Sir John Elliott's magnificent synthesis of two dauntingly large bodies of scholarship on the making of Spanish and British America before 1830 is unquestionably a masterpiece. Elliott is one of the great historians of our time and this is one of his great books. Anyone interested in early America and in the burgeoning field of Atlantic history will read this book and absorb its insights. The research is prodigious, the erudition awesome, the judgements sound and the organizing principles sensible. It will shape scholarship on both empires for many years. It is already an indispensable text for students and scholars alike in Atlantic history.

We might speculate, however, on what this book says about the developing historiography of the Atlantic world. This book marks an important departure for Elliott, previously interested in the interplay between old worlds and new worlds. Here he explores a hemispheric history of the Americas, in which the similarities and differences between Spanish and British colonization (their experiences in the Americas) are of more moment than the connections between each imperial polity and developments in the metropolis (the inheritances brought to America). Such an emphasis heralds an important shift in early British American historiography. The frame of reference for early americanists is increasingly not early modern Britain but other places in the Atlantic world. The implicit message to British americanists in this book by a great hispanicist is that we should be reading fewer works in British history (that is undoubtedly happening) and more works about Latin America. If we want to understand Boston, Elliott tells us, it might be as useful to know a bit about Mexico City as to learn about London.

Elliott covers so much in this book that it is churlish to ask him to do more, but what is clear from this hemispheric account of early modern imperialism is that comparing British and Spanish colonization is not enough. At the very least, we have to add France to this story. Contemporary politics makes it imperative to look at the historical roots of the hispanicization of America, but in the early modern period British Americans and Spanish Americans were as likely to contrast their position with that of French Americans as with each other.

It might also be useful to look at early America not from the vantage point of white settlers and with Massachusetts as the normative British American place, but from the perspective of the majority of migrants to the Americas, West Africans brought to labour on plantations. Elliott emphasizes the differences between Spanish and British colonies, which is undeniable when comparing Peru with New England. The differences get less obvious if, say, Jamaica is compared with Cuba or, indeed, with Saint Domingue. Elliott comes to British America as an outsider. Not surprisingly, he is guided by the existing literature as to what is important. That literature tends to privilege Massachusetts and Virginia at the expense of the Caribbean or the backcountry. But it was in those areas where interactions between empires in the Atlantic were most frequent and possibly most profound. One does not want to diminish Elliott's achievement. He has shown us, in masterful fashion, an entwined world and has made sense of that bewildering world. But there are still other comparative histories to write, ones that perhaps emphasize the role that the Dutch, the French, Africans and Indians played in the making of Atlantic America as much as the role played by Puritans and Conquistadors. Challenges still await. Elliott provides a model of how to confront those challenges.