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

experience in any one part of the Americas can be fully appreciated only if set into a wider context, whether pan-American or Atlantic in its scope. This view has had a strong influence on the study of slavery," and is currently giving a new impetus to discussions of the process of European migration to the New World.16 Implicitly or explicitly such discussions involve an element of comparison, and comparative history may prove a useful device for helping to reassemble the fragmented history of the Americas into a new and more coherent pattern.
    An outsider to American history, the great classical historian Sir Ronald Syme observed in a brief comparative survey of colonial elites that `the Spanish and English colonies afford obvious contrasts', and he found an `engaging topic of speculation' in their `divergent fortunes'.17 These `obvious contrasts' inspired a suggestive, if flawed, attempt in the 1970s to pursue them at some length. James Lang, after examining the two empires in turn in his Conquest and Commerce. Spain and England in the Americas,18 defined Spain's empire in America as an `empire of conquest', and Britain's as an `empire of commerce', a distinction that can be traced back to the eighteenth century. More recently, Claudio Veliz has sought the cultural origins of the divergence between British and Hispanic America in a comparison between two mythical animals - a Spanish baroque hedgehog and a Gothic fox. The comparison, while ingenious, is not, however, persuasive.19
    Comparative history is - or should be - concerned with similarities as well as differences '20 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 tends to conceal diversity beneath a factitious unity. A comparative approach to the history of colonization requires the identification in equal measure of the points of similarity and contrast, and an attempt at explanation and analysis that does justice to both. Given the number of colonizing powers, however, and the multiplicity of the societies they established in the Americas, a sustained comparison embracing the entire New World is likely to defy the efforts of any individual historian. None the less, a more limited undertaking, which is confined, like the present one, to two European empires in the Americas, may suggest at least something of the possibilities, and the problems, inherent in a comparative approach.
    In reality, even a comparison reduced to two empires proves to be far from straightforward. `British America' and, still more, `Spanish America' were large and diverse entities embracing on the one hand isolated Caribbean islands and, on the other, mainland territories, many of them remote from one another, and sharply differentiated by climate and geography. The climate of Virginia is not that of New England, nor is the topography of Mexico that of Peru. These differing regions, too, had their own distinctive pasts. When the first Europeans arrived, they found an America peopled in different ways, and at very different levels of density. Acts of war and settlement involved European intrusions into the space of existing indigenous societies; and even if Europeans chose to subsume the members of these societies under the convenient name of `Indian', their peoples differed among themselves at least as much as did the sixteenth-century inhabitants of England and Castile.
    Variables of time existed too, as well as variables of place. As colonies grew and developed, so they changed. So also did the metropolitan societies that had given birth to them. In so far as the colonies were not isolated and self-contained units, but remained linked in innumerable ways to the imperial metropolis, they were not immune to the changes in