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Reviews of Books
| Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700. By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006. 343 pages. $63.00 (cloth), $25.95 (paper).
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Reviewed by Nicholas Canny, National University of Ireland, Galway
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Several recent publications have advocated, with varying degrees of plausibility, that the early modern Atlantic world should properly be considered a Black, a Red, or even a Green space rather than a primarily British one.1 In this book Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra makes the case for considering the Atlantic world as essentially an Iberian construct for several reasons. Spanish and Portuguese New World settlement and trade predated those of other European groups by more than a century. Moreover educated people in the Iberian powers' employ (usually clergy of various religious orders) gave more detailed consideration in print about how to shape this world and its inhabitants to conform to the aspirations of European Christians than did any other cluster of authors. And Cañizares-Esguerra's own belief is that the initial Iberian fashioning of this world became the norm that subsequent European settler groups, including the British, were to emulate. |
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This summary indicates that all scholars of early American history and culture will have to contend with this book, but Puritan Conquistadors deserves to enjoy a wider appeal for three further reasons. First, Cañizares-Esguerra makes systematic use of and offers an excellent guide to a substantial body of evidence—Catholic prescriptive literature treating New World problems in a universal context—that previously has attracted only limited, and then usually mistaken or condescending, attention. Second, he is especially proficient at explicating and interpreting complex visual images that were either included within the Catholic texts he discusses or published independently as woodcuts, engravings, paintings, or statuary. The third and most compelling reason why this book should command attention is that in the course of promulgating his case for the centrality of the Iberian experience to the shaping of the entire Atlantic world, Cañizares-Esguerra takes issue with the traditional contention, advocated by nineteenth-century writer William H. Prescott and most recently reiterated by Samuel P. Huntington, to the effect that the path to progress in the Americas has been led by people of northern European ancestry and has been hindered by those of Iberian extraction scattered throughout the region, including within the United States.2 |
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To sustain his case for a persistent Iberian influence on the shaping of the Americas, and of the Atlantic world, throughout the early modern centuries, Cañizares-Esguerra revisits the proposition, long cultivated by Protestant and secular authors, that the Reformation created such a rift within European culture that almost every aspect of European achievement, including the conquest and settlement of the Americas, had to be recommenced from fresh foundations. As he does so, he is aware that European Protestants, whether French, Dutch, or English, who engaged with the Atlantic in the middle of the sixteenth and more persistently from the outset of the seventeenth century represented themselves as committed reformers dedicated to bringing true religion to benighted but gentle indigenous Americans shamefully exploited by Spanish conquistadors, whose behavior testified to their not being Christians. This argument, as Cañizares-Esguerra acknowledges, owed much to the criticism of Spanish treatment of indigenous peoples articulated by many Iberian clergy (not just Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose critique of his fellow nationals' New World endeavors was most effectively put to use in northern Europe). For all the Protestant insistence that their intervention in the Americas would mark a fresh departure in the introduction of Christianity there, however, Cañizares-Esguerra concludes that this prediction was never borne out in either practice or theory. |
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