Forum Essay: Responses

Borders and Borderlands of Interpretation

CHRISTOPHER EBERT SCHMIDT-NOWARA

Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone.1

The Cuban nationalist leader José Martí invoked "barricades of ideas" as a defense against the imperial pretensions of the United States. "Our America," imagined by Martí, was Latin America, an America with a common history and culture that transcended borders while respecting national differences. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron simultaneously challenge and reinforce that vision of the Americas. Like Martí, they look beyond political borders at deeper connections and commonalties that borders often obscure. In contrast, Adelman and Aron cast their gaze beyond Latin America, including the United States and its origins in the clashes between rival empires and emerging nation-states on the North American continent.	1
The affinity with and distinction from Martí's view of "Our America" raises two related questions. First, Martí wrote his essay more than one hundred years ago against the backdrop of numerous Cuban and Latin American essays and historical studies in a similar vein. His work suggests that English-speaking historians and intellectuals were not alone in theorizing the history of empire and cultural connections in the Americas; Herbert Bolton and Frederick Jackson Turner (and then William Cronon, Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and David J. Weber) are not the only sources of this historical project, even though the predominance of English-language social-science monographs in Adelman and Aron's scholarly apparatus might inadvertently lead one to believe otherwise. Second, Martí's perspective implies a relationship between historical vision and political sovereignty. What would Adelman and Aron's model mean for historians in other American countries? In other words, how would a distinct political and institutional context alter the transnational model theorized by Adelman and Aron?	2
In this short response, I do not pretend to answer these questions. Rather, I raise them to ask how Adelman and Aron's encompassing historical vision might also reflect on the broad history of interpretation intertwined with the events and processes it seeks to comprehend. Rivalries among empires, states, and peoples manifest themselves not only through trade and warfare but also through the interpretation of those struggles. Along with their counterparts in the United States (and often in dialogue with them), historians and intellectuals from Latin America have pondered the distinctive trajectories and moments of overlap between the different European empires and their interactions with subaltern groups. Such was the case in another territory caught between empires, Cuba in the nineteenth century. Briefly examining Cuban views of empire and the American past suggests that a North American history might be built on intellectual foundations inscribed with their own transnational historicity.	3
Cuban (and Spanish) intellectuals felt compelled to explain and interpret the persistence of three seemingly archaic institutions until the end of the nineteenth century: the slave trade to Cuba (abolished 1867), slavery (abolished 1886), and Spanish colonial rule (which lasted until the U.S. intervention in 1898). In doing so, they often resorted to the comparative history of American colonial empires, seeking both to throw their own situation into relief and to draw useful lessons from other colonialisms, especially British. Many of them were well informed of historical and theoretical trends in the English-speaking world.	4
Cuban intellectuals drew a firm distinction between the rationales and effects of Spanish and British colonialism: in their eyes, the former was distinguished by its religious motivations and racial intermixing (although economic motives and exploitation were not absent), the latter by its almost exclusive concern with commerce and its foundation in racial segregation. Political institutions were also distinctive: Spain sought to rule unilaterally over its colonies, while Great Britain permitted considerable self-rule.2	5
Reflecting on these contrasts, many Cubans perceived Spanish colonialism as superior. While based on forms of unfree labor, Spanish rule and customs nonetheless permitted the coexistence and intermixture of Africans, Indians, and Europeans. Foreshadowing Gilberto Freyere's arguments about the Portuguese in Brazil, the Cuban writer José del Perojo argued that the Spaniards' experience with colonialism and distinct racial and religious groups within Spain itself during the Middle Ages prefigured the development of Spanish-American societies.3	6
For their present situation, however, Cubans loyal to the colonial regime vastly preferred British models. The British had ended the slave trade and moved to abolish slavery in a gradual and compensated process. Moreover, British colonial subjects had an important voice in local budgets and trade policies and elected their own officials. Cuba, in contrast, was subject to exceptional military rule for most of the nineteenth century, its economy was highly regulated in favor of Spanish interests, and the survival and growth of slavery bred permanent social instability.	7
A variegated image of British colonialism, and especially of the United States, emerged from this interpretive process. For Cubans in favor of preserving the colonial bond in the later nineteenth century, the ideal colonial society was Canada because the metropolis had peacefully ceded virtual sovereignty to the colony. For those in favor of annexation to the United States, the vigorous economic growth and decentralized political institutions were attractive (as was the political weight of Southern slaveowners until the Civil War). For separatists, the most progressive and inclusive political actors in Cuba, the former British colonies were ambiguous at best: though democratic, they were nonetheless rent by violent racial strife and discrimination and expressed threatening ambitions in the Caribbean.	8
The fears of Cuban nationalists like José Martí were borne out in 1898 when the United States invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, annexing the latter two and preserving the right of intervention in the former. U.S. motives were mixed. While many Americans supported the intervention to help Cuban forces defeat Spain, some political and military leaders saw the war between Cuba and Spain as a good moment to satisfy long-held territorial ambitions. In the subsequent century of explanation of the intervention, interpretive positions solidified: U.S. historians emphasized the selflessness of U.S. actions, unaware of the depth and sophistication of the Cuban nationalist movement, while Cuban historians argued that the United States acted to head off Cuban independence without regarding the democratic motives of some North American supporters. Ironically, an event that tightened U.S.-Cuban political, military, and economic bonds also created new intellectual and historiographical borders between them. As a leading historian has recently argued, that border has made the events of 1898 mutually incomprehensible.4	9
Adelman and Aron offer excellent conceptual tools for thinking across that historiographical divide by theorizing the linkages between imperial rivalries and state formation and how those processes are shaped by multiple axes of conflict. My only reservation is that the intellectual foundations of this project seem to lie too squarely in the English-speaking world, from Turner and Bolton to the current western historians. Historians from other parts of the Americas have thought about this interrelated and contentious history for reasons as diverse as those in the United States and Canada. In exploring the origins of contemporary political borders in the borderlands of the past, should historians of North America stop at the "barricades of ideas" that obscure borderlands of historical interpretation?	10
Christopher Ebert Schmidt-Nowara received his PhD in 1995 from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Rebecca Scott, Geoff Eley, and Fred Cooper. He teaches Spanish and Latin American history in the Department of History, Fordham University, Lincoln Center. He has also taught in the History Department of Stanford University. In June 1999, the University of Pittsburgh Press published his first book, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. His articles concerning aspects of Antillean slavery, Spanish colonialism, and post-emancipation politics appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review and Illes i imperis in 1998. He is also one of the authors of Más se perdió en Cuba: España, 1898 y el fin de siglo (Madrid, 1998). Notes 1 José Martí, "Our America" [1891], in Martí, Our America: Writings in Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, Elinor Randall, trans., Philip S. Foner, ed. (New York, 1977), 84. 2 See Antonio Angulo y Heredia, Estudios sobre los Estados Unidos de América (Madrid, 1865); José Antonio Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américo-hispanos (Barcelona, 1879); Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Cuba primitiva (Havana, 1883); and José del Perojo, Ensayos de política colonial (Madrid, 1885). The works of the Cuban-born Spaniard Rafael María de Labra on slavery and colonialisms in the Americas are also important. See La abolición de la esclavitud en el órden económico (Madrid, 1873); and Política y sistemas coloniales (Madrid, 1874). 3 Perojo, Ensayos de política colonial. 4 See Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); and Pérez, "Incurring a Debt of Gratitude: 1898 and the Moral Sources of United States Hegemony in Cuba," AHR 104 (April 1999): 356–98.

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