Volume 3 of A. J. R. Russell-Wood’s planned 32-volume series of Variorum article reprints is a collection of 15 articles written in English over the last four decades. This volume’s editor, the late Ursula Lamb, writes in her introduction that the collection’s function is “to serve as a baseline for current concerns, built upon preceding developments. . . . This volume is a preview of the vast canvas of events to be covered in the succeeding histories” (p. xv).
Russell-Wood, in his General Editor’s Preface (p. x), states the editorial decision to exclude literature in Danish, Dutch, German, and Portuguese (and, presumably, all other languages besides English, French, and Spanish). This decision, when taken with Lamb’s asserted “base line,” provides a curious hierarchy of scholarship, and one which must be taken into account while surveying the volume’s contents. Following J. H. Elliot, Lamb’s title speaks of the controlling and dominating nature of Europeans’ interactions with the globe that they conceptualized and held in their hands (p. xviii). In this volume, the controlling and dominating has a particular Anglocentric orientation.
Articles by many familiar historians, as expected, will be found in this collection: Samuel Eliot Morison, Woodrow Wilson Borah, C. R. Boxer, and John H. Parry, for example, all (appropriately) appear. The criteria for selection are not particularly clear: Lamb writes that the sampling of variety and the looking “at the beginnings of the story of transoceanic expansion of the Iberian powers” are the “functions” of the selections (p. xvi). She includes a brief bibliography of almost exclusively English works and appends a 10½page index. The index has only three references to the Spanish holdings known as the Netherlands, and no mention of the dynasty that ruled Spain for much of this period of “global encirclement” and “revelation,” the Hapsburgs.
Like many Variorum reprint collections, this one performs a useful service to the academic community by making older and often difficult-to-find works accessible. With its limited bibliography and index, however, it is not too greatly of service as a reference work.
