In recent years, the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain has been invigorated by interdisciplinary engagement with scholars working on topics such as empire, slavery, and race. No scholar better exemplified these developments than Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, whose 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 for assessing the present state of Spanish historiography, charting scholarly paths that move past reductive national narratives and offer new insights into identity, power, and transnationalism.