Cátia Antunes (ed), Pursuing Empire: Brazilians, the Dutch and the Portuguese in Brazil and the South Atlantic, C. 1620-1660. Leiden: Brill, 2023, 213 pp. ISBN 9789004528468

Charles Boxer looms large in this edited volume. That’s not surprising. The overarching focus of this collection of nine essays is historiographical in nature and it is the pioneering British historian’s exploration of the Dutch and Portuguese in Brazil that serves as the model to explore and test what empire means and what, as the title implies, it means to pursue an empire. Throughout these nine substantive chapters, a re-evaluation of the models of European expansion is in varying ways arg.