Workers whom their employers called “Chinese” in eighteenth-century Borneo wrote to their places of origin, spreading the surprisingly disclosed new identity among the folks at home who had previously identified only with small, traditional ethnicities. Names as widely accepted as “Welsh,” “Dutch,” and Deutsch seem originally to have meant something like “foreigner.” Africans never called themselves Africans until Europeans invited them to do so. Does anyone believe that the Angli so called by the slave dealer who presented them to Gregory the Great would have designated themselves as such back in Britannia? Commonly, perhaps normally, identities that transcend the limits of communities formed by awareness of kinship or genius loci or mutual acquaintance or dependence start outside the group.
Antonio Feros, however, has had enough of studies of Spanish identity-formation that focus on foreigners’ perceptions. In his new book he sets out to trace the process from within Spain and...
