This book has been a long time in the making. Four decades have passed since my first attempt to write about European colonization in the Americas, in a 34-page essay submitted to Professor Carl N. Degler, who supervised a Winter Quarter reading course in my third year at Stanford. Since he had just completed Neither Black nor White, which compared slavery and its consequences in Brazil and the United States, for which he would win the Pulitzer Prize, Degler was very interested in comparative history and familiar with the literature on European colonization in the Americas.

The reading course had allowed me to survey the existing secondary literature in English that examined the era of discovery, exploration, conquest and colonization. I titled my paper “England, France and Spain in America: A Speculative Essay” because I wanted not only to summarize the material I had studied, but also to try to draw some meaning from it and to try to construct an interpretive framework that would organize my discussion of the activities Europeans engaged in as they populated a new world.

Degler read my essay with great care and a critical eye. He made no effort to spare my feelings as he jotted his observations in the manuscript's margins: “not the French,” he cautioned; “false alternative,” he objected; “you are fudging,” he insisted; “non sequitur,” he pointed out. His summary comments, however, were somewhat kinder than the marginal notations: “A very thoughtful, often original—if sometimes unconvincing— essay. Your compression of many facts into a small compass of argument without losing the train of argument is highly commendable. The section on openness of New World and ideal societies is imaginative.”

I had been introduced to the topic of “Comparative Empires” as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis by Professor John M. Murrin. It was he who made history so compelling that I knew I wanted to spend my life trying to understand the past, the history of early America in particular. Murrin ignited my interest not only in English America but also in how the English colonial experience compared with that of the French and the Spanish. During my junior year he insisted that if I wished to study European colonization of the Americas I needed to supplement my mastery of Spanish with at least a reading ability of French. So I enrolled in French 101.