The field of Atlantic history initially focused exclusively on the Anglo-American North Atlantic, largely ignoring the South Atlantic and Africa. This approach, dominant after World War II, portrayed a “Western civilization” based on North Atlantic liberal values, akin to a postwar Mediterranean. Over time, historians of the Anglo-American Atlantic criticized this narrow focus, recognizing the broader interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Recent decades have seen a shift, with more historians acknowledging the Atlantic as a complex, interconnected space involving four continents. Particularly notable is the rise of studies on the South Atlantic, especially regarding science and empire in the Iberian world. These studies highlight the significant role of Spain and Portugal, challenging the previously North Atlantic-centered narrative. This research has revealed that the Atlantic world was as much, if not more, shaped by Spanish and Portuguese influences as by English ones. The reviewed works exemplify this shift, focusing on the South Atlantic's imperial entanglements and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

This article offers a new approach to early modern global history, dubbed (dis)entangled history as a way to combine the conventional focus on the history of connections with a necessary appreciation of the elements of disconnection and disintegration. To exemplify this approach, it offers a case study related to the history of cannibalism as both a disputed anthropophagic practice and a cultural reference point across the early modern world. Through a rich multilingual and multimedia source base, we trace how the idea of Indigenous Tapuya endo-cannibalism in Brazil travelled across the Atlantic through Europe and Africa to East Asia. The idea of Tapuya cannibalism crossed some linguistic borders, stopped at others and interacted unevenly with long-standing Ottoman, Polish, West African, Islamic and Chinese ideas about ‘cannibal countries’, of which it was just one more example. This trajectory challenges the historiographical consensus that early modern ideas about cannibalism were centred on the Atlantic world. By tracing how one particular discourse did and did not travel around the globe, this article offers not just a theoretical statement, but a ‘fleshed out’ and concrete approach to writing about intermittent connectedness during the period 1500–1800.

This article aims to analyse some of the multilateral flows of capital that contributed to weaving a Global South during the second half of the eighteenth century. It specifically revisits the functioning and financing of the Portuguese slave trade from a global perspective, and offers insights for assessing older frameworks that explain it, in either triangular or bilateral terms. The article argues that the Portuguese slave traffic should be liberated from the South Atlantic borders to which it has been confined. In so doing, it offers an Atlantic history in a global perspective, disclosing the connections between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Putting the financing of the slave trade into a larger global perspective helps to more accurately explain how it actually operated in terms of the organization of trade. When the financial and institutional foundations of Asian and African trade are analysed together, it becomes evident that they were part of larger networks and capital flows, both westwards and eastwards, which were not just framed imperially or locally.

The article explores the emergence and workings of the free port of Gustavia, founded in 1785 shortly after the Swedish acquisition of its first Caribbean colony, St. Barthélemy. Its free trade policy was modelled closely after Dutch and Danish predecessors in the region, which had been successful for centuries as neutral marketplaces, especially during times of international conflict. An increasing field of scholars have begun reconsidering the significance of contraband trade in Caribbean and Atlantic history. Arguments have been made for a more nuanced understanding of Caribbean geopolitics, one that acknowledges the necessity of informal transnational trade networks. The history of Gustavia is poorly explored in this context. With the aid of new sources, it has become possible to assess the economic role of Gustavia in the Caribbean transit trade during the European conflict of 1793–1815; these sources show that the free port was of greater importance than previous research has found it to be. Through its creation, the Swedish government hoped to commercially exploit a colonial territory of marginal value. War was the primary catalyst that drew people as well as capital to the island, contributing to both its commercial strength and cultural diversity. Former inhabitants of Dutch and French colonies sought refuge there in the wake of the French Revolution and the subsequent wars. Albeit for a brief time, Gustavia gained the character of an international, polyglot merchant community and functioned as an imperial crossroads where business could be conducted as usual between allies, neutrals, and enemies.

This article explores the relation between transatlantic immigration and wealth accumulation in late colonial Mexico City, the chief destination for transatlantic emigrants from Spain. In contrast to the prevalent focus in the literature on networks and transatlantic ties, I argue that economic mobility and thus entry into the upper classes of colonial society depended on the social background of immigrants in their home regions in the peninsula. Human capital rather than social capital was the key determinant explaining why certain regional groups, notably the Basques, succeeded economically as merchants and miners, challenging traditional notions of networks and interconnectedness in Atlantic history and beyond. The findings are grounded in quantitative datasets of Spanish immigrants, overcoming both the biases of anecdotal sources and the methodological intricacy of disentangling the causal relationship between wealth accumulation and social ties.

This article proposes a new framework of analysis for studying inter-imperial spaces in global history. The analytical construct developed here – that of the inter-imperial microregion – highlights the density of networks and interactions found in certain areas with multiple competing polities. It provides a relational approach to the study of transnational and inter-polity exchanges that challenges traditional imperial narratives and suggests a more direct engagement between global, regional, and local histories. After discussing the theoretical and historiographical implications of this model, the article goes on to look at empirical evidence from the case of the Danish West Indies. It analyses the role that these Caribbean colonies played within the inter-imperial microregion of the Leeward Islands during the century from 1730 to 1830. The case study is structured around three central elements of colonial life – geography, security, and commerce – showing how these created the conditions for a high level of interdependence between colonies of multiple empires in the region.