The Americas

A sweeping analytical narrative that reinterprets 350 years in the history of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean islands

The Americas reinterprets the history of the western hemisphere in the era of European colonization. In a sweeping analytical narrative, it synthesizes 350 years in the history of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean islands. Authors Eric Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn present a new account intended to change the way readers understand the processes and transformations that culminated in an era they label “the age of imperial fracture.”

The book begins by highlighting the dramatic demographic variations across the hemisphere before European arrival. It then considers distinct types of European colonies: composite colonies, planted atop Indigenous kingdoms with dense populations and rich silver mines; plantation colonies, in tropical and subtropical zones where enslaved labor produced commodities like sugar and tobacco; and provisioning colonies, which supplied food, raw materials, and enslaved Indigenous workers to other colonies. The authors also consider the vast expanses dominated by autonomous Indigenous and African-descended peoples. Despite immense variations, they argue that the Americas shared a common history.

Hinderaker and Horn offer the concept of an age of imperial fracture as an alternative to the age of Atlantic revolutions, which they consider to be inadequate to describe events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They highlight the interconnectedness of European empires in the eighteenth century and trace the complex developments that led to the transformation of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires in the Americas. Some people sought independence, but many others preferred loyalty to their empires. The age of imperial fracture forced American peoples to wrestle with colonial legacies that set the stage for new patterns of entanglement and new forms of nation and empire.