Elliott quotes several times from Thomas Gage, the first Englishman to publish a lengthy account of travels in the Spanish empire, whose writings encouraged Cromwell to seize Jamaica. Like Gage he is impressed by the grand and monumental manner in which the Spanish planted themselves in the New World. The English had nothing much to show by comparison, and this was still the case when the two powers fought in the first decades of the 18th century. Spain was still rather more formidable than we have been led to believe — few besides readers of Smollett’s Roderick Random remember Admiral Vernon’s failure at Cartagena, never a part of the national curriculum. Smuggling, always referred to as ‘rife’ in the Spanish possessions and a source of weakness, does not loosen an imperial hold anything like as much as do efforts to suppress it. For a long time it was common for historians to refer to ‘the ramshackle Spanish empire’, but the adjective is more justly applied to our own construction in the Americas, as this work politely but firmly hints. The 18th century saw the two powers embarked on similar courses, tightening up imperial control and making their American subjects pay more taxes. The results were unpopular in both halves of the hemisphere, but it was the British empire that rapidly succumbed to revolt. The Spanish weathered the rebellion of Tupac Amaru in Peru and the Comunero revolt in New Granada: they were more flexible and more solidly entrenched. The end of Spanish rule in the Americas came when Napoleon made the mistake of dethroning the Bourbons in 1808, and the decapitated empire was thrown into confusion. The only imperial parallel that comes to mind, not a very good one, is the state of the French empire after the fall of France in 1940.
John Elliott ends his masterly accordion- playing with Independence, and a brief look forward to what is then to come. Having previously found frustratingly little to disagree with — he does employ the adjective ‘lucrative’ a bit too much, even using it for the Spanish American book trade, where the fortunes made can probably be counted on the fingers of Cervantes’ one remaining hand — here I think he takes too gloomy a view of Latin America. The Independence wars were exceptionally fierce in Venezuela, but less so elsewhere, and the violence and disorder of the remaining 19th century are commonly much overstated: France had a more disorderly 19th century than some Latin American republics — one thing that made her culture so attractive to them. And the longest, bloodiest and most destructive civil war in the Americas was fought in the United States.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.