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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.2 (2006) 288-290


Reviewed by
Ralph Bauer
University of Maryland, College Park
Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. By David Weber (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005) 466 pp. $35.00

Weber's new book is a powerful reminder that at the end of the eighteenth century, more than half of the landmass of what today is Latin America remained under the effective dominion of independent Native American polities, which were, nevertheless, profoundly changed by their contact with Europeans. Since the study of these colonial frontiers makes special demands on providing evidence, Weber avails himself of the methodologies of various disciplines, including cultural anthropology and geography; social, political, and intellectual history; and literary criticism and theory. The inevitable result of his interdisciplinary approach, as well as of the vast geographical scope of his comparative study of borderlands in both North and South America during the eighteenth century, is an enormous apparatus of notes and bibliography that accounts for no less than one-third of his book.

The first chapter establishes the European intellectual context, particularly that of the "Spanish American Enlightenment," for eighteenth-century Spanish interactions with Native Americans. Whereas the Spanish Habsburgs during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had tended to turn to scholastic philosophy and ecclesiastical authorities for guidance in questions relating to Native Americans, the new Bourbon dynasty followed the conservative rationalism that Spanish Enlightenment thinkers (sometimes erroneously) imagined to be exemplified in the French and British approach to Empire. Thus, eighteenth-century Spanish ethnographies, such as the travel diaries kept by Malaspina during his journey from Acapulco up the Pacific coast to Alaska, manifested a "new Spanish sensibility" that viewed the Native American "savage" primarily as a "specimen" in the Enlightenment's scientific quest to theorize the origin of human society. 1 It also emphasized trade and cultural [End Page 288] integration over conquest and cultural separatism and Spanish de facto occupancy of territory over de jure territorial claims.

The translation of these new sensibilities and policies into actual interactions with Native Americans on the imperial frontiers was, as Weber shows, highly variable—mitigated by and dependent on local geographical, social, and political situations. Among those Europeans who lost influence under the Bourbons' "new method" of conversion and Hispanization of Native Americans were the regular clergy, whose strong former authority over neophytes was transferred to the secular clergy, and private colonists (the Jesuits were even expelled from the Americas in the 1760s). The beneficiaries were rich private landholders, who were able to buy the secularized mission lands on the old frontiers and to profit from increasingly available cheap Indian labor to work on large haciendas. Weber argues that in Spanish interactions with "unpacified" Indians on the new frontiers, power, though not the power of ideas, typically determined the outcome.

In both North and South America alike, the introduction of European technologies, especially horses, tended to transform loose alliances of smaller independent Native American tribal, ethnic, or political groups into larger and more hierarchical polities. In fact, some of the groups who were most successful in resisting Spanish encroachments—such as the Comanches in North America, as well as the Araucanians, Pampas, or Guaycuruans in South America—were the very products of social, cultural, and demographic transformations that had occurred partially in response to contact with Europeans and their technologies in previous centuries. Especially effective were Native American groups with access to trade goods from rival European powers. They could play off one power against another in shrewd diplomatic maneuvers. Although some native groups had no choice but to submit to Spanish rule, others were actually able to exact tribute from their Spanish neighbors—who typically preferred to view these tributes as "gifts." Nevertheless, they were forced to recognize the limits of their dominion.

Of special importance in these negotiated border relations were "peoples in between" (256)—cultural brokers, such as captives, traders, and deserters, both Spanish and Indian—whose cultural knowledge was valued by pragmatists on both...

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