World Without End ─ Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire

Following Rivers of Gold and The Golden Empire and building on five centuries of scholarship,World Without End is the epic conclusion of an unprecedented three-volume history of the Spanish Empire from “one of the most productive and wide-ranging historians of modern times” (The New York Times Book Review).

The legacy of imperial Spain was shaped by many hands. But the dramatic human story of the extraordinary projection of Spanish might in the second half of the sixteenth century has never been fully told—until now. InWorld Without End, Hugh Thomas chronicles the lives, loves, conflicts, and conquests of the complex men and women who carved up the Americas for the glory of Spain.

Chief among them is the towering figure of King Philip II, the cultivated Spanish monarch whom a contemporary once called “the arbiter of the world.” Cheerful and pious, he inherited vast authority from his father, Emperor Charles V, but nevertheless felt himself unworthy to wield it. His forty-two-year reign changed the face of the globe forever. Alongside Philip we find the entitled descendants of New Spain’s original explorers—men who, like their king, came into possession of land they never conquered and wielded supremacy they never sought. Here too are the Roman Catholic religious leaders of the Americas, whose internecine struggles created possibilities that the emerging Jesuit order was well-positioned to fill.

With the sublime stories of arms and armadas, kings and conquistadors come tales of the ridiculous: the opulent parties of New Spain’s wealthy hedonists and the unexpected movement to encourage Philip II to conquer China. Finally, Hugh Thomas unearths the first indictments of imperial Spain’s labor rights abuses in the Americas—and the early attempts by its more enlightened rulers and planters to address them.

Written in the brisk, flowing narrative style that has come to define Hugh Thomas’s work, the final volume of this acclaimed trilogy stands alone as a history of an empire making the transition from conquest to inheritance—a history that Thomas reveals through the fascinating lives of the people who made it.

Praise for Hugh Thomas

“The great historian of the Spanish-speaking world.”—The Guardian

World Without End

“Literary power is a vital part of a great historian’s armoury. As in his earlier books, [Hugh] Thomas demonstrates here that he has this in abundance.”—Financial Times

“A vivid climax to Hugh Thomas’s three-volume history of imperial Spain.”—The Telegraph

The Golden Empire

“Compelling . . . Thomas is acknowledged as one of the masters of grand narrative, and in this latest work he once again lights up a vivid tableau.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[A] gripping, old-fashioned narrative history, grand in scope and colorful in detail.”—Publishers Weekly

Rivers of Gold

“Magisterial . . . a grand and sweeping account of the world’s transformation half a millennium ago.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Big, bold, informative, and meticulously researched . . . It is the kind of ‘history in the grand manner’ for which Thomas . . . is famous.”—The Washington Post

Hugh Thomas is the author of many histories, including The Golden Empire; Rivers of Gold,a New York Times Notable Book; The Spanish Civil War, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award; andA History of the World, for which he won the Arts Council Prize for History. He has also received the Calvo Serer prize in Spain and the Boccacio and Nonino prizes in Italy and was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and a lord in England. Lord Thomas was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. He lives in London.