Historiography
The story of the “conquest” of the Aztecs
and Incas by the Spanish in the sixteenth century has usually been told
from a European perspective, using European sources, and has been inextricably
bound up with the idea of the “Black Legend.” And the foundation
for the “Black Legend” view of Spanish-Native historiography
undoubtedly stems from the work of Spanish witness Bartolomé
de las Casas (1484 – 1566) who, in 1552 published a book entitled
A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which gave a graphic
description of hundreds of atrocities committed by the Spanish in their
conquest of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, Central America
and New Spain (now Mexico). Las Casas’ accounts of the shocking
cruelties of the Catholic Spanish were subsequently popularised in Northern
Europe by rival European – and Protestant - imperial powers, and
a series of graphic images engraved by Johann Theodor de Bry (1528 –
1598), a Flemish-born engraver, draftsman and book editor and publisher
who became famous for his vivid depictions of early European expeditions
to the Americas. De Bry’s illustrations of the cruelties of the
Spanish conquest are often associated with the stories told by Las Casas.
Las Casas’ account and the Black Legend, while exerting a powerful
hold on western historical imagination was, of course, deeply problematic.
Anthony Pagden, in an introduction to one of the more recent editions
of Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,
reminds us that Las Casas wrote to inform, but also to persuade: “It
was in the most immediate, most transparent sense of the word, an exercise
in propaganda.” His account was above all, a petition –
a petition for justice for the Indians. It was also part of a formal
debate in the early sixteenth century over the legitimacy of Spanish
claims to Indian labour. Thus while many of the stories Las Casas told
may have been true, others had clear classical antecedents and were
part of a “recognizable rhetorical strategy for arousing wonder
in the reader.” So too were the numbers he so often cites, which
often ran into the indeterminate but impressive sounding “teeming
millions.” As Pagden quite conclusively shows, the exaggerated
and horrific tales of destruction, and constant inflation of numbers
was meant “only to impress upon the reader the literal magnitude
of the event.” Given this context, Las Casas has to be used in
a critical fashion.
Significantly, though, while Las Casas’ account of the Spanish
in the Americas may have originally fuelled the rise of the Black Legend
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, an equally polemical
“White Legend” had taken deep root by the mid-twentieth
century. The turn away from the Black Legend, at least in English historiography,
began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the monumental
histories written by “gentlemen-scholars” such as William
H. Prescott. Prescott’s monumental History of the Conquest of
Peru (1916; orig. pub. 1847) was a romantic work in which his pro-Spanish
leanings were clear. And like other romantic historians such as Francis
Parkman, his work asserted a triumphant Christianity and civilization
over Indian heathenism and savagery. Though he often gave his Indian
subjects a romantic, even heroic character, it was clear that he believed
they were doomed to extinction in the face of an expanding superior
white civilization. More generally, these histories moved away from
a general emphasis on Spanish atrocities and ferocious conquests to
take a more romantic view of Spanish imperialism. Though the literature
still reflected strong anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic prejudices, the influence
of Social Darwinism towards the end of the nineteenth century also meant
that “even the inferior Spanish variant of white civilization
had a role in the [civilizing] mission” of the “superior
white race among the lesser breeds.” In this scholarship, Las
Casas was often depicted, at best, as a well-meaning but misguided and
naïve figure. At worst, he was accused of purposefully and wilfully
distorting and exaggerating the facts of Spanish imperialism.
The historical debate over the Spanish colonial system and Las Casas
grew more intense in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
His controversial status was inspired in part by social and political
upheavals in both Spain and Spanish America, but also resulted from
a more heated discussion of imperialism in general. Interestingly, the
rise of America’s own empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific
(including a victory against Spain, and the violent suppression of native
rebels in the Philippines) helped ensure a prominent place for American
scholars in rehabilitating Spain’s colonial reputation, which
reached its height in the aftermath of Franco’s victory in Spain.
The proponents of the new “White Legend” brought a professionalism
to their studies of the Spanish colonial experience, and a relativism
that tended to shy away from overt moral judgments (at least of condemnation).
As one chronicler of the historiography has put it, Spanish and American
historians after 1898 took a “hardboiled” approach that
regarded colonial conquest and exploitation as unfortunate but inevitable,
and a tendency to assess Spanish colonial policy and practice from the
standpoint of Spanish rather than Indian interests. Instead of ignoring
Las Casas’ over-inflated claims, more confident scholars of the
inter-war period took them on and even justified Spanish atrocities.
One reputable scholar, Arthur S. Aiton, went so far as to defend reports
that Antonio de Mendoza, the first Viceroy of New Spain, had punished
Indians during the Mixton War by blowing them from cannons and setting
dogs upon them. Aiton, assuming a relativist posture reflecting the
mood of the 1920s and 1930s, argued that it was after all “a matter
of opinion, admirably expressed by Mendoza,” when he claimed that
the punishments were necessary as “a lesson in order to strike
fear into the Indians.”
After World War II, Spanish American historiography – reflecting
a more general historiographic turn away from apologetic and pragmatic
interpretations of colonialism and empire – turned back towards
a more explicit critique of Spanish policy and a more favorable orientation
toward Las Casas in particular. Such a movement was evident in the rapid
rehabilitation of Las Casas and his reputation. Ironically, White Legend
revisionists such as Bailey W. Diffie and Lewis Hanke began this trend
when they co-opted Las Casas as representative of Spanish benevolence
in their imperial endeavors. The resurrection of Las Casas, however,
reached its apotheosis in a very different post-war climate with critical
reappraisals such as Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen’s edited collection,
Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of
the Man and His Work (Dekalb, Ill., Northern Illinois University Press,
1971). In a celebratory preface, they noted that in the post-Second
World War period, Las Casas’ reputation stood higher than ever
before, mainly because of his teachings on the unity of mankind, the
principle of self-determination, and the right of men to the satisfaction
of their elementary and cultural needs – all of which, they asserted,
had acquired a new relevance with the defeat of fascism, and the liquidation
of colonialism which was predicated on “anti-Lascasian”
principles of racism and the right of the strong to dominate the weak.
“It is, therefore, a time of full vindication of Las Casas and
his ideals,” they concluded.
At the same time, however, Lewis Hanke also precipitated a broader movement
to put Las Casas and his life and work into historical context, as well
as to trace Las Casas’ contributions to anthropology, political
science, and other fields outside of history. Today, Las Casas is still
a popular historical figure for analysis, but few scholars use Las Casas
as a primary source for accounts of the Spanish conquest, at least not
without careful qualification and corroboration. Most commentators would
agree with Pagden’s assessment of Las Casas, and recognize that
his work was a polemic, written as part of a dialogue among Spanish
Colonial administrators and missionaries, and as an early contribution
to an ongoing western critique of and debate over colonialism.
At the same time that Las Casas’ work came under closer scrutiny,
post-Second World War social historians also finally began to focus
their work on Native Americans themselves, and began to stress Native
American agency, persistence and continuity. Up to middle of the twentieth
century, indigenous peoples generally remained passive objects, viewed
through the eyes of those that punished, enslaved, or killed them. Even
scholars who were sympathetic to the Indians generally practiced a “victim”
history that emphasized the “death” of native cultures,
whether through outright physical destruction, or overwhelming acculturation
to European “civilization.” But the post Second World War
period saw an outburst of scholars who took Indians of the Americas
seriously as subjects of historical study, as dynamic historical actors
and participants, and as highly adaptive and syncretic peoples.
Such studies have often been said to have begun with Charles Gibson’s
Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, published in 1952. Significantly,
works such as Gibson’s The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (1964) that
took an Indian perspective often vindicated Las Casas’ views as
they explored in more systematic detail the harshly exploitative Spanish
labor and tribute systems. But taking an Indian perspective has also
forced scholars to recognize and explore Native American strategies
of survival and ultimately, their persistence. Gibson’s pioneering
work especially, but also the influence of anthropologists in the post-Second
World War period, has helped radically revise the history of Indians
in the Americas. Interdisciplinary approaches, most significantly the
combination of historical and anthropological approaches in the newly
created field of “ethnohistory,” have flourished, and native
American historiography has exploded in all kinds of different directions.
Most notably, however, this trend has included a tendency to adopt a
pro-Indian stance, viewing Indians as dynamic agents of history rather
than as passive victims of Spanish rule or even a wider and inevitable
acculturation process. For example, historians are much more likely
now to distinguish between the many different Native American groups
that Europeans encountered (rather than “Indians”), to portray
the European invasion in terms of small groups of difficult-to-control
ethnic European groups inserting themselves into dynamic power struggles
and complex relationships between many small groups of difficult-to-control
ethnic Indian groups, and to portray the conquest of the Aztec and Inca
civilizations as the substitution of one aggressive, expanding, exploitative
imperial elite for another.
Moreover, though much of this literature has stressed Indian resistance
to Spanish and European pressures, scholars have also begun to recognize
the degree to which Indians creatively adapted to the arrival of newcomers
on their shores, noting the marked continuity and persistence in adaptive
strategies between pre- and post-1492 native communities and from there
throughout the long encounter with Europeans.
This new scholarship highlights a more general inner tension or dilemma
within the field: whether to focus on and emphasize Indian agency, adaptation,
resistance, persistence, and continuity, or to focus on the undeniable
magnitude of the physical and cultural destruction of Native peoples.
By fixating on the destruction of Native peoples, we are inevitably
forced to take a more European-centered approach to indigenous history.
We follow the story over the shoulders of European conquistadors, settlers,
and soldiers who brought disease, dislocation, and death. We focus on
the numbers killed, the cultures destroyed, and the tragedy of contact,
colonization, and conflict between different peoples. What we lose in
this story is a much richer and nuanced tale of Indian agency and dynamism
as diverse groups reacted in different and creative ways to the new
challenges presented by the arrival of Europeans. We lose focus on those
who individually and collectively adapted to the new circumstances,
exploited new opportunities, and ultimately survived. But of course,
by stressing successful “adaptations” and “negotiations”
we are at risk of losing a sense of the human tragedy that accompanied
European settlement in the Americas.
Of course, this is more a question of emphasis and narrative strategy,
and not an either/or situation. Historians are learning that during
the long colonial period, at least, Europeans were rarely able to impose
themselves so wholeheartedly on Native Americans in a one-sided way.
In the most (in)famous example of European penetration, the conquest
of New Spain, the Spanish essentially did what the previous Mexican
people had done: inserted themselves at the top of an imperial hierarchy
and try to manipulate it to their advantage. They were supported by
some constituent parts of that empire, and opposed by others. Even where
they “dominated” there was still much room for “negotiations”
because numerically the Spanish could never impose their full will on
such vast numbers. Moreover, despite initial losses from the brutality
of the Spanish conquest, and despite much larger losses in population
due to diseases, the cultural and social history of New Spain and the
racial politics of Mexico today supports a story of persistence and
continuity as much as one of destruction and dispossession.
The situation was not qualitatively different in North America. As Richard
White shows in his book, The Middle Ground, the vast majority of Native
Americans before 1800 were not subject to “European domination,”
whether physical or cultural. In the colonial period in North America,
“negotiations” between Indian tribes and different European
groups took place all of the time, indeed in all instances where there
was not outright conflict - which was relatively and surprisingly small
- or deaths from diseases. Many Native Americans became particularly
adept at playing off different imperial powers, and threatening military
and trade alliances when they could not get what they wanted from one
power. After two hundred years of settlement, Europeans “dominated”
only a tiny area along the eastern seaboard extending into the continent
about 200 miles, and not from want of trying. Of course, some Indian
groups had been conquered, or worse, but often even these, we are now
learning, were dispersed, integrated into other communities, and are
now re-emerging, a process that had sometimes been underway among Indians
well before the Europeans arrived.
Thus while recognizing the destructive nature of many European-Indian
relations, the “New Indian history” has taught us that we
need to take into account a great deal more nuance and subtlety when
thinking about “the” Native American experience in the Americas.
After all, the “Indian” in the Americas was a fictional
European construction. Ignoring the diversity of historical experiences
among different Native American groups is to perpetuate this fiction
and commit another kind of destructive act.