J.H. Elliott’s memoir of his life as an historian explains how grappling with the tensions between the centralising Spanish monarchy and Catalan resistance in the seventeenth century led him into ever-expanding circles of research that eventually encompassed the modern history of three continents. His experience shows up the naïveté of John Howard and others who regard ideology as the main driver of historical research. Son of a private school headmaster, Elliott won a scholarship to Eton and went on to Cambridge. Casting about for a dissertation topic in the early 1950s, he seized upon the Count-Duke of Olivares of Spain, whom the painter Velázquez captured in a striking equestrian portrait, now on display at the Prado. Like his better-known counterpart in seventeenth-century France, Cardinal Richelieu, Olivares pulled the strings of state policy under Philip IV. Once settled down in the Spanish archives, Elliott found the rug pulled beneath his feet. Most of Olivares’ papers had perished in a palace fire 250 years before. Lesser scholars would have caught the first bus home, but Elliott found another way to his quarry. Since the Catalan revolt posed a major problem for Olivares, Elliott burrowed through the Barcelona archives, emerging triumphantly with troves of material on his subject.

In the process he revised his views on both Catalan nationalism and the formation of modern nation-states. There was, he discovered, nothing natural or eternal about national feeling. Dynastic politics created Spain. Then the king, with the help of men like Olivares, attempted to shore up Spain’s position through warfare, imperial expansion, and patriotic propaganda. Accustomed to revere their princes throughout the Middle Ages, subjects only grew restive when the fiscal and military demands of the state threatened their long-established rights and liberties. As Elliott saw it, seventeenth-century Catalans were driven to revolt not by their social and economic aspirations, let alone their ethnicity, but by oppression from above. As he began to publish his findings he saw other scholars inching toward similar conclusions about the ‘new monarchies’ of France, Stuart England, and Prussia. This, in turn, inspired him to cast his net farther afield. A comparative study of Richelieu and Olivares reinforced some of his hypotheses and confounded others.

Next came a study of art and society in the glorious seventeenth century. Was it true, he asked, that the state of the nation sets the spirit of an age in the arts and letters? The case was not so conclusive as earlier scholars had imagined. To some extent, artists followed the money; royal patronage or its absence made a difference. The arts might rise while the nation appeared to decline. That set Elliott wondering about the notion of decline itself. The clichéd view held Spain and the Ottoman Empire to have been in a state of terminal decline since the late sixteenth century. And yet they took an unconscionable time about their dying. A related stereotype painted a contrast between the go-ahead, freedom-loving British colonists of North America and the decaying grandees who dominated Latin America. Elliott’s investigation over time produced a massive work, Empires of the Atlantic World (2006).

Along the way he collaborated with many of the scholarly luminaries of his epoch. A painting done for Britain’s National Portrait Gallery in 1999 shows him in the company of others who served on the editorial board of Past and Present in the 1960s, when that journal was making the running in the new social history. Seeing Elliott alongside noted Marxists Christopher Hill (1912–2003) and Eric Hobsbawm (who died in October 2012 at the age of ninety-five), the uninformed observer might leap to the wrong conclusion that here was a band of ideologically driven radical history warriors. In fact Elliott had been invited to join the board precisely because he was not a Marxist. What they shared was a commitment to the hunt for knowledge. It took Elliott to the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford and a knighthood.

This book is not about personal achievements, however, or even about the person, who remains elusive to the end. It charts a continuing intellectual journey. Elliott shows a remarkable ability to keep abreast of the latest fads and trends without ever giving his heart away. His quest began under the tutelage of scholars present at the birth of modern historical practice, when the nation-state was taken for granted as the great object of study. It goes on as globalisation shakes the foundation of nation after nation. The final disintegration of Great Britain into the European provinces of Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales appears a real possibility. So, say the crowd in Barcelona, is the emergence of the new Catalonia.