Assignment: Empires of the Atlantic Exam

Utilizing the many themes discussed throughout the course, analyze the following sections and explain how they relate major ideas regarding a comparison of European, English and Spanish, conquest and colonization of the Americas. Answers should be one page minimum and two page maximum each and should use specific evidence from the texts to back your arguments.

1. "But the Virginia colony that emerged from these harsh birth-throes differed sharply in many ways from the viceroyalty of New Spain. Unlike New Spain, it was not established on the tribute and services of the indigenous population, whose numbers were rapidly depleted by hunger, war and disease. And salvation, when it came, came not from gold but from tobacco."

2. "The relatively slow and haphazard British moves towards the imposition of empire stood in marked contrast to the speed with which Spain's American territories were formally incorporated within an effective imperial framework."

3. "If a hierarchical order emerged in the plantation societies of the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, it was a relatively simple hierarchical order when compared with that which emerged in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. The black-white dichotomy of a largely agrarian world of planters and slaves saw to this, even if the dichotomy was complicated by the presence of a population of poor whites, and by the emergence in the Caribbean of a significant intermediate sector of free blacks and mulattoes. There were, too, groups of subservient Indians in the Chesapeake region. Over large parts of Spanish America, on the other hand, the coexistence and interbreeding of different ethnic groups in a much more urbanized environment than that of the British plantation societies was reflected in the construction of a social order of far greater complexity."

4. "For both these imperial powers, the war itself had exposed major structural weaknesses, which the acquisition of new territories under the terms of the peace settlement would only compound. In London and Madrid alike, reform had become the order of the day. Britain might be basking in the euphoria of victory, but, as ministers in London were painfully aware, its power was now so great that it could only be a question of time before France and Spain again joined forces to challenge its supremacy. How long that time would be depended on the speed with which Charles III's secretaries of state could implement a programme of fiscal and commercial reforms that had been the subject of constant discussion in official circles, and which the government of Ferdinand VI had taken the first steps to introducing in the 1750s. The failure of the defending forces at Havana and Manila brought a new urgency to their task. ‘The secretaries', it was reported, ‘...are working like dogs. They are doing more in a week than they previously did in six months.' The long siesta was drawing to a close. The most pressing problem for both the British and Spanish governments was the improvement of measures for imperial defense. For the victors as for the vanquished, the strains and stresses of war had thrown the inadequacies of the existing system into sharp relief."

5. "Yet the story could have been very different. If Henry VII had been willing to sponsor Columbus's first voyage, and if an expeditionary force of West Countrymen (English) had conquered Mexico for Henry VIII, it is possible to imagine an alternative, and by no means implausible, script: a massive increase in the wealth of the English crown as growing quantities of American silver flowed into the royal coffers; the development of a coherent imperial strategy to exploit the resources of the New World; the creation of an imperial bureaucracy to govern the settler societies and their subjugated populations; the declining influence of parliament in national life, and the establishment of an absolutist English monarchy financed by the silver of America."