2007 Francis Parkman Prize Acceptance Speech: Sir John Elliott

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It is an enormous pleasure and privilege to be here this evening and I should like to begin by thanking the Society of American Historians for its invitation and its generous hospitality. When I received from your president the news that I had been awarded the Francis Parkman Prize for 2006 I was both surprised and thrilled. I feel deeply honored to be awarded a prize named after Parkman—a historian whose writings have given me many hours of enjoyable reading over the course of the years, and whose work I greatly admire for its combination of scrupulous scholarship and narrative skill. Above all, Parkman was a historian with a sense of style, and it is right and proper that his name should be kept before us in this all-too-illiterate age.

This is the fiftieth anniversary of the Parkman prize, and as I look down the list of previous recipients I am naturally very honored to find myself in such distinguished company—and all the more so because, so far as I can see, I am the first non-American to find a place on the list. But I find myself here among many friends, starting with your president. We share the same Oxford college, but I hasten to add that no collusion need be suspected, since he assures me that he had nothing to do with the awarding of this year's prize. But I should like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the jury, and my publisher, Yale University Press. Above all, though, I want to thank the very many friends and colleagues on this side of the Atlantic who so generously offered help, advice, and encouragement to someone who can only be described as a late-comer to the field of North American history.

I hope it will not be taken as an implied rebuke to the founders of this society, if I say "North American" rather than American, because my background as a historian of Spain and Spanish civilization has made me sensitive to the complaints of Iberian Americans that the people of the United States have unilaterally appropriated to themselves a title that properly belongs to all the peoples of the hemisphere. There is, I think, more here at stake than a purely semantic issue. The question, "Do the Americas have a common history?," goes back to H. E. Bolton's famous 1932 American Historical Association presidential address on "The Epic of Greater America," although it was only posed in these words some thirty years later by that great evangelist for Latin American history, Lewis Hanke. It was Hanke who guided my first tentative steps in the history of the Iberian New World when I spent three stimulating months of sabbatical leave at Columbia University in the fall of 1963. Since then, I have never quite managed to get out of my mind the question of the extent to which the Americas do indeed have a common history, and it hovers over the book being celebrated this evening, my Empires of the Atlantic World. It is a question that, as Bolton appreciated, demands a comparative approach.

I began thinking about the possibilities for a comparative study of British and Spanish colonial America in the last two or three years of my time as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a position I held from 1973 to 1990, when I returned to England to become Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Those 17 years spent on this side of the Atlantic gave me fresh perspectives on many historical problems, both in European history and the history of the Americas. Back in 1969 I had published a little book on the impact of the discovery of the New World on the Old, but life in Princeton, with its visible reminders of colonial America all around me—Nassau Hall, the Princeton battlefield, the Friends' Meeting House—intensified my interest in the more conventional theme of the impact of the Old World on the New. Much of my time at the institute was devoted to writing about different aspects of the history of early modern Spain and Hispanic civilization, but, living in a former British colonial territory, I felt a growing desire to learn more about the character and consequences of British expansion overseas. I knew, of course, quite a lot about British history, but had never been exposed in my undergraduate years to the history of Britain's American colonies. So I embarked on some desultory reading in what I soon discovered was a formidably large and sophisticated historical literature.

I had long been interested in the possibilities of comparative history, and indeed had tried my hand at it in a book comparing Cardinal Richelieu with his Spanish rival, the Count-Duke of Olivares. It occurred to me that, while I had neither the information nor the expertise to make an original contribution in the crowded field of British American colonial history, my knowledge of Spain and Spanish America might cast new light on the British colonial experience if I looked at the ways in which the two imperial powers, Britain and Spain, approached their encounter with the indigenous peoples of America and dealt with the problems involved in occupying and settling American land. At the moment when I began thinking about this, there was a rapidly growing interest in what has now become the fashionable theme of Atlantic history, and I realized that the story I had to tell would only be comprehensible if I followed developments on both sides of the Atlantic, in the Old World as well as the New.

So it was that I embarked on what seemed at the time, and still seems in retrospect, an absurdly ambitious historical enterprise: to attempt a comprehensive comparative study of British and Spanish America from the beginnings of colonization to the winning of independence. Although, of course, others had undertaken such comparisons before me, nobody had attempted it on quite this scale. The task was complicated by my return to England, and for the seven years in which I held my Oxford chair I could do little more than continue my crash-course of reading in British American colonial history, while the project was largely put on hold. But after my retirement in 1997 I finally had the chance to settle down to more or less uninterrupted thinking and writing, with the results that you see before you today.

I already had some idea both of what I wanted to do, and did not want to do. Comparisons of Anglo-America and Hispanic America have traditionally revolved around a question of understandable contemporary concern, which could be crudely formulated as "Why is Latin America not more like the United States?" This gave all attempts at comparison a teleological slant, as historians and social scientists struggled to explain what they saw as the success story of the United States and the failure story of the societies of Latin America. In doing so, they found in Latin America's "colonial heritage" what many of them thought was the key to the mystery. While no historian of the two civilizations can entirely escape this question, my central concern was different. I wanted, as far as possible, to banish from my mind the knowledge of what came after the achievement of independence, and examine the process of colonization and the formation of the colonial societies in the context not of future developments, but of the time when the colonizing process was under way. I was anxious to understand and explain why, at various moments in the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Spaniards and the English thought and acted as they did. How far were differences in their behavior caused by the different timing of their colonial projects, by differences in the environments, both ecological and human, they found on their arrival in America, and by dissimilarities in the culture, both political and non-political, of the societies from which they came?

These are enormously complex questions, to which there are no easy answers, and in so far as I have succeeded in answering them, I have tried to do so in a nuanced way. But my object has been less to answer questions than to raise them, in the hope that this will open up new lines of inquiry for specialists in North American and Latin American history alike. I believe that the study of both British and Iberian America has suffered from too much compartmentalization, and from an all-too-frequent failure of historians to lift their eyes beyond the immediate area of study. This has led to an excessive belief in exceptionalism in the conceptualization of British and Spanish history alike. In my view, this is where comparative history can serve as a corrective, by posing awkward questions that historians have either ignored or dismissed.

There are of course obvious dangers in the enterprise. Comparative history is great fun to write, but it's full of traps. If you are concerned to discredit exceptionalist interpretations there is a standing temptation to look for commonality; and the temptation is increased by the need to come up with a coherent and manageable story, which will also be accessible to one's readers. It is easier to keep control of an account in which two societies move more or less in parallel, than of one in which they move along different lines. But it is no less important, and perhaps even more so, to identify the differences rather than the similarities, and then to search for possible explanations. It is this that I have attempted to do in my book.

It has been a highly enjoyable enterprise, but also a very challenging one, because I found myself having to keep several balls in the air as I juggled with the perennial themes of nature versus nurture, of historical timing and the role of contingency and individual agency. I also faced the problem, which I'm afraid I failed to solve, of the internal disparities in the worlds I set out to describe. New England, as we all know, is not Virginia, nor is it identical with the Middle Colonies; and all differ in important ways from the Caribbean settlements. Similarly in Hispanic America, Mexico is not Peru, nor Venezuela Argentina. All these territories possess distinctive characteristics of their own, both environmentally and in the kind of societies that sprang up on their soil. This inevitably complicates the task of generalization. I was painfully aware when I wrote the book that, at different moments, I was privileging some regions and societies at the expense of others. But I did not see, and still do not see, how I could have played a more equitable hand and still kept the book within bounds. Comparative history on this scale demands many sacrifices, and while I regret them, it is difficult to see how to avoid them. My only consolation is that the deficiencies in my own treatment will encourage those who come after me to reassess the comparisons and make good the gaps.

Beyond these problems, which are inherent in any comparative enterprise, especially one attempted on this scale, I was faced, as every historian is faced, with the problem of gaining, and holding, the attention of my readers. An Anglo-American readership cannot be expected to be closely informed about the history of the Hispanic world, while Spanish and Latin American readers will probably have little knowledge of the history of Britain and its overseas expansion. British or North American readers may have some idea of who Bartolomé de Las Casas was, but are unlikely to have heard of Don Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of Mexico. For their part, Hispanic readers will have heard of the execution of Charles I and the Glorious Revolution, but will probably not be acquainted with Lord North or Samuel Adams. This means that it is necessary to provide at least a basic background that will inform one set of readers without boring the other. Up to a point this problem can be negotiated by switching between the two civilizations and political worlds before the boredom threshold is reached. At least the switches have the merit of keeping readers on their toes. But the danger of such switches is they can create an impression of disconnectedness as the author moves from region to region and topic to topic. While it seemed to me that analysis and explanation were essential to the enterprise, I was not interested in simply establishing a series of static comparisons. Such comparisons no doubt make it possible to come up with a more or less persuasive theory about the reasons for the differences between the two empires, but, as a historian, I was more interested in telling two stories than in concocting one theory. The value of a narrative approach is that it allows one to maintain the sense of movement over time, and in a history that covers three centuries or more, change as well as continuity must have a place. And it had to be two stories, not one story, that I set out to tell, because, as I came to see, the history of neither empire can properly be treated in isolation. I have therefore tried to interweave the histories of the two empires on the printed page just as they were interwoven in real life. Each empire moved in its separate orbit, but each exercised an influence over the other, and there were occasional moments of high drama as the two orbits came into collision.

Finally, as Parkman knew better than anyone, narrative is an important device for holding the reader's attention. For all the complexity of the stories I was telling and of the message I was anxious to convey, I was determined to make the book as accessible to my readers as I possibly could. I therefore spent a lot of time polishing my prose, in an attempt to make the transitions as smooth as possible and maintain a sense of narrative flow. It is for readers to judge for themselves how far I have been successful in this. But I am immensely proud that Empires of the Atlantic World should have been awarded a prize that was created to encourage the writing of history as literature. And I am equally proud that this honor should have been bestowed by a society that has done so much to promote the study of North American history, and has now so generously admitted an errant Hispanist into its fold.