Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (2 page)

Attempts have been made to explain the differences between imperial metropolis and peripheral colony in terms both of the push of the old and the pull of the new In an influential work published in 1964 Louis Hartz depicted the new overseas societies as `fragments of the larger whole of Europe struck off in the course of the revolution which brought the west into the modern world'. Having spun off at a given moment from their metropolitan societies of origin, they evinced the `immobilities of fragmentation', and were programmed for ever not only by the place but also by the time of their origin.9 Their salient characteristics were those of their home societies at the moment of their conception, and when the home societies moved on to new stages of development, their colonial offshoots were caught in a time-warp from which they were unable to break free.

Hartz's immobile colonial societies were the antithesis of the innovative colonial societies that Frederick Jackson Turner and his followers saw as emerging in response to `frontier' conditions.1° A frontier, they argued, stimulated invention and a rugged individualism, and was the most important element in the formation of a distinctively `American' character. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized," `American' was synonymous with `North American'. The universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. If such a phenomenon as a `frontier spirit' exists, there seems in principle no good reason why it should not be found in those regions of the New World settled by the Spaniards and the Portuguese as well as by the British.'2 This realization lay behind the famous plea made in 1932 by Herbert Bolton, the historian of the American borderlands, for historians to write an `epic of Greater America' - an enterprise that would take as fundamental the premise that the Americas shared a common history.13

Yet Bolton's plea never evoked the response for which he hoped.14 The sheer scale of the proposed enterprise was no doubt too daunting, and caution was reinforced by scepticism as over-arching explanations like the frontier hypothesis failed to stand the test of investigation on the ground. Dialogue between historians of the different Americas had never been close, and it was still further reduced as a generation of historians of British North America examined in microscopic detail aspects of the history of individual colonies, or - increasingly - of one or other of the local communities of which these colonies were composed. The growing parochialism, which left the historian of colonial Virginia barely within hailing distance of the historian of New England, and consigned the Middle Colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware) to a middle that had no outer edges, offered little chance of a serious exchange of ideas between historians of British America and those of other parts of the continent. Simultaneously the historians of Iberian America - the Mexicanists, the Brazilianists and the Andeanists - pursued their separate paths, with all too little reference to each other's findings. Where the history of the Americas was concerned, professionalization and atomization moved in tandem.

An `epic of Greater America' becomes more elusive with each new monograph and every passing year. In spite of this, there has been a growing realization that certain aspects of local 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 values and customs that were occurring at home. Newcomers would continue to arrive from the mother country, bringing with them new attitudes and life-styles that permeated the societies in which they took up residence. Equally, books and luxury items imported from Europe would introduce new ideas and tastes. News, too, circulated with growing speed and frequency around an Atlantic world that was shrinking as communications improved.

Similarly, changing ideas and priorities at the centre of empire were reflected in changes in imperial policy, so that the third or fourth generation 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. This in turn forced changes. There were obvious continuities between the America of the first English settlers and the British America of the mideighteenth century, but there were important discontinuities as well - discontinuities brought about by external and internal change alike. The `immobilities of fragmentation' detected by Louis Hartz were therefore relative at best. British and Spanish America, as the two units of comparison, did not remain static but changed over time.

It still remains plausible, however, that the moment of 'fragmentation'- of the founding of a colony - constituted a defining moment for the self-imagining, and consequently for the emerging character, of these overseas societies. Yet, if so, there are obvious difficulties in comparing communities founded at very different historical moments. Spain's first colonies in America were effectively established in the opening decades of the sixteenth century; England's in the opening decades of the seventeenth. The profound changes that occurred in European civilization with the coming of the Reformation inevitably had an impact not only on the metropolitan societies but also on colonizing policies and the colonizing process itself. A British colonization of North America undertaken at the same time as Spain's colonization of Central and South America would have been very different in character from the kind of colonization that occurred after a century that saw the establishment of Protestantism as the official faith in England, a notable reinforcement of the place of parliament in English national life, and changing European ideas about the proper ordering of states and their economies.

The effect of this time-lag is to inject a further complication into any process of comparison which seeks to assess the relative weight of nature and nurture in the development of British and Spanish territories overseas. The Spaniards were the pioneers in the settlement of America, and the English, arriving later, had the Spanish example before their eyes. While they might, or might not, avoid the mistakes made by the Spaniards, they were at least in a position to formulate their policies and procedures in the light of Spanish experience, and adjust them accordingly. The comparison, therefore, is not between two self-contained cultural worlds, but between cultural worlds that were well aware of each other's presence, and were not above borrowing each other's ideas when this suited their needs. If Spanish ideas of empire influenced the English in the sixteenth century, the Spaniards repaid the compliment by attempting to adopt British notions of empire in the eighteenth. Similar processes, too, could occur in the colonial societies themselves. Without the example of the British colonies before them, would the Spanish colonies have thought the previously unthinkable and declared their independence in the early nineteenth century?

When account is taken of all the variables introduced by place, time, and the effects of mutual interaction, any sustained comparison of the colonial worlds of Britain and Spain in America is bound to be imperfect. The movements involved in writing comparative history are not unlike those 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.