On How to Write the History of the New World

Woof, this is a tome. To start off, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra finds that modern and postmodern debates about which sources historians should rely on are not at all new. Instead, they have their origins in historiographical discussions that took place as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries!

I suppose the starting point for this book is Antonello Gerbi’s The Dispute Of The New World: The History Of A Polemic, 1750 1900, which I sadly have not had the opportunity to read. In it, Gerbi traces a debate (among northern Europeans) about whether or not the Americas are a naturally inferior space. The case that the Americas were an inherently degenerative space were heavily advocated by the French Comte de Buffon and the Prussian Cornelius de Pauw. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson argued that the Americas were no worse than Europe; in fact, the continent may have been even better. To bolster his case, Jefferson made careful measurements and saved archaeological/prehistoric specimens in order to sent them back to Europe. Yet, that shouldn’t have even been necessary—had not the history of the Incas and Aztecs been enough to prove that the Americas are a healthy enough space to develop strong, settled societies?

Well, that’s the problem that Cañizares Esguerra confronts in this book. He argues that northern Europeans refused to take any sort of Spanish historical writing seriously, regardless of which sources they used. In chapter one, Cañizares Esguerra shows us that northerners refused to accept Spanish accounts, as they had too heavily bought into the “black legend.” When Spanish historians attempted to counteract this by using indigenous sources, which they regularly used, northern Europeans instead pushed back saying that Mayan scripts, Nahuatl testimonies, and Incan qipus were too “uncivilized” to be useful evidence.

To counteract northern European chauvinism, the Bourbons established the Royal Academy of History and commissioned it to write a new history of the New World while making the patriotic case that what occurred was not as murderous as northerners thought. In the process, Spanish scholars wrote a contradictory history that downplayed indigenous achievements and population levels and elevated Spanish sources. Interestingly, most of the writers were not Castilian and, in many ways, the histories written with the support of the Royal Academy of History actually helped distill a sense of Spanish identity (with equal inclusion of Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon, and the Asturias) over Castilian identity. It didn’t matter though, because British and French thinkers mocked these works too. At the same time, creole historians wrote their own histories without the support of the Royal Academy, and they developed a sense of American patriotism over one that was necessarily Spanish.

In the end, Spanish writers were caught in a bind. There was absolutely nothing they could do to win the respect of northern European scholars, who instead treated them with absolute condescension. Cañizares Esguerra indicts Gerbi in this, as well, for refusing to include Spanish counter-narratives in his text. To Cañizares Esguerra, Anglo-American accounts of the healthfulness of the Americas pale in comparison to Spanish American writings.

Absolutely fascinating text, but it takes a bit of work to make sense of. Realistically, this should be a text that all historians read, whether they work on the Americas or the eighteenth century or not. There are implications here about taking seriously the historical writing of other peoples and reliance on a variety of sources. Highest recommendation