is LORDS OF ALL THE WORLD A REVIEW

Historians have always had problems while dealing with large territorial empires and their raison d' etre for their very existence. The Roman Empire for instance claimed to have brought peace to a warring Europe, and formulated the concept of pax romana to justify is conquests. Edward Gibbon rightly said that the pretence of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence, an acknowledgement that the ideological formulations of Vergil, Livy and Tacitus wre exactly self serving. More recently, Napoleon justified his ruhless war of expansion by claiming to be the inheritor of the French Revolution. And of course, we have the "white mans' burden" theory of the English Empire. Now the Americans have their own take on the imperial ideologies of the past by claiming that they advocate democracy and human rights the world over. As ideological formulation such statements are not subject to refutations and it does not matter that the USA ends up supporting the worst kinds of criminal regimes in the world.

Antony Pagden is a Professor ofn History at Johns Hopkins University and is one of the leading American historians of the Spanish Empire in the New World. His book Lords of All the World
is a classic study of imperial ideologies as fashuioned by the Christian Empires of the Eary modern period. How did the educated churchmen of the sixteenth century justify the expropriation of land and human rights of the Amer Indian population? How did Christian theology justify the acts of Cortes and his conquistidores?How was slavery justified using the theology of Saint Augustine? An answer to all these questions is found in the book.