Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 FROM THE PUBLISHER
Empire is a global survey of the two and a half centuries (from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth) in which the Spaniards established the most extensive empire the world had ever known, ranging from Naples and the Netherlands to the Philippines. Unlike previous accounts, which have presented the Empire as a direct consequence of Spanish power, this provocative work of history emphasizes the inability of Spain to run an imperial enterprise by itself. The role of conquest was deceptive. Spain's rise to power was actually made possible by the collaboration of international business interests, including Italian financiers, German technicians and Dutch traders, in the task of setting up networks of contact ranging across the oceans. At the height of its apparent power, the Spanish Empire was in reality a global enterprise in which non-Spaniards - Portuguese, Basque, Aztec, Genoese, Chinese, Flemish, West African, Incan and Neapolitan - played an essential role. It is this vast diversity of resources and people (which included many of its greatest adventurers and soldiers) that made Spain's power so overwhelming.
SYNOPSIS
This book was published as Spain's Road to Empire by Penguin in 2002. Kamen's historical analysis of the two and a half centuries in which the Spanish Empire ruled the world portrays Spain as a global enterprise that grew because of collaboration with German technicians, Dutch traders, and Italian financiers who helped create a vast network of contacts ranging across the oceans. Kamen (Higher Council for Scientific Research, Barcelona) further asserts that the empire could not have functioned without the support of non-Spaniards including Basque, Aztec, Chinese, Flemish, and West African influences. The book contains several maps and color photos of paintings. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Whether the term "globalization" is defined as the global imposition of a hegemonic culture or as a more creative dynamic of global interactivity, it's nothing new-it can be traced at least as far back as the Spanish Empire of the 16th and 17th centuries. Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision) depicts this golden age globalization on a suitably grand canvas, tracing the surprisingly hesitant and serendipitous spread of empire from Naples to Manila. He demonstrates to superb effect that this empire was in its very origins a truly multinational enterprise in which the Spanish element was one among many. This element, he suggests, was wholly-if understandably-distorted by contemporary propagandists. In reality, without Genoese bankers, expansionism into the Canary Islands (and Italy itself) would have been unworkable; without Muslim agency, Granada would not have fallen, nor Tenochtitlan without indigenous collaboration; there were Greeks, Netherlanders and at least two blacks in the party that conquered the Aztec capital. Like David Northrup in his recent study, Africa's Discovery of Europe, Kamen restores agency to those who have been relegated to victim status: the black people who helped forge colonial society, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. While he recognizes that empire catalyzed Spanish patriotism, not least a regressive nostalgia among settlers in the New World, he observes that among those who cried out "Espa$a!" at the battle of Muhlberg (1547) were crack Hungarian cavalry. While memories of empire (not quite so dead as Kamen claims) continue to shape Spanish culture, and as new forms of global imperialism develop, this sophisticated and broad-minded book could not be more timely. 16 pages of color illus., 11 b&w photos. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Kamen (Philip of Spain) attempts to explain how the peoples of the Spanish portion of the Iberian Peninsula managed to acquire control of an unprecedented world empire. From the 15th century, Spain was inspired by competition from Portugal into mounting a series of ventures to seek commercial ties with the Orient, which led first to the discovery and conquest of the Canary Islands and then the New World. Dynastic interests were also drawing Spain into a contest with France for possession of the Italian states of Lombardy and Naples. By 1580, the Spanish Empire would expand to include Portugal and its colonial holdings in Brazil, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. By 1600, Spain possessed an empire that embraced the globe. What Kamen has accomplished is to demonstrate how much of this achievement was the result not of simple conquering but of the successful cooperation between the Spanish and the people (Mexicans, Peruvians, Portuguese, Flemings, and southern Italians, among others) with whom they came into contact. The Spanish could not have controlled these lands without the assistance of people who saw it in their own interest to help maintain Spain's global enterprise. This study of global empire will interest both students and lay readers. Highly recommended for all academic and larger public libraries.-Robert J. Andrews, Duluth P.L., MN Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Wide-ranging survey considers Spainﾽs conquest of much of the Americas in the light of conditions and developments back home. Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition, 1998, etc.) amplifies here his previously stated view that the Spanish military adventure in the New World was Spanish in name only; it relied on legions of foreign mercenaries, Catholics displaced from Protestant lands in rebellion, and would-be Crusaders, all of whom served in far greater numbers than Spaniards themselves. It relied, too, on the cooperation of conquered peoples. The Spanish assumed control of local polities, Kamen notes, by "placing themselves at the top in the place previously occupied by the Aztecs and Incas" but otherwise leaving the pyramid of power largely intact. The process of conquest helped Spain forge itself as a nation; where formerly it had been a congeries of small kingdoms united only provisionally by the task of driving out the Moors, in the face of the common goal of subduing faraway lands "the Galician, the proud Asturian and the rude inhabitant of the Pyrenees," in the words of a contemporary observer, joined with fighters from Castile, La Mancha, and Andalusia to create something new: Spain. This is a history of large forces moving sometimes of their own accord and by their own logic: the institutions, for example, that slowly replaced adventurers and conquistadors with bureaucrats, and the elaborate trade networks that developed to cart off and distribute all that New World loot to a waiting Europe. Kamen does a fine job of answering such thorny questions as: "Who gave the men, who supplied the credit, who arranged the transactions, who built the ships, who made the guns?" Well written andexactingly researched, of much appeal for professional historians and general readers with an interest in the world-systems view of things.
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