J. H. Parry – författare

The Age of Reconnaissance, as J. H. Parry has so aptly named it, was the period during which Europe discovered the rest of the world. It began with Henry the Navigator and the Portuguese voyages in the mid-fifteenth century and ended 250 years later when the 'Reconnaissance' was all but complete. Dr. Parry examines the inducements - political, economic, religious - to overseas enterprises at the time, and analyzes the nature and problems of the various European settlements in the new lands.

The Spanish empire in America was the first of the great seaborne empires of western Europe; it was for long the richest and the most formidable, the focus of envy, fear, and hatred. Its haphazard beginning dates from 1492; it was to last more than three hundred years before breaking up in the early nineteenth century in civil wars between rival generals and 'liberators'. Available now for the first time in paperback is J.H. Parry's classic assessment of the impact of Spain on the Americas. Parry presents a broad picture of the conquests of Cortes and Pizarro and of the economic and social consequences in Spain of the effort to maintain control of vast holdings. He probes the complex administration of the empire, its economy, social structure, the influence of the Church, the destruction of the Indian cultures and the effect of their decline on Spanish policy. As we approach the quincentenary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas, Parry provides the historical basis for a new consideration of the former Spanish colonies of Latin America and the transformation of pre-Columbian cultures to colonial states.

A discussion of the day-to-day government of a remote Spanish province at a time when the disorders of conquest were giving way to a settled administration.

Originally published in 1949, and as a third revised edition in 1966, this is a fascinating, lucid and comprehensive survey of the complicated succession of colonial empires in east and west. The book begins with an analysis of the scientific knowledge and technical limitations of trade, exploration and discovery in the age of the Renaissance. It describes in turn the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries, the organization of their empires for trade and government, the attempts of the Northern Europeans to penetrate through America or find markets and sources of supply in it, and the struggle of the Dutch with their rivals in the East and of the English with their rivals in the West.