#  Debating Empires: Atlantic Imperial Ideology and the Spanish-British Competition for the Americas, 1660s-1720s 

 



**Eva Botella-Ordinas**

Between the 1660s and the 1720s several major British authors involved in the colonization of the Americas claimed that the British territory was a new kind of empire: commercial, Protestant, maritime, and free. These authors opposed the British imperial model to that of the Spanish Monarchy, an empire of conquest, Catholic, based on land, and run by an absolute government. The judgment of British writers about the Spanish Monarchy was consistent with conflicts between Britain and Spain over American “debatable lands” (the Carolinas, Georgia, and Honduras). Most of these writers were members of the Council of Trade and Plantations and of the Royal Society, and they had direct private interests in either the West or the East Indies. I examine the works of John Evelyn, Edmund Waller, Daniel Coxe, Josiah Child, and particularly some works of John Locke, who originated the British imperial ideology from the Councils of Trade and the Royal Society, and I relate these works to information in the Calendar of State Papers in order to explain how their “theories” were created and deployed in political quarrels to achieve ownership and use of American land and nature, shaping not only imperial British ideology but also the image of an imperial Spain dissimilar to its actuality.

**\[WP #07016\]**