Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  101. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 83-4.

  102. Voyages of Gilbert, 1, p. 71.

  103. See Juan Friede, Los Welser en la conquista de Venezuela (Caracas, 1961), for the failure of the Welsers, and Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company. The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York, 1932), for that of the Virginia Company.

  104. See John H. Elliott, Illusion and Disillusionment. Spain and the Indies (The Creighton Lecture for 1991, University of London, 1992).

  105. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 168.

  106. Taylor, Writings of the Two Hakluyts, 1, p. 143.

  107. Ibid., 2, pp. 233-4.

  108. Cited by Elliott, Illusion and Disillusionment, p. 14.

  109. For an introduction to this debate, see Elliott, Spain and its World, ch. 11 ('Self-Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain').

  110. Cited from his Memorial de la politica necesaria y util restauracion a la republica de Espana (Valladolid, 1600), fo. 15v, in Elliott, Illusion and Disillusionment, pp. 12-13.

  111. See Michel Cavillac, Gueux et marchands dans le `Guzman de Alfarache', 1599-1604 (Bordeaux, 1993), especially ch. 5, for insights into this struggle in Castile at the turn of the century.

  112. See Carole Shammas, `English Commercial Development and American Colonization 1560-1620', in K. R. Andrews et al., The Westward Enterprise (Liverpool, 1978), ch. 8. Also Charles Wilson, Profit and Power (London, 1957), and Barry Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642 (Cambridge, 1959).

  113. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, pp. 312-13.

  114. Cited by Richard S. Dunn, Puritan and Yankee. The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-1717 (Princeton, 1962), p. 36.

  Chapter 2. Occupying American Space

  1. William Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America (6th edn., London, 1777), pp. 203-4. I am grateful to Dr Ian Harris of the University of Leicester for making available to me a copy of this book.

  2. For a brilliant account by a modern geographer of the varieties of settlement of 'Atlantic America', see vol. 1 (Atlantic America, 1492-1800') of D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America (New Haven and London, 1986).

  3. Everett Emerson (ed.), Letters from New England. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638 (Amherst, MA, 1976), p. 21.

  4. Smith, Works, 1, p. 143 (A Map of Virginia').

  5. Jose de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. Edmundo O'Gorman (2nd edn, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, 1962), p. 127.

  6. Thomas Gomez, L'Envers de l'Eldorado. Economie coloniale et travail indigene dans la Colombie du XVIeme siecle (Toulouse, 1984), p. 143.

  7. The suggestive work of Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, and `Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires', WMQ, 3rd set., 49 (1992), pp. 183-209, seems too keen to emphasize differences based on national stereotypes.

  8. Above, p. 12; Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 76.

  9. Cited from Partida III, tit. 28, ley 29, by Morales Padron, `Descubrimiento y toma de posesion', p. 332.

  10. Introduction by Eduardo Arcila Farias to Joseph del Campillo y Cosio, Nuevo sistema de gobierno economico Para la America (2nd edn, Merida, Venezuela, 1971), p. 50.

  11. Pagden, Lords of All the World, pp. 91-2.

  12. Cited by Morales Padron, `Descubrimiento y toma de posesion', p. 334.

  13. Journal of the First Voyage, pp. 29 and 36.

  14. Cristobal Colon, Textos y documentos completos, ed. Consuelo Varela (2nd edn, Madrid, 1992), p. 272.

  15. Morales Padron, `Descubrimiento y toma de posesion', pp. 331 and 342. For Cortes, see above, p. 4.

  16. Hakluyt, Navigations, 2, pp. 687 and 702; Seed, `Taking Possession', pp. 183-4.

  17. Hakluyt, Navigations, 2, p. 677.

  18. Gradie, `Spanish Jesuits in Virginia', p. 133.

  19. Pagden, Lords of All the World, pp. 76-9; and above p. 12.

  20. Hakluyt, Navigations, 2, p. 687.

  21. D. B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (eds.), The New England Voyages 1602-1608 (Hakluyt Society 2nd set., vol. 161, London, 1983), p. 267.

  22. Seed, `Taking Possession', pp. 190-1.

  23. Carmen Val Julian, `Entre la realidad y el deseo. La toponomia del descubrimiento en Colon y Cortes', in Oscar Mazin Gomez (ed.), Mexico y el mundo hispanico (2 vols, Zamora, Michoacan, 2000), 1, pp. 265-79; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), pp. 82-3; and, for the wider context of Columbus's choice of names, Valerie I. J. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, 1992).

  24. Helen Nader (trans. and ed.), The Book of Privileges Issued to Christopher Columbus by King Fernando and Queen Isabel 1492-1502 (Repertorium Columbianum, 3, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1996), p. 99 (Letter of 16 August 1494).

  25. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 82.

  26. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 144.

  27. Cortes, Letters from Mexico, p. 158. For naming practices by Cortes and other conquistadores, see Carmen Val Julian, `La toponomia conquistadora', Relaciones (El Colegio de Michoacan), 70 (1997), pp. 41-61.

  28. Baker, American Beginnings, ch. 3.

  29. Smith, Works, 1, p. 324; Quinn, New England Voyages, p. 3.

  30. Smith, Works, 3, p. 278.

  31. Smith, Works, 1, pp. 309 and 319.

  32. George R. Stewart, Names on the Land. A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (New York, 1945; repr. 1954), p. 64.

  33. Ibid., p. 59.

  34. Fernandez de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 2, p. 334. See also Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, p. 175.

  35. Iconoclastes, p. 1, cited by Alicia Mayer, Dos americanos, dos pensamientos. Carlos de Sigiienza y Gongora y Cotton Mather (Mexico City, 1998), p. 161.

  36. Cited by Stewart, Names on the Land, p. 53.

  37. See Geoffrey Parker, Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe (London, 2002), ch. 4 ('Philip II, Maps and Power'), and, more generally, for Iberian cartography in this period, Ricardo Padr6n, The Spacious World. Cartography, Literature, and Empire (Chicago, 2004).

  38. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain; Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493-1793 (New Haven and London, 2000), ch. 3; Francisco de Solano (ed.), Cuestionarios Para la formation de las Relaciones Geogrdficas de Indias, siglos XVI/XIX (Madrid, 1988); Howard F. Cline, `The Relaciones Geogrdficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586', HAHR, 44 (1964), pp. 341-74.

  39. Quoted by I. K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy. The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696-1720 (Oxford, 1968), p. 154.

  40. Benjamin Schmidt, `Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English North America', WMQ, 3rd ser., 54 (1997), pp. 549-78.

  41. Baker, American Beginnings, p. 304.

  42. Vas Mingo, Las capitulaciones de Indias, pp. 81 and 196.

  43. Hakluyt, Navigations, 2, p. 687.

  44. Fricdc, Los Welser, pp. 135-46; and see above, p. 25.

  45. Andrews, The Colonial Period, 2, p. 282.

  46. William Cronon, Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), p. 69.

  47. Gbmara, Cortes, p. 67.

  48. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1952), p. 76; George D. Langdon Jr., `The Franchise and Political Democracy in Plymouth Colony', WMQ, 3rd ser., 20 (1963), pp. 513-26.

  49. Bradford, Plymouth Plantation, p. 62.

  50. Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People. Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York and London, 1971), p. 22.

  51. Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town. The First Hundred Years. Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York, 1970), p. 12.

  52. Smith, Works, 3, p. 277.

  53. William Wood, New England's P
rospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst, MA, 1977), p. 68; and see Vickers, `Competency and Competition'.

  54. Otte, Cartas privadas, pp. 169 (pasar mejor) and 113 (Francisco Palacio to Antonio de Robles, 10 June 1586). Translations of some of this correspondence can be found in James Lockhart and Enrique Otte (eds), Letters and People of the Spanish Indies. The Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1976).

  55. See Pedro Corominas, El sentimiento de la riqueza en Castilla (Madrid, 1917).

  56. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA, 1964), p. 406.

  57. Richard Konetzke, America Latina. II. La epoca colonial (Madrid, 1971), p. 38.

  58. Francisco de Solano, Ciudades hispanoamericanas y pueblos de indios (Madrid, 1990), p. 18.

  59. Cortes, Letters from Mexico, pp. 102-3.

  60. For Spanish urban traditions and their transfer to the New World, see in particular Richard M. Morse, 'A Prologomenon to Latin American Urban History', HAHR, 52 (1972), pp. 359-94, and `The Urban Development of Colonial Spanish America', CHLA, 2, ch. 3. Also Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, ch. 2, and Solano, Ciudades hispanoamericanas.

  61. Martinez, Documentos cortesianos, 1, doc. 34, especially p. 281.

  62. Gomara, Cortes, p. 10.

  63. Konetzke, La epoca colonial, p. 41.

  64. Above, p. 21.

  65. Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, p. 12.

  66. Jose de la Puente Brunke, Encomienda y encomenderos en el Peru (Seville, 1992), p. 18.

  67. Silvio Zavala, Ensayos sobre la colonization espanola en America (Buenos Aires, 1944), pp. 153-4; James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560 (Madison, WI, Milwaukee, WI, London, 1968), p. 12.

  68. For the encomienda, the fundamental works remain Silvio Zavala, La encomienda mexicana (1935; 2nd edn, Mexico City, 1973), and Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950).

  69. Silvio Zavala, Estudios indianos (Mexico City, 1948), p. 298.

  70. In England, on the other hand, the crown's rights to ownership of mineral deposits were transferable. For the different approaches in Castile and England to possession of the subsoil, see Patricia Seed, American Pentimento. The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis and London, 2001), ch. 4. The failure of the British to discover precious metals in the territories under their control reduces the importance in the American context of any difference between English and Spanish practice in regard to mineral rights. For the development of mining in Spanish America through private enterprise, see below, p. 93.

  71. Cronon, Changes in the Land, p. 130.

  72. Campillo, Nuevo sistema, introduction, pp. 50-2.

  73. Guillermo Cespedes del Castillo, America hispanica, 1492-1898 (Manuel Tunon de Lara (ed.), Historia de Espana, 6 (Barcelona, 1983), pp. 217-18); James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America. A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge, 1983), p. 137.

  74. Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, pp. 41, 50-1.

  75. Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz, `The Population of Colonial Spanish America', CHLA, 2, p. 18.

  76. Cespedes del Castillo, America hispanica, p. 149.

  77. See Solano, Ciudades hispanoamericanas, ch. 3.

  78. See Erwin Walter Palm, Los monumentos arquitectonicos de la Espanola (2 vols, Ciudad Trujillo, 1955), 1, ch. 2; Valerie Fraser, The Architecture of Conquest. Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru 1535-1635 (Cambridge, 1990); Kagan, Urban Images, pp. 31-4.

  79. Richard Kagan, `A World Without Walls: City and Town in Colonial Spanish America', in James D. Tracy (ed.), City Walls. The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 5.

  80. Quinn, New England Voyages, pp. 236-41; Fraser, Architecture of Conquest, p. 176, n. 31.

  81. Susan Myra Kingsbury (ed.), The Records of the Virginia Company of London (4 vols, Washington, 1906-35), 3, pp. 669-70; and see John W. Reps, Tidewater Towns. City Planning in Colonial Virginia and Maryland (Williamsburg, VA, 1972), p. 46.

  82. Craven, `Indian Policy', p. 70.

  83. Ibid., pp. 74-5.

  84. Kevin P. Kelly, "`In dispers'd Country Plantations": Settlement Patterns in SeventeenthCentury Surry County, Virginia', in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (eds), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (New York and London, 1979), essay 6.

  85. Meinig, The Shaping of America, 1, p. 148; T. H. Breen, `The Culture of Agriculture: the Symbolic World of the Tidewater Planter, 1760-1790', in David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, Thad W. Tate (eds), Saints and Revolutionaries. Essays on Early American History (New York and London, 1984), pp. 247-84; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), pp. 15-17, and chs 1-3 for the Virginia landscape in general.

  86. Reps, Tidewater Towns, p. 197; Richard R. Beeman and Rhys Isaac, `Cultural Conflict and Social Change in the Revolutionary South: Lunenburg County, Virginia', The Journal of Southern History, 46 (1980), pp. 525-50, at p. 528.

  87. W. W. Abbot, The Colonial Origins of the United States, 1607-1763 (New York, London, Sydney, Toronto, 1975), p. 44.

  88. John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1991), p. 319.

  89. Meinig, Shaping of America, 1, p. 104; Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, pp. 37-8.

  90. See Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness. The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (1939; repr. Oxford, London, New York, 1971).

  91. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America (New York, 1992), p. 142.

  92. James D. Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America (3 vols, Baltimore and London, 2002), 2, p. 1174; John Nicholas Brown, Urbanism in the American Colonies (Providence, RI, 1976), p. 5.

  93. Cited by Bushman, Refinement of America, p. 142.

  94. Reps, Tidewater Towns, p. 296; Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning, 2, pp. 1175-6.

  95. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1985), p. 254.

  96. Abbot, Colonial Origins, p. 45. For the headright system, see below, p. 55.

  97. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA and London, 1999), pp. 52-3, and Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England's Generation (Cambridge, 1991), p. 21, for the preponderance of family groups.

  98. John Demos, A Little Commonwealth. Family Life in Plymouth Colony (London, Oxford, New York, 1970), p. 6.

  99. The Journal of John Winthrop 1630-1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA and London, 1996), p. 433.

  100. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641 (Cambridge, 1993).

  101. Ibid., pp. 110-16.

  102. Cited Anderson, New England's Generation, p. 38.

  103. See Martin, Profits in the Wilderness.

  104. Ibid., pp. 235 and 217-18. For the status and rights of vecinos in the Hispanic world, see Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations. Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven and London, 2003), ch. 2. Also Maria Ines Carzolio, `En los origenes de la ciudadania en Castilla. La identidad politica del vecino durante los siglos XVI y XVII', Hispania, 62 (2002), pp. 637-91.

  105. Martin, Profits in the Wilderness p. 79.

  106. Cited ibid., p. 118.

  107. Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson. An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY and London, 1986); Meinig, Shaping of America, pp. 122-3.

  108. See Douglas Greenberg, `The Middle Colonies in Recent American Historiography', WMQ, 3rd set., 36 (1979), pp. 396-427.

  109. James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country. A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore and London, 1972), ch. 2; Gary B. Nash, Race, Class and Politics. Essays on American Colonial and Revolutionary Society (Urbana, IL and Chicago, 1986), pp. 8-11.

  110. Cited by Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992; repr. 1993), p. 128.


  111. Magnus Morner, La corona espanola y los foraneos en los pueblos de indios de America (Stockholm, 1979), pp. 75-80.

  112. For initial attitudes to the Indians, and English policy to the Indians in the first stages of colonization, see especially Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians. The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa, NJ, 1980), and Indians and English. Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2000); Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier. Puritans and Indians 1620-1675 (1965; 3rd edn, Norman, OK and London, 1995); James Axtell, The Invasion Within. The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York and Oxford, 1985); Wesley Frank Craven, `Indian Policy in Early Virginia', and White, Red and Black. The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville, VA, 1971).

  113. Craven, `Indian Policy'.

  114. Vaughan, New England Frontier, pp. 107-9.

  115. Bradford, Plymouth Plantation, p.-62._

  116. Winthrop, journal, p. 416 (22 September 1642).

  117. James Horn, Adapting to a New World (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1994), p. 128.

  118. See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, 1956); Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness (New York and London, 1969); John Canup, Out of the Wilderness. The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, CT, 1990).

  119. See under despoblado in Peter Boyd-Bowman, Lexico hispanoamericano del siglo XVI (London, 1971).

  120. Fernando R. de la Flor, La peninsula metafisica. Arte, literatura y pensamiento en la Espana de la Contrarreforma (Madrid, 1999), pp. 130-54; D. A. Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico. The Diocese of Michoacan (Cambridge, 1994), p. 29.

  121. Canup, Out of the Wilderness, p. 50.

  122. For a general survey of Spanish American frontiers, see Hennessy, The Frontier in Latin American History.

  123. Noble David Cook, Born to Die. Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 44.

  124. OHBE, 1, p. 197.

  125. For overseas European migration, especially to the Americas, in the Early Modern period, see in particular the essays assembled in Altman and Horn (eds), `To Make America', and Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move. For Spanish New World emigration, in addition to Altman, Emigrants and Society, previously cited, see Peter Boyd-Bowman, Indite geobiografico de cuarenta mil pobladores espanoles de America en el siglo XVI (2 vols, Bogota, 1964; Mexico City, 1968); Antonio Eiras Reel (ed.), La emigration espanola a Ultramar, 1492-1914 (Madrid, 1991); Auke P. Jacobs, Los movimientos entre Castilla e Hispanoamerica durante el reinado de Felipe III, 1598-1621 (Amsterdam, 1995). For British emigration, in addition to Anderson, New England's Generation, and Games, Migration and the Origins, previously cited, see Cressy, Coming Over, and Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British America. An Introduction (New York, 1986) and Voyagers to the West (New York, 1986).