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

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-072

1527-1900

Stanley J. Stein,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

This is a remarkable tour de force, in thematic and chronological coverage broad, seamlessly shifting between two colonial cultures and their metropoles. Elliott crafts a political, institutional, and cultural narrative spiced with usually well-founded, penetrating insight — withal, infused with an understandable British triumphalism in its repeated recourse to Protestantism and English libertarianism. Empires of the Atlantic is an outstanding contribution to the historian’s craft and, on reflection, could only be produced by a craftsman at home in the history of sixteenth-and especially seventeenth-century western Europe. It is also a measure of how far we have come over the past half-century in the historiography of the occupation of the western Atlantic after Columbus’s inadvertent landfall, since Vera Brown Holmes’s pioneer first volume, A History of the Americas from Discovery to Nationhood (1950), which, it must be noted, also embraced French Canada and Brazil.Comparative history is neither for the ill prepared nor the fainthearted, and Elliott comes to his task superbly prepared. More than 30 years ago he probed the impact of the occupation of the western Atlantic on western Europe (The Old World and the New), followed by a tentative Britain and Spain in America (1994) and a short overview of Bolton’s concept in Do the Americas Have a Common History? (1994), a theme earlier explored by Lewis Hanke. More relevant, Elliott also honed his skills in two magisterial studies, first what amounts to a defense of Catalan resistance to Castile’s tax policy and infringement of its autonomy under the “composite” Spanish monarquía (The Revolt of the Catalans, 1984) before directing his focus to the Castilian nobleman inseparably associated with that hapless policy at the close of the Thirty Years’ War, The Count-Duke of Olivares (1986) — incidentally, the origin of Elliott’s interest in Catalonia.This volume is organized along convention lines, although the nomenclature is inviting. Three sections cover familiar ground: first, conquest (here, “Occupation”) of indigenous peoples; second, putting them to work or dislodging them to the frontier while seeking to force them into a different culture (“Consolidation”); and third, what is oddly labeled “Emancipation,” that fusion and fissioning during the so-called era of eighteenth-century reform (and hoped-for centralization) in both colonies and metropoles in the pressure cooker of commercial expansion and international wars in the Atlantic. One of many striking features is Elliott’s integrated treatment of British North America (mainland and Caribbean colonies) and Spanish America, an imaginative dovetailing, recurrent in the volume’s three main sections, of themes in the two imperial contexts. On display is a skilled craftsman’s sleight-of-hand that in understated fashion highlights significant contrasts and similarities; fortunately, there is a flow of fact, thought, and argument that bars readers from a geographically compartmentalized view of the Atlantic experience of two western European polities and cultures over more than two centuries.Understandably, so comprehensive a study lacks an explicit master narrative to explain differing patterns in the evolution of the colonies in British North America and Spanish America. This, however, may be teased from the four substantive chapters of “Consolidation,” which summarize themes treated in “Occupation,” lead into the narrative of the last section (“Emancipation”), and ultimately underpin the differing paths to independence and sharply divergent aftermaths.The fundamental difference, to follow Elliott, stems from a religious source he traces back to the Protestant Reformation, ultimately fissioning into sects in British North America — Anglican, Congregational, Presbyterian, Quaker, Baptist; religion fused with political dissension erupted in civil war in England and ultimately fashioned forms of religious toleration in British North America, encapsulated in Gordon Wood’s lapidary “Nowhere else in Christendom was religion so fragmented.” Linked to toleration were thousands of in-migrants to New England and the Chesapeake, peopling and invigorating a handful of Atlantic ports — Boston, New York, Philadelphia — with more fanning out to the frontiers. With multiplicity of sects, Elliott’s argument seems to run, came space for toleration and then voices of political dissent (“Religious diversity reinforced political diversity”), for notions of egalitarianism surfacing during the civil war in England and a hearkening to English “liberties.” Small wonder that by the mid – eighteenth century British North America enjoyed extraordinarily high literacy rates — 70 percent for males, for females a not insignificant 45. And the vehicles of dissent were the early colonial legislative assemblies wherein the political hierarchy of British colonialism could be contested, a kind of politics from the ground up and seedbed of later antiauthoritarianism.Spain’s American colonies pursued a different path, omitting for consideration the difference of more than a century between Spanish “conquest” and English “settlement,” an element Clarence Haring’s Spanish Empire in America highlighted decades ago. Where Elliott finds diversity and complexity in British North America, in Spain’s colonies of New Spain and Peru he discerns uniformity and conformity, products of the Trentine response of the Counter-Reformation: intolerance of religious dissent. Matching such conformity was, at least in theory, early top-down centralization of colonial administration: powerful viceroys and no representative colonial legislative bodies, but instead high courts (audiencias) empowered — far more than those of the metropole — with judicial and administrative authority, presided over by viceroys (“the living mirror of kingship in a distant land”). To uniformity, religious and politico-administrative, Elliott adds his presumed unity of a “transcontinental web of inter-related families and elite uniformity” woven together in a tight mosaic of administration, church, mining, and, somewhat distanced, mercantile elites; the latter — surprisingly — he considers “never fully integrated with the upper echelons.”The last chapter of “Consolidation” leads into Elliott’s probing for the sources of divergent pathways to decolonization (his “Emancipation”) and postcolonial trajectories. At the end of the seventeenth century he discerns in the two empires a “fundamental question of identity” heightened in the eighteenth by repeated Atlantic trade wars between one “maritime and commercial” empire and another “land-based empire of conquest.” In the English instance, a bond of religion and liberty is explicit in a comment that the infamous War of Jenkins Ear (1739) generated in the North American colonies, “the conviction they were participating in a joint enterprise, both Protestant and free”; while after the Great War of midcentury would come the dilemma of reconciling an “empire of liberty” with an “empire of trade.” As his narrative advances into the early stage of decolonization, Elliott postulates that trade growth touched off different responses: in British North America, bonds with the metropole were reinforced (the colonies were “inexorably drawn to a close relationship”), while in Spain’s “empire of the Indies” the relationship seemed “moving inexorably in the opposite direction.” As for the respective durations of colonial and civil wars leading to decolonization, Elliott speculates that the drawn-out struggle in Spanish America was a product of geographical isolation, the strength of imperial structures spelled out as a “complex system of institutional structures and patronage networks stretching downwards from the King.” By contrast, the relatively brief conflict in North America is explained, not exclusively of course, by popular confidence in “men of experience,” a prior widespread “degree of political participation,” and the military and financial assistance of France and Spain.In an “Epilogue” (really summary and conclusions), Elliott clarifies the underpinnings of his comparative colonial history of England and Spain in the western Atlantic. There is no overt mention of colonialism or imperialism. Rather, England brought to North America a society and polity “transformed by the Protestant Reformation” and influenced by Dutch “religious tolerance” and “political consent.” The policy was latitudinarian: the English colonists were free to “make reality conform to the constructs of their imagination,” free to create “their imagined communities.” By contrast, Spain — a “pioneer” with no model to follow or reject — brought to its vast overseas enterprise a “grand imperial design,” an “organic conception of a divinely ordained society dedicated to the achievement of the common good” in a “conscious, coherent and . . . in theory centrally controlled attempt to incorporate and integrate the newly discovered lands into the King of Spain’s dominions.”Elliott’s vision of the initial, Atlantic phase of “globalization” leads to reflection on the presumed divergent paths in postcolonial North and South America. Or, were they that divergent in the first half of the nineteenth century? Elliott, perhaps influenced by a generation of U.S. historians beginning with Bernard Bailyn in the 1960s, apparently shares the implicit triumphalism that crowned decolonization in the United States — a remarkable constitution and bill of rights stemming from the tradition of English/ British libertarianism. These documents, however, did not address the fundamental problem of slavery, which Spanish American polities managed to eliminate by midcentury, the United States only in 1863 and initially as a wartime expedient. More to the point, neither postcolonial North nor South resolved the abiding conflict between core and periphery, between centralized versus decentralized polities, between nationalists and believers in regionalism/sectionalism or states’ rights, until after about 1870 — when at last, it might be argued, patterns of growth and development truly commenced to diverge.