Legends of Empire: Negotiating the Imperial Moral Compass (review)

On February 17-18, 2012, over sixty scholars gathered for New York University's Atlantic History Conference "Legends of Empire: Negotiating the Imperial Moral Compass." In her opening remarks, Professor Karen Kupperman, head of the Atlantic World History Program, said that she had long wanted to host a conference on the Black Legend. She has been astonished at the continuing vitality of the paradigm: in the field of early America, no other mode of thought has been so thoroughly discredited on one level while at the same time continuing to exert such strong influence on another. For a number of years, however, her desire was thwarted, for it seemed nearly impossible to develop a framework for a conference that would not in itself reify the categories it was intended to dislodge. How to interrogate such a legend without seeming to ask such futile questions as "Who was worse, the Spanish or the English?" This past year, NYU graduate students Daniel Kanhofer and Gabriel Rocha volunteered to undertake the task, but with a significant twist. They sent out a more capacious call for papers on morality and the construction of empire in the New World, rather than limiting it to the Black Legend per se.

The sixteen presenters included graduate students, assistant professors, and established scholars: Matthew Barton, Christopher Bischof, Kristen Block, Hugh Cagle, Greg Childs, Richard Conway, Sarah Faraud, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Nicole Legnani, Amy Morris, David Sacks, John Savage, Casey Schmitt, Damien Tricoire, Sasha Turner, and Karin Vélez. NYU faculty chaired the panels, and NYU graduate students served as discussants (and indeed, performed so admirably that in the case of the first two panels, the initial questions were addressed to them!). The Friday evening keynote address was given by Jorge Cañizares Esguerra. At the close on Saturday, Sacks, Cañizares, and Vélez were joined by Thomas Abercrombie and Carla Pestana for a roundtable discussion.

The first panel on "Constructing and Contesting Legitimacy" was the one that most directly responded to the set of questions that had initially given rise to the conference. As Dan Kanhofer, the commentator, put it, neither the panelists nor he were there to spend time debating whether the moral posturing of the English, Spanish, and Portuguese imperialists was genuine or not. Nor were they there to answer the related question of whether morality can be used to explain politics in any genuine sense. Rather, the papers asked what notions of morality were at play in different times and places, what power they did and did not have, and how they were changing in the face of the realities of the New World. Certainly the presenters did not assume that the Anglos were interested in "morality" and the Iberians were not, but rather that each used different moral codes to justify their own actions, and each had to replace those moral codes as historical events unfolded and the people on the ground responded. David Sacks, for example, demonstrated that the English colonizers reached back into ancient classical tradition to anticipate and celebrate the potential for exchange with the Indians—but then were only too happy to consider themselves free of defending such ideals after the rebellion of 1622 in Virginia. Kristen Block pointed to the language of infection, and of evil, that was employed in the Spanish Caribbean in religious discourses on English and Dutch merchants (especially slave traders)—but noted that the church's warnings were regularly and even systematically ignored by colonists. Richard Conway explicitly argued that Spanish notions about political officials' rights to material gain were challenged in court and on the street by Mexican indigenous people who argued that they could not possibly fulfill their role in the otherwise respected social hierarchy and pay their tribute if their leaders were too rapacious. And Mathew Barton likewise directly argued that miners in Minas Gerais, Brazil, rebelled in response to debilitating taxation demands, even insisting that "the king depends on us" and not...