In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Americas 60.3 (2004) 452-454



[Access article in PDF]
How to Write the History of the New World: Historiographies, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 450. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.

One would not think it easy at this point to make an impressively original, compulsively readable, highly suggestive contribution to the history of ideas about the [End Page 452] Spanish colonial world within an Atlantic context, populated as the field is by such accomplished scholars as David Brading, Anthony Pagden, Urs Bitterli, Antonello Gerbi, Walter Mignolo, and Serge Gruzinski, just to mention some of the most well known. But the historian of science and of Latin America, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, has done it, and although his book makes heavy demands upon even a specialist reader, it is well worth the effort. This book will be of great interest not only to historians of colonial Latin America, but to early modernists more generally, to those scholars who work in the history of Western ideas, post-colonial studies, and the history of science, and even to historically inclined anthropologists. The book is extremely dense but gracefully written, deeply researched, intellectually ambitious, and historiographically acute in its judgments about other scholars' work.

In his treatment of European thinking about what AntonelloGerbi called "the nature of the New World" and the attendant eighteenth-century debates in the Atlantic world about how to write its history from pre-Columbian times to about 1800 or so, Cañizares-Esguerra ranges from Adam Smith and Voltaire, through the familiar quartet of Robertson, de Pauw, Raynal, and Buffon, to Spanish historians and antiquarians of the eighteenth century such as Juan Bautista Muñoz and Lorenzo Boturini (actually an Italian, of course). He ends up in the latter part of the book with detailed discussions of the acrimonious debates between the Mexican savants León y Gama and Alzate y Ramírez about the nature and significance of the famous Aztec calendar wheel and the great and frightening stone effigy of the goddess Coatlicue, and with the treatises of other late colonial creole scholars, working within a burgeoning intellectual tradition of a "patriotic epistemology," on themes such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the ruins of Palenque. Along the way Cañizares-Esguerra dusts off the work of a host of lesser European and New World intellectuals who engaged in these debates, and indeed at certain points in his narrative there are so many of these that the text becomes a bit cataloguish, even if the polemical positions themselves are of high interest.Another criticism that might be made of the book is that its author is so intently focused on inter-textuality—on the intellectualgenealogies of the debates he traces and the relationships among his thinkers—that he often neglects contextuality: the more mundane considerations of imperial rivalry, for example, that in part motivated anti-Spanish intellectual agendas.

The central question that propels Cañizares-Esguerra's analysis is the contradiction eighteenth-century European writers found between the accounts of large populations and highly complex indigenous state-level societies in the New World at the arrival of the Spanish, and the apparently degraded social condition and relatively thin numbers of these same native peoples in the last century of colonial rule. Cañizares-Esguerra shows that after the early colonial period European writers outside Spain came to see as untrustworthy native pre-Columbian non-alphabetic texts, as well as early Spanish historical accounts, and the Spanish themselves as ignorant, credulous, and excessively patriotic. What had for a century or so after 1492 been seen as credible historical "sources" for the history of New World peoples and their conquest were archaeologized, so to speak, into artifacts that supported ideas about faculty psychology and sociocultural evolution. In this way a skeptical, critical [End Page 453] approach to native documents and Spanish accounts supported the new critical reading skills associated...

pdf

Share