Christopher’s Blog for Transatlantic History

Review of Empires of the Atlantic World

J. H. Elliot’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 is a work of comparative history that ably looks at the development of the two greatest Atlantic powers, England and Spain, over the course of more than three centuries. Empires of the Atlantic World is also a work that Elliot admits relies more on secondary resources than on primary sources.¹ Elliott also eschews grand historical theories (especially Louis Hartz’s ‘immobility theory’) as reductionist.² The result is a masterfully written work that is rather conventional, especially when compared to Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, in its interpretive models and organizational layout.

Empires of the Atlantic World spans great swaths of time and space and, as such, is likely to have several concurrent central themes rather than an a single thesis³ The first of these themes is best expressed in Elliot’s own words and are as follow:

Comparative history is-or should be-concerned with similarities as well as differences and a comparison of the history and culture of large and complicated political organisms that culminates in a series of sharp dichotomies is unlikely to do justice to the complexities of the past. By the same token, an insistence on similarity at the expense of difference is liable to be equally reductionist, since it trends to conceal diversity beneath a factitious unity.

Though comparative history may simply seem a tool of organization, through these words and examining Empires of the Atlantic World’s parts and chapters, with titles such as Occupation and Crown and Colonists in the context of Anglo-Spanish comparisons, the reader finds that comparative history is central to Elliot’s arguments about the Spanish and English empires. Therefore, comparative history cannot be relegated to a simple literary tool but, at least in this instance, takes center stage among the central themes of the work.

This is not to say that Empires of the Atlantic World is devoid of an argument. Indeed, Elliot argues fervently throughout this work that the Spanish empire was dominated by conquest and imperial impetus (if not always direct control) while the British empire was overwhelmingly an empire of settlement and trade.⁴ This argument is the driving force of the book and will be examined in more detail in this review in the following paragraphs that discuss Empires of the Atlantic World’s organization.

Elliot divides this work into three parts with each part further divided into four chapters. Part one, titled Occupation, deals with the beginnings of the Spanish and English New World empires. Occupation begins with such detailed looks at people such as Hernan Cortes and Christopher Newport that it is readily identifiable as a reliance on the conventional interpretive mode that Restall would call the ‘great man theory’. This sections chapters then finds similarity in England’s experience in Ireland with Spain’s experiences during the Reconquista as well as a lack of similarities in the value of land in the New World that English settlers placed on that land and the Spanish did not.⁵ The idea that the English emphasized trade and settlement compared to Spanish conquest and subjugation is explained in this section by a lack of English self-confidence⁶ and a looser hierarchy in the English system though Elliott also takes the opportunity to point out that both empires were moving towards similar attitudes of subordination of their colonies in relation to the metropolitan center.⁷

Section two, Consolidation, obviously works towards explaining the Spanish and English empires histories after initial experience in the New World led to a more substantive and enduring presence in the Americas. The chapters of this section largely work through the structure of the Spanish and English empires, pointing to the patchwork system of English control⁸ of its colonies and contrasting that to the Hispanic world’s system that “…could only have looked like a triumphant assertion of the obedience properly due to kings.”⁹. Additionally, Elliot brings us back to his recurring them of the nature of the English and Spanish empires by asserting that, “Britain’s empire was therefore to be a maritime and commercial empire. As such it came to think of itself as the antithesis of Spain’s land-based empire of conquest.”¹⁰.

Section Three is titled Emancipation and its main arguments are succinctly summed up in the chapter A New World in the making examines how the British and Spanish Atlantic empires fell apart at slightly different times though under similar revolutionary forces and gave way to republics as different as the mother countries that formed them. The epilogue even takes Elliot’s argument to its theoretical conclusion by asserting that if Henry VII and Henry VII had sponsored Columbus then the resulting English empire might have looked very similar to the actual Spanish empire that came out of the early voyages of Atlantic discovery.¹¹

Among the book’s many strengths are it internal honesty. Elliot straightforwardly states the regions and themes the book will not cover¹² with no attempt at obfuscation or presentation of a thesis that is later ignored in the book. Furthermore, pulling together the disparate sources in Empires of the Atlantic World’s bibliography make this an excellent synthesis of materials on the subject of the Spanish and English empires which make the book thoroughly useful as a textbook. Empires of the Atlantic World’s primary weakness is that it is not, in large, a book of original research that contributes new knowledge or interpretive models to the understanding of either comparative or imperial history.

Additional weaknesses include the fact that Elliot rejects grand theories as modes of explanation in history but structures his book and arguments in such a well-designed linear fashion that it makes all that occurs in the Spanish and English empires from 1492 to 1830 to be intrinsically linked in a causal relationship reflected in the titles of the three sections of the book. The strengths and weaknesses of Empires of the Atlantic World also point to its relevance to transatlantic history. As a teaching tool, the book is strong and well-written but as a source of innovation for the professional historian it is lacking in originality in both content and structure.

~ by christopheraw on November 9, 2008.