Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (review)

This is an impressive comparative study of Spain’s policies with respect to many of the unconquered indigenous peoples in its vast empire, from northern New Spain to Argentina and Chile during the late Bourbon period from 1759 to 1810. The author does not attempt to write a history of these remote frontiers from a native perspective because it is problematic; most of the documentation about Amerindians has come to us through European sources. In other words, there is reluctance on the author’s part to tease Spanish sources in order to reconstruct native views. Weber instead provides a solid analysis of the impact of Bourbon Spain’s enlightened reforms on indigenous communities, including groups that had been subjugated by Spain for more than a century. Weber convincingly argues that the Spanish Bourbons had no single policy but several policies. These included gift giving, use of trade, diplomatic treaties, gentle treatment, and occasionally all-out war. Weber achieves his goal of providing a panoramic view of the complexity of the frontiers where Spaniards and unincorporated indigenous peoples interacted during the late colonial period. He carefully underscores the scope and variety of issues that Spaniards had to confront in remote areas of its empire.

New enlightened ways of thinking about the world and its inhabitants did not alter many Spaniards’ view of people who were different from them. Perceptions that indigenous peoples and those born in America were inferior to Europeans lingered into the late eighteenth century. Only a small minority viewed native peoples as rational beings. Unable to subjugate tribal peoples on its frontiers and borderlands, enlightened Spaniards experimented with strategies of peaceful coexistence and the slow integration of independent Indians into colonial society. These policies, however, did not always prevail. In those places where Spaniards wanted Indian land and had the means to take it, enlightened policies gave way to avarice, opportunism, and violence. Power, rather than the power of ideas, Weber argues, determined how Spaniards treated Indians in the Age of the Enlightenment. Contradictory Bourbon policies also partly explain why missionaries failed to win over Amerindians in the Amazon and Chaco regions. While Bourbon officials lessened missionaries’ authority, they urged religious orders to send out better-trained and more zealous missionaries to teach Spanish to mission Indians.

In contrast to the rich captive narratives in North America, Spaniards left few words of their captivity in the historical record. Spanish captives sometimes went native as Indians became more like Europeans and served as cultural brokers. Spanish-speaking Indians moved between the worlds of the Spaniards and their own cultures in ways that often frustrated Spanish officials. Poor, illiterate Spanish settlers on the frontier lived and dressed like Indians, fought like them, and most likely bore the brunt of Indian wars the Spaniards waged. African slaves on the frontier and Spanish women as captives receive some needed attention in this important study as well.

This book is solidly grounded on a wealth of archival evidence and a thorough knowledge of the secondary literature. Some readers, however, might like to know more about a group of Spaniards the author occasionally refers to as “war hawks.” Were these members of the militias or clergy, or were they encomenderos, bureaucrats, or settlers? Were they young or old? Nonetheless, Weber’s excellent monograph provides specialists and general readers alike a fuller understanding of Spanish borderlands, ethnic studies, and Spanish policies and behavior during the late colonial period. Beautifully illustrated and gracefully written, its wealth of information on Spanish-Indian relations will prove to be a significant departure point for historians for many years to come.