Review of: Silvia Cinnella Della Porta, Traduttori e mercanti. La scoperta inglese del Nuovo Mondo (Firenze: FUP, 2025)

When the English had not yet produced sustained narratives of their own explorations nor undertaken organised overseas expansion, Europe already possessed a vast textual archive on America. Chronicles of conquest, cosmographies, navigation manuals, travel accounts, and natural histories circulated widely in Spanish, Latin, and Italian. Through translation of this corpus, the New World entered the English cultural sphere. England first learned empire by reading Spain: the origins of English imperial ideology emerged not from internal development but through sustained engagement with Iberian experience and the wider humanist republic of letters. A central contribution of Cinnella Della Porta's book is to show that anti-Spanish rhetoric—later so fundamental to English imperial identity—was not original but derivative. In the early sixteenth century Spain functioned less as England’s imperial antithesis than as its principal source of authoritative knowledge about overseas conquest and colonisation. Before opposing Spain, the English translated, assimilated, and admired it. English imperial consciousness thus took shape within a phase of reception and cultural reworking preceding political expansion.