World Without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire by Hugh Thomas (review)

It has now been over a decade since a series of short, brilliant essays on the topic of “Placing Latin America in World History” was published in the Hispanic American Historical Review. In that forum Jeremy Adelman noted, “Latin America’s heterogeneous integration into the world still needs its full nanative exploration.” Erick Langer and Lauren Benton, respectively, lamented that Latin America was still included in world history within a “Rise of the West plus” framework or as the “odd region out.” And Micol Siegel argued compellingly that the persistence of “the battle between civilization and barbarism” as world history’s “most prominent story”—at all levels of pedagogy and popular culture, from school textbooks to Hollywood blockbusters—remained a banier to better understanding the past in general (not just Latin America).⁴

Since then, historians have made valiant efforts to address these issues, both within the format of world history textbooks⁵ and at the level of scholarly books.⁶ But the contraction of the discipline of History has exacerbated the traditional imbalance of regional fields. Americanists and Europeanists, as the overwhelming majority in almost all History departments, continue to exercise a kind of field tyranny, effectively perpetuating categories of U.S. nationalism and Eurocentrism simply through their numerical domination of cunicula—and by obliging others “to be part of ‘world’ groupings,” while themselves remaining “relatively immune from the pressures to integrate” (to bonow Adelman’s words).⁷

Into such public, professional, and scholarly contexts (all of which are of course far more complex than suggested in the two short paragraphs above) lands this new book by Hugh Thomas. World Without End is the third in a trilogy on sixteenth-century Spain and its empire and the latest in a notable and influential series of books written by him over the last half-century-plus—a period in which the study of world history and understandings (both academic and popular) of Latin America’s place in the larger narratives have in many ways changed dramatically, while in other ways shifting hardly at all. Evaluated in isolation, World Without End seems unconcerned with meeting the challenges of allowing Spanish, Latin American, Atlantic, and world histories to illuminate each other (is Atlantic history just global history applied to the Atlantic world, as Alison Games observed,⁸ or is world history by Atlanticists just Atlantic history applied globally, and are Latin Americanists doing likewise with their forays into world history?). On the other hand, seen within the larger context of his career, the book gains some luster; after all, Thomas has, over the decades, helped place Spain firmly within a theater of understanding where scholars are now productively debating how regional and global studies can illuminate each other in new ways (even if such recent debates and studies are not referenced in this book).

There are few historians who would not envy Hugh Thomas’s career. His long list of books on the history of Spain and Spanish America have reached readers numbering in the six figures for over half a century, bringing him international renown, honors, and accolades. The list of international book prizes alone is extraordinary. He has enjoyed academic appointments on both sides of the Atlantic. He held high-profile positions in diplomacy and politics, for which efforts he was made Baron Thomas of Swynnerton at the age of fifty. He is also a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, was given the Cross of the Order of Isabel the Catholic in Spain, and admitted into the Order of the Aztec Eagle in Mexico.

Lord Thomas’s working life has had something of an epic sweep to it, and it is thus perhaps fitting that his most recent endeavor has been the creation of a trilogy on the epic rise of the Spanish Empire—close to two thousand pages in total, telling the tale from Columbus’s...