Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (review)

Abstract

Empires of Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830. By. H. Elliott. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 546. Paper, $22.00.)Reviewed by David P. DewarEliga Gould and others are constructing an approach to early modern Atlantic world studies that focuses on entanglements inherent among various competing European empires as they colonized Americas and Caribbean. This approach does not embrace or sanction traditional comparative histories emphasizing political differences between empires. Nevertheless, its adherents recognize that traditional analyses have helped historians discover need to go beyond national narratives and discover effects of metropolitan policy on peripheral people thousands of miles away. For new Atlantic historians, empire is complicated by cultural as well as political interplay. J. H. Elliott engages this approach in his ambitious synthesis Empires of Atlantic World by trying to disentangle threads of each empire's influence upon other. He examines both similarities and differences between early modern world's most prominent imperial forces, but he does so without falling into trap of nationalist narrative.Indeed, without ignoring or dismissing it, Elliott works against entire traditional comparative historiography. He recognizes that Spain and Britain each had unique ambitions and policies that created unique empires, and he uses features of traditional historiography as a starting point to understand ways in which imperial policy was conceived and implemented in separate peripheral political spheres each nation dominated. But Elliott also recognizes distinct limitations that such an approach to comparative history features, one that focuses on national mythologies and legends, for instance, and allows early modern nationstates to create very notion of uniqueness necessary to much traditional comparative history. He argues that any of history and culture of large and complicated political organisms that culminates in a series of sharp dichotomies is unlikely to do justice to complexities of past, but he also points out that an emphasis on too many similarities would be equally reductionist (xvi). Thus, writing a comparative history that does justice to whole is akin to playing accordion, Elliott suggests. two societies under comparison are pushed together, but only to be pulled apart again (xvii). The trick for historian is to end up with music.Elliott creates a symphony. The book is organized so as to recognize effects of cultural miscegenation. Beginning with occupation of North America by Spain and Britain, he continues on to consolidation of empires by means of authority and hierarchy and ways in which resistance to consolidation changed composition of culture. Finally, he analyzes social and cultural dynamics that led newly minted Americans to emancipation from empire.As a scholar of seventeenth-century Spain and, later, of Spanish empire in America, Elliott begins on familiar territory. He discusses ways in which Spain asserted its perceived authority over a variety of people in North America, first conquering native peoples and then inserting settlers to do work of colonization. Elliot contends that English, on other hand, were always 'planters', not 'conquerors' - at least publicly. But Richard Hakluyt elder and others recognized success of Spanish model and opposition posed by Natives, and came to conclusion that conquest would likely have to precede planting (9).After imperial intrusions in New World, Elliott shows ways in which both empires created productive colonies. Monarchs devised methods of establishing law and order and means by which they could supervise structure of society. Elliott argues that full integration of church and state in Spanish empire overcame difficulties created by Council of Indies, which seemed to create built-in conflicts between competing authorities and the numerous opportunities of procrastination, obstruction and graft (129). …