Buy this book

Michael Savage
posted 17 August 2006

Frontiers seize the imagination. Popular genres like science fiction and Westerns are all about exploring the unknown. But one of the greatest frontier stories of all is true. It is the story of the European conquest and colonisation of the Americas. JH Elliott tells the whole story in this new synthesis, looking at the British and Spanish experiences in parallel. The British and Spanish empires have both been closely and exhaustively studied separately, but Elliott’s book is an important new synthesis.

Elliott is one of the most highly respected academic historians today – Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford, he has taught in Britain and America, and written many of the foremost books about the early modern history of Spain. But it’s not just a scholarly tome. It is also an outstanding example of historical writing that manages to combine serious, rigorous historical scholarship with an approachable style and grand narrative that commends it to the general reader. Elliott is one of that rare breed – a public intellectual who is more intellectual than public!

Elliott writes well and captures the sweep of history, but he does not have an eye for anecdote. He uses details to illustrate broad developments, but I yearned for more stories. The Valladolid Debate is covered only briefly in a matter-of-fact way (pp 76-77). But it is one of the great illuminating stories of the era, when scholars convened a formal debate to determine whether or not the people of South America were the ‘natural slaves’ that Aristotle described. (Lewis Hanke’s Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World, published in 1970, tells the story well.) The personalities are compelling and the way that the argument was resolved tells us more about how those times differ from ours than many thousands of words of new description.

It is not only the anecdote that is missing. In his grand sweep of history he avoids generalisation and theory. Elliott has a practical, pragmatic bent. Usually that is a strength; this book is much better than the second-rate pop theory that scarcely hides the shallowness of some historians. But his insistently immediate discussion sometimes lets him down – especially since this is meant to be a work of grand synthesis. Sometimes more theoretical reflection is needed. For example, he writes that ‘Family and hierarchy were the twin pillars supporting the social structure of Early Modern Europe,’ (p. 153).

This is very nearly unintelligible. Is he saying that family isn’t hierarchy? Surely in Early Modern Europe that’s exactly what it was. And he confuses two kinds of category – family is a specific structure, hierarchy is a way of ordering structures. What does it tell us to say that hierarchy ‘supported’ the structure? Perhaps hierarchy was in fact the structure, but even that needs to be explained – why was it hierarchical, how did this hierarchy differ from others?

But these criticisms are niggling; it is a very fine book. Elliott’s commitment is to sound common sense, and that is a fine virtue in a historian. Perhaps it is for the best if it leaves the reader to do some of the work of interpreting and deriving meaning.