Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History (2010). Chapters 5–7 of this recent work describe and compare the empires of the early modern world.

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History (2007). A collection of essays that treats the Atlantic basin as a single interacting region.

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians (1987). A brief and classic account of changing understandings of Columbus and his global impact.

John Kicza, Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500–1800 (2003). An account of European colonization in the Americas that casts the native peoples as active agents rather than passive victims.

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011). A global account of the Columbian exchange that presents contemporary scholarship in a very accessible fashion.

Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2005). Describes how China became an empire as it incorporated the non-Chinese people of Central Asia.

Willard Sutherland, Taming the Wild Fields: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (2004). An up-to-date account of Russian expansion in the steppes.

“Discover the Ottomans,” http://www.theottomans.org/english/index.asp. A series of essays and images that traces the history of the Ottoman Empire over six centuries.

“1492: An Ongoing Voyage,” http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/1492.exhibit/Intro.html. An interactive Web site based on an exhibit from the Library of Congress that provides a rich context for exploring the meaning of Columbus and his voyages.