The Guardian has a review of an interesting book about the spanish conquest and colonisation from Henry Kamen, called "Spain's Road to Empire": "The conquistadores were wrongly named. Those brave men who crossed the Atlantic to "discover" the New World were neither all-conquering, nor all Spanish. Perhaps they should have been called adventurers, collaborators or opportunists, though if you ask a Latin American, you'll hear some choicer suggestions. The point, as made by Henry Kamen in this impressive study, is that Spain alone neither created nor maintained the Spanish empire, which at its peak covered a third of the world, from the Netherlands to New Mexico. Spain did not even exist as a political entity until the 18th century. It was merely an association of states, of which the most powerful was Castile."

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