How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (review)

A literary historian recently characterized the eighteenth century as "a true one hundred years of solitude" in Latin American colonial studies.¹ Jorge Cañizares's persuasive, erudite book reminds us that this holds true not only for literary criticism but for historiography. Since Antonello Gerbi's classic work, studies on this topic have been rare and primarily concerned with the controversial hypotheses advanced by Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, and their followers about the "newness" and degeneration of the Americas.² To a lesser extent, they have also included the furious responses of Spanish American creoles to these "denigrations." Cañizares's analysis, in contrast, centers on the epistemological and methodological contributions to the debates by historians on both sides of the Atlantic.

How to Write the History of the New World begins with comparatively familiar material: the northern European "dispute of the New World." Cañizares carefully charts the discussion leading to the new conjectural histories of de Pauw, the abbé Raynal, and William Robertson in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Contemporary observations of the supposedly wretched state of the native population of America led to a radical questioning of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century reports of native American grandeur. Eventually, in what Cañizares calls de Pauw's "new art of reading" (26), humanist "external" evaluation of the sources based on the nature and status of the eyewitness was dismissed on the grounds that sixteenth-century Spaniards were untrained and unreliable observers and was replaced by an "internal" criticism that scrutinized the coherence and common sense of the report. Material data gathered from the scientific reports of "enlightened" travelers consequently took precedence over literary sources. On the presumption of parallel developments, with Native Americans representing a primitive stage, historians reconstructed the history of the earth and humankind.

In chapter 2 Cañizares narrows his focus to one of the main questions raised by European critics, the value of native American sources. Here Renaissance and eighteenth-century scholars diverged notably. Drawing on a vast number of historiographical works on Mexico and Peru, Cañizares maintains that, in great contrast to most of their enlightened successors, many humanist historians accorded authority to indigenous sources, oral as well as pictorial, as a means of keeping historical records and did not necessarily privilege "alphabetical writing" (64). Cañizares's evidence challenges one of Walter D. Mignolo's central theses, namely, that the Renaissance philosophy of language prevented early modern Spaniards from recognizing that native American cultures had legitimate nonalphabetic ways of recording the past.³ Native American antiquities began to lose credibility with the appearance in the late seventeenth century of conjectural histories of writing as histories of the mind. These histories classified native American, Egyptian, and Chinese scripts as prealphabetic and thus characteristic of earlier stages in the progress of the human mind. De Pauw et al. later turned these sources into further evidence for the inferiority of native American cultures.

Chapter 3 moves to contemporary debates in Spain. It tells the story of the multiple and vigorous, but mostly fruitless, endeavors of eighteenth-century Spanish historians to remedy the shortcomings of previous historiography. Instead of starting with the controversy that accompanied the publication of the works of de Pauw, Raynal, and Robertson, Cañizares chooses the 1740s and 1750s as his point of departure, thus proving that several decades before the uproar caused by northern European conjectural histories, Spaniards were already calling for revisionist histories of the Indies. In doing so, Cañizares again rejects the cliché of belatedness that haunts Spanish culture and scholarship. A case in point is his illuminating analysis of why the Italian historian and collector of Mexican antiquities Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci succeeded...