Spain's Road to Empire by Henry Kamen<br></br>Empire: how Britain made the modern world by Niall Ferguson

Piers Brendon finds that Europe's greatest empires both failed to practise what they preached

It was an empire, so the cliché ran, on which the sun never set. It began amid loot and blood, continuing with slavery and Christianity. Its builders divided and ruled – more by collaboration than coercion, though they anticipated the Germans in setting up concentration camps. It relied on private enterprise rather than state aid, for its home base was tiny and its people mostly indifferent, if not hostile, to the imperial enterprise. Indeed, the empire was so disparate that historians have questioned whether it had any genuine existence at all. But its cultural legacy survives and its language (as befits a race of hopeless linguists) is now ubiquitous.

Which empire? This description fits both the British empire and the Spanish. But if similarities emerge strikingly from these excellent books, so do their differences. These are brought out all the more clearly because the authors have radically contrasting approaches to history.

Crudely stated, Henry Kamen is a splitter while Niall Ferguson is a lumper. The former dissects the Spanish empire so sharply that he ends up with little more than a congeries of weaknesses. The latter, hammering together a print version of what promises to be a fine television series for Channel 4, reckons the British empire was on the whole a Good Thing. The books shed an interesting light on each other.

Kamen argues that the Spanish empire was hardly worthy of the name since it was rotten to the core. It was based on dynastic alliances rather than national vigour, starting with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469 and growing into an unwieldy European conglomerate under the Emperor Charles V. Spain had a small population and large debts. It was technologically backward, militarily feeble and culturally hermetic. It relied on Genoese bankers, German soldiers, Italian and Belgian sailors, Indian allies in the New World, Chinese traders in the Philippines. The Spanish monarch could never control its far-flung territories or monopolise their wealth. When the Araucanians captured the governor of Chile, they killed him with symbolic refinement – by pouring molten gold down his throat.

Kamen makes his case incisively, but not altogether convincingly. If Spanish power was illusory, how did Pizarro and 260 countrymen capture Atahualpa, the ruler of Peru, in 1532, massacre 8,000 followers in two and a half hours, collect a king's ransom in treasure and behead the Inca empire? This was exceptional, Kamen asserts. The usual process was to exploit conflicts in the indigenous population, as Cortes did. When he stormed Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital) in 1521, his army consisted of 900 Spaniards and 300,000 native warriors.

Nevertheless, this was a Spanish victory just as Plassey was a British one, even though most of Clive's troops were sepoys. The point is that both empires employed auxiliaries and ruled with the help of local élites. This did not mean they were impotent. Nor did the insubordination of their own men, and frequent frontier defeats, prove the Spanish empire a chimera. For the British empire was similarly afflicted.

Of course, Queen Victoria reigned over a Greater Britain far stronger than anything imagined by Philip II of Spain. Sustained by incomparable financial and industrial resources, Britannia ruled a quarter of the earth. Unlike Spain, which mainly peopled its dependencies with single men who married local women, British settlement was, as Ferguson says, a "family affair". Colonists took with them the mother country's ideas of liberty, free trade, and the rule of law. Elsewhere, in the non-white empire, Britain provided cheap, efficient and relatively honest government, and invested unprecedented sums.

Yet Britain's empire fell even faster than Spain's. This suggests that by 1945 the imposing façade concealed a gutted ruin, though Ferguson attributes the collapse to the assaults of rival empires in two world wars. He is sardonic about Britain's subsequent efforts to find a role, comparing Tony Blair's messianic aspirations with Gladstone's endeavours to export British progress to benighted regions. Bombing Serbia to protect human rights is the equivalent of sending gunboats to suppress the slave trade in west Africa. "The Mahdi was in many ways a Victorian Osama bin Laden, a renegade Islamic fundamentalist whose murder of General Gordon was a '9/11' in miniature."

Blair's neo-imperialist project is pie-in-the-sky, since he lacks the power to implement it. But Ferguson apparently favours American moves to secure a more "orderly world". The trouble is that superpowers invariably profess altruism while practising Realpolitik, and their interventions are often disastrous. Ferguson knows this and cites appalling instances of British imperialism at work. He recalls the Tasmanian genocide. He finds a banyan tree standing in Cawnpore on which 150 Indian mutineers were hanged, simultaneously. He reports that when British officers wore out the dance floor at the Bloemfontein Residency during the South African War they sold the old floorboards for 1s 6d each to Boer women in the camps – to make coffins for children.

Despite all this, Ferguson quotes Smuts's assertion that Britain established the "widest system of organised human freedom which has ever existed". He declares that London exercised a restraining influence on imperialists in treatment of native peoples and that the empire had a "conception of human rights". True enough. But Spanish monarchs also tried to rein in the conquistadors and insisted their primary duties were preaching the gospel and protecting the Indians. Horrified by the barbarities of the slave trade, Philip II even suspended it for a time. Yet atrocities occurred wherever standard-bearers of European civilisation trod. Morally, there was little to choose between the two.

Kamen's book is more scholarly, less entertaining than Ferguson's, which is also beautifully illustrated; the latter includes words like "rip-off", "fat-cat" and "belly-up" – a touch of the Schamas. And it employs such a broad brush that slips occur: Lord Mansfield did not pronounce slavery illegal in England in 1772, but said slaves could not be removed from England against their wishes. Still, like Kamen, Ferguson has done a first-rate job on a subject that is looming ever larger on the historical horizon. Empires are striking back.

Piers Brendon's 'The Dark Valley' is published by Pimlico