Book excerpt: Two major themes drive this article: identifying the minimal structure necessary to formulate quaternionic operator theory and revealing a deep relation between complex and quaternionic operator theory. The theory for quaternionic right linear operators is usually formulated under the assumption that there exists not only a right- but also a left-multiplication on the considered Banach space $V$. This has technical reasons, as the space of bounded operators on $V$ is otherwise not a quaternionic linear space. A right linear operator is however only associated with the right multiplication on the space and in certain settings, for instance on quaternionic Hilbert spaces, the left multiplication is not defined a priori, but must be chosen randomly. Spectral properties of an operator should hence be independent of the left multiplication on the space.