The Seven Years’ War and the globalization of Anglo-Iberian imperial entanglement: The view from Manila

[Extract] It has been a decade since Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Eliga Gould boldly argued in the pages of the American Historical Review that the Spanish and British empires in the Atlantic world were deeply interconnected institutions that belonged to “the same hemispheric system or community.”1 “There seems to be an emerging consensus,” Cañizares observed back in 2007, “that ‘the Atlantic’ as a category should deliver narratives on the circulations of peoples and staples (to say nothing of ideas), carving out a distinctly transnational space in the process.” 2 And so it has. This volume is proof that “the Atlantic” has redefined how historians understand Spanish and British imperial expansion and colonial rule within this transoceanic zone. We no longer imagine these empires as separate, comparable entities. Looking beyond national historiographies, we search for and interrogate the processes that pushed these empires together, and the consequences of their entanglement. Entwined empires are no longer an anomaly but an assumed characteristic of the early modern Atlantic world.