This picture of Powhatan's mantle, a deerskin with shell decoration, now preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, appears in Empires of the Atlantic World (Yale, £25), by Oxford professor Sir John Elliott.
The two empires are those of Spain in Mexico and the south, and Britain in the north. Powhatan was the father of Pocahontas, of Disney fame. His empire, which was the nearest North American equivalent to the Aztec empire, contained just 13-15,000 people, compared with up to 25 million controlled by the Aztec Montezuma when Cortes first set foot on Mexican soil. And Powhatan managed to outwit the white intruders, at least for a while. Ellliott argues that the different ways in which the two halves of America were colonised, and Spain's longer reign over its territories, shaped today's faultline between north and south.
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