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

In the introduction, Elliott makes his overarching goal clear, stating that "by constantly comparing, juxtaposing, and interweaving the two stories, I have sought to reassemble a fragmentary history, and display the development of these two great New World civilizations" (xviii). He succeeded in this aim; Empires of the Atlantic World stands as an impressive achievement. Elliott's ability to hold English America in the same analytical frame as Spanish America is the result of prodigious reading in two allied but distinct sub-disciplines. The text is informed by recent ehtnohistorical, political, social, and art-historical scholarship, effectively synthesizing a large body of material.

Developing the insightful morphological approach that Elliott deployed in the 1994 Stenton lecture at Reading University, the chapters in Empires of the Atlantic World are thematically arranged. They explore the processes of exploration and contact, the occupation of space, the consolidation of imperial structures, and the management of dissent. The book is organized into three parts, titled "Occupation," "Consolidation," and "Emancipation." Each part is comprised of four chapters, which break the large processes of the imperial life span into more manageable topics of investigation.

In the first part, Elliott compares the processes of intrusion—the justifications and activities of occupation of space, conversion, coexistence, and segregation in Euro-indigenous interactions. In the second part, he treats the structural frameworks of the empires, the emergence of local elites, religious developments, and the formation of trans-Atlantic cultural communities.

By the time Elliott turns his attention to Part III, his chronologies and morphologies are more or less synchronized, the two empires' interactions with each other having attained similar levels of colonial maturity during the 1760s. The last part of the book deals with population growth and the movement of peoples in the Americas, the Seven Years' War, the imperial crises, and the emancipation of America.

Looking at the Spanish and British imperial experiences in the Americas through the lens of Elliott's sustained comparison dispels the arguments made by early modern Britons regarding their nation's exceptionalism. Although coming a century after Spanish activities in the New World, England's early activities in the Chesapeake and Caribbean during the founding era appear similar to the early steps taken by the Spaniards. In an Epilogue, Elliott states the conclusion in clear terms: "As the fate of the indigenous peoples and imported Africans makes all too clear, the records of New World colonization by both Britons and Spaniards are stained by innumerable horrors" (405).

Elliott's comparison, however, does much more than make the two empires clones of one another, as if the English merely re-played Spanish imperial history 100 years later. The book does not homogenize the two experiences; in fact, it allows for the differences between the two to stand out in sharper relief. Even though one of the messages of the text is that neither the Spanish nor the English experiences were entirely exceptional, and even though (especially in the early stages) the two countries took similar paths, Elliott is careful to note the ways in which the empires, the people in them, and the polities that emerged in their domains were distinct. Political development, cultural self-definition, European-indigenous interactions, and the emergence of local hierarchies and structures of power emerged as distinct processes in the Anglophone and the Spanish realms.

One quibble with the book—more like a matter of questionable emphasis—concerns the narrative's directionality: Once Elliott's chronologies come into a rough alignment after the English Glorious Revolution and the eighteenth century, a subtle note of end-point driven explanation enters the work in an attempt to anticipate the rupture that will engulf the First British Empire in the 1770s, and the Spanish empire soon thereafter. Elliott stresses and comments upon discordant notes in British imperial development as straws that might eventually break the camel's back, while slightly...