Shrinking World Rather than Expanding Europe?

Anthony Pagden, ed., Facing Each Other, vol. 31 [in 2 parts] of An Expanding World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Pp. 742. $295. ISBN 0-86078-526-2

William K. Storey, ed., Scientific Aspects of European Expansion, vol. 6 of An Expanding World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996). Pp. 364. $132.95. ISBN 0-86078-524-6

Douglas M. Peers, ed., Warfare and Empires, vol. 24 of An Expanding World(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). Pp. 420. $142.95. ISBN 0-86078-528-9

Part of an expensive set of over thirty volumes priced to sell only to academic libraries, the three volumes reviewed here are part of an ambitious program designed to republish the most important journal essays in the enormous field of the history of what used to be called the "Expansion of Europe." It is important, therefore, to use them as a guide to the general utility and quality of the series, as well as to review them. It is encouraging that the general editor of the series is John Russell-Wood, who was guided and encouraged in his early work by Charles Boxer, the great English historian of the Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish overseas empires. Oxonian Russell-Wood made his name with an important study of the Santa Casa da Misericordia of Bahia between 1550 and 1755 and has written other important and more general works on the Portuguese overseas empire in the early modern era. Although he now holds a distinguished chair in history at John Hopkins, whatever his passport may currently say, intellectually he is, in Gilbertian terms, one who in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations is an Englishman.

An instinctively Anglophobic reviewer would hope to persuade his readers that this is probably a very good thing. There have been demands from the trendier wings of academe in the U.S. that people like Boxer should not ever be reprinted on the grounds of his unfashionable views and general political incorrectness. This is distinctly hard on a man who was so non-ethnocentric as to absorb to an alarming degree the warrior culture of the Japanese Imperial Army, in which he served as a seconded British officer. He also wrote on the cult of Mary and the practice of misogyny in Iberian expansion overseas and was persona non grata with the Salazar regime in Portugal for exposing the bogus nature of its claim that the Portuguese Empire was color-blind. With one of Boxer's pupils as the general editor setting the tone by his choice of volume editors—and most of his choices seem to be excellent—we can assume that this series will reflect open, not closed, minds. Having said that, one has to record that a decision was taken to include essays only in English, French, and Spanish, thereby excluding the literature in Danish, Dutch, German, and Portuguese. The great bulk of the essays are in fact in English, no doubt reflecting the nature of the publisher's targeted market. Danish and German material is smaller in bulk and thus of less overall significance, but the loss of access to the Portuguese and Dutch literature is more serious inasmuch as, ideally, imperial historians still need to read about five languages.

Anthony Pagden, who edited the thirty-first and concluding volume of the series in two parts, is a good point of departure for this review essay. An Englishman from Oxford with strong family links with the Southern Cone of Latin America, he has of late cut a swathe, in several ways, through North American academe in a fashion one feels Charles Boxer would rather have admired. A distinguished editor of Cortés at an extraordinarily young age, Pagden is now best known both as a student of the origins of comparative ethnology in the encounter between the American Indians and the early modern western Europeans who so named them and as a voluminous writer on the ideologies of early modern European empires...