This research examines the emergence of a discourse supporting European colonial expansion in the works of the English scholar Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616) and the French historian Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière (1541-1608), in a comparative approach. Both authors were armchairs travellers who collected a wide variety of sources about ancient and modern European maritime explorations. This research is divided into three intertwined themes: their editorial practices of collecting, editing and printing geographical literature across a transnational network, their varied representations of Spanish and Portuguese conquests and works, and the articulation between the fields of geography and history in their imperial representation of the world. I argue that their editorial enterprises were geo-historical projects, which, inspired by Iberian writers, had a global outlook both in their defence of colonial expansion and in their acknowledgment of the role of Africa, Asia and America in the changing intellectual landscape of sixteenth-century Europe.