By: Matthew Restall (The Pennsylvania State University)
| Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763. By Henry Kamen. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 636 pages. $34.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan. By Hugh Thomas. New York: Random House, 2004. 720 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $17.95 (paper).Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. By J. H. Elliott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 568 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $22.00 (paper).Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. By Irene Silverblatt. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 315 pages. $84.95 (cloth), $23.95 (paper).Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. By David J. Weber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 487 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper).Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500–1600. By Karen Vieira Powers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 240 pages. $45.00 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America’s Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present. By Susan Kellogg. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2005. 350 pages. $74.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. By Camilla Townsend. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. 302 pages. $23.95 (paper).Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600. By Alida C. Metcalf. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. 391 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $22.95 (paper). | |
| At a time when the concept of empire is a political and intellectual battleground, the prompt for much soul-searching and navel-gazing in the Western world, perhaps it is not surprising to find historians returning to metaphors of empire that might have offended early modern Spaniards and delighted early modern Englishmen. Henry Kamen describes Spain’s failure “to create an understanding among its peoples based on shared interests, communication and language” as “the silence of Pizarro” (497). Francisco Pizarro’s compatriots were uninterested in other peoples and cultures, in learning their languages, and in reading what they wrote. Irene Silverblatt begins her new book on the Inquisition with reference to Hannah Arendt’s exploration of the roots of modern fascism and totalitarianism, tracing this “subterranean stream of Western history” (3–4) back to seventeenth-century Peru by the top of the second page. These two different images of imperial Spain place a kind of barbarism at the heart of the empire and suggest that a phoenix may have risen from the ashes of the old anti-Spanish tropes of the Black Legend and Spain’s interminable imperial decline. | 1 |
| Perhaps Gibbon is to blame. The notion of an imperial decline that is excruciatingly protracted has hardly been novel since 1777, when Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; that volume began three centuries before the sack of Rome, and thirteen centuries elapsed before Gibbon deemed the fall to be final. Or maybe the fault lies with Las Casas. The Dominican friar’s little book on how Spaniards destroyed the Indies became a big seller north of the Pyrenees for centuries. As has long been observed—by scholars ranging from William S. Maltby on the Black Legend to Felipe Fernández-Armesto on the Spanish Armada—the seventeenth-century development in England of a set of myths about the Armada encouraged a related myth about Spanish incompetence and an imperial decline dating as far back as 1588.1 | . . . |
There are about 4709 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you’re already logged in register your subscription.