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

In 1992, on the 500^th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, David J. Weber published The Spanish Frontier in North America, the first borderland study to successfully integrate the histories of Spain's colonial southeastern and southwestern frontiers in North America. In his sweeping new work, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment, Weber now compares frontiers across the Americas, focusing on the "independent Indians" on the fringes of empire whom the Spaniards failed to conquer and whom they designated as bárbaros or savages. Weber's temporal focus is the eighteenth century, when Bourbon rulers of Spain employing Enlightenment principles sought to reorganize and modernize the empire. Among their primary goals were to make administration more efficient and profits greater. Inspired by his English and French competitors, the most notable Bourbon, Carlos III (1759–1788), commissioned scientific expeditions such as that of Alejandro Malaspina to assess the state of the empire and its vast unknown frontiers. Malaspina took particular interest in the indigenous groups he encountered in regions as distinct as southern South America and the northwest coast of North America, describing them as "noble" savages, capable of improving and developing if treated kindly. Drawing on evidence from expeditions such as Malaspina's, as well as from local administrators, clerics, and military officials, the Bourbons recognized a critical need to "civilize" the natives living on unstable Spanish frontiers. Made into "new men," they could be incorporated into the Spanish body politic.

Weber is careful not to assign total power to the Spaniards on those frontiers, and he repeatedly illustrates how local circumstances and local politics shaped Indian agency. He devotes considerable attention to the most successfully independent Araucanians of Chile ("Wild Men Extraordinary"). Their dense populations and dispersed social organization, their nomadic hunting-and-gathering lifestyles, in addition to their rapid adaptation to guns and horses, allowed the Araucanians to keep the Spaniards from their homelands south of the Biobío River well into the nineteenth century. Eventually crossing the Andes eastward into Argentina, they "Araucanianized" the Pampas and Patagonian cultures, and the blended groups became noted for their success in stock raising and for raiding isolated Spanish estancias. Over long contact, Weber argues that the Spaniards living on those remote ranches of Argentina, and others whom the raiders captured, also became "Araucanianized."

Access to and mastery of horses also allowed other groups to hold off Spanish domination, notably the Indians of the Chaco, Paraguay, and Upper Peru (Bolivia) in South America, and the Apaches and Comanches of North America's southwestern deserts. But in Latin America, as in Africa, the introduction of guns and horses increased the levels and frequency of violence on the frontiers. Permanent war became a way of life, as Indians fought one another and the Spanish, making and breaking alliances often. War "justified" enslaving defeated enemies, and the profits from slave trading encouraged more war, as it had in Africa, and as it did in North America, as well.

The high costs of permanent war drove the Crown to seek alternative means of "reducing" Indians. To analyze shifts in Bourbon Indian policy, Weber looks back to the Hapsburgs, who over their centuries-long rule repeatedly returned to the question of the nature of the new people they had encountered in the Americas and how best to treat them. Caught in the dilemma of trying to protect and at the same time exploit their new "subjects," the Hapsburgs developed a voluminous code of paternalistic legislation that, although unevenly enforced, set Spain apart from later European colonizers. So too did the Spaniards' tendency to include Indians in their new societies, rapidly producing a large mestizo population throughout the Americas, unequalled in English and French colonies where Indians were largely excluded.

The Hapsburgs relied heavily on the missionary orders to convert and "reduce" hostile natives. Influenced by Enlightenment rationality...