Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763

by Henry Kamen

Book Overview

From the late-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, Spain was the most extensive empire the world had seen, stretching from Naples and the Netherlands to the Philippines. This provocative work of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060194766
• ISBN13: 9780060194765
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Highly informative but ill-organized

This fact-laden book is worth reading if you have the patience. It is based on a mixed chronilogical and thematic outline, and aside from describing the rise and fall of Spain's empire, Kamen seeks to show that it was a participatory empire which at every stage depended on non-Spaniards. This is a revisionist history, and like some other revisionist histories, it does border on the danger of emphasizing the many exceptions to the traditional understanding to the extent that it distorts the overall picture. The non-expert wonders whether Kamen might have underemphasized the role of Spaniards/Castillians in the empire. My main criticism of this book is organizational. As one who has written a book of history myself, yet not being a specialist in European history, I cannot help but thinking that he could have organized it better, because the mass of details tend to run into a blur. For example, in describing Spain's many wars in the Netherlands, both against the Dutch and with them against the French, Kamen spreads them across virtually every chapter, mixing them in with economic history, the Pacific empire, etc., separated only by an extra space between paragraphs. It would have been much better if he had, for example, had three chapters devoted exclusively to the Netherlands, and then spaced them throughout the book in a chronilogical scheme. Having just read the book, I could only provide a wild guess as to how many different wars Spain had with the Dutch. Also, there aren't enough chapters; Kamen should have broken this 512-page book up into more than 11 chapters. Those who already have a good knowledge of early-modern Italian, Dutch or Spanish history will have fewer problems with the organization.

Good history with an important Caveat

The caveat is that the Spanish Empire was in many ways not Spain's. Empire reminds us that many of those working, and fighting, for Spain were non-Spaniards. This is repeated throughout the book, for the most part to good effect. Empire is a truly academic work, in the sense that it presents us with the dark side of the Empire, without pretending that Spain of five centuries ago should be judged by modern standards. What Spain did wrong, and there is plenty, is presented as simple fact, and placed in the context of how human beings behaved in that time period. The two minor flaws I see in the book are these: Empire reminds us, rightly, that many who worked for Spain were not Spaniards, however, too much can be made of this. The men involved thought they were working for the Spanish Empire, their successes were attributed to that Empire, and benefitted that Empire. Where Spain's soldiers were born is interesting, but not quite as important as the author believes. Still, he can be forgiven for over-emphasizing in this book something that is ignored in others. The other flaw is a lack of consistency in applying this underlying principal to other countries in their dealings with Spain. When the Spanish Empire faces other powers, whether in the old world or the new, the troops of those powers are typically treated as homogenous masses. Surely, if Spain's men were not all Spanish, and that is important, then the makeup of the forces opposing Spain should also be investigated... Still, the book is the very readable story of one of the greatest empires in european history. It deals with the worst aspects the Empire without either condoning them or descending into moralistic chest-thumping. If you're interested in the subject matter, you'll enjoy this book.

Solid Study

This is an interesting history of the Spanish Empire from its foundation at the end of the Reconquest of Spain to the 18th century. The author is a leading authority on early modern Spain. Kamen has two primary objectives. The first is simply to provide an accurate narrative history of the Empire. The second is to rebut nationalistic claims that the Spanish Empire resulted from the formation and activities of a powerful Spanish (actually Castillian) state. As can be seen by some of the negative comments of prior reviewers, this second objective is surprisingly controversial. Kamen demonstrates well that early modern Castille was not a strong state and that the assembly of the huge Spanish Empire resulted from a confluence of factors that had relatively little to do with the strength of Castille. A crucial fact was the dynastic good luck of the Castillian state. A series of very competent rulers - Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V, Phillip II - were in charge during the formation of the Empire. Beyond their own personal abilities, they were also pan-European figures and the formation of the Empire owed a great deal to the fact that the ruling dynasty was able to tap into the talents and capital of other European entities. The Castillian monarchs also exercised power in the Low Countries and Italy, and under Charles V, in Central Europe. These territories and resources were crucial for building the Empire. Kamen shows very well the multi-ethnic and trans-national aspects of the Empire. A great deal of the capital for overseas investment came from Italy. Italians, Flemings, and Germans were all important servants of the Crown. The assembly of the Empire in the Western Hemisphere was largely a private enterprise though the Crown did provide crucial captial and sanctions. While most have concentrated on the Western Hemisphere, Kamen does an excellent job of reviewing the Empire in Europe and imperial efforts in North Africa. Kamen is concerned also with undermining the view that the conquest of the Americas was due to the overwhelming power of the Europeans. He points out repeatedly the importance of native American allies and the crucial role of epidemics involving imported diseases. In this context, Kamen probably misses a chance to make an important connection. Not only did epidemic disease facilitate conquest but it really made it possible for the Europeans to impose their culture, language, and rule in permanent ways. As Hugh Thomas pointed out in his book on the conquest of Mexico, without the huge depopulations that followed the conquest, the Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere might have resembled British India in the 18th and early 19th centuries, an administrative European veneer over a powerful native culture. Kamen shows very well the weaknesses of the Empire. Since Castille was not a strong state, the success of the Empire depended crucially on appropriate management of resources contributed from the holdings

Empire: the Spanish Version

To outsiders the history of Early Modern Spain appears as a story of decline. On the one hand Spain from 1492 onwards was one of the largest empires in history, ranging from Naples to Manilla, controlling much of Germany and Italy, as well as what is now Holland and Belgium. It was responsible for destroying two great urban civilizations, the Aztec and the Inca, and for shattering the culture and society of an entire hemisphere. Yet after the defeat of the Spanish Armada the history of the Empire appears to be a slow and agonizing decline, while Spain itself turned from being the feared master of Europe to a poor isolated periphery. It is the virtue of Henry Kamen's book that he shows this to be an illusion. Kamen is one of the leading historians of Spain and the last decade has been a prolific one for him, since he has also written an important study of the counter-reformation in Catalonia, biographies of Philip II and Philip V, as well as a revision of his book on the Spanish Inquisition. In Kamen's new book he shows that Spain was always a poor country on the periphery of Europe. How then did it dominate much of the world? The short answer is that it didn't really, and it had a lot of help to dominate what it did.People tend to think that the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella created a united Spain. Not true. What it did was create a system in which the various territories and regions that made up Spain were ruled by a common monarch. But each region, as well as much of the rest of the Spanish empire, had its own sets of privileges and local assemblies. No unified Spanish state existed in 1492 and would not for centuries to come. The result was that Spain had no coherent bureaucracy and could never have formed its vast armies on its own resources and populations. It relied heavily on foreign mercenaries. Belgians were crucial to the success at St. Quentin in the 1550s, the Italians for the victory at Lepanto in the 1570s. The Spaniards made up only a sixth of the soldiers ruling Italy in 1544 Italy. The Guarani Indians, under the Jesuit missions made famous in the rather inaccurate film "The Mission," aided the Spanish 50 times, and successfully fought off, at times, the British, the French, and the Portuguese. Indian allies were crucial to the conquest of the Americas, while the free blacks also played a vital role. Financiers from Italy and Belgium and elsewhere funded the Empire. Columbus was an Italian, with no Castillians on his first voyage, while Magellan was Portuguese. Spain could never have funded the armies to conquer the Americans. Instead it made offers that were taken up by ambitious freebooters. The power of the Spaniards was often weak. Officially, it had expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. Officially, its armies fought to purge Europe of heretical Protestantism. Officially, it maintained a monopoly on all trade with the Americas. In fact many Jews stayed on in Spain for decades, in fact many of it

The Reign Explained

Mr. Kamen begins his book with the following lines of Bertolt Brecht: "The young Alexander conquered India. All by himself? Caesar beat the Gauls. Didn't he even have a cook with him?" The answers are obvious. Mr. Kamen asks a different question: Who built the Spanish Empire? The answer to that question seems obvious, also....the Spanish, right? But Mr. Kamen spends the next 500 pages showing us that the obvious answer, in this case, is the wrong answer. In a dazzling display of erudition, covering events in Granada, North Africa, Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, the Caribbean, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, etc., the author reveals that the Spanish Empire was built and maintained with the help of the people of many nations- that it was a true "multinational enterprise." Mr. Kamen also shows that rather than the Empire being created by Spain, Spain was created by the Empire- for, at the starting point of the book, 1492, there really was no such entity as Spain. Like several European countries of the time, such as Italy and Germany, Spain consisted of many geographical units- each with its own language and/or culture, and people felt a loyalty to that particular area rather than to the larger abstraction called Spain. Only after the Empire developed and the language of the largest geographical area, Castile, became the language of Empire did people start to think of themselves as belonging to something bigger than the particular region they lived in. Mr. Kamen also points out that the population of Spain (which was much less than that of France or England) was never great enough to provide the quantity of soldiers needed to support the far-flung Empire. Where did this Empire come from, though? When Ferdinand of Aragon died in 1516 the thrones of Castile and Aragon passed to his grandson, the archduke Charles of Habsburg (known to us as Charles V). Charles was born in Ghent and raised in the Netherlands. In 1520 he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. Besides Spain, his responsibilities included (from his Burgundian inheritance) the Netherlands and (from his Habsburg inheritance) also Austria, Hungary, Naples, Sicily and the continent of America. So, the Empire started by inheritance rather than by conquest. But, to maintain what already existed and to, later on, "branch out," Charles and later rulers had access to the people and resources of these various possessions. Thus, most of the soldiers were Italians, Belgians, Germans, etc. with the addition of mercenaries, such as Swiss troops, when needed. As Castile didn't have the financial resources necessary to handle the responsibilities that went along with administering these areas, most of the financing was provided by the bankers of Milan, Genoa, Amsterdam, etc. When the Empire expanded to encompass the Caribbean, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, etc., it had to rely on native peoples, and African slaves, for manpower. The Spanish didn't have the muscle to conquer and control these vast areas and had t