Empires of the Atlantic World

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Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

J. H. Elliott

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This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus’s arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America.
Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires’ processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.

J. H. Elliott is Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History, University of Oxford. His previous books include The Count-Duke of Olivares, A Palace for a King (with Jonathan Brown), and Spain and Its World, 1500—1700, all published by Yale University Press. Among the many honors he has received are the Wolfson Prize for History, the Prince of Asturias Prize for the Social Sciences, and the Balzan Prize for History.

Sir John Elliott Observes...
 
A long period of residence in a foreign country opens new windows on the . For seventeen years I lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Institute for Advanced Study, before returning to my home country to take up a professorship at Oxford in 1990. During those seventeen years I was heavily engaged in researching and writing on my principal area of interest, the history of Spain and Hispanic civilization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, living in the United States and not in Europe, I was for the first time looking at Spain from across the Atlantic, and at Iberian America within a hemispheric context. As a Briton living abroad, I was also coming to look at the past and present of my own country from a transatlantic vantage point, and to reflect on the ways in which British institutions and culture had been reshaped by their transfer to an American environment.
 
It then occurred to me that it would be an interesting exercise to compare and contrast the empires of Britain and Spain in America, and explore the similarities and the differences in the societies that emerged from the process of conquest and colonization. It has been a long but exciting voyage of exploration, which I hope will open the eyes of others, as it has opened mine, to the rich and complex history of the Atlantic .

ISBN: 9780300114317
Publication Date: April 15, 2006
560 pages, 6-3/4 x 9-5/8
40/50in 2 plate sections half colour