J. H. Elliott
EMPIRES OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830
560pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
0 300 11431 1
Imagine what the world would look like today had Henry VII been willing to sponsor Christopher Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage, and a subsequent expeditionary force of Englishmen conquered Mexico for Henry VIII. Would Latin America be a thrifty and pluralistic society, firmly entrenched in the capitalist economy of the First World, while North America was a collection of heavily indebted enclaves of outmoded forms of baroque culture? On the last page of Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830, J. H. Elliott addresses this question with a counterfactual argument that might at first sight appear surprising, but which is by no means implausible. The conquest of Mexico by English adventurers, he speculates, would most probably have led to a huge increase in the wealth of the English Crown, as growing quantities of silver flowed into its coffers. This, in turn, would have encouraged the development of a coherent imperial strategy, complete with the creation of a bureaucracy to govern the English settlers and their enormous subjugated populations. As a result, the influence of Parliament in English national life would have been severely curtailed and the English monarchy would more than likely have developed along absolutist lines.
More startling but no less plausible suggestions could be added to Elliott’s characteristically measured speculation. With his coffers full, it is unlikely that Henry VIII would have felt tempted to dissolve the monasteries; and with huge numbers of newly conquered, sedentary and comparatively civilized peoples under his authority, it is unthinkable that he would not have tried his damnedest to live up to the title of Defender of the Faith – which Pope Leo X had conferred on him for his defence of Catholic doctrine against Luther. Thus, Catholic missions would have been funded from England and, fed by a renewed sense of mission and divine predilection, early modern English culture would very likely have become staunchly Catholic. Meanwhile, Spain would have remained relatively impoverished. Without money, it is unlikely that Charles of Ghent would have been elected Holy Roman Emperor, and any notion of a unified Spanish monarchy would have been irreparably weakened after the deaths of Isabel of Castile in 1504 and of Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516. The racial and religious pluralism and relative tolerance that had been a mark of medieval Spanish culture would have continued, and the flirtations of Erasmians with growing pockets of Lutherans from the 1530s onwards would have been left unchecked, leading to the establishment of important Protestant enclaves throughout the peninsula by the mid-sixteenth century.
These groups, in turn, would have found little difficulty in obtaining royal permission to emigrate to those areas of the New World still not under the control of the English Catholic monarchy. Since the bulk of these regions will have been sparsely populated, the Spanish emigrants would have had no option but to develop an approach to colonization based on strings of trading enclaves, thus reinforcing the individualist and mercantile aspects of the medieval Spanish tradition, rather than the conquering and colonizing approach that their English counterparts, for obvious reasons, had chosen to adopt.
As we can see, the world might not after all look very different today had Columbus been funded by Henry VII. Of course, it is not Elliott’s intention even remotely to attempt an answer to such questions. Counterfactual arguments, however, do often highlight just how stimulating comparative history can be, especially when carried out with the meticulous care and breathtaking expertise that are on display on virtually every page of this handsome book. Sharp dichotomies, Elliott tells us, will almost certainly fail “to do justice to the complexities of the past”; but similarities at the expense of differences will likewise tend to “conceal diversity beneath a factitious unity”. For these reasons, he tells us, “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 not as close as they look at first sight; differences are discovered which at first sight lay concealed”. And even when they fail, Elliott adds with unnecessary modesty, “comparisons can help to shake historians out of their provincialisms, by provoking new questions and offering new perspectives”.
One such perspective opens up, for instance, when Elliott reminds us that Castile and England were both “proto-colonial powers” long before they acquired territories in the New World. Just like Andalusia, which provided Ovando, Cortés and Pizarro for Spain, Ireland had long been seen by the English as a useful testing ground for empire – and indeed Gilbert, Ralegh, Carew and Grenville had all tested their first efforts there. More fundamentally, although they were each subject to one monarch, Britain and Spain consisted of different realms and territories with their own distinctive traditions and forms of government. They were both, in other words, what Elliott calls “composite monarchies”. And although they produced two distinctive colonial worlds with sharply divergent political characteristics, there were often striking points of resemblance in their outlooks.
It is good to be reminded, for example, that the conquest of Mexico in 1521 coincided with the revolt of the comuneros in Castile, whose claims that the health of the community was inseparable from a properly constituted contractual relationship between the ruler and the ruled were readily taken up by Hernán Cortés and his followers. This implied a conception of the State that was essentially patrimonial, one where ruler and subjects formed an organic community, a corpus mysticum, designed to enable its members to live good and sociable lives under the benevolent rule of their monarch. Of course, in practice, far too much was at stake in Spanish America to permit the kind of laissez-faire approach that would be so characteristic of early Stuart policy in North America. The juridical idea of absolute royal power could always be used to override the Spanish Crown’s contractual obligations. The successful implementation of this idea was soon reflected in the creation of a system of viceregal government which, as Elliott puts it, “might well be the envy of European monarchs struggling to impose their own authority on recalcitrant nobles, privileged corporations and obstreperous Estates”. As Francis Bacon once suggestively alleged, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza was known to have remarked that Peru “was the best place that the king of Spain gave, save that it was somewhat too near Madrid!”.
Nevertheless, the efficiency of the system is too easy to exaggerate. If it is true that Spanish America was never allowed to develop formal systems of representation, this did not preclude the development of other institutional devices, notably the cabildo or council, and the widespread use of the ritual formula obedezco pero no cumplo – “I obey but I do not comply” – by officials who considered a royal order inappropriate or unjust. “This formula,” Elliott explains, “which was to be incorporated into the laws of the Indies in 1528, provided an ideal mechanism for containing dissent, and preventing disputes from turning into open confrontation.”
There are clear points of convergence between this widely used formula and some of the practices of the British colonial system. Even if English settlers could never resort explicitly to a comparable ritual formula, it was always possible for them to refuse to comply with a royal order on the grounds that the monarch was misinformed. This in turn implied the recognition of the fundamental importance of royal authority and of the obligation of its colonial officials to behave, just like Spanish American viceroys, as the king’s “living images”. The allegations that Lord Cornbury, the Governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708, dressed up to resemble his sovereign, Queen Anne, are of course likely to be the result of scurrilous attempts by his enemies to discredit him; yet the very fact that such a prank could be played suggests that English royal officials, just like their Spanish counterparts, were at the centre of a system where “etiquette and ritual replicated in microcosm those of the royal court”. Additionally, both the British and the Spanish systems were characterized by a high degree of legal pluralism. The local privileges (fueros) of Spain were mirrored in England in the competition of common law courts with a multiplicity of courts which possessed their own forms of jurisdiction – church courts, admiralty courts, law merchant courts, local and manor courts, and prerogative courts like the Star Chamber. Such pluralism was especially reflected in the two colonial worlds in the way in which both English and Spanish settlers took the specific local circumstances carefully into account in numerous instances of ad hoc legislation and accommodation with local customs and traditions.
In practice, of course, these circumstantial initiatives were often expressed in contrasting forms. Nowhere is this more evident than in the very different approaches of the two nations to the evangelization of the native inhabitants. Despite its dreadful disappointments, the Spanish achievement on this front was impressive enough by the early seventeenth century for William Strachey to hold it up as a worthy example to his English compatriots as they set off to colonize Virginia. Yet the English would never achieve anything even remotely comparable. The reasons for this are not far to seek. To begin with, the Reformation in England had done away with the religious orders, which had been the main engines of evangelization in Spanish America. Furthermore, the Anglican Church in the early seventeenth century did not enjoy the full support of the Crown and, at any rate, it was in no shape to devise and implement a comprehensive programme of evangelization, since it was still struggling to establish itself at home. The fact that it did not even possess a monopoly of religious life meant that the English settlements soon became an arena for inter-denominational tensions. And although Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot did manage to learn native languages in an effort to convert the Indians, they were forced to rely on private donations and voluntary associations for projects that in Spanish America would have undoubtedly received official support.
It is true that in some respects, most notably the absence of coercion, the English approach to mission compares quite favourably with the Spanish: “not with rapier’s point and musket shot . . . but by fair and loving means, suiting to our English natures”, as Robert Johnson put it in 1609. But this religious tolerance ironically gave way to a much greater intolerance in civil matters and behaviour than was the case in Spanish America. Here, the influence of the indefatigable Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas and his supporters had led to the creation of a moral climate that made the Spanish Crown acutely aware of its obligations towards the Indians. This in turn brought about a commitment to ensuring justice throughout the Hispanic world for which, as Elliott puts it, “in its continuity and strength, it is not easy to find parallels in the history of other colonial empires”. It was a system that thought in terms of incorporating the Indians into an “organic and hierarchically constituted society”, one which would give them the chance of fighting for their rights “all the way to the summit of the judicial system”, and where conflicts and tensions among the Spanish settlers did not play against the persistence of a culture “which was not afraid to interact with the surrounding population because it took it for granted that sooner or later its values would prevail”.
No such confidence was ever in evidence among the English, who actually ended up by dismantling Indian courts after King Philip’s War (1675–6) made it plain to them that there was no middle way between anglicization and exclusion. These attitudes became tragically evident in the development of chattel slavery. As it was developed by the Portuguese, and then adopted by the Dutch and the English, the commerce of slaves led to conditions which, in Elliott’s words, were “uniformly barbaric” in British America. Abuses against slaves throughout the Hispanic world, by contrast, were often mitigated by the ministrations of the religious orders and by the ability of slaves to follow the example of the Indians in playing the game by Spanish rules. In their struggle to secure their rights to marriage, for example, or their entitlement to freedom, slaves in Spanish America skilfully availed themselves of the help of Church and Crown to erode the claims of masters to hold them as mere chattels. The situation in the British American colonies, where increasing restrictions were placed on the master’s power to free his slaves, was entirely different.
There is consequently something to be said in favour of the early imposition of religious orthodoxy in Spanish America, particularly when we consider that the failure of a similar development in New England effectively precluded the development of any sense of inner cohesion, often giving the impression, writes Elliott, of “an atomised society in a continuous state of turmoil”. In the coherence and sophistication of its cultural life at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by contrast, Spanish America far outshone its British counterpart. The populations of Boston (c16,000), Philadelphia (c13,000) and New York (c11,000) pale into insignificance when compared to those of Mexico City (c112,000), Lima (c52,000), Havana (c36,000), Quito (c30,000), and Cuzco (c26,000). In all these cities, civic elites spoke a common religious and cultural language, and the viceregal courts constantly transmitted the latest fashions of the court cultures of Baroque Europe. Lacking this kind of structure, Elliott comments, “it is not surprising that the more ambitious North American artists of the eighteenth century . . . should have set their sights on London”, whereas “Mexican and Peruvian artists . . . felt no comparable need to travel to Madrid”. The same, of course, applies to baroque intellectuals such as the Mexicans Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
In the end, however, this very strength gradually developed into a fundamental weakness. It was not merely, as Elliott remarks, that a society based on an inner cohesion that was dependent on uniformity of faith would find it incomparably more difficult to adjust to new ideas. A more fundamental issue was brought to the fore by the extinction of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty with the death of Charles II in 1700, an event which led to the establishment of a new Bourbon dynasty after the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) and the consequent detachment of the Hispanic world from all its old international connections. Given the radical nature of this break, it is startling to observe that the Bourbon succession passed off almost without incident in Spanish America, in sharp contrast to the turmoil that the events surrounding the 1688 Revolution in England caused in British America. In securing a Protestant succession in England, and confirming its future as a parliamentary monarchy, the Glorious Revolution, Elliott argues, “contributed new layers of religious and political ideology” to British imperialism. From now on, Protestantism, liberty and commercial enterprise were to be “enshrined as the mutually reinforcing constituents of a national ethos which, in the long and exhausting wars against the popish tyranny of Louis XIV, would win the ultimate sanction of military success”. Meanwhile, Spanish America persisted in regarding itself as an integral part of a composite monarchy, even as Madrid, under the sway of the new Bourbon reformers, had come to see the notion as anathema and to speak the language of a unitary nation state in which the monarch received his power directly from God without any mediation by the community.
These circumstances go a long way towards explaining why the various rebellions that erupted in both colonies in the second half of the eighteenth century were easily contained in Spanish America, while they led irrevocably to the independence of its northern neighbour. On the one hand, the British colonies found themselves confronting a regime that simultaneously proclaimed its absolute authority and still half spoke the language of composite monarchy – of liberty and rights. What this meant, Elliott tells us, was that “the languages spoken by Britain and British America were confusingly, and dangerously, the same”, since the two regions had become “inextricably involved in that most intractable of all forms of conflict, the conflict over competing constitutional rights”. On the other hand, the two sides of the Spanish Atlantic were effectively talking at cross-purposes: while the Crown spoke the language of the unitary nation state, Spanish Americans remained imbued with the traditional notions of contract and the common good, yet they continued to operate within the framework of the monarchy. Even after the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, Elliott reminds us, there was still a widely held hope that “the shaky edifice of Spain’s empire in the Indies might yet be sustained . . . by a mixture of loyalty and fear”. There is therefore a strange but clear logic in the fact that whereas the Spanish imperial state had created an indispensable framework for colonial life which was much more thorough and successful than its British American counterpart, the disappearance of the imperial structure from British America left the colonies free to manage their lives much as they had done before. By contrast, the disappearance of the Spanish imperial structure left a despairing vacuum behind it, a vacuum that the successor Latin American states would prove themselves ill prepared to fill.
This appraisal can barely begin to do justice to the formidable scholarship and the wealth of suggestions and insights contained in this magnificent book. Merely to have written a synthesis of either of the two empires would have been a brave undertaking and an impressive tour de force. But to have produced such a detailed and illuminating comparative synthesis of both, with hardly a dull paragraph despite its dispassionate – perhaps at times too dispassionate – scholarship, is a mighty triumph. Seldom can comparative history have been done so thoroughly, and presented with such flair, authority and aplomb. |
