The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru by Orlando Bentancor (review)

For a century and a half after Columbus returned with news of his discovery, Spanish philosophers, theologians, and lawyers debated and rationalized the monarchy's title to the Americas. Their explanations, as Orlando Bentancor demonstrates in this superb intellectual history, used Aristotle's physics and medieval scholasticism to justify the Spaniards' right to preach Christianity in the New World. Metaphysical instrumentalism entitled Spain, they argued, to exploit American mineral resources and to do so with coerced indigenous labor.

Over five dense chapters, Bentancor shows how these theories unfolded into irreconcilable contradictions. At the University of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria headed a group that laid the philosophical foundations for the legitimacy of Spain's actions. Trained in Thomist Scholasticism in Paris, Vitoria explained and justified what was occurring in the New World. For him Catholic metaphysical instrumentalism asserted that God formed matter in a process that would culminate in civilization, the common good, and salvation. In this context Amerindians were imperfect matter that had to be formed to serve the metaphysical ends of the process initiated by the Prime Mover. God used the Spaniards to evangelize the Amerindians, who could be forced, if necessary, to permit the Christian missionaries to enter their lands. Commerce was also a crucial aspect of metaphysical instrumentalism. God had placed rich mineral resources in the Americas to aid the empire as instruments towards the metaphysical ends.

According to Bentancor, metaphysical instrumentalism thus became the parameter for the famous debates between Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas. Sepúlveda, who later served as a tutor of Philip II, denied that Amerindians were slaves by nature. Nonetheless, he carried Vitoria's metaphysical instrumentalism to a logical, radical end, pronouncing the Indians so inferior and imperfect that they must be improved through coercion. Las Casas argued, on the other hand, that Indians had established autonomous, self-perpetuating communities, which the Spaniards had no right to disrupt.

Bentancor then turns his attention to Jesuit José de Acosta, who like Las Casas had long experience in the New World. Acosta arrived in the Indies in 1571 just as Spaniards were beginning to refine the vast silver deposits at Potosí with amalgamation, a more efficient refining process than guayras or indigenous smelters. Although Acosta conceded that the violent conquest of the Spanish American colonies was often inhumane, he nonetheless justified Spanish rule on the basis of spreading Christianity and the right to circulation and commerce, in particular New World mineral wealth. Amerindian technology was too primitive to produce American gold and silver to meet the needs of the empire. Without colonial gold and silver, neither evangelization nor imperial administration would have been possible, thereby frustrating the divine, metaphysical ends served by the Spanish Empire. Although in its mineral state, American bullion was imperfect matter, it could be formed into money to serve the metaphysical ends, which included spreading Christianity and the establishment on earth of an imperial common good. Acosta acknowledged that many Spaniards engaged in mining out of greedy ambition and treated indigenous workers cruelly, but even so their actions helped God save Amerindian souls. Thus, Acosta converted the violence of mining at Potosí into "an inevitable and necessary means for the consummation of a providential plan" (210).

By the late sixteenth century, Bentancor notes, evangelization and civilization had become the means of justifying the imperial system of amalgamation and forced labor (mita) imposed by Viceroyal Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s to produce the silver required by the empire. Juan de Matienzo's Gobierno del Perú, for example, portrayed the Incas as tyrants and the Spanish conquest as Christian liberation. No longer dominated by the Inca tyrants, Indians benefitted from freedom under Spanish laws. Spaniards needed to force the Indians to work, given their laziness and deplorable culture, as well as compel them to enjoy their imperial and Christian freedom. Matienzo described the horrific working conditions in the Potosí mines...