Whither the Empire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries? Taking Stock of a Vibrant Field in English and American S

With the advent of globalisation at the end of the twentieth century, and a rising consciousness of the long-lasting consequences of European imperial colonizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the “Empires” of earlier periods have come to be seen as appropriate objects of investigation and reflection in a new “world history” (Cooper and Burbank, Martinez-Gros). While a generation earlier Eric Hobsbawm still referred to “the Age of Empire” as encompassing the turn of the ninetee...