How to Write the History of the New World: Historiographies, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (review)

Those of us who study the many literatures of colonial British America have by now grown accustomed to, if not yet downright annoyed by, calls for us to remember the transatlantic nature of culture in those colonies. Far from being the pure products of American soil, colonial British-American writing can be properly understood only when placed in the context of discursive systems that extended beyond individual nation-states. I would consider my own work to advance just such a position, but I must confess that I have many more questions than answers when it comes to understanding the relation between the various parts that make up the rather gargantuan entity known as "the Atlantic world." In particular, I wonder what relation the almost exclusively English-language texts I study bear to the texts produced in a daunting—at least for the scholar—variety of languages that intersect in the world of the Atlantic. For in placing early modern British-American writing in the context of European or Atlantic culture, we have, for understandable reasons, focused the bulk of our attention on matters British (and specifically British English) so that the Atlantic world has too often come to mean simply the Anglo-American world. This question takes on particular relevance for me at the moment, for I write this review in the John Carter Brown library,where Spanish materials comprise approximately 20 percent of their vast collection of early Americana. Spain, of course, dominated colonial American affairs throughout much of the colonial period, and British-American colonists were keenly aware of the Spanish presence as a colonial and, indeed, a cultural force. Yet for all the talk of an Atlantic world in which both Spanish and English texts operated and whose participants were inextricably tied together, the precise nature of the relationship between the linguistic and cultural systems (if I can separate the two for a moment) that would help me put in dialogue literary texts growing out of these two traditions remains murky at best.

In seeking to understand possible relationships between Spanish and Spanish-American colonial writings and colonial British-American culture, we could do worse than turn our attention to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's insightful, learned, and exciting How to Write the History of the New World: Historigraphies, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. The book's goals appear at first glance quite simple and straightforward. Modern historians produce much of the knowledge they have to offer us working under the assumption that published documents cannot quite be trusted as evidence of genuine experience because, after all, they are the products of artful rhetorical manipulation. Instead, these historians see archival materials such as diaries and letters as more trustworthy windows into the experiences of historical actors. These documents, historians have long contended, present us with an actor's sense of his or her life absent the rhetorical maneuvers one uses in the attempt to shape or fashion those texts for posterity. Cañizares-Esquerra's How to Write the History of the New World "seeks to show that these modern (and postmodern) historigraphical sensibilities originated in the eighteenth century in seemingly obscure epistemological disputes" (1). He goes on to challenge the dominant story of the exclusively European emergence of these historical sensibilities by arguing that "the New World was as significant in eliciting the fundamental tenets of contemporary historians as it was in shaping the economies of the Atlantic world" (7).

The first two chapters, "Toward a New Art of Reading and New Historical Interpretations" and "Changing European Interpretations of the Reliability of Indigenous Sources," tell us the story of the emergence of a radically "new art of reading that appeared in northern Europe in the mid eighteenth century" (6). Enlightenment thinkers such as Cornelius de Pauw, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, and William Robertson contended that...