The Spanish Seaborne Empire

For three hundred years Spanish conquistadores, missionaries and judges built up a vast American Empire which stretched over 6,000 miles from Cape Horn to the banks of the Rio Grande. In The Spanish Seaborne Empire J.H. Parry, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University, reconstructs the forced growth (amid slaughter and plunder) of a durable and bizarre society, and its complex relationship with metropolitan Spain until the wars of ‘liberation’ in the early nineteenth century.—from the back coverThe cover shows a detail from ‘Cortés orders the scuttling of his fleet before attempting the conquest of Mexico’ by Miguel González, in the Museo de América, MadridA Pelican Book