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Featured Review
| J. H. Elliott. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 546. $35.00.
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| Academic presses are releasing a flood of books labeled to catch the current wave of interest in "Atlantic history." There are histories of white, black, red, and green Atlantics, and there are studies of Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish ones, as well as some that can be called American. Academic conferences and internet bulletin boards broker debates about what Atlantic history is and how to teach it. J. H. Elliott's masterly synthesis is bound to become part of those debates, though it addresses neither of them directly. |
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When a leading expert on the history of early modern Spain and its empire offers a detailed comparison between Britain and Spain in America, sympathetic professional readers can be forgiven for holding their breath. So much comparative history is a shallow commerce in stereotypes, platitudes, and idiosyncrasies that most careful historians are inclined to avoid the approach entirely. Elliott promises a very nuanced playing of his analytic accordion, which alternates between pushing these competing colonial worlds together and then pulling them apart. While incorporating the rich recent scholarship on Amerindian and slave societies, he frankly admits "my principal focus has been the development of the settler societies and their relationship with their mother countries" (p. xviii). This is a social and political history of two successful transatlantic applications of the power to exploit, integrate, and create. Almost inevitably, the study divides into the three phases of occupation, consolidation, and emancipation. Such simplicity promises much less than this insightful and illuminating exploration delivers. |
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Pairing conquistador Hernán Cortés with Captain Christopher Newport as imperial pioneers may seem surprising but proves entirely apt. Cortés not only carried the ambitions and methods of the reconquista to America with spectacular success, he provided the basis for extravagant and enduring creole claims against the Spanish monarchy as well as aspects of a mestizo identity. Nearly a century later, a relatively colorless Elizabethan privateer named Christopher Newport led the expeditions of an English trading company that would fail to find profit in what became Virginia. Obvious contrasts are tempered by discussing the private investors in the Cortés venture, his history as a trader and plantation owner in the unspectacular colony on Hispaniola, and the comparatively modest alternatives for which he had prepared. It was the unexpected and astonishing portable wealth of the Aztecs and Incas, and the vast scale of those confiscated, but still-functioning, empires that quickly drew the Spanish monarchy into governance and gave them the resources to control Spain, dictate to Europe, and spread Christendom. The Castilian dominance of that Spanish empire bears interesting comparison with the English dominance of the British one. In a telling aside, Elliott invites us to think of how different things would have been if the Tudors had funded Columbus: there might well have been an English absolute monarchy defending an unreformed faith, a luxuriant church that dominated its America, and a parliament that had faded into insignificance. |
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