A big history of North America : from Montezuma to Monroe

The special relationship between the United Kingdom, an established and secure power, and the United States, a rising one, began after the War of 1812, as the former enemies sought accommodation with, rather than the annihilation of, one another. At the same time, Mexico, also a rising power, was not so fortunate. Its relationship with Spain, an established but declining power, turned hostile with Spain’s final exit from North America after Mexico’s War of Independence, leaving its former colony isolated, internally unstable, and vulnerable to external attack. Significantly, Mexico posed little threat to its northern neighbor. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, then, the fate of North America was largely discernable. Nevertheless, the three-century journey to get to this point had been anything but predictable. The United States’ rise as a regional power was very much conditioned by constantly shifting transcontinental, transpacific, and above all transatlantic factors, all of which influenced North America’s three interactive cultural spheres: the Indigenous, the Hispano, and the Anglo. And while the United States profoundly shaped the history of Canada and Mexico, so, too, did these two transcontinental countries likewise shape the course of U.S. history. In this ground-breaking work, Kevin Fernlund shows us that any society’s social development is directly related to its own social power and, just as crucially, to the protective extension or destructive intrusion of the social power of other societies. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Prologue 14 Chapter 1: On Method 16 Chapter 2: On Asymmetry 36 Part I: North American Contours 62 Chapter 3: The Renaissance Explores the East Coast 64 Chapter 4: The Enlightenment Explores the West Coast 104 Interlude 120 Chapter 5: A Short History of Cultural Evolution 122 Part II: The Hispanosphere 140 Chapter 6: The Two Mexicos 142 Chapter 7: Mexico’s Axial Age 168 Chapter 8: The Two Spains 190 Part III: The Anglosphere 212 Chapter 9: Neo-Europes and Middle Grounds 214 Chapter 10: Transatlantic Wars and Transcontinental Treks 240 Chapter 11: The Thucydides Trap—and The Great Escape 272 Epilogue 296 Chapter 12: The Clinched Fist and the Invisible Hand 298 Notes 306 Bibliography 336 Index 376 "This book looks at America's initial rise to power and considers what made its relatively short path to hemispheric dominance possible. However, it does so within a continental context, and therefore begins with the conquest of the Aztec Empire of Mexico by Spain's Hernando Cortés. But unlike a typical history survey, this book tracks and measures over time the sources of social power - the abilities of a particular society "to get things done," in the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris's apt formulation, including the projection of military force. And it has tried to do so by placing America's rise in a continental as well as a transatlantic context"-- Provided by publisher