Agents of European overseas empires overhauls our understanding of early modern European imperial history and the extent of the participation of early modern polities in the conduct of European overseas trade and colonisation. Contributions from historians based in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States focus on the 'private' interests that initiated the pursuit of overseas commercial and colonising interests during the early modern period. They track the networking of various colonisers, traders and thinkers who pursued early modern European global interests and who conducted their activities both with and without the approval of polities. These networks constituted the ligaments that bound these far-flung endeavours to the respective sovereigns, but also paradoxically exposed the laxity entailed in those ligaments in the form of smuggling and piracy, as well as endemic jockeying for economic and political advantage. This collection relegates 'the state' to its appropriate secondary, reactive role in this history, but also avoids exaggerating the place of colonials, especially with respect to conflict with metropolitan interests, in the development of the Dutch, English, French and Spanish Empires.