De bezinning op het verleden in Latijns Amerika, and: Leven met het verleden (review)

De bezinning op het verleden in Latijns Amerika. By B.H. Slichter Van Bath. N.p., [1998]. Tables. Notes. 762 pp. Cloth.

Leven met het Verleden. By B. H. Slichter Van Bath. N.p., [1998]. Notes. 96 pp. Cloth.

B.H. Slichter van Bath is one of the most well-known Dutch historians outside the Netherlands. At the age of 88, the Nestor of the Low Countries' historians has put out two more books to add to his impressive oeuvre. Both books reflect his career as a lifelong historian. Leven met het Verleden (Living with the Past) is a short professional autobiography, "an interview that ran out of hand" (p. 9); De Bezinning op het Verleden van Latijns Amerika (Reflection on Latin America's Past) analyzes and quantifies the works of Slichter van Bath's Latin American colleagues during the colonial era.

Slichter van Bath is most known for his Agrarian History of Western Europe. However, in Leven met het Verleden one gets to understand how pluralistic Slichter van Bath's career has been. He started off as a Medievalist at the University of Groningen, where he turned to the history of the Dutch countryside. In the 1950s Slichter van Bath combined his professorship in Groningen with one at the Agricultural University in Wageningen. This gave him the opportunity to focus more intensively on agrarian history. Finally, in the 1960s, he shifted once again to Latin American history, holding positions at universities in Amsterdam and Leiden. As a Latin Americanist, Slichter van Bath published three books in Dutch and several articles in English, about demography, economy and Spanish-Native American relations in Mexico and Peru.

Leven met het Verleden remains a fascinating portrait of the confines of Dutch academia, the cross-fertilization of different branches within history, and the fruits of academic cooperation in Dutch, European and transatlantic contexts. The author links his shift to--and the Dutch interest in--Latin America during the 1950s with the Netherland's loss of Indonesia and a subsequent decline in attention to Asia (p. 41). He also clarifies how he used his expertise in the quantitative aspects of agrarian history in his approach to Latin America. After reading Leven met het Verleden, Slichter van Bath's perspective in De Bezinning op het Verleden van Latijns Amerika will not come as a surprise.

The most interesting part of the book is the author's premises. The historical profession reached a novel stage in 1493, when Europeans encountered a New World. This land without history needed other conceptions, another way of looking at the past. Of course there were links to Spanish, Native American and Christian history: the new territories were part of Spanish and Portuguese motherland, while the continuity of Native American past, and the Native American's presence had to be explained in Biblical terms. However, a New World created a new historiography, first as a narrative of the novelty, and after about 1600 as a description of a new society.

In order to evidence these trends, Slichter van Bath used a database of 2,642 publications and 244 tables. The author liberally manipulates his tables to discuss the background of the authors, the themes of their accounts, the sophistication of their work, the degree of their professionalization, and their audience. Slichter van Bath answers many questions in detail. His large databases allows him to distinguish trends over various regions and periods, and one may expect answers to questions like: Which authors had the most knowledge of Native American languages (pp. 226-28). Slichter van Bath gives us many interesting details that arise from the tables. Its strength is also its weakness: the author remains too close to his database. Therefore, the book lacks a leitmotiv and a more encompassing conclusion.

As Slichter van Bath admits in the introduction, the book "is an account of a research project, for...