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On 9 June 2017, scholars from a range of disciplines across the United Kingdom and Spain met at the University of Warwick to discuss the ways in which taking a global perspective can enrich research on early modern Iberia and colonial Spanish America. Coming at a time when Spanish exceptionalism is being increasingly challenged but the Americas are still being side-lined in the writing of global history, the presenters addressed gaps in current historiography and challenged Eurocentric narratives of early modern history which have predominated since the Enlightenment. The final roundtable called for definition in the language of movement in global history and concluded that we need to rethink global history as a project that began in the sixteenth century with conceptions of an Iberian or Catholic globe, an orbe hispano.Keywords: global; early modern; Iberia; empire; exchanges; migration; circulation Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in America are by no means political powers in the globalised world of the twenty-first century. This was not the case between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The first America was not that of the thirteen English colonies in North America, but the one reached by the Spaniards (Brading, 1991). The first great overseas expeditions, and the first global histories, were written in the Iberian world.Since the late eighteenth century, historians have spent much time pondering the reasons why Spain and Portugal declined in influence on the world stage, or why they (and Latin America) failed to enter a modern age along with the rest of Europe. The French Enlightenment and the writers of the Encyclopédie proposed that the Iberian states contributed nothing to 'progress' -that in fact, they had historically impeded progress. In the last five decades this notion of 'Spanish In the opening paper, Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon (Brunel University) presented a history of exchanges of Arthurian legends between England, Spain, and Portugal in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Her paper 'Early Modern printers, exiles, and exchanges between England and Iberia' stressed the role of the translator and the position of exiles within networks in these exchanges. Anthony Munday (1553-1633) emerged as key figure in English responses to the continental versions of Arthurian romances through his translations of the Amadis of Gaul and the Palmerin of England, which appeared in several English editions starting in 1588. . In the Iberian world, the romances were common ground for a discourse of nobility. In England, Evenden-Kenyon argued that the Iberian romances were not merely popular entertainment, but also offered a 'refashioning' of English history, one that crossed confessional divides. Amidst the heightened tensions between Spain and England in the post-Reformation world of the 1580s, and with England's continued friendship with Portugal, the romances could be seen not only as nostalgic views of Anglo-Iberian medieval relations but also as texts that intertwined European ...