History Professor Lou Roper recently co-edited a volume of essays on early modern European overseas colonization published by Manchester University Press, alongside French scholars Agnes Delahaye of the University of Lyon, Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber of the University of Poitiers and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke of the University of Paris–Vincennes St. Denis.
Agents of European Overseas Empires: Private Colonisers, 1450-1800 includes contributions from historians based in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States that focus on the private interests that initiated the pursuit of overseas commercial and colonizing activities prior to the 19th century. They track the networking of various colonizers, traders, and thinkers who pursued global interests and who conducted their activities both with and without the approval of politics.
This collection relegates the concept of the state to its appropriate secondary, reactive role in the history of European overseas colonization, 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.
In addition to co-authoring the Introduction, Roper contributed an essay to the volume that examines the global pursuits undertaken by the English during the seventeenth century that provided the platform for the establishment of the later British Empire.
Roper’s involvement in this collection is an extension of his renowned scholarship in the areas of Early Modern England and Colonial American history, research he has actively pursued since joining the New Paltz faculty in 1995.
Roper is a SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest academic honor in the SUNY system, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the New York Academy of History.
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