Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830

TLDR

Europe’s overseas expansion created competing colonial empires, prompting historians to compare them, a task undertaken with skill by Sir John Elliott in his forthcoming study. Elliott aims to continuously compare, juxtapose, and interweave the histories of Spain and Britain in the Americas rather than merely tabulate similarities and differences. He limits his analysis to the Spanish and British empires in the Americas, giving less attention to native peoples and the Caribbean. By interweaving the two narratives, Elliott uncovers fresh insights, showing Spain’s occupation focused on conquest, exploitation, conversion, and integration, while Britain favored heterogeneous migrant communities and less engagement with natives, offering North Americanists a nuanced understanding of unity and diversity forces.

Abstract

The recognition that Europe's overseas expansion bred competing colonial empires—in contrast to the more monolithic growth of a Rome or China—has long alerted historians to the opportunities for their comparative assessment, even as the range of expertise required has rendered this approach more preached than practiced. Sir John Elliott's long-awaited study, nearly two decades in the making, takes on the task with grace and skill. A renowned historian of peninsular Spain, Elliott sets limits on his voyage into a wider transoceanic world by focusing on the two empires of Spain and Britain in the Americas and by giving, he acknowledges, somewhat lesser attention to native peoples and to areas such as the Caribbean. Sensitive to the dangers of merely tabulating similarities and differences, he seeks to work “by constantly comparing, juxtaposing and interweaving the two stories” (p. xviii). So skilled is this interweaving, when informed by the span of Elliott's reading—the book concludes with a one thousand-item bibliography—the book concludes with a one thousand-item bibliography—that it continually generates fresh insights forged out of familiar materials. Many such insights emerge in “Occupation,” the opening section of the book's three parts, as Elliott demonstrates how Spain and Britain, both “composite states” but of varied elements, evolved different patterns for “occupying American space,” with the first more bent on conquest, exploitation, conversion, and integration of its subject peoples and the second on planting migrant communities more heterogeneous in their political and religious ways and less engaged with the native peoples they encountered (p. 29). North Americanists can learn much from Elliott's analysis of the contrasting forces for unity and diversity—as of pigment, caste, belief, urbanization, and the generation of a labor supply—that textured each society.