In recent years, the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain and Latin America has been invigorated by interdisciplinary engagement with scholars working on topics such as empire, slavery, abolition, race, identity, and captivity. No scholar better exemplified these developments than Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, a specialist on Spain and its Caribbean colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico. A brilliant career was cut short in 2015 when he died at the age of 48. Rethinking Atlantic Empire takes Schmidt-Nowara's work as a point of departure, charting scholarly paths that move past reductive national narratives and embrace transnational approaches to the entangled empires of the Atlantic world.

Offering a window into the history of the modern legal profession in Western Europe, Stephen Jacobson presents a history of lawyers in the most industrialized city on the Mediterranean. Far from being mere curators of static law, Barcelona's lawyers were at the center of social conflict and political and economic change, mediating between state, family, and society. Beginning with the resurrection of a decadent bar during the Enlightenment, Jacobson traces the historical evolution of lawyers throughout the long nineteenth century. Among the issues he explores are the attributes of the modern legal profession, how lawyers engaged with the Enlightenment, how they molded events in the Age of Revolution and helped consolidate a liberal constitutional order, why a liberal profession became conservative and corporatist, and how lawyers promoted fin-de-siecle nationalism. From the vantage point of a city with a distinguished legal tradition, Catalonia's Advocates provides fresh insight into European social and legal history; the origins of liberal professionalism; education, training, and the practice of law in the nineteenth century; the expansion of continental bureaucracies; and the corporatist aspects of modern nationalism.

Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of power that closely resembled that of its European predecessors.Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a decline in U.S. global power, including: erosion of economic and fiscal strength needed for military power on a global scale; misuse of military power through micro-military misadventures; breakdown of alliances among major powers; weakened controls over the subordinate elites critical for any empire's exercise of global power; insufficient technological innovation to sustain global force projection.