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IN JANUARY OF 1494, Christopher Columbus found himself in the disagreeable position of having to explain to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella why so many of the European settlers on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola had fallen sick and died. The explanation was simple, but it had alarming implications for the nascent Spanish colony: Europeans did not thrive in the very different environment of the New World. The “change in water and air,” Columbus believed, was the principal cause of the dreadful ailments afflicting the small Spanish settlement. Fortunately, he explained, the mortality would cease once the settlers were provided with “the foods we are accustomed to in Spain.”1 European food, Columbus insisted, would counteract the deleterious effects of the New World environment and make feasible the dream of colonization. He was not alone in this belief. Columbus’s assertion that European food was vital to the survival of such settlements forms part of a vast current of discourse that links diet to discussions of Spanish health, Indian bodies, and overseas colonization. Diet was in fact central to the colonial endeavor. As we shall see, food played a fundamental role in structuring the European categories of “Spaniard” and “Indian” that underpinned Spain’s colonial universe in the early modern era. Beyond this, attending to food’s place within that universe illuminates the profound but incompatible desires that characterized Spain’s colonial mission, which sought simultaneously to make Amerindians like Europeans and to keep them separate. Many aspects of early modern colonial expansion proved unsettling for its European protagonists. The encounter with entirely new territories and peoples raised doubts about the reliability of existing knowledge and also posed theoretical and practical questions about the proper way for Europeans to interact with these new peoples and places. Far from being an enterprise based on an unquestioning assumption of European superiority, early modern colonialism was an anxious pursuit. This anxiety is captured most profoundly in the fear that living in an unfamiliar environment, and among unfamiliar peoples, might alter not only the customs but also the very bodies of settlers. Perhaps, as Columbus suspected, unmediated contact with these new lands would weaken settlers’ constitutions to such an extent that they

THE STORY OF JAMESTOWN’S FIRST YEARS is often told as a tardy, frail, and fumbling beginning for English settlement in the New World. Undermined by its leaders’ stubborn and often brutal pursuit of unrealistic plans, Jamestown found salvation in the form of tobacco monoculture, which the Virginia Company neither intended nor fully embraced. The logic of tobacco cultivation led to an insatiable desire for land and labor that culminated in the violent expulsion of the Chesapeake’s native population and the establishment of African slavery. The turmoil and violence of Jamestown’s beginning, in this telling, were problems that prefigured their solution in the establishment of a regime of racial exclusion and exploitation. Recent literature has put forward a substantially different interpretation by situating Jamestown in a broad sixteenth-century context. For promoters of English settlement such as the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, the Virginia Company’s project was the culmination of a lifetime’s work collecting, translating, and publishing travel accounts. Hakluyt and others applied the lessons learned from Dutch, Portuguese, French, and especially Spanish efforts to the settlement at Jamestown, drawing also on English experiences in the Mediterranean, in Ireland, and elsewhere in the Atlantic world. From this perspective, what makes Jamestown important is not its singularity as the first permanent English settlement, but the links between the Virginia Company’s effort and those that came before it. Jamestown represents an especially well-planned and well-documented project that offers valuable insights into the political and social ideas that shaped the early English Atlantic world as a whole.1

OVERSEAS COLONIZATION AND THE DETERMINED PURSUIT of godly discipline by Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics building their confessions in the wake of the Reformation were among the most important developments in the history of early modern Europe and its Atlantic periphery. European historians have asked whether the campaigns for godly discipline proved more effective in polities with modest levels of social complexity and legal pluralism.1 Meanwhile, scholars of New World empires have argued that colonial conditions enhanced the already considerable legal pluralism of early modern European metropoles.2 Studies of New World legal pluralism and of post-Reformation godly discipline are seldom brought together. Both literatures are comparative, employing case studies to identify patterns of similarity and difference. The puritan campaign to combat sin and reform morals in early Massachusetts (1630–ca. 1660) can be fruitfully used as a case study to investigate the relationship between social complexity, legal pluralism, and godly discipline in a colonial setting. Early Massachusetts was neither particularly large nor economically important. But because it was simultaneously a New World settlement and a Calvinist polity on the edge of the European Reformation, it can serve as a point of contact that connects these two flourishing literatures. Using Calvin’s Geneva and lowland Scotland as contrast cases provides a comparative framework that can help us identify features of the Massachusetts experience whose significance would not be readily apparent if examined in isolation. Massachusetts governor John Winthrop famously called on his fellow colonists to “bring into familiar and constant practice” what English Protestants “maintain as a truth in profession only.”3 The colony’s ability to turn “professions” widely shared

In a series of articles written over many years, Ian W. McLean has addressed the dual questions of how Australia attained high levels of prosperity less than a century after European settlement and why it has since remained amongst the wealthiest of nations. Although this book is not a comprehensive study of Australian economic history, it builds on this earlier body of work and brings together his answers to these questions. It is engagingly written, helped by the minimal use of technical material and the creation of counterfactual scenarios in several places. Most important of all is McLean's impressive use of the comparative approach. While arguing that Australia's path of development has been strongly shaped by international influencesimmigration, investment, trade, and political institutionshe interrogates closely its performance relative to that of other specific nations to tease out national differences as well. These are appropriately selected in most cases: the role of differences in land ownership patterns and political institutions with Argentina, or the greater connection of Canada's timber and grain industries to manufacturing than Australia's wool and mining. However, New Zealand might have featured more strongly in the comparative story.

Preface Abbreviations Map I. The Geography and History of Alfonso's Ebro Conquests 1 II. Possessing the Land: The King as Agent and Governor of Settlement 59 III. The Nobility of the Ebro 115 IV. Non-Noble and Non-Royal Settlement of the Ebro 157 V. The Church of the Ebro Frontier 224 VI. The Dilemma of Conquered Muslims Under Christian Rule: The Aragonese Solution 279 Conclusion 316 Bibliography 321 Index 333

Preface - Acknowledgements - Introduction: The Succession in History and Theory - The Late Elizabethan Succession Question - God's Providence and Man's Presumption - Kings by Law, Lineal Succession, and Undoubted Right - A Settlement with Something of Monarchy in it - The Need for a Certainty in the Succession - The Unsettling Prospect of an Elective Crown - The Survival of Hereditary Monarchy and the End of Indefeasible Right - The Problem of Allegiance - A Rightful and Lawful King and Queen - The Persistence of Fiction - Abbreviations - Bibliography - Index

IN THE BOLD AND INCISIVE LANGUAGE that we have all come to admire in his work, Paul Schroeder insists he is not merely tinkering with the definition of the term balance of power but discarding the concept altogether, at least as an interpretation of the Vienna settlement. The settlement's "essential power relations were hegemonic, not balanced," he says, and further, this is what made the system work. In this respect, he adds, the Vienna settlement of 1815 differed from all other settlements in modern times, most particularly the predatory balance of power politics practiced in the eighteenth century.' Before challenging this thesis, as this rejoinder is meant to do, it is important to acknowledge broad areas of agreement with the picture Schroeder paints of hegemonic politics. First of all, his critique of the conventional explanations for relative stability is essentially sound though not entirely free of inconsistencies. War weariness there certainly was but unevenly distributed. Britain was physically unscathed and financially sound; Russia in 1815 was just reaching the peak of its military build-up, which in turn depended heavily on British subsidies and foreign enlistments; Prussia actually favored war over Saxony; Austria was bankrupt, but that was its normal condition. Nor does war weariness explain why peace reigned after 1815 but not long after many other debilitating conflicts such as the War of the Austrian Succession. Schroeder likewise doubts that a common fear of revolution drove fearful monarchs to huddle together in a common front against their rebellious peoples. This version of the Concert, parading the Holy Alliance and the Troppau Protocol as its prime exhibits, became liberal, and nationalist orthodoxy until well into this century; and until just recently it continued to reign in the countries of the former eastern bloc, representing the Congress of Vienna as a ruling-class conspiracy, a classic demonstration of a class struggle across international boundaries.2 Schroeder's refutation is valid; in making it, however, he comes close to crediting war weariness after all. "European leaders," he writes, "were not driven to seek lasting peace in 1815 because they feared revolution. They did so because

PAUL SCHROEDER'S ESSAY ON THE VIENNA SETTLEMENT AND THE BALANCE OF POWER touches on two major fields of research: the actual distribution of power and operation of the system, and the language and practices of the Vienna settlement. He argues that we need not redefine the concept of balance of power with respect to the Vienna system of 1815 or understand it differently. For him, that settlement did not represent a particular, modified kind of balance of power. He believes rather "that any balance of power interpretation of the Vienna settlement is misleading and wrong. Its essential power relations were hegemonic, not balanced, and a hegemonic distribution of power, along with other factors, made the system work."' As far as the language and the practices of the Vienna system are concerned, Schroeder discusses the seemingly plausible reasons for calling the system of Vienna a balance of power system, referring to the language being used by statesmen and writers of the period, the success of the international system established at Vienna, and the assumption that a hegemonic system could not suddenly come about and provide peace and stability. These perceptions he tests against his own evidence. He concludes that the case against the balance of power interpretation of the Vienna system is clear, stating that "eighteenth-century balance of power rules and practices produced predatory, destabilizing hegemony. The Vienna era's equilibrist rules and practices promoted benign, stabilizing kinds of hegemony."2 I would argue instead for a characterization of the international system established in 1815 as a reformed, multipolar, and intertwined balance of power system with built-in checks. The Vienna system was not designed and set up as a hegemonic great power system, despite the fact that the great powers played a

List of illustrations List of tables Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1. Rural France in the eighteenth century 2. The crisis of the late 'ancien regime' 3. 1789: between hope and fear 4. Dismantling the seigneurial regime 5. The land settlement: collective rights versus agrarian individualism 6. The administrative revolution 7. Terror and counter-terror 8. The balance-sheet Notes Bibliography Index.