As they seized new territories, European nations produced maps proudly outlining their possessions. The situation on the ground, however, was often much more complicated than the lines on those maps would suggest. Many groups of people lived in the contested frontiers between empires, habitually crisscrossed their borders, or carved out niches within empires where they carried out their own lives in defiance of the official rules.

Restricted from owning land and holding many occupations in Europe, Jews were eager participants in colonial trade and established closely linked mercantile communities scattered across many different empires. Similarly, a community of Christian Armenians in Isfahan in the Safavid Empire formed the center of a trade network extending from London to Manila and Acapulco. Family ties and trust within these minority groups were a tremendous advantage in generating the financial credit and cooperation necessary for international commerce. Yet Jews and Armenians were minorities where they settled and vulnerable to persecution. For example, restrictions existed on the number of slaves Jews could own in Barbados in the early eighteenth century, and the end of Persian tolerance in the same period led to the dispersion of Armenians from Isfahan.

Other groups openly defied the law. The growth in world trade attracted smugglers who routinely violated colonial trade monopolies as well as bandits eager to profit from the vulnerability of fleets laden with precious silver or spices. During the seventeenth century piracy was endemic in the Caribbean islands, as well as in the South China Sea, in the western Indian Ocean, and along the north African coast. States often encouraged predatory attacks by authorizing privateers to raid the ships of countries with which they were at war. A thin line thus separated illegal piracy from legal privateering. Another important group of outlaw communities in the Caribbean islands were Maroons, runaway slaves who took advantage of the mountainous terrain to establish secret settlements where they could live in freedom.

The nomadic Cossacks and Tartars who inhabited the steppes of the Don River basin that bordered the Russian and Ottoman Empires are yet another example of “in-between” peoples. Often depicted as warring pawns of the two great powers whose clients they became, in fact the Cossacks and the Tartars maintained considerable political and cultural autonomy through the seventeenth century and enjoyed a degree of peaceful interaction. By the eighteenth century, however, both Ottoman and Russian rulers had expanded state control in their frontiers and had reined in the raiding and migration of nomadic steppe peoples. As their example suggests, the assertion of state authority in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made it progressively harder for all of these groups to retain autonomy from the grip of empire.