RIVERS OF GOLD: The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan
Hugh Thomas, . . Random, $35 (720pp) ISBN 978-0-375-50204-0
Thomas has long belonged to the elite of Spanish studies. His popular reputation was made in 1961 by a sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, strongly sympathetic to the Second Republic and smuggled across the Pyrenees during Franco's dictatorship. But by the '80s he was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher (who made him a lord), and over time unfolded an increasingly conservative vision of the Spanish past. In his new book, Thomas returns to the conquest of the Caribbean islands and Mexico in the first two generations after Columbus, relating a sequence of events he has described as the most important phase of world history. He does so with narrative vigor, informed by personal familiarity with two continents. In his insistence on accidental imperialism and on the multinational dimensions of the enterprise of conquest, his interpretation bears some similarity to recent work by Henry Kamen (
Reviewed on: 04/12/2004
Genre: Nonfiction
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Paperback - 720 pages - 978-0-8129-7055-5