On Bárbaros

There’s a lot here that early Americanists (United States) will find find familiar in this text, to the point that it almost fits effectively in the literature of the New Indian History and there’s a lot here that uses the peoples of North America as the subject.

In this work, David Weber argues that the treatment of indigenous Americans by the conquistadores of the 16th century should not be seen as the model for the way the Spanish treated indigenous Americans. While there were profound tensions between the Spanish and American Indians, the reality was far more complex, changing depending on where you look and when you look. This book takes the case of the Bourbon Americas, which epitomized the impact on Spanish America during the Enlightenment. While the Habsburgs saw some continuity with the conquistadores, the Bourbons represent a break, and those who saw themselves as enlightened attempted to guide Spanish policy in a way equalized and integrated the status of indigenous peoples. Importantly, this book does not examine the case of indigenous peoples who were already effectively part of the imperial system, but those on the borderlands and managed to exist outside of the reach of Spanish governance (notable here are the Patagonians, the Paraguays, the Araucanians, the Comanches, and the Apaches).

Spaniards made contacts with indigenous through a variety of different ways—evangelization, trading, scientific expeditions, and war—and they were not equal. Trading and scientific expeditions seem to have had the most benign effect, with these individuals viewing American Indians as relative equals—although not entirely. Missionaries had the most ambivalent results; while some indigenous peoples went to the missions of their own accord, missionaries were not above abusing and “civilizing” indigenous peoples. Military officers and soldiers generally had the worst track record, and their expeditions frequently resulted in the wholesale killing of indigenous peoples.

After the end of Spanish rule in America, treatment of Native peoples tended to look very similar to their treatment by Anglo-Americans further north. While governments often (but not always) tried to protect and integrate American Indians through more benign means, settlers often were outside of the reach of government, and settlers actively vilified, fought, and robbed these peoples. Fortunately for Latin America (as far as I can tell), Spanish-speaking settlers were never quite valorized as settlers in the United States, where they have become recognized as heroic figures in the popular imagination.

I learned a lot here, and this text broke a lot of my notions of a relatively homogeneous Spanish America. The diversity of actors, geographies, and periods are particularly notable in this book, and it’s a net benefit to the scholarship on Spanish America (and the colonial United States)!