From the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Spain was regarded as a unique social and political community -- the most exalted, the most feared, the most despised, and the most discussed since the Roman Empire. In this important book, Anthony Pagden offers an incisive analysis of the lasting influence of the Spanish Empire in the history of early modern Europe and of its place in the European and Spanish American political imagination.

Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory 1513-1830

History

Pagden, Dr. Anthony

Americas

Yale University Press

Explores how Europeans interpreted their encounters with the New World, beginning with Columbus's strategies for coming to terms with the startling unfamiliarity, through the widely held view that the encounter forever altered the course of European history, to the adoption of Native American views of Europe that led to a fierce attack on colonization and imperialism. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism

The rise and fall of modern colonial empires have had a lasting impact on the development of European political theory and notions of national identity. This book is the first to compare theories of empire as they emerged in, and helped to define, the great colonial powers Spain, Britain and France. Anthony Pagden describes how the rulers of the three countries adopted the claim of the Roman Emperor Antoninus to be 'Lord of all the World'. Examining the arguments used to legitimate the seizure of Aboriginal lands and subjugation of Aboriginal Peoples, he shows that each country came to develop identities - and the political languages in which to express them - that were sometimes radically different. Until the early eighteenth century, Spanish theories of empire stressed the importance of evangelization and military glory. These arguments were challenged by the French and British, however, who increasingly justified empire building by invoking the profit to be gained from trade and agriculture. By the late eighteenth century, the major thinkers in all three countries, and increasingly the colonies themselves, came to see their empires as disastrous experiments in human expansion, costly, over-extended, and based on demoralizing forms of brutality and servitude. Pagden concludes by looking at the ways in which this hostility to empire was transformed into a cosmopolitan ideal that sought to replace all world empires by federations of equal and independent states.

Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800

Europe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pagden, Dr. Anthony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pagden, Dr. Anthony

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pagden, Dr. Anthony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory 1513-1830

European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism

Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800