During the final decade or so of the second millennium, the historiography of European overseas expansion has been dominated by the fruits of the quincentennial celebrations of Spain's 'discovery' of America in 1492. The process will continue into the new millennium as Portugal commemorates the 500th anniversary of Pedro Alvares Cabral's landfall in Brazil in April 1500. Subsequently, the Latin urge to celebrate centenaries (whether first, fifth, or numbers in between) will be dominated in the period 2010-2022 by the bicentenaries of the collapse of the Iberian empires in the New World, with occasional asides for the quincentenaries of the conquests of major mainland regions, notably Mexico in 1521. The direct involvement of British historians of colonial Latin America in the varied academic activities - notably international conferences and publishing projects - that typically accompany these processes has been, and will be, relatively small-scale. Their paucity in terms of numbers reflects both the different priorities of mainstream British historiography, and a certain scholarly reticence (belied, perhaps, by the importance attached a decade ago by the historical establishment to celebrating the fourth centenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada) towards the more ostentatious forms of academic activity practised in the Iberian world. In terms of quality, however, the contribution of British scholars to '1492 and all that' has been of disproportionate importance, leading, albeit somewhat indirectly, as in the case of this volume, to the publication of seminal studies in English of the interaction of Iberian and British interests and forces in the New World.
One of the most ambitious and successful of the publishing projects devised in Spain for the quincentennial celebration was that of the 'MAPFRE América' foundation, which succeeded in publishing no less than 270 books, grouped in 19 series, covering all aspects of 'the ephemera of 1492', to quote from the official description of the collection. Four British scholars contributed volumes that have proved to be far from ephemeral, relating to the Americas in the colonial period, to various series in the collection, and the publication of Peter Bradley's British Maritime Enterprise in the New World means that all four (including Bradley's Navegantes británicos) have now been expanded and revised for publication in English by prestigious British presses (the others are works by Anthony McFarlane, John Lynch, and John Fisher). Peter Bradley's British Maritime Enterprise in the New World, included in MAPFRE's 'Sea and America' series, was already a fine work of scholarship, widely welcomed by reviewers as a clear, coherent, authoritative analysis of the activities, motives and achievements of British navigators in the New World from the late-l5th century to the early-19th century. However, like others in the series, it was written to a strict template which included a firm word limit and excluded the usual scholarly apparatus of explanatory footnotes and a bibliography. These omissions are remedied in this revised edition, which also embraces not only expanded discussion of key themes - such as the role of the Royal Navy in the Caribbean - but also entirely new consideration of buccaneering activities there and in the Pacific. The result is a splendid synthesis, the first in English, of the activities of English navigators over a long historical period in Caribbean and North American waters, and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America. Fittingly it concludes with a succinct discussion of related activities even further afield in the Falkland Islands and with reference to the Terra Australis Incognita.
Peter Bradley already enjoys a distinguished reputation for his meticulous scholarship within two somewhat separate but overlapping constituencies. The first is that of historians who specialise on the history of 17th century Peru, who regard him as the leading authority on the fiscal and naval problems encountered by the Spanish crown in trying to defend Peru's exposed Pacific coastline from foreign intruders in a period when Spain's European rivals were trying to seize the fruits of empire - booty and an opportunity for contraband - if not territory beyond the Caribbean. His crowning achievement here is his 1992 monograph Society, Economy and Defence in Seventeenth Century Peru, which used the career of a particular viceroy - the Count of Alba de Liste (1655-61) - as a peg upon which to hang a sophisticated analysis of the political, social and economic structures of Spain's richest overseas territory in the Hapsburg era. Three years earlier, his The Lure of Peru(1989, and 1990) had presented a somewhat broader readership - that concerned with European overseas expansion as a whole in the Early Modern Period - with a major, scholarly analysis of the significance of Dutch, English and French penetration of the Pacific in the 17th century, and of the effects of this intrusion upon Spanish imperial policy. British Maritime Enterprise in the New World pulls together the threads of Peter Bradley's earlier work and extends it both chronologically and geographically. The result is to be welcomed as an authoritative survey by a scholar of truly international stature of British maritime enterprises in the New World and beyond from the first Bristol voyages of the l5th century to the beginning of the l9th century. Rather like the English settlers in the Caribbean in the 17th century, he has taken a valuable asset first created by Spanish initiative and enterprise - if the metaphor is pursued Navegantes británicos might represent, for example, Jamaica - and turned it into an asset, British Maritime Enterprise in the New World, far richer than its Spanish creators had ever expected.
John Fisher, Professor of Latin American Studies, Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool