An Empire restored : America and the Royal Society of London in the Restoration

Over thirty years ago, J. H Elliott framed the confrontation between the Old World and the New in terms of the issue of how the discovery of the New World affected European categories of understanding. America, he argued, was assimilated into "the half-light of [the European] traditional mental world." More recently, however, some scholars have suggested a very different situation, in which the discovery of America produced a kind of shock of the new; a sense of wonder which, defying categorization, compelled the reorientation of European consciousness.