No one will question the need for a new one-volume treatment of Spanish American independence. A fresh synthesis which summarizes current revisionist writing would be a boon to all students from hairy freshmen to hoary professors. Doubtless the difficulties of synthesis inherent in regionally divergent historical patterns have tended to discourage professionals from the task. Now a British journalist, the late Irene Nicholson, has left us this book as her legacy. Does it fulfill the need?
The basic outline and apparatus of her book are not in themselves reassuring. After a prologue and a chapter on “Early Causes,” the ubiquitous Miranda trundles through forty pages. Then San Martín obligingly inaugurates “The Fighting Phase.” Once across the Andes and up from Chile, San Martín waits at Guayaquil for Bolívar to catch up. By page 227, the Liberator, having done that and more, is dead. (“The times, and human nature itself, were against him.”) “The Mexican Insurgents” round out the fighting so that the book can close with fifty pages of “Aftermath” and a “Chart of Dates” consisting mostly of misinformation (e.g., Plan of Iguala: 1820) and blanks. The book thumber who pauses over the maps and bibliography may find his skepticism increased. Audiencia of Charcas and Audiencia of Chuquisaca appear in different places on the same map (p. 95). The bibliography boasts Hanke’s Spanish Struggle for Justice and Bealunde’s [sic] book on Bolívar, but where, for example, are the works of Bushnell, Céspedes del Castillo, Griffin, Humboldt, Lanning, Lynch, McAlister, Masur, Mitre, and Mora? Then there is a glossary which helps out with words like “conquistador,” “gaucho,” “siesta,” and “sombrero.”
But these superficial impressions and the routine attention to the heroes of independence are not the greatest disappointments. After all, we need a sophisticated reassessment of those protocaudillos. Unfortunately, the book presents conceptual flaws which are surprising when one recalls Miss Nicholson’s birth in Chile and long residence in Mexico. The expected insight into the tonalities of colonial society and into the nature of the scattered conflicts for independence are missing. This is a characteristic passage: “From the Age of Enlightenment onward, freedom in the New World was opposed by vested interests embalmed within the sarcophagus of an exclusive aristocracy. The heritage of the Inquisition was a drag even upon the progressive mentality of Charles III and his advisers. Across the ocean Indian cultures had evolved a peculiar absolutism of their own. When the two joined, autocracy was reinforced. Yet both Spaniards and Indians were at heart lovers of freedom. Free people had been caught within a barricade of repression which had to be violently torn down. Add the sharp contrasts of the geography of the New World, and there is the perfect setting for a drama which has been acted out since time immemorial both within societies and within man himself, in which some kind of police force or gestapo is pitted against freedom of conscience and of action” (p. 24).
To be sure, there are attempts to reveal social divisions, but these are marred by confusion of terms—for example, that the colonizers “were torn by contrary desires: greed for gold, which represented power; and the longing for Utopia, which meant, at the time, Christianity in the form the friars conceived it. Intense greed and liberalism thus grew up side by side and could find no way of coexisting without unbearable tensions’’ (p. 22). Or again: Peninsulares “could not comprehend the pride of the Creole in having been bom in the New World, of the mestizo for the very fact of mestizaje. Indian and Spaniard had not mingled but had fused to create a new psychology and a new thought. The independence wars were fought in order to bring a new special order into being’’ (p. 36).
Economic forces, which have drawn so much attention in recent scholarship about the late Bourbon period, are mentioned but never in depth. References to “Spain’s jealous guarding of her trade’’ (p. 44) are not accompanied by probing analyses of commercial patterns. Efforts to explore economic grievances of the Indians are disrupted by such explanations as that for corregidores. They were, we are told, “owners of tracts of land known as encomiendas or repartimientos” (p. 49).
Were it not for the extravagant claims on the dust jacket it might be unfair to measure this work against scholarly and heuristic needs. There is, however, too much inaccuracy and superficial interpretation to sustain the notion that this is “a significant, fresh analysis of a basic aspect of Latin American history.’’ The best that can be said for the book is that Pilling’s version of Mitre’s account of San Martín’s Andean crossing is retold with verve.
