EMPIRES OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830
by J.H. Elliott
Yale ₤25, 546 pages

Demonstrations last month by immigrant Hispanic workers in the US protesting against their second-class status make a topical reference point for this monumental analysis of two New World empires.

Most British readers will have an idea of how the US came into being in 1776, less than 200 years after English colonists first set foot on the mainland. But even if we know the names of Cortes and Montezuma, Pizarro and Atahualpa, few of us are familiar with the story of how Spain lost its American empire 300 years after Cortes planted his flag on Mexico in 1519.

John Elliott, regius professor emeritus of modern history at Oxford University, uses the story of each colonisation to illuminate the other. He challenges our prejudices about the Spanish conquest and the patriotic myths that have grown up around the English one.

There is nothing black-and-white about this book. Nor is there anything racy about his style, which holds the readers’ interest with an encyclopedic knowledge. Elliott’s writing is Latinate, at times almost Gibbonian, but it moves with a gentle rhythm of a sea swell to carry the reader along.

Where Spain dreamed of conquest and dominion, England spoke of plantation and trade. Both believed God had blessed their mission of “reducing the savage people to Christianity and civility”, as a 16th-century English writer put it. The reduction was literal: European diseases wiped out millions of New Worlders. As for “civility”, that was ambiguous: Hernan Cortes was amazed by the sophistication of the Aztecs he had come to “civilise”. The conquistadors’ cruelty was offset by the compassion of clergymen such as Bartolome de Las Casas, who made extraordinary efforts on behalf of the Indians. Indeed, the natives were regarded - in theory - as new Spaniards. There was no “frontier mentality” and intermarriage was encouraged. English colonists, on the other hand, after early efforts to enlist the Indians, came to live in fear of them.

After the epidemics, black African slaves were imported to do the hard work. Once again, the urban-dwelling Spaniards treated their slaves better than did the rural English planters of the Deep South. In the “pigmentocracy” of the Spanish Indies, whites enjoyed the highest status, but you could buy your way up the rankings.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the empires was their relation to the mother country. The Spanish Indies were run by an army of expatriate officials while the English colonists were largely left to themselves. That made a big difference to the ease of transition to independence.

Elliott says it is too glib to blame Spanish imperial rule for the political disorder of South and Central America after independence - the penchant for caudillos (strongmen) or the endemic corruption. That view was inflated by anti-Catholic propaganda. A lot of the mess was the result of the long and bloody struggle for independence, not over until the 1820s.

The Spanish had the disadvantage of getting there first, thanks to Columbus’s landfall in 1492, and of governing a much larger area (by the end of the 18th century their empire extended from Buenos Aires to San Francisco). After a rocky start the English colonists, on the other hand, seemed destined to succeed. Arriving in 1607, they learned from Spanish successes and failures. Confined to a much smaller area, the belt of coast behind the Appalachian Mountains, they had a democratic culture and the ideals of the 1688 Glorious Revolution to draw on. Political sophistication and religious tolerance were rewarded with huge economic progress. The painlessness of their revolution may explain why US politicians are still inclined to assume democracy is as simple to export as Coca-Cola. But the English colonists’ failure towards the Indian natives and the slaves left, says Elliott, a “terrible legacy”.

Still the wheel turns. North America may have won the economic and political argument, but today the language of New Spain can be heard all the way up to New England.