Alistair Hennessy - In the Atlantic Mirror

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130new left review 46july aug 2007

J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America,14921830Yale University Press: New Haven and London 2006, 35, hardback

546 pp, ISBN 0 300 11431 1

IN THE ATLANTIC MIRROR

Alistair Hennessy

Ever since Hector de Crvecur posed the question, What then is this

American, this new man? in 1782, North Americans have endlessly rumi-nated on their uniqueness. Yet they have rarely considered what they have in

common with the Other America, the sister-continent to their south. Such

has been the ingrained Protestant providentialism of Anglo-American think-

ing that Spains Atlantic empire has too often been consigned to the shadows

of the Black Legend, according to which the greed and depravities of the

Old World were visited on the New by Iberian conquistadors and viceroys.

The same view is alive and flourishing: in his post-9/11 jeremiad Who Are

We?(2004), Samuel Huntington deplores the erosion of Americas nationalidentity by immigration, and the undermining of its culture of Protestant

individualism by Hispanic bilingualism, multiculturalism and the denation-

alization of elites. Fortress America is today symbolized by the iron curtain

erected on the usMexican border to exclude illegal immigrants.

Asymmetries of power in the Americas are reflected in asymmetrical

historiographies. Spanish American historians, even those based in us uni-

versities, tend to concentrate on Spanish American topics, while exceptionalist

views ofus history have engendered a widespread parochialism that has sur-

vived the strictures of the eminent us historian Herbert Bolton, who in 1932argued for a broader treatment to supplement the nationalist presentations

to which we are accustomed. Few historians have the experience and staying

REVIEWS


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power to overcome such prejudices and preconceptions. John Elliotts path-

breaking Empires of the Atlantic Worldassembles a formidable and fascinating

array of material, testifying to an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge.

Author of pioneering books on Olivares, the modernizing minister of Philip

IV, Elliott has an unparalleled grasp of 17th-century Spain. After a long anddistinguished teaching career at Cambridge, London, Princeton and Oxford,

in 1997 he began work on the daunting project that has now been brought to

a resoundingly successful conclusion: a comprehensive comparative history

of the Spanish and British empires in the Americas.

The strength of the book is the masterly way in which Elliott interrelates

and compares the numerous different dimensions of British and Spanish

policies in all their economic, political, religious and constitutional com-

plexities. Covering the period from the arrival of the first Spanish andEnglish colonists in the 16th century to the end of the independence strug-

gles (17761830), Elliott moves in broadly chronological fashion through a

series of comparisons: differing patterns of conquest and settlement, dis-

tinct approaches to the indigenous peoples and material resources of the

New World, contrasting visions of God, crown, state and empire. The result

is a gripping and lavishly produced portrait both of the Spanish and British

colonial projects, and of the widely varying social, political and economic

orders to which they gave rise.

The magnitude of Elliotts achievement must be seen in the contextof a general reluctance among historiansunlike anthropologiststo

undertake the exacting discipline of comparative analysis. They have too

often been deterred by mundane professional considerations, such as the

burden of retooling or the risk of criticism from resentful specialists. As

Elliott pungently observes, where the history of the Americas was con-

cerned, professionalization and atomization moved in tandem. The few

who have attempted comparisons on a continental scale have done so in

terms of obvious contrastsjuxtaposing Britains empire of commercewith Spains empire of conquest, for instance, or focusing on divergent

mindsets, as in Claudio Vlizs The New World of the Gothic Fox (1994),

which borrows Tolstoys metaphor, popularized by Isaiah Berlin, to set the

Counter-Reformation rigidity of the Spanish hedgehog against the flexibility

and pluralism of the British fox.

Elliott has little time for this ingenious but unpersuasive approach. Nor

does he subscribe to the immobilities of fragmentation thesis put forward

by Louis Harz, who argued in the once influential Founding of New Societies

(1964) that the salient characteristics of the metropolitan society continue tocondition new social formations issuing from them. On the contrary, Elliott

observes that changing ideas and priorities at the centre of empire were

reflected in changes in imperial policy, so that the third or fourth generation


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of settlers might well find itself operating within an imperial framework in

which the assumptions and responses of the founding fathers had lost much

of their former relevance. Moreover, British and Spanish America did not

remain static but changed over time; not only did the two sets of colonists

interact with the conditions and circumstances in which they found them-selves, they were also well aware of each others presence. The Atlantic

colonies were not two self-contained cultural worlds, but parallel projects

which borrowed from and influenced each other.

There were important precedents for the conquest and settlement of the

New World. Elliott notes that Castile and England were both proto-colonial

powers long before they set out to colonize Americathe former engaged

over centuries in the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, the latter having sub-

jugated Wales and Scotland, and planted colonists in Ireland. In many cases,techniques of conquest were transmitted across the Atlantic, along with the

accompanying preconceptions. Hence, for instance, Corts tended to refer to

Mesoamerican temples as mosques, and in making his alliances with local

Indian caciques . . . resorted to strategies often used against the petty local rul-

ers of Moorish Andalusia. To the north, one British observer concluded that

the wild Irish and the Indian do not much differ; Elliott points out that it is

no accident that the Elizabethans most active in devising the first American

projectsSir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Lane, Thomas

Whitewere deeply involved in the schemes for Irish plantation.Nevertheless, the Americas presented the arriving colonists with entirely

new, and dissimilar, constraints and opportunities. Where Mesoamerica

was densely populated by hierarchically organized peoples, and rich in

gold, silver and other plunderable wealth, the indigenous groups of North

Americas eastern seaboard were smaller in number and more thinly spread;

British America was initially altogether less promising in economic terms

forcing on the settlers a developmental as against an essentially exploitative

rationale. But Spanish colonists faced an imperative the British lacked: thepapal bulls of 149394 that had granted Ferdinand and Isabella dominion

over newly discovered lands west of Brazil also imposed an obligation to

Christianize their inhabitants. Catholic theologians conceived the New World

as a utopia where the evils of the Old World would be purged, but there were

also intense debates on the legitimacy of subduing native peoples. There is

no English equivalent to the discussions at the School of Salamanca, or to

the moral pressure exerted by certain scholars and theologians on Castilian

monarchs to codify the legal status of indigenous peoples.

The 1512 Leyes de Burgos classed the indigenous inhabitants of SpanishAmerica as vassals of the crown; they were given the right to own property,

and had to be remunerated for their labour. Though the encomienda system

provided a way round this, the indigenous demographic collapse wrought


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by conquest and European diseases made imported slave labour increas-

ingly attractive. By 1640 there were some 150,000 of African descent in

the Viceroyalties of New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras,

Nicaragua and the bulk of the southwestern us), and 30,000 in that of

Peru (stretching from Panama to Tierra del Fuego, though later subdividedinto three ViceroyaltiesNew Granada, Peru and Ro de la Plataand the

Captaincy-General of Chile). The British Caribbean and Chesapeake settle-

ments also imported enslaved Africans to meet labour shortages on sugar and

tobacco plantations; by 1710, one fifth of Virginias population were slaves,

while Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands had absorbed 250,000

slaves from Africa by the beginning of the 18th century. Elliott describes the

slave trade as uniformly barbaric across the Americas, but suggests that

African slaves in Spains American possessions seem to have enjoyed moreroom for manoeuvre and more opportunities for advancement than their

counterparts in British AmericaSpains longer experience of slavery, and

the consequent higher degree of codification, paradoxically providing some

mitigation of their lot.

Elliott covers well the different regimes of slavery that obtained in British

and Spanish America, which have attracted more comparative work than

other aspects of the colonial experienceperhaps because they can be set

alongside similar phenomena in other continents. Frontiers have likewise

been the basis of cross-continental comparisons, and are also given sustainedattention by Elliott. It was at the 1893 Chicago Exposition for the quatercen-

tenary of Columbuss voyage that Frederick Jackson Turner first enunciated

the frontier thesisarguably the most influential paper ever read at a his-

torical conference. In Turners view it was the frontier that transformed

Europeans into Americans, a myth that would be absorbed into popular

culture through the Western. One difficulty with the frontier thesis, as

many critics have shown, is that of definition. In Latin America there is no

Turnerian mythological frontier, but only various frontiersmining, cattle,coffee, missionaryeach with its own distinctive settlement pattern involving

different inter-group situations. These can serve to draw together migrants

through shared experiencesconfronting daunting spaces, strange and for-

bidding flora and fauna, impenetrable forests, impassable mountains, strange

peoples speaking unintelligible languages and worshipping fearsome gods.

But Elliott is too experienced and able a historian to reduce his analysis

to a single formative experience, however varied its expression. Instead, he

draws a distinction between frontiers of inclusion and exclusion that under-

lines the fundamental difference between the two empires.

While the Spaniards tended to think in terms of the incorporation of theIndians into an organic and hierarchically organized society which would


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enable them in time to attain the supreme benefits of Christianity and civil-ity, the English, after an uncertain start, seem to have decided that there wasno middle way between anglicization and exclusion.

The same distinction divides Spanish and British attitudes towards sexual-ity. This was not simply a matter of sexual preferences, as Gilberto Freyre

argued in the case of Brazil, but of demography, religion and economic

pressures. In the early stages of the Conquest, Bartolom de las Casas had

encouraged intermarriage as a means of creating one of the best republics

and perhaps the most Christian and peaceful in the world, and friars on the

mission frontier encouraged soldiers to intermarry with the locals. For con-

quistadors on the make, marriage to the daughters of Aztec or Inca notables

also conferred a certain sense of rank.In British America, the mobile foraging and hunting life-patterns of the

indigenous tribes would have made inclusion impractical. Moreover, for

these settlers miscegenation tended to carry the assumption that it led to

a degeneration of stock. This was reinforced by the application to the New

World of Biblical metaphors of the wilderness, where temptation always

lurked; the Puritan minister Cotton Mather even referred to Satan as that

old usurping landlord of America. But whatever the strictures against

miscegenation in the Puritan colonies, there were no admonitions in the

Caribbean islands, where fornication was rife between planters and theirslaves (as can be seen from the endless couplings recorded in the diary of

Thomas Thistlewood, overseer on a Jamaican sugar plantation). The off-

spring of such unions remained illegitimate, leaving a long-term legacy

of common law partnerships, and a sizeable mulatto class. In Virginia

and the Southern colonies, by contrast, mulattoes were simply absorbed

into the slave population, buttressing an exclusionary order founded on

the supremacy of white over black.

Spanish America gave rise to a social order of far greater complexity,in Elliotts words. Though creoles soon came to adopt limpieza de sangre

cleanness of bloodas a means of social discrimination, miscegenation had

distinctive social and cultural consequences. Among racially mixed Spanish

American families, compadrazgoco-godparenthood, a form of ritual kin-

ship brought over from Spainplayed an integral role in bonding between

the races. Nothing illustrates more vividly the Spanish colonies wide variety

of castes than the series of 18th-century Mexican paintings, four of which

are reproduced in Elliotts book, attempting to establish a taxonomy for

New Spains kaleidoscopic ethnic mix. Cultural fusion was also graphicallyexpressed in the incorporation of indigenous craft skills and motifs in the

building of Spanish American churches, whose baroque magnificence was

in marked contrast to the modest, often wooden churches of New England.


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Yet though the British American colonies were culturally less sophisticated,

they possessed a political vitality and a religious effervescence that differen-

tiated them from the Spanish American societies to the south. In Elliotts

view, the degree of popular participation in British America set in motion

a dynamic that, once unleashed, could mount a powerful challenge to theexercise of power and privilege by the few.

During the 18th century, Britains rapidly expanding fleet and economy

posed an increasingly significant threat to both Spain and France. The

Bourbon kings of these two countries were bound together by the Family

Compact of 1761, sealed midway through the Seven Years War that would

alter the balance of forces on the entire American continent. Victory pre-

sented the British with the problem of vastly extended frontiersnow

stretching from Nova Scotia to Florida, the Atlantic to the Mississippiandcorrespondingly greater military expenses, which ministers in Whitehall

attempted to levy on a resistant colonial populace. Less than twenty years

later, the Thirteen Colonies would unite to overturn imperial rule. Spain,

meanwhile, was confronted with a worsening fiscal position, and symptoms

of its decline multiplied. Failure to recapture Gibraltar in the Great Siege

of 177983 before an invited European audience was probably its greatest

public humiliation of the century; worse was to follow in 1805 when the

Spanish fleet was virtually destroyed at Trafalgargraveyard of Spanish

sea power, and index of Britains naval pre-eminence and technologicaladvantage. The Napoleonic invasion of 1808 dealt a further, mortal blow,

and inaugurated the processes that would culminate in independence

for Spains American colonies.

In sharp contrast to the imperial framework Spain had managed to

impose on the Americas within a generation of conquest, British America

exhibited a patchwork of different styles of government and jurisdiction.

Within these, a contestatory civic culture developed that had no equivalent

in Spanish America; cabildos were scarcely a match for the town coun-cils of New England. Armed with a huge variety of books and pamphlets,

including many from Paris, and a more sophisticated level of political

debate, British colonists were better prepared than their Spanish coun-

terparts both for constitutional conflict with the metropole, and for the

challenges of independence.

The federal compact that bound the Thirteen Colonies together is a clear

example of the differing political cultures of British and Spanish America.

Of all the legacies bequeathed by the Founding Fathers, the federal principle

was arguably the most important, and had far-reaching consequencesnotleast the constant conflict in the us over states rights that finally erupted

in a devastating civil war, eclipsing anything to have occurred in Spanish

America. Federalism was prominent in Spain itself in debates over the


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1812 Constitution in the Cortes at Cadiz; indeed, with its king in exile in

France, Spain had practically been a federal republic during the struggle

against Napoleon, power residing in the numerous local juntas that directed

the guerrilla war. But despite the explosive impact of the 1812 Constitution

in Spanish America, federalism has had a slight and chequered historythere: early failure in Venezuela, source of endless conflicts in Argentina,

Colombia and elsewhere.

If Elliotts discussion of the issues and dilemmas thrown up by the

Peninsular War lacks the density of Raymond Carrs analysis, this is amply

compensated by Elliotts lucidity. As he wryly observes, the most effective

gravediggers of empire are usually the imperialists themselves. The Cadiz

Cortes did little to address the concerns of creole elites, who had realized

after the Trafalgar disaster that Spain could not protect them, and welcomedthe increased autonomy and opportunities for trade with the British afforded

them by Madrids powerlessness. After the war, Spain opted to follow the

centralizing Bourbon model, instead of the contractual principle which pre-

ceded it, in a bid to reassert controla decision which stoked tensions with

the colonies still further. As Elliott puts it:

Six years of turmoil and constitutional upheaval in Spain itself, the break-down of authority over large parts of America, the rise of a more informedpublic opinion with a new taste for liberty, and heavy pressure from Great

Britain and the United States, eager to capture valuable American marketsall this made a return to the past impossible.

Rather than facilitating a reassertion of Madrids authority, the resto-

ration of Ferdinand VII proved instead to be the catalyst for movements

aimed at winning outright independence. Over the next two decades, war

raged across almost the whole of Spanish America, as royalist forces battled

insurgent armies from Chile to Venezuela. Here Elliott notes that the length

and ferocity of the wars of independence in Spanish America can in greatmeasure be ascribed to the absence of foreign intervention, which had made

the struggles of the British American colonies comparatively shorter and

less bloody. The fledgling United States also gained considerably from the

Napoleonic Wars, securing trade connections with a limping Europe and,

through the Louisiana purchase, vast tracts of land from a France which

valued European expansion over American possessions. On their emancipa-

tion, meanwhile, the new states of Spanish America were confronted with

a considerably less favourable conjuncture: they found themselves on the

fringes of an international trading community that wanted their markets butdid not want their produce. They also found themselves overshadowed by an

increasingly confident and assertive United States, to which Mexico would


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lose half its territory between 1845 and 1854. The parameters for an unequal

hemispheric division of power and wealth had been set.

What economic benefits did Spain and Britain derive from their

empires? Adam Smith was sceptical: the empire has existed in imagination

only . . . it has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire.Elliott cites the work of Stanley Engerman, whose cost-benefit analysis esti-

mated that, because of high administrative costs and a standing armythe

British did not trust militias, unlike the Spanish, whose soldiers were often

of mixed race or blackthe mainland colonies and possibly also the British

West Indies brought no significant positive benefits to Britain. It seems

odd, however, to include the West Indies in this judgement, in view of the

extraordinary profits from sugar imports which underpinned the growth of

the symbiotic towns of Liverpool and Manchester, and given the numerouscountry houses built on sugar profits and marriage to West Indian heir-

esses. The large number of estates in Scotland is evidence, too, of success

obtained through the British empire after the Union of 1707.

In Elliotts view, the ratio of costs to benefits for Spain was substantially

more favourable: despite regular shipments of silver to Seville, Spanish

America, unlike British America, was self-sustaining. But Elliott concludes

that the ultimate gain may have lain outside Castile: The silver that . . .

fell through the meshes of the Spanish sieve flowed into the economies of

Europe and Asia, generating in the process an international monetary systemwhose development did much to facilitate the global expansion of trade.

Elliott wisely restricts his analysis to the two largest Atlantic empires.

Othersthe French, Dutch and Portugueseare discussed only briefly,

where they impinge on the main analysis. But the exclusion of Brazil precludes

consideration of a fundamental problem in the history of the Americas: why

did Portuguese America not fragment? Not only did it not do so, it expanded

at the expense of its neighbours. Elliott does explain fully and lucidly the

reasons for Spanish Americas fragmentationgeographical breadth anddiversity, historical particularities, the grip of creole oligarchiesalthough

the failed 1826 Congress of Panama, and with it the demise of Bolvars

pan-American vision, perhaps merited some discussion. But the complex

and contentious matter of the New Worlds only 19th-century empire sug-

gests further comparisons. The question has considerable contemporary

relevance. How can Brazils current Great Power ambitions be reconciled

with the Bolivarian dreamwhich in fact never included Brazilrecently

resuscitated by Hugo Chvez, vaulting over the pessimism of Bolvar, who

wrote shortly before he died that those who have served a revolution haveploughed the sea?

The Caribbean, as Elliott admits, was also a casualty of hard choices he

had to make. But one may regret the omission of the effects of the Haitian


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Revolution, and the subsequent foundation of the first black republic, which

defeated the armies of France, Britain and Spain. The example of Haiti hung

like a thundercloud over the Americas, profoundly affecting rulers and ruled

alike. It influenced Bolvars attitude towards slaveryPtion making his

assistance to the Liberator conditional on a promise of slave emancipationand offered a beacon of hope to other enslaved populations, for whom Haiti

meant independence, liberty and equality. This was especially the case

in the Caribbean, where for the first time West Indians became aware of

themselves as a people.

By far the most important impact, however, was on Cuba. Britain could

slough off the loss of American coloniestrade rapidly resumed, and

increased as Adam Smith had predictedand despite the humiliation of the

war of 1812, Canada was secured. In any case, Britain had an imperial futurein India and Africa. Spain had no such option, except for the opportunity

opened up by events in Haiti to promote Cuba as the worlds major sugar

producer. Cuba benefited from the expertise of French Haitian planter refu-

gees, who modernized sugar production as well as introducing coffee. The

downside was the huge increase in slave imports which raised the threat of

slave revolts; encouraged by the Haitian example, the free black Jos Antonio

Aponte led one such rebellion as early as 1812. But Cuba was seen as an El

Dorado by impoverished Spanish emigrants, whose remittances supported

countless families in the metropole. More visibly, Cuban wealth under-pinned the Catalan Renaissance of the late 19th century, and made fortunes

for the patrons of Gaud or the poet Jacint Verdaguer. The riches of Cuba

even fuelled visions of a revivified empire: after success in the Moroccan war

of 1859, Spain embarked on a series of imperial ventures in the Dominican

Republic, Peru, Cochin China and Mexico; all were failures. It was the even-

tual loss of Cuba and the Philippines in the SpanishAmerican war of 1898

that delivered the quietus to Spain as an imperial power.

In view of the colossal political, economic and social consequences of thetwo empires, it is curious that neither Spaniards nor British should have pro-

duced an Atlantic epic. But Atlantic storms did have significant, if delayed,

cultural repercussions, above all on the way Spanish Americans came to

regard their northern counterparts. In 1609, the Sea Venturer, belonging

to the Virginia Company, was wrecked on the rocks of Bermuda in a hur-

ricane. Remarkably, all passengers and crew were saved, some opting to stay

on the island, others to return to London where Shakespeare, who invested

in the Company, fashioned the wreck into The Tempest. Prospero, Ariel and

Caliban were re-deployed as metaphors by the Uruguayan Jos Enrique Rodin 1900. With the Spanish-speaking world shaken by the defeat of 1898, and

shocked at the prospect of the United States dominating the whole conti-

nent, Rod argued for the superiority of idealist, Spanish and classical values,


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represented by the ethereal spirituality of Ariel, over the crass materialism

of the United States, represented by Caliban. Seventy years later, the Cuban

Roberto Fernndez Retamar would instead claim Caliban as representative

of Latin Americas mestizo culture, allowing him to shed his subservient

position and speak up for the long-exploited colonial underdog.Even fluctuating visions such as these can gradually solidify into

stereotypes. Elliotts magisterial study makes an invaluable contribu-

tion to challenging such entrenched preconceptionsnot least in the wry

counter-factual at the books conclusion, imagining the outcome had it been

Englands Henry VII who had sponsored Columbus:

It is possible to imagine an alternative, and by no means implausible script:a massive increase in the wealth of the English crown as growing quanti-

ties of American silver flowed into the royal coffers; the development of acoherent imperial strategy to exploit the resources of the New World; thecreation of an imperial bureaucracy to govern the settler societies and theirsubjugated populations; the declining influence of parliament in nationallife, and the establishment of an absolutist English monarchy financedby the silver of America.

While playful in tone, the parallel scenario serves to underscore once again

Elliotts comparative method, and the consistency with which he brings

together the contrasted but complementary branches of Western civiliza-

tion. It will take a rare historian to produce a sequel encompassing theintervening centuries, and the disequilibria of the present, with comparable

rigour and intelligence.

Alistair Hennessy - In the Atlantic Mirror

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