With duties ranging from issuing passports to offering commercial counsel to providing diplomatic mediation, consuls are a ubiquitous feature of our modern world. In Empire of Consuls, Simeon A. Simeonov traces the origins of the modern consul back to the golden age of consulship, a transformative period that witnessed the reformation of European empires and the rise of new nation-states in an increasingly integrated Atlantic system. Unlike diplomats, whose functions were strictly defined, consuls leveraged the expansive and opaque bounds of their duties to become essential on-the-ground actors for these larger state-building processes. Their daily interactions with ordinary citizens, sailors, refugees, migrants, and international diplomats provided the intellectual testing ground for diplomatic policies surrounding questions of citizenship, migration, surveillance, international relations, and racial exclusion.

Connecting discrete geographic regions of the Atlantic—North America, Latin America, western Europe, and the Caribbean—this sweeping study uncovers the indispensable role consuls played in transforming international relations in the Atlantic world.