e precise – and the English (and subsequently British) Empires were linked almost from birth, and their parallel evolution has continued to exercise a considerable influence over the lives of millions in the Western hemisphere to this day. Yet such is the nature of imperial history, both old and new, that it has persisted in examining each imperial experience very largely in isolation. Add to this the assumption of many US historians that the colonial past of their nation was the expression of a destiny, manifest or not, utterly unlike that of the ‘sister republics’ to the south, and it is perhaps not surprising that there have until now been few, if any, sustained or systematic analyses of what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires.
As with all Elliott’s books, the architecture and the scope are breathtaking. Empires of the Atlantic World covers almost every imaginable aspect of the imperial experience, from politics and economics to art and law, religion and literature, science and technology: all encompassed within a single narrative which takes us from discovery in 1492 to the eve of the final independence of the Spanish-American colonies in 1830. Inevitably, some aspects are treated in greater depth and with greater originality than others. It is not so much in the discussion of individual themes, however, that the strength of the book lies, as in the way these are woven together: now, maybe for the first time, it is possible to see that no single topic, no single dimension of the histories of the two empires can adequately be understood without the others. Empires of the Atlantic World is not only a comparative history of two immense and varied polities, but the portrait of an entire world over nearly four hundred years.
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