Take World Without End: Spain, Philip II, And The First Global Empire Composed By Hugh Thomas E-Text

am currently researching the golden age of Spain, which was the reason I've picked this book, While it is obvious that the author knows his material, it was somewhat surprising to me how hard he tries to exonerate atrocities the Spaniards left in their wake in the South and Central America.
Before my recent trip to Peru, I was able to research the conquest and its outcome, Well, it was one of the most horrifying examples of genocide in human history devised and manufactured by imperial Spain, With this in mind, I had a hard time following the author's attempts to justify what was done in Spanish colonies, He stated that Spain rebuilt and improved life in Peru and Mexico and how their native populations loved their fryars and how talented Spanish architects built beautiful cathedrals instead of pagan temples.
I've heard and read very very different descriptions of what had happened there, I also saw the remains of the mind blowing Inca structures what Spaniards were not able to destroy and pieces of unique ancient art which somehow escaped greedy hands of Spaniards who melted most of them into bricks of gold to ship them back to Spain.

Overall, besides this major disagreement with the author, I felt that the book was very uneven and contained many unnecessary details which did not in my opinion contribute to the narrative.
I am a very tolerant reader, but I sometimes was bored to death by long descriptions of minor nobles and their parents and their siblings and their cousins who at the end brought nothing to the story.

I forced myself to finish the book hoping that maybe at the end it would get better, but it did not, The epilogue reiterated how Spain "enlightened" the natives and brought peace and prosperity to the region, Frankly, I was speechless. A nonfiction book, the third in a trilogy about the Spanish Empire, This one focuses on the time period of King Philip's reign, though it's more concerned with the country's new colonies than anything happening in Philip's court itself.
The book is organized by place: we've got New Spain modern Mexico and the surrounding areas, Peru the former Incan empire, more or less, newly conquered areas of South America Chile, Paraguay, Guyana, etc and the Philippines.


Argh, this book, This fucking book. First of all, it took me over two weeks to read  and it's not that long, aboutpages which no book has done to me since.
. . I don't even know when, It's been years at least, It's so unbelievably boring that every page was like trudging through thick mud, And since I spend a significant portion of my time reading articles from academic journals or PhD theses, when I say something is boring, it's not because I'm unfamiliar with the conventions of the genre.
sitelinkAnother reviewer compared it to a "locally produced county history", and that is the perfect description, Endless lists of names, characterized only by the town they were born in, who they were relatives of, and the dates they served in various government posts Got that.
Long accounts of debates over tax rates or how to classify property Yup, Analysis or insightful connectionmaking None,

But more important than its mindnumbing lifelessness, World Without End is shockingly racist, I'll share just a few of the quotes I highlighted while reading:
Each subdivision had its particular name: thus the children of blacks and whites were mulattos, a useful designation which nobody seems to employ in our morally opaque twentyfirst century.


Of course, the friars knew that vestigial idolatry continued, but such offenses were punished with nothing more serious than the occasional whipping.

Ah, yes, the 'nothing serious' of being whipped for trying to practice your own religion

Many slaves seemed at that time to prefer white masters to their indigenous black ones.
Most slaves were bought as such, having been enslaved in Africa,
HOW WOULD YOU EVEN KNOW THAT FIRST CLAIM, What the hell sort of historical record is he using here This line is, of course, not footnoted,

In which Thomas endorses a ridiculous Spanish claim that it was going to conquer all of China using onlyships:
Had it been approved, it would have amounted to the grand climax of a hundred years of Spanish conquests and struggles.
Had it happened, it would surely have brought less deprivation to China than occurred under the Manchu dynasty and certainly less than under the terrible communist era of the twentieth century.


But don't worry! Thomas does not restrain his bigotry to nonwhite races, He's got plenty of condescension for women too, He barely mentions them throughout the book, which fine, It's a history of conquistadors, He could have made more of an effort, but I understand that he's working from a limited source, But every women that does get mentioned is "beautiful", I AM SO NOT KIDDING:
The new queen, still only fourteen years old, had a dark and Italian complexion, recalling her Medici forbears.
She was vivacious and attractive pg
Philip's mother was the beautiful, strongminded and unbending Empress Isabel pg
His famously oneeyed yet beautiful wife, Ana pg
She was born inand the Indian maid who looked after her in her cot as a baby saw that she had two beautifully formed roses on her cheeks.
pg
The delightful conquistadora Mencia de Nidos, a woman as beautiful as she was brave pg
Ursua's beautiful mestiza mistress, Ines de Atienza.
She was renowned in thes as 'the most beautiful woman in Peru' pga two for one!
Unfortunately the prior's mother was a beautiful conversa, Violante Gomes pg
The tale of the beautiful gallega Isabel de Barreto pg
Another daughter of Montezuma, the apparently beautiful Techuipo pg
By the way, I gathered these by running a search on the text for 'she', and can report that both 'sheep' and metaphorical shes countries and boats, mostly far outnumber actual women.


Thomas also spends multiple chapters eulogizing the work of friars, priests, and missionaries: the buildings they constructed, the books they wrote, the languages they learned, the numbers they converted, etc etc.
In their turn, the work of nuns get this one paragraph out of the entire book:
The nuns included brillant cooks, They made pretty dresses for the everpresent images of the Virgin, They chanted charming cradle songs and were, from time to time, allowed to swoon in amorous ecstasy,

I could go on, but I think y'all get the point, But I do want to share one more quote: the final paragraph of the entire book, which I feel really puts a cap on all the crazy shit that came beforehand.

The Spanish empire lasted three centuries, from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, Its last remnants only fell in, following the SpanishAmerican war in Cuba, overyears after Columbus had embarked for the Caribbean, Spain had left behind a Catholic religion and innumerable monuments, a tradition and much literature, Above all, it had created dependencies which matured successfully into the new independent countries of Latin America, Wars in this region are rare, In comparison with the rest of the world, Latin America now seems an oasis of peace,

If I could give World Without End less than one star, I absolutely would, I want to give it negative,

I read this as an ARC via sitelinkNetGalley, I was already getting irritated by the endless lists in this book, masquerading as analysis, But afterchapters of praise for an empire that exploitedcontinents, and committed acts of genocide and cultural extinction, . . to be told that it was a peaceful, efficient operation that reached an accommodation with native peoples made me want to vomit, No further reading of this book, This is truly an excellent book, I was not very familiar with the Spanish Empire and it's conquest of the Americas, This was a very interesting account of Phillip II's enterprises in the American Hemisphere, This book is full of details and anecdotes, It does tend to read a bit dry, so if you are not a fan of pure historythen this may not be the book for you.
However, if you are interested in Philip II

or the Spanish Empire in America in the wake of the conquistadores then this is a great book for you.
El tercero de la serie sobre el imperio español, Los dos anteriores trataron el período del inicio con los Reyes Católicos y las conquistas con Carlos V, Este se concentra en el reinado de Felipe II y como en los anteriores, Thomas abruma al lector con un alud de información que se concentra más en las colonias que en la España misma y sus problemas en Europa.
Son tratados con amplitud los sucesos en México, Perú, el cono sur, las Filipinas e incluso los planes de invasión y conquista de China.

Puede ser una lectura percibida como pesada para el principiante, pero realmente se trata de una exposición destinada a dar un panorama general del imperio por medio de detalles y pequeñas piezas de información, como la aventura de Aguirre llevada incluso al cine.

En fin, una buena experiencia para el lector, An engagingly written, fastpaced book it nonetheless took me awhile to finish, It's not the book, it's me, There's a danger in picking up the last in apart history without having first read the other two, Again, that's my fault. But World Without End passed the standalone test with aplomb perhaps not with "flying colors", This is a treatment of the Spanish Empire through the prism of the reign of Philip II, Thomas maintains the view that Philip's death inmarked the transition of the Spanish Empire from its expansionary phase to its administrative one, Colonial Spain has been much demonized for its brutality toward the indigenous people it conquered, with justification, Thomas argues, however, that the Spanish reputation for brutality is somewhat exaggerated by the fact that much of the history on the subject has been written from a British perspective.
For his part, he points out more moderate voices like Bartolome de las Cases who argued for better treatment of the Indians and of the Franciscan orders.
When discussing the history of colonial Spain, most people do not mention the Philippines, and this book made me wonder why, That conquest, as it were, was made with relatively less rapacity than those in the Americas, and was based more on trade than on pure extraction of resources.
That the Spanish partially coopted the administrative structure of the places they conquered as empires generally do to one degree or another is a given.
The Empire at that time was beginning to wind down its expansionary phase, even as Spain had sights on China and Japan, World Without End closes by positing that in a way the Spanish Empire never really declined, Although it no longer formally exists, it remains in a strong linguistic and cultural sense in a large part of the world, This was a very interesting book and on a subject that I was unfamiliar with, Somewhat late in life I've "discovered" Latin America and so have been looking for good general histories of the Spanish Conquest period,

While I found much in this and its companion books of great interest, in the end the entire series was thoroughly unsatisfying.
Clearly the author is an expert in this field but these books would have benefited from an entirely more critical editing process, Finding the narrative and larger story in the midst of excessive pedantic details just becomes a hard slog, This is a very nice conclusion to the Spanish Empire trilogy, It covers the period of Spanish exploration during the period of the reign of Philip II, After the death of Charles V, Philip II takes over the exploration of the Americas, This talks briefly about who Philip was as a person, then goes straight to the matter in Mexico, then south the Peru, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, etc.
There is a great detail given to trade and trade efforts all over the continent, The brutality of the natives and how they were "civilized", He then heads further west to the Philippines named after the Monarch and then to China/Japan, I never knew that Spain thought about launching invasions from the Philippines into China to conquer them, Oh my how history would have been written differently! The text of my edition of this book runs to less thanpages, but that reasonably brief overview somehow requires an indexdoublecolumn pages long.
There are over a thousand individual names of people men, mostly referenced in that index, which means that a new person enters the narrative at the rate of roughly one every third of a page.
The author can't simply say that a message is received he has to give the name of the messenger, his place of origin and a quick run through his family history.
The effect of this is that the reader cannot possibly remember everyone, and has no way of knowing in advance which of these many new characters will turn out to be a significant player.


The other effect is to make the text seem outrageously padded and badlypaced, with trivialities treated at length and momentous events sometimes dismissed in a few lines so that no narrative rhythm is ever sustained or built upon.
He relates a fascinating tale, one that it would seem impossible to make boring, But he certainly does his best to do just that, .