Sir John Elliott concludes this magisterial comparative history of empire in the Americas with a striking counterfactual sketch, imagining a different royal patron for Christopher Columbus and a different fate for the New World: "If [England's] Henry VII had been willing to sponsor Columbus's first voyage," he writes, "and if an expeditionary force of [Englishmen] had conquered Mexico for Henry VIII, it is possible to imagine a ... massive increase in the wealth of the English crown as growing quantities of American silver flowed into the royal coffers; the development of a coherent imperial strategy to exploit the resources of the New World; the creation of an imperial bureaucracy to govern the settler societies and their subjugated populations; the declining influence of parliament in the national life, and the establishment of an absolutist English monarchy financed by the silver of America…
