Richard L. Kagan, Geoffrey Parker, eds. Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xv + 359 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-47045-2.

Reviewed by Abel A. Alves (Ball State University)
Published on H-LatAm (August, 1996)

Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World

Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World achieves the primary goal of any Festschrift: it demonstrates the impact of the scholar being honored. It does so by elegantly reviewing Elliott's impact on imperial Spanish and early modern studies in three parts that truly reflect the main themes of his work. "Part I: Power and Propaganda: The World of the Court" presents three essays that build on Elliott's most recent contribution--his study of the politics and policies of the Spanish imperial court in works such as The Count-Duke of Olivares (1986) and Richelieu and Olivares (1984). "Part II: The Pattern of Society, Community and Identity in Habsburg Spain" deals with his thesis concerning the importance of the multiplicity and overlapping nature of regional identities in early modern Spain-- even as Spain itself was being created as a method of identification in an ongoing tension between shifting centers and peripheries. In short, Part II deals with Elliott's interest in early modern European territoriality and tribalism, as presented in his Revolt of the Catalans (1963). Finally, "Part III: Spain and Its Empire" presents essays that reflect on Elliott's life-long aptitude to see the forest as well as the trees (something absent in so many histories today). "Spain and Its Empire" pays homage to Elliott's Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (1963) and The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (1970)--to his very real interest in the Americas and Spain in relation to the rest of Europe. The authors of all fourteen essays are renowned scholars and have themselves shaped our knowledge of early modern Spain and its empire. They also all were students of and/or collaborators with J. H. Elliott at one time or another.

In Part I, Antonio Feros elaborates on the difficult role played by a monarch's privado. While political discourse in the age of Charles V distinguished between Cobos, the King's (the Crown's) trusted advisor and friend on the one hand, and Don Luis de Avila, Charles's personal friend on the other, the confusion of these separate roles in Lerma and Olivares opened Philip III and Philip IV to political criticism. Feros's major contribution is his ability to set this discussion within the context of Ernst Kantorowicz's paradigm of the "King's Two Bodies," and, by doing this, he deepens the reader's understanding of what was disturbing to contemporaries of the privados. Charles Jago, in "Taxation and Political Culture in Castile 1590-1640," demonstrates how confessors served as mediators between the constitutionalist political theologies and polemics of individuals like Juan de Mariana and the actions taken by the bureaucrats in their charge, while Richard Kagan focuses on those historical polemics that mediated against any sense of "Spanish unity"--chorographies which "helped both to create and sustain the forces of localism by arguing for the historical importance of the kingdom's municipalities at a time when municipal councils everywhere believed that the monarchy was threatening to impose new taxes and to deprive their cities of their hard-won traditional privileges and rights" (p. 95). In short, Feros, Jago, and Kagan all build on Elliott's commitment to accept ideas as more than epiphenomena--a commitment illustrated by his analysis of Olivares's dedication to reputacion. However, all the authors show some level of concern with the readers and appropriators of ideas, thus demonstrating that the new cultural history is much more than the old history of ideas. In fact, Kagan's piece naturally leads into Part II's focus on complementary and conflicting regional identities in Habsburg Iberia.

Linda Martz opens Part II clearly and succinctly by writing, "The centre-periphery balance within the Iberian peninsula was one of shifting fortune and power, but few would deny that during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs the balance shifted toward the centre" (p. 103). Her own case study not only demonstrates the means by which Toledans, including many conversos, became successful merchants and tax-farmers in Granada, thus contributing to centralization; it also shows how converso social mobility led to the Toledan city council's being the only Castilian city council to suffer the "imposition of a pure blood statute in the sixteenth century" (p. 124). Therefore, Martz does a superb job of "problematizing" center-periphery schisms by demonstrating that they can be created through the mental and cultural means of ethnic and racial divisions, as well as by geographic regionalism. Though not explicit in her piece, the extent to which peripheries of all sorts are created through xenophobic tendencies is demonstrated. Here, Latin Americanists must once again take note that prejudices preceded the 1492 "encounter" on both sides of the Atlantic.

In their respective pieces in Part II, Xavier Gil and James Casey both argue for the inclusiveness of early modern constitutionalism and patriotism. Gil does this by presenting the Aragonese foralista tradition in the broader context of European constitutionalist thought. Casey, in turn, studies Valencia, where, he argues, "Patriotism, unlike modern nationalism, was inclusive rather than exclusive" (p. 189). While Gil notes that foralista thought defended special group liberties, rather than liberty for all, and Casey admits that Valencian culture was "shaped by the crusade against the Muslims" (p. 202) both authors explicitly fail to note how first Jews and Muslims, and then conversos and moriscos, were excluded. Just because early moderns had no explicit terms for nationalist prejudices does not mean that similar trends in xenophobia were absent. In fact, Part II ends by reminding us of human xenophobic tendencies through James Amelang's study of the prejudicial Jeroni Pujades (1568- 1635) and Peter Sahlins's study of how village communities in the Pyrenees (in the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries) defined themselves as Spaniard or French "against either a collective or singular other" (p. 242). The beauty of the entire section is, in fact, its overall ability to show how human culture is complex enough to include both inclusive and exclusive trends simultaneously. After all, early sixteenth-century Castile did nurture both Erasmianism and the height of Inquisitorial activity.

Part III is the weakest of the three thematic sections, and this may be because of its attempt to present the latest general trends in Latin American and Low Countries research to nonspecialists. Thus, Peter Bakewell's "Conquest after the Conquest" will help to introduce Europeanists to the work of such scholars as Lockhart and himself, but it does not provide anything new and exciting for the Latin Americanist. Jonathan Israel's piece does stand out in its use of archival documents to argue that both Olivares and the Cardinal-Infante consistently favored an offensive war against the Dutch Republic rather than the momentary turn toward an assault on France in 1637. Here Israel adds to Elliott's analysis in The Count-Duke of Olivares by proposing that Olivares's French strategy was "a momentary impulse if it was even that" (p. 270). Israel honors the Festschrift by raising a subtle debate within the body of Elliott's interpretive work. Still, the rest of the section merely reviews some well-known generalities like the contribution of the luces to the Bourbon Reforms' shift from colonialism as exploitative tributary conquest to colonialism as exploitative comercio libre.

However, Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott clearly demonstrates the impact of his historiographical contribution. All the contributors have had illustrious careers developing his theories and hypotheses. Though many contemporary historians argue vehemently against "presentism," Elliott's vast impact may indeed be the result of his willingness to admit his desire to present work that is relevant to present-day concerns. Indeed, Croce and Collingwood see all history as the study of our present-day reactions to the documents we call the past. Elliott admits:

I suspect that my choice {Spanish history} (was) influenced at some level by my sense, as an Englishman living in the aftermath of the Second World War, that the collective predicament of the last great imperial generation of Spaniards after the triumphs of the sixteenth century was not entirely dissimilar to the collective predicament of my own generation after the triumphs of the nineteenth and early twentieth (p. 3).

In an age when multiculturalists and diverse Bosnian subgroups argue for the importance of cultural uniqueness, it is important to remember that Franco's Spain reveled in its "difference." In the words of "Sir John Elliott: An Appreciation," the opening essay of this volume, Elliott in his first two books in 1963 "managed to re-attach Spain to Europe by demonstrating that its history, for all of its individuality, generally reflected phenomena evident in other European states" (p. 6). Likewise, he willingly studied a Spanish empire within the context of European imperial expansion and its general trends. Elliott forces all historians to look beyond the idiosyncratic, and this volume of essays in his honor can serve Latin Americanists by introducing them to some excellent work in Spanish history. It then becomes their active task to seek out the parallels and influences in their own particular areas of study.

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Citation: Abel A. Alves. Review of Kagan, Richard L.; Parker, Geoffrey, eds., Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 1996.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=546

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