Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends (review)

Colonialism's legacies are myriad. Among them, and certainly not least of all as this excellent and eclectic collection of essays suggests, is its ability to generate certain kinds of paradigms about the past. The aim of the essays in this collection, product of a conference held at Fordham University in 2001, is to begin to examine the origins, uses, and legacies of paradigms, such as the Black and White Legends, in writing about the Spanish colonial past. Putting the colonization of the past under close scrutiny, the authors in this collection tell us much about both the Spanish empire and its place in subsequent national and imperial historiographies.

The collection is divided in to two parts. The first part is composed of essays that offer histories of Spain's nineteenth-century imperial remnants. The collection begins with a very suggestive essay by Javier Morillo-Alicea, who looks at intellectual and bureaucratic connections between the imperial possessions of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines (what he calls the Spanish imperial archipelago). Morillo-Alicea cogently shows how the imperial state learned comparatively from its own far-flung territories, while, in contrast, anti-imperial movements seemed stymied by the vast expanses of space occupied by empire. Dale Tomich's article, "The Wealth of Empire," is, as its title suggests, something of a play on the work of Adam Smith vis-à-vis conventional wisdom regarding the Cuban slave economy and liberal political economy. Tomich provides a compelling piece of intellectual history that, by analyzing closely the work of Francisco Arango, questions trenchantly the assumption of a linear progression of capitalist development in which Cuba represents a failure. In particular he effectively demonstrates how liberal political economy was not a closed and completed ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to which Spain's colonial possessions with their slave systems could be compared. Rather, his study of Arango's work shows how liberal political economy and proslavery could in fact be quite compatible at the time, and returns a sense of historical process, agency and complexity to the Cuban planters responding to both the threats and opportunities created by the Haitian revolution.

Astrid Cubano-Iguina's essay looks at Puerto Rican intellectuals and writers in the decades immediately preceding the Spanish-Cuban-American War, focusing in particular on their discussions about empire and how intellectuals situated themselves vis-à-vis Spain, the U.S., and their own subordinated subjects in Puerto Rico. The essay cogently captures the strained and ambivalent place occupied by Puerto Rican elites, pulled in different directions by economic, cultural and political imperatives. The final essay in Part I, by Antonio Feros, looks at how ideas of Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas related to the formation of the Spanish nation-state. Feros shows how ideas of Spain as a transatlantic nation, and of the history of America being an extension of the history of Spain, were generated beginning in the late nineteenth century and eventually professionalized after Franco's rise to power. The legend of Spain in America—of Spain surpassing its percieved boundaries—is paradoxically part of the glue that continues to bind the nation-state together.

Part two of the collection is more explicitly historiographical and, at least in terms of time frame if not methodology, postcolonial. It opens with an essay by José del Valle on the use of the Spanish language, and the creation of a "language ideology," to forge ideas of unity with the Americas, elide a past of violence, and more recently to promote Spanish business interests. His is a particularly detailed and acute analysis of the role of language, and control over language, in the forging of a national present and an imperial past. Jeremy Adleman looks at the relationship between history writing and nation-building in New Granada and Argentina in the aftermath of the revolutions for independence through the writings of José Manuel...