To compress into one volume the history of a continent and a half during two centuries that witnessed the implantation of new peoples and the evolution of new structures is no easy task. Bold new ways of organization may promise shortcuts, but many pitfalls are possible; traditional ways may be surer, but lack freshness. McAlister, opting for traditional ways, has endowed them with new life by a crisp style and by making each section of his text a summary of scholarly discussion. The result is a well-written, well-thought-out volume of value to the general public and the scholar who wishes information on a debate outside his specific speciality.
McAlister moves from a survey of the history of the Iberian peninsula, with its two emerging nation states and their expansion in the Old World—far more important to Portugal than to Spain—to the eruption into the New World, the conquest of the great native empires, and the first era of settlement. The end of the first cycles of conquest and the development of an imperial framework of legislation in the years centered around 1570 mark for him a significant break and occasion for a survey of the forms which had been implanted in the New World. His second major period is the long span from 1570 to 1700, a period of filling in unoccupied space in areas already staked out by the two empires, of denser settlement, and of some advance along the margins of control. Since the period is one of settlement by other European peoples in the Caribbean and temperate North America, of a much quickened international commerce, and the development of relatively self-sufficient creole economies in the Hispanic colonies, analysis is necessarily different. Brazil at all times is treated separately from Spanish America. A final chapter, one of the most fascinating of the book, examines New World influence on the Old.
In the survey McAlister moves from one scholarly controversy to another. After summarizing views and kinds of evidence on both sides of the debate over the size of preconquest American populations, he voices preference for a relatively large population. He also gives full weight to introduced diseases as the major lethal factor. In the debate over Las Casas and the Spanish urge to social justice, he accepts much of Hanke’s views, but is equally aware that the unjust were Spaniards and that their ideas of what constituted social justice differed in that period from our ideas today. The book summarizes at some length the current controversy over whether there was a seventeenth-century depression and what constituted its main elements. McAlister’s own view is that a depression occurred but that its exact nature and time remain major problems. His most decided judgment appears in his handling of the debate over feudalism vs. capitalism. Throughout the book he uses señorial in preference to feudal, and in the space devoted to the debate he clearly finds the economy capitalist although with medieval and noncapitalist elements. A remarkably even-handed examination of the debate over dependency theory in the various forms in which it has evolved concludes that the theory is hardly fully tenable but that the research on it has opened examination of significant aspects of history that otherwise might have been ignored.
The final chapter on the influence of America on Europe summarizes a vast amount of research in widely diverse topics: intellectual perception; geographical, botanical, and zoological knowledge; the vast contributions of America in important food plants, such as maize, manioc, and the potato; the syphilis-vector problem (for which McAlister suggests a solution); the development of international law; and the effects of the colonies on the two mother countries. A fine bibliographical essay, complementing the notes, provides a guide for further exploration.
