Book Review

Methods/Theory

Seldom does a work of such obvious historiographic significance and intellectual merit so overtly result from the efforts of such an engaged cultural critic. A native of Ecuador, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra would convince his readers that greater emphasis on the intellectual history of the Hispanic world, and specifically on its eighteenth-century scholars' debates about how correctly to source and write the history of the Americas, will ultimately neutralize a Latin American historiography that does little more than "emphasize inordinate social conflict and collective failure" (pp. 347–48). Like many an intellectual historian before him, this author insists that we should tune down the social and the collective many while vaunting the mental achievements of the few if we are to grasp the genius not just of Latin America but of the peninsular motherland as well.	1
This being about debates, the author organizes his book ideologically rather than diachronically. The main targets—not just of Cañizares-Esguerra but of the Hispanic intellectual elite he centers on—are the eighteenth-century northern European scholarship that denigrated Amerindian cultures and the sixteenth-century Spanish historians who had originally described the Amerindians for European audiences. Thus the first chapter of this book is on "enlightened" eighteenth-century northerners like the comte de Buffon, the abbé Raynal, and William Robertson, and the second is on sixteenth-century "humanistic" writers whom the northerners later attacked. Cañizares-Esguerra essentially skips the seventeenth century. The remaining three chapters study the patriotic Hispanic reactions against these northern put downs. Chapter three focuses on the eighteenth-century peninsular patriots who marshaled evidence that, beyond Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega, their culture had not been and was not obtuse and thus their historiographic efforts in the Western Hemisphere were noble, while the last two chapters deal with those the author calls the "Creoles" but who, as he recognizes, would be better labeled "the overseas Spanish clergy." Mostly speaking from New Spain, these writers defended themselves first against the northern Europeans and latterly against the secularizing Bourbons as well.	2
Cañizares-Esguerra's two main theses are as follows. While all Hispanic scholars were equally patriotic, their internal exchanges regarding the writing of American history reveal "the density and originality of [their] intellectual debates" (p. 209) in comparison not only to those of the northerners—in the early seventeenth century, "Spanish scholarship . . . far surpassed anything then available in English" (p. 363)—but also to the little that North Americans like "Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin" had done to respond to European critics of America (p. 210). To this insistence on Hispanic intellectual sophistication, the author adds the thesis that in their scholarship, the Creoles especially repeatedly anticipated our current preoccupations. For instance, their criticisms of travel literature "foreshadowed many of our contemporary postcolonial insights" (p. 206).	. . .