, and the ways in which these empires developed a kind of mature relationship with their colonies that were largely, but not entirely, in the Americas. Next it delves into a patchy examination of law and political economy in each empire and then various social issues, such as labor, race, and migration, and a breathless discussion of the Age of Revolutions. Each chapter is long enough to hold a reader's interest and provoke additional questions but not thorough enough to cover its subject. The discussion of John Locke and Hugo Grotius and the ideas of property that they generated, for example, focuses on the difference between them (73–75), but it has nothing to say about Locke's presence on the English Board of Trade. An extended treatment might have offered a clearer understanding of why Britain's empire developed its ideas of property and law, and Paquette could have articulated more clearly how these ideas differed from those of other empires.

Also more deserving is the theme of smuggling and contraband trade, the presence of which weakened these European empires, but because of the distance involved, also allowed these colonies and territories to function and even thrive. The discussion of migration concentrates so heavily on [End Page 307] slavery and other coerced migration that the very people who temporarily migrated to run these empires—from colonial officials to estate managers, attorneys, merchants, and physicians—are never addressed.

Even with these omissions, which will be apparent to scholars with regional or methodological expertise...

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