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

involved in playing the accordion. The two societies under comparison are pushed together, but only to be pulled apart again. Resemblances prove after all to be not as close as they look at first sight; differences are discovered which at first lay concealed. Comparison is therefore a constantly fluctuating process, which may well seem on closer inspection to offer less than it promises. This should not in itself, however, be sufficient to rule the attempt out of court. Even imperfect comparisons can help to shake historians out of their provincialisms, by provoking new questions and offering new perspectives. It is my hope that this book will do exactly that.
    In my view the past is too complex, and too endlessly fascinating in its infinite variety, to be reduced to simple formulae. I have therefore rejected any attempt to squeeze different aspects of the histories of British and Spanish America into neat compartments that would allow their similarities and differences to be listed and offset. Rather, by constantly comparing, juxtaposing and interweaving the two stories, I have sought to reassemble a fragmented history, and display the development of these two great New World civilizations over the course of three centuries, in the hope that a light focused on one of them at a given moment will simultaneously cast a secondary beam over the history of the other.
    Inevitably the attempt to write the history of large parts of a hemisphere over such a broad stretch of time means that much has been left out. While well aware that some of the most exciting scholarship in recent years has been devoted to the topic of African slavery in the Atlantic world and to the recovery of the past of the indigenous peoples of America, my principal focus has been the development of the settler societies and their relationship with their mother countries. This, I hope, will give some coherence to the story. I have, however, always tried to bear in mind that the developing colonial societies were shaped by the constant interaction of European and non-European peoples, and hope to have been able to suggest why, at particular times and in particular places, the interaction occurred as it did. Yet even in placing the prime emphasis on the settler communities, I was still forced to paint with a broad brush. The confinement of my story to Spanish, rather than Iberian, America means the almost total exclusion of the Portuguese settlement of Brazil, except for glancing references to the sixty-year period, from 1580 to 1640, when it formed part of Spain's global monarchy. In discussing British North America I have tried to allow some space to the Middle Colonies, the source of so much historical attention in recent years, but plead guilty to what will no doubt be regarded by many as excessive attention to New England and Virginia. I must also plead guilty, in writing of British and Spanish America alike, to devoting far more attention to the mainland colonies than to the Caribbean islands. Hard choices are inevitable in a work that ranges so widely over time and space.
    Such a work necessarily depends very largely on the writings of others. There is now an immense literature on the history of the colonial societies of British and Spanish America alike, and I have had to pick my way through the publications of a large number of specialists, summarizing their findings as best I could in the relatively limited space at my disposal, and seeking to find a point of resolution between conflicting interpretations that neither distorts the conclusions of others, nor privileges those that fit most easily into a comparative framework. To all these works, and many others not cited in the notes or bibliography, I am deeply indebted, even when - and perhaps especially when - I disagree with them.
    The idea for this book first came to me at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, at a moment when I felt that the time had come to move away from the history of