Main Currents in United States Writings on Colonial Spanish America, 1884-1984

This article attempts to identify the main stages and trends in a century of United States writings on colonial Spanish America, and to suggest some of the political, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that have influenced historians in their selection and treatment of themes and their overall interpretation of Spain’s work in America.¹ The piece is historiographic rather than bibliographic, and I shall cite only a relatively small number of books and articles to illustrate major trends in the literature; the omission of many others implies no disrespect. I shall concentrate on writings published since 1884, the year of the founding of the American Historical Association, but a number of important, precedent-setting works were published before that date and require at least brief mention.

The first substantial studies of the colonial period of Spanish American history by United States scholars appeared between 1820 and 1850.² History was then a province of literature, cultivated by gentlemen-scholars who generally shared the prejudices of the country’s elites and much of the public. Two such prejudices helped to shape the attitude of North American historians of the period toward the Spanish conquest: a view of the Indian as an inferior racial type, an obstacle to the march of Anglo-American civilization over an otherwise empty continent; and another of the Spaniards as a people with a romantic past, but backward and priest-ridden. These stereotypes made for a certain ambivalence, but since it could be argued (as William H. Prescott in effect argued in his History of the Conquest of Mexico [1843]) that even the inferior Spanish variant of white civilization had a civilizing mission among the lesser breeds, on balance a favorable assessment of the Spanish conquest prevailed. Romanticism, tempered in the best cases by a critical, rationalist spirit, a legacy of the Enlightenment, was the dominant mode of historical thought and expression; romantic artistic criteria, for example, determined Prescott’s choice of the conquest of Mexico as the subject of his masterpiece.

In the post-Civil War era, a triumphant industrialism banished romanticism (at least in principle) from historical writing, and enthroned positivism and evolutionism as the ruling ideologies. Scholarly businessmen like Lewis Morgan and Hubert H. Bancroft challenged the monopoly of gentlemen-scholars like Prescott and Francis Parkman over history and the social sciences. Like the romantic historians, historians of the post-Civil War era displayed a certain ambivalence toward Spain’s colonial record. The Social Darwinism of the time favored the traditional prejudice against a backward, fanatical Spain and thus supported the Black Legend critique of Spain’s work in America. On the other hand, Social Darwinism had a negative view of the Indian as a being who had lost out in the struggle for existence, as a living fossil, and this made for a more favorable view of Spain’s colonial record. Meanwhile Lewis Morgan, a founding father of North American anthropology, had elaborated and popularized in scholarly circles a scheme of early social evolution, expounded in his Ancient Society (1877), that assigned even the most advanced Indian peoples to the stage of barbarism. By downgrading the advanced Aztec and Inca civilizations, Morgan absolved Spain of the charge of having destroyed splendid civilizations. The net result was that Indian stock fell and Spanish stock rose in the historical marketplace.

Morgan’s disciple, the Swiss-born Adolph Bandelier, on whose linguistic and research skills Morgan had drawn in writing the Aztec chapter in Ancient Society, gave further impetus to the growth of pro-Spanish attitudes among United States historians. Bandelier is best known to students of Mesoamerica for a series of monographs, trailing gargantuan footnotes, in which he sought to demolish the romantic vision of the Aztecs as having formed a feudal society and to reduce it to the simplicity of Iroquois social organization. Following his secret conversion to Catholicism in 1881 during an archaeological tour in Mexico (with the Hispanophile historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta as sponsor), Bandelier launched a campaign in the United States to vindicate Spain’s work in America. In an address titled “The Romantic School of American Archaeology” (1885) Bandelier ridiculed the traditional critique of the Spanish conquest, claiming that, thanks to three centuries of Spanish rule, the Indians “emerged fully able to grasp every advantage that civilization of the nineteenth century was able to afford.”³

Bandelier had his own loyal disciple in the popular southwestern writer Charles F. Lummis, whose The Spanish Pioneers (1893), with a foreword by Bandelier, applied the master’s teachings to the Spanish conquest. Lummis complained that although the conquistadors had made “a record unparalleled . . . our textbooks have not recognized that fact, although they no longer dare dispute it. Now, thanks to the New School of American History, we are coming to the truth—a truth which every manly American will be glad to know.”⁴ By 1917, seven editions of Lummis’s highly readable book had carried his message to the North American public; a new edition appeared as late as 1936.

More important than either Bandelier or Lummis was Hubert H. Bancroft, who, in the words of Howard Cline, combined “regional pride, vast bibliographical cupidity, and extraordinary power of organization.”⁵ An adopted son of California, Bancroft applied the industrial principles of concentration of resources and division of labor—or, as his critics called it, “the factory system”—to the writing of a colossal History of the Pacific States (1874-90) covering the history of Mexico, California, and the Northwest. Although Bancroft disagreed with Bandelier’s assessment of the Aztec and Mava civilizations, whose advanced character he supported, he sounded like Bandelier when he emphasized the improvement in the material and spiritual state of the Indians under Spanish rule. Conceding that there was “much in their conduct that was cruel and unjust,” he held that the sixteenth-century Spaniards were no worse than their European neighbors.⁶

Between 1880 and 1900, a combination of economic and intellectual developments sharpened interest in the United States in Latin America and its history. A series of severe depressions focused the attention of North American businessmen and political leaders on Latin America as a market for surplus goods and inspired efforts by United States statesmen to draw the area into the orbit of the country’s economic and political dominance in the name of Pan-Americanism. In this period United States capital began to flow into the Caribbean and Mexico; by 1900 North American investments in Mexico alone had reached $500 million. This growing economic and political connection drew the attention of some historians and other intellectuals to an area they had hitherto neglected.

The growing professionalization of historical activity in the United States, symbolized by the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884, also contributed to an increased interest in Latin American history and to its maturation as an autonomous discipline. One feature of this process of professionalization was a trend toward specialization by subject and area; another was the emergence of a guild of professors whose union card was the Ph.D. and whose training in seminars and other new research methods had equipped them to write the scientific history that was now the mode.

Bernard Moses, the first professor of Latin American history in the United States and the first to write monographs of the modern type on colonial Latin America, illustrates the interplay of these economic and cultural factors. Born in 1846, Moses studied in Germany, the home of the seminar and the new scientific history, and returned to teach all the courses in history and the social sciences at the University of California. From 1894 until his death in 1930, his writing concentrated on Latin American themes. His first book, however, The Railway Revolution in Mexico (1895), revealed his deep interest in the impact of foreign— chiefly United States—capital on Mexico’s economic and political development. Three years later appeared his first study of a colonial subject, The Establishment of Spanish Rule in America. This collection of essays on various disparate topics connected with the Spanish conquest faithfully digested the available printed sources and secondary works. Prosaic in style and generally uninspired, the book reflected the prevailing Social Darwinist ideology in its contrast of the Spanish and English systems of colonization: Moses argued that the Spanish practice of mixing the races had retarded the advance of Latin America, whereas the English practice of liquidating the Indian population had served the cause of social progress.⁷ Moses’s later studies showed some advance in organization and interpretation of his subject matter. According to Charles Gibson, he made “an admirable effort” in The Spanish Dependencies in South America (1914) and Spains Declining Power in South America, 1730-1806 (1919) “to establish a chronological structure for the entire colonial period as soundly developed as that for the sixteenth century.”⁸

By 1900, then, a basically favorable assessment of Spain’s work in America had become firmly established in United States writings on the subject. After the turn of the century, United States historians became even more favorably disposed toward Spain. This development undoubtedly reflected the rise of a proimperialist climate of opinion, and more particularly the fact that the United States, having launched its own colonial career, could regard Spain’s colonial record with greater sympathy, especially after it had eliminated Spain as a colonial rival in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Yale professor of history Edward G. Bourne elaborated and synthesized the pro-Spanish arguments of such nineteenth-century historians as Prescott, Bandelier, Lummis, and Bancroft in an influential book, Spain in America (1904). Adopting and perfecting the comparative method used by Bancroft and others, Bourne used this method to put Spanish colonial policies and practices in the best possible light. Charles Gibson has called Bourne’s book “an unequivocally scholarly presentation” that laid “a positive assessment of early Spanish colonialization before the American public.”⁹ On close inspection, however, the book’s treatment of such subjects as Spain’s Indian policy appears tendentious and idealized.¹⁰

Bourne’s book set the tone for a half-century of revisionist writing on colonial Spanish America. Bourne’s influence was reinforced by that of Herbert E. Bolton, who taught history at the University of California from 1911 until 1945. Bolton was the foremost historian of the Spanish Borderlands, and his professed aim was to “Parkmanize”¹¹ the history of the Spanish achievement in North America (the reference to Parkman suggests the essentially romantic spirit of his scholarship). The Borderlands field was in large part Bolton’s creation. He provided much of its bibliographical and documentary base, wrote important monographs and inspired many others to do so, and developed its techniques, including not only the stress on archival sources but his famous on-the-ground research to establish the geographic setting of his subjects. He crowned his career with full-length biographies of Father Eusebio Kino and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado that were models of careful scholarship and vivid narrative style.¹²

Bolton’s generous enthusiasm, however, for Spain’s daring explorers and missionaries, whose progress he described as a “picturesque pageant,” cast a distorting romantic aura about both. Impressed by the advance of the “harbingers of civilization” into “the realm of heathendom,” Bolton ignored or minimized the negative, coercive aspects of mission activity just as he ignored the predatory aspect of the military conquest. In effect, he offered a “white man’s burden” defense of Spanish colonialism.

After his achievements in the field of Borderlands history, Bolton is best known for his unitary hemisphere thesis, presented in his syllabus, History of the Americas (1928), and in his presidential address, “The Epic of Greater America,” before the American Historical Association (1932). Charles Gibson has observed that the thesis “depended for its acceptance upon definition, upon selected levels of generalization, and upon a philosophical interpretation of unity and diversity in history, problems in which Bolton himself was not profoundly interested.”¹³ Less charitably, John Higham has said that Bolton “lacked the analytical ability to make his concept fruitful; he gave a specious appearance of significance to a program of fragmentary research.”¹⁴ It may not be unfair, perhaps, to describe the doctrine as a historiographic corollary of the contemporary official Pan-Americanism. Bolton himself was aware of the economic and political implications of his thesis of “the larger historical unities and interrelations.” In his “Epic of Greater America,” for example, he stressed the growing importance of Latin America as a source of raw materials and an outlet for foreign capital and complained that “European influence in South America today far outweighs that of Saxon America . . . For the rest, efforts to apply his concept to the writing of hemispheric history have not to date yielded significant results.¹⁶

Bourne and Bolton had provided a positive assessment of Spanish colonization, but it was little more than a sketch or outline; it remained for their disciples to flesh out the interpretation with solid monographs that could sweep away once and for all the supposed harmful influence of the anti-Spanish Black Legend on the North American mind. Bolton’s students—Arthur S. Aiton, John T. Lanning, Charles E. Chapman, and Irving A. Leonard—played a prominent role in this work of vindication. Other major revisionist historians of the post-1920 era were Lesley Byrd Simpson, Lewis Hanke, and Bailey W. Diffie.

Before we consider the accomplishments of these scholars, two comments are in order. First, the revisionist movement in the United States was not an isolated phenomenon. Parallel movements, usually having a conservative or reactionary coloration, arose in Spain and Spanish America in the first half of the twentieth century, and the three movements reinforced each other.¹⁷ Second, not all leading colonial historians of this period can be characterized as Hispanophile or revisionist. At Harvard, for example, Clarence H. Haring went his own way, writing solid works on trade and navigation, buccaneers, and treasure that made pioneering use of quantification.¹⁸ His The Spanish Empire in America (1947)—still a valuable institutional history—cannot be described as apologetic regarding Spain’s colonial policies. The same may be said of the monographs on colonial economic history by Haring’s students, Roland Hussey and Arthur Whitaker.¹⁹

The historians of this formative period of our field had more to do than correct the supposed errors of the Black Legend tradition; they had to provide the fledgling Latin American history with an infrastructure of guides, syllabi, textbooks, and surveys of the basic institutions of Spanish colonial rule.²⁰ The natural direction of movement in research was from the general to the particular, and from the more manageable political and administrative topics to economic, social, and intellectual subjects. Herbert I. Priestley and Arthur S. Alton wrote political biographies of José de Gálvez and Antonio de Mendoza, model monographs that retain most of their value.²¹ Both, however, displayed the characteristic revisionist tendency to assume the priority of Spanish over Indian interests and to minimize the oppressive and repressive aspects of Spanish rule. Alton’s biography of Mendoza, for example, offered an attractive portrait of an efficient, hard-working viceroy who did what he could for the natives “after his majesty’s patrimony had been safeguarded.” Typical of Alton’s unwavering support of Mendoza was his defense of the viceroy against charges of cruelty in the punishment of Indians captured during the Mixton War by means that included having them blown from the mouth of a cannon and torn to pieces by savage dogs. Assuming a relativist posture, Alton argued that it was, after all “a matter of opinion, admirably expressed by Mendoza” when he claimed that these punishments were necessary “as a lesson in order to strike fear into the Indians.”²² The same apologetic tone marks Arthur Zimmerman’s biography of Francisco de Toledo, the viceroy of Peru whose “reforms” took a fearful toll of Indian lives; Zimmerman praises him for “the humanity, moderation, and wisdom of his ordinances.”²³

After Bourne’s book, the most influential work in the revisionist tradition was Lesley Byrd Simpson’s pioneering The Encomienda in New Spain (1929). The work illustrates some major tendencies of the revisionist school; a relativism that shunned moral judgments (though not consistently), a pragmatic, “hard-boiled” approach that viewed colonial conquest and exploitation as unfortunate, but inevitable, facts of life, and a tendency to assess Spanish colonial policy from the standpoint of Spanish rather than Indian interests. Typical, too, of much revisionist writing was the book’s lack of anthropological perspective; for Simpson, the conquest purged ancient Mexico of “the most hideous vices, the most abominable of which were cannibalism, idolatry, and human sacrifice.”²⁴ A notable feature of the book was its vitriolic attack on Bartolomé de Las Casas, whom Simpson, like Bourne, blamed for having led astray whole generations of historians with his exaggerated accounts of Spanish misdeeds.

In the second, heavily revised 1950 edition of his book, Simpson omitted the introduction, with its slashing attack on Las Casas, and his criticism of Las Casas took on a more moderate tone. Simpson may have been influenced in the interval by his discovery (as co-author with Sherburne F. Cook of The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century [1948]) that the native population of central Mexico had declined between 80 and 90 percent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a truly Lascasian finding. In the new edition, Simpson also concluded that the encomienda had lost all its significance by the end of the sixteenth century and claimed that the encomienda, having been tamed and shorn of its most harmful features, was transformed into “a kind of benevolent paternalism.”²⁵ Between 1934 and 1940, Simpson published a series of Studies in the Administration of the Indians in New Spain, the most important of which dealt with the repartimiento. Here Simpson again defended Spain’s use of Indian forced labor on the pragmatic grounds that all “the great empires of the past have been built upon slave labor or upon coerced labor of some sort. Whatever the justification or rationalization of the system has been, the brutal fact remains that someone had to be found to do the work.” He again rejected contemporary criticism of Spanish labor policies as biased and exaggerated, insisting that the viceregal government “made a sincere and not entirely unsuccessful effort to administer the repartimiento with a minimum of suffering ....”²⁶

Simpson’s studies were written in a trenchant style and appeared to provide solid documentary backing for the Bourne-Bolton theses regarding Spanish colonialism. The encomienda study, in particular, profoundly influenced a generation of teachers and students of Latin American history.²⁷ The enthusiasm with which some reviewers received the book may in part, perhaps, be explained by their satisfaction at finding their own notions on the subject confirmed. John T. Lanning, reviewing the book in the HAHR, proclaimed the work’s high point to be “the penetrating and brilliantly written analysis of the unmerited influence of Las Casas upon historians of the Indies”; and Charles E. Chapman, in his popular textbook, Colonial Latin America (1933), wrote that “no one has given a sounder judgement with respect to Spanish cruelty than Simpson.”²⁸

Simpson’s efforts to absolve Spain from Black Legend charges of cruelty had a counterpart in the efforts of Irving Leonard and John T. Lanning to acquit Spain of at least the worst charges of ignorance and obscurantism. Already in his first book, a study of the Mexican savant Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (1929), Leonard had cited the debate between Sigüenza and Father Eusebio Kino over the nature of comets to show that “Mexico was not so utterly enveloped in the darkness of ignorance and intolerance at this time as is still a common belief in some quarters.” Yet Leonard also stressed Sigüenza’s isolation, noting that he was an outstanding figure “in a seventeenth-century Mexico dominated by a medieval atmosphere.”²⁹ In a series of later books and articles, notably in Books of the Brave (1949), Leonard demonstrated that the Spanish laws forbidding the circulation of books “that treated of profane and fabulous matters” were disregarded in practice, and that the romances of chivalry and picaresque novels popular in Spain also circulated in Spanish America. Leonard cautioned, however, that it was not his purpose to transform the denigration of Spanish colonial policies into a White Legend”; rather he hoped to demonstrate that “the true color of the ‘legend’ was something like, perhaps a light gray.”³⁰ Leonard’s Baroque Times in Old Mexico (1959), an elegantly written and sensitive re-creation of the literary and social climate of seventeenth-century Mexico, seemed to mark an advance in his penetration of the relations between society and culture.

How high, actually, was the level of colonial culture? In his Academic Culture in the Spanish Colonies (1940), John T. Lanning conceded that “in ordinary circumstances the regimen produced men of stupendous rote memory, along with imposing but inappropriate and artificial allusions to the ancients and the myths.”³¹ He insisted, however, on the basis of his study of a large number of colonial university theses, that there was much wider acceptance of Enlightenment ideas by colonial intellectuals than had been commonly supposed. “The truth,” Lanning wrote in a 1942 paper on the subject, “is that instead of a cultural lag of three centuries behind Europe there was a hiatus in the Spanish colonies of approximately one generation from European innovator to American academician. . . . Between 1780 and 1800, with fair allowance for transportation and isolation, the lag ceased to exist.”³²

Revisionist historians were not in total agreement on the level of colonial culture. In a massive work of synthesis, Latin American Civilization: Colonial Period (1947), Bailey W. Diffie complained that the reaction against the supposed legend of Spanish intolerance had gone too far. Surveying the evidence, he concluded that “the intellectual climate created by this system was by no stretch of the imagination liberal and free, yet oppressive as it was, some types of intellectual activity managed to flourish.” Diffie also dissented from banning’s claim that the Newtonian and Cartesian doctrines were fully incorporated into colonial thought. Latin American scholastics, he argued, could accept Cartesian metaphysics, based on a Creator, but not the mechanistic implications of Cartesian-Newtonian thought.³³ banning himself, it is worth noting, was moved to protest the excessive claims of overly zealous converts to the revisionist faith. He objected to the tendency “to take it as axiomatic that all adverse criticism of Spain should be reversed. Much of it should, but the really solid literature of revision is limited. The tendency is too strong upon us to pass prematurely from the particular supported in these monographs to the general.”³⁴

Despite his partial dissent from the positions of the cultural revisionists, Diffie’s book on the colonial period was in some ways a climactic work in the revisionist tradition, a summing up of some of its major conclusions. In particular, Diffie carried the revisionists’ anti-Indian bias to an extreme, heavily stressing the supposed widespread practices of cannibalism, human sacrifice, drunkenness, incest, and homosexuality among preconquest Indians. He also disparaged the Indian economic achievement. His estimates of the carrying capacity of the most advanced Indian areas, the Aztec and Inca empires, reduced their populations to new lows: less than one million for the Aztec empire, two million for the Inca empire. On the other hand, Diffie, closely following the Mexican revisionist historian Carlos Pereyra, had high praise for the Spanish economic contributions to the New World, claiming that the introduction of new plants, livestock, and improved techniques had greatly increased production and alleviated the widespread Indian plague of hunger. In fairness to Diffie, it must be said that he made no effort to gloss over the oppressive aspects of the colonial regime; his chapter on “Social Evolution to 1810—Class Structures,” paints a dark picture of the condition of the working classes, Indian, Black, and mixed-blood. For the rest, Latin American Civilization: Colonial Period, is a work of formidable scholarship, bringing together a mass of valuable data drawn from a wide variety of sources.

In the field of revisionist sociointellectual history, the writings of Lewis Hanke, notably The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949) and Aristotle and the American Indians (1959), occupy a leading place. Hanke’s principal achievement, I have written elsewhere, was to initiate the study of Las Casas and his role in the struggle over Spain’s Indian policy on an archival base, with special attention to the clash of ideas that constituted the superstructure of that struggle .... Hanke’s exploration of Las Casas’s contributions to history, anthropology, and political science amounted to a discovery of these facets of Las Casas’s career.”³⁵ Fascinated by the dramatic outward form of a clash of ideas that the struggle over Spain’s Indian policy assumed, however, Hanke tended to slight its socioeconomic and political origins and to view the crown as an impartial arbiter swayed in its decisions by the debating points of jurists and theologians. Basing himself on the record of such disputations and royal decrees, Hanke concluded that “no other nation made so continuous or passionate an attempt to discover what was the just treatment for the native peoples under its jurisdiction as the Spaniards.”³⁶ Charles Gibson has rightly observed that Hanke’s writings “have had a major influence in stressing Spanish imperialism’s benevolent and legitimate side.”³⁷

We may also assign to the category of revisionist sociointellectual history Frank Tannenbaum’s influential essay, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (1947), one of a small number of writings on Black slavery in colonial Latin America in the period under review. Supported by the authority of Gilberto Freyre’s brilliantly written though impressionistic study of Brazilian slavery, The Masters and the Slaves (English ed., 1946), Tannenbaum’s view that cultural and religious factors tended to make slavery milder in Latin America than in English America held an almost undisputed sway until the 1960s.

The revisionist era, to conclude, made important contributions to the development of colonial Latin American history in the United States as an independent field of study. It established high standards of historical research and produced a substantial monographic literature that corrected errors and oversimplifications in the liberal, anti-Spanish literature of earlier centuries. The revisionist historiography, however, was seriously flawed by its ideological biases and faulty methods. It focused almost exclusively on the activities of Spanish and colonial elites and often displayed a blatant partiality for those elites in its treatment of Spanish-Indian relations. There is little trace of anthropological perspective in the revisionist writings, which tend to portray the Indian as a being tainted with hideous vices, or as a child or savage to whom Spain brought the redeeming gifts of civilization. In their eagerness to absolve Spain of undeserved charges of cruelty and intolerance, the revisionist historians introduced embellishing distortions into their accounts of the Spanish conquest and colonial society. A new generation of historians had to correct these faults and explore with fresh perspectives and methods the many areas the revisionist school had ignored.

Professional historians, however, were often handicapped by the conservative mind-sets they had inherited from their teachers. A striking feature of the new colonial historiography is that the principal impulse for its renovation came from outside the field, from disciplines more responsive to modern currents in social thought and to new research techniques in the social sciences. A case in point is the history of the so-called Berkeley school of demographic and economic history. The geographer Carl O. Sauer, whose chief research interest was the relationship between “life and land,” may be called a forerunner or founder of that school. In the 1930s, Sauer published in the Ibero-Americana series (which he founded in 1932) a group of studies of the aboriginal population of Northwest Mexico that anticipated the Berkeley school’s conclusion that preconquest native populations had been much larger than was commonly supposed.³⁸ Another forerunner was the environmental physiologist Sherburne F. Cook, whose research interests ranged from the incidence of disease in Aztec Mexico to the relation between soil erosion and population in pre- and postconquest Mexico. In 1948, Cook and L. B. Simpson (who had taken his degree in history, but taught in the Spanish department at Berkeley) published The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, which analyzed tribute and tithe records to arrive at a preconquest population of about 11 million that had fallen to 1,500,000 in the seventeenth century. Four years later Simpson published his important Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, a work clearly influenced by Sauer’s ecological approach, and pointing, among other conclusions, to the replacement of Indians by cattle and sheep.³⁹ Thus, alongside the Bolton tradition of Borderlands history, centered on the romantic themes of conquest, exploration, and mission activity, there arose at Berkeley a tradition of demographic and economic history featured by large use of quantification and other interdisciplinary methods. In contrast, moreover, to the Hispanophile tone of the Bolton tradition, writings of the Berkeley school tended to he explicitly or implicitly critical of Spain’s Indian policies.⁴⁰

After World War II the school (in reality a loose grouping of scholars with like research interests and approaches) was joined by Woodrow Borah, who had come to Berkeley in 1936 to pursue the doctorate in Latin American history. Bolton sent Borah to Sauer, whose seminar Borah attended for six years, but kept him in his own seminar and was chairman of his thesis committee. Borah’s doctoral dissertation, Silk Raising in Colonial Mexico, was published in 1943; his most seminal work, New Spain’s Century of Depression, appeared in 1951. Taking Cook and Simpson’s 1948 population study as his springboard, Borah offered an economic interpretation that linked Indian population decline to a drop in food and mining production, labor shortages, and a growth of haciendas, repartimiento, and debt peonage. Later research has corrected Borah’s findings in one or another detail, but his major conclusions have stood the test of time. In the 1950s, Cook and Borah began a comprehensive reexamination of the population figures in the Cook-Simpson 1948 study. Their successive monographs, based on careful study of the social and institutional context in which Spanish population counts and fiscal changes occurred, and using ever more extensive sources and complex mathematical formulas, pushed their estimates of the preconquest population of central Mexico ever higher, reaching 25.2 million in their 1963 study.⁴¹ Later Cook and Borah extended their inquiries into population to other parts of Latin America in their Essays in Population History, 3 vols. (1971–79). One of their most remarkable findings was an estimate of from 4 to 7 million for the native population of Hispaniola in 1492—a figure double that of Las Casas, whose estimates had long been regarded as the patent exaggerations of a pro-Indian enthusiast.⁴²

No auxiliary discipline did more for the renovation of colonial Spanish American history than anthropology. One of its major services was to help purge the field of its traditional anti-Indian bias. Franz Boas and his disciples, with their gospel of the “equality of cultures,” had freed the Indian from the burdens of “savagery” and “barbarism.”Later, the revival of evolutionism under the leadership of Leslie A. White and Julian Steward gave anthropology a historical, genetic approach that proved most useful in the study of Indian societies. A list of anthropologists who contributed to the revival of colonial studies must include the names of Philip A. Means, John H. Rowe, Elman Service, Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, George M. Foster, and John V. Murra.⁴³ To this list we should add the name of George Kubier, an art historian who doubled as ethnohistorian. His monumental Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, 2 vols. (1948), which studied architecture in the context of Indian demographic decline, conversion, and labor, was an object lesson in the value of interdisciplinary approaches.

In 1964, Charles Gibson, who combined training in history and anthropology, published a landmark book, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, which epitomized some major features of the new colonial historiography: a certain shift in focus from colonial elites to Indians; the combined use of approaches drawn from history, anthropology, and sociology; and the abandonment of the Hispanophile tone of much revisionist literature. Indeed, in his somber conclusion concerning the “deterioriation of a native empire and civilization,” Gibson went out of his way to resurrect the Black Legend that the revisionists had seemingly buried. “The Black Legend,” he wrote, “provides a gross but essentially accurate interpretation of relations between Spaniards and Indians. . . . It is insufficient in its assessment of the institutions of Spanish rule. But the substantive content of the Black Legend asserts that the Indians were exploited by Spaniards, and in empirical fact they were.”⁴⁴ Rich in new insights into the economic and social history of colonial Mexico, Gibson’s book became an inspiration and a point of departure for students of the colonial Indian.

In the two decades since the publication of Gibson’s classic work, ethnohistory (the study of pre- and postconquest Indians with a combination of historical and anthropological approaches) has flowered; and some new trends have emerged.⁴⁵ They include a tendency for historians and anthropologists to collaborate on ethnohistorical projects that sometimes span the preconquest, colonial and national periods. (A good recent example is a collection of essays, Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica: Essays on the History of Ethnic Relations [1983], edited by Muido MacLeod and Robert Wasserstrom.) Another is a tendency for scholars (especially younger ones) to drop the posture of neutrality traditionally affected by historians and adopt a clear pro-Indian stance. This change is reflected in two recent studies of the impact of the conquest on Andean society: Steve Stern’s Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (1982); and Karen Spalding’s Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (1984). Stern describes his book as “a history of oppression,” and links that history to the continuing struggle of the Andean peasantry against the “capitalist entrepreneurs and corporations of the modern world.”⁴⁶ Spalding makes her attitude explicit in the dedication of her book “to the creativity, the endurance, and the courage of the people who built Lima’s houses, mined its gold, and paid the piper. This posture of taking sides” undoubtedly reflects the growing influence of Marxism, especially on younger scholars.

A major new trend involved a change in the way of viewing the Indian in his dealings with Spaniards. Traditionally, historians and anthropologists had viewed the Indian as the more or less passive object of Spanish rule or of an acculturation process. Even in Gibson’s innovative study, the Indian appears as essentially passive. The Indian community, he wrote, survived “in spite of manifold and severe stresses,” hut Indians “in general yielded to Spanish demands, protesting only in rare cases of community disturbances.”⁴⁷ In recent studies, the stress is on the Indians as actors who resisted Spanish pressures with a variety of strategies, both armed and peaceful. Karen Spalding observes in her book on Huarochirí that the Andes were the scene of “rebellions that make a mockery of the notion of the passive Indian’.”⁴⁸ An original aspect of Stern’s study is his demonstration that in Huamanga, at least, the Indians were able to lighten the burdens of the mita by a defensive strategy of “engaging in aggressive, persistent, often shrewd use of Spanish juridical institutions to lower legal quotas, delay delivery of specific corvées and tributes, disrupt production, and the like.”⁴⁹ Woodrow Borah makes the same point in his study of the Indian General Court of New Spain. “The Indians,” writes Borah, “perceived the Indian General Court as another opportunity in a complicated game of defense, redress, and even offense.⁵⁰ The themes of Indian solidarity and collective resistance run through William B. Taylor’s Drinking, Homicide, und Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (1979), which notes the “underlying ethos of village solidarity” in the region of Mixteca Alta, expressed among other ways in ritual drinking that “like the rebellions brought the villagers together in a collective act that reaffirmed community membership.”⁵¹ A new book by Nancy Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (1984), studies in rich detail the process of creative adaptation that enabled the Maya to survive the many stresses and strains imposed by Spanish rule.

Solidarity and resistance, however, were not the only forms of Indian adaptation to the conquest. Much recent writing finds evidence of growing internal differentiation, stratification, and conflict within Indian society, especially in the late colonial period. Karen Spalding has called attention to the phenomenon of “social climbing on the part of Indians who chose to ally themselves to the local representatives of Spanish authority in return for rewards that included exemption from mita service and tribute payments.⁵² The success of the Indian minority who adopted Spanish strategies for enrichment, Stern notes in his study of Huamanga, compounded preexisting rivalries and disunities, and on its highest levels reproduced within native society class contradictions first imposed by Spanish colonials.”⁵³ Stern also shows that even the limited gains achieved through use of Spanish juridical institutions had their price: by dampening native militancy and promoting accommodation between Spanish and Indian elites, this use actually strengthened Spanish rule. The problem of internal differentiation seems to have become most acute in Indian towns and villages penetrated by sizable groups of Spaniards. John Tutino offers an example from the town of Otumba, in the Valley of Mexico, where in the late eighteenth century a hispanicized Indian elite, closely linked to influential Spaniards, dominated the principal offices and was accused, apparently with good reason, “of electoral fraud, theft of community funds, and extreme favoritism in land allocation.”⁵⁴

A notable increase in the last two decades in writings on the African, slave and free, accompanied by a radical change in perspective on the problem of slavery, undoubtedly reflects such postwar developments as the rise of New Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States.⁵⁵ An anthropologist, Marvin Harris, launched a full-scale attack on the Tannenbaum thesis of the relative mildness of Latin American slavery in his Patterns of Race in the Americas (1964), which argued that the supposed mildness was a myth, that Spanish protective legislation was often ignored, and that economic rather than cultural factors determined the specific differences between slave societies. Since the appearance of Harris’s book, the Tannenbaum thesis has lost much of its influence as a result of accumulating evidence that Black slavery—always brutal and dehumanizing in essence—varied widely in different times and places, with the tempo of economic activity an important variable in determining the intensity of exploitation of slave labor and the opportunities for manumission. Evidence for such variation emerges from some recent studies of Black slavery in colonial Spanish America: Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (1974), Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (1976), and William F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Chocó, 1680–1810 (1976). Perhaps the only work of the last two decades to lend strong support to the Tannenbaum thesis is Herbert Klein’s Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (1967). The subject of slave revolts and other forms of slave resistance has not yet received the attention it merits from North American scholars.

The subject of Indians, Blacks, and other “lower-class” groups is inseparable from that of the economic structures erected and maintained by their toil. In the category of “land and labor” studies, Gibson’s book on the Aztecs again became a point of departure and a source of inspiration. Gibson’s findings regarding the hacienda in the Valley of Mexico (the hacienda, if no paradise, offered many Indians a refuge from overwhelming labor and tribute burdens; debt peonage had little importance, at least in the late eighteenth century; and Valley haciendas carried on a highly commercialized agriculture serving the large markets of Mexico City) diverged widely from the conventional picture of a feudal-seeming hacienda based on François Chevalier’s classic study, La Formation des grands domaines au Mexique. Terre et société aux XVI^e–XVII^e siécles (1952),⁵⁶ which focused on the north and near-north of Mexico. Gibson’s unorthodox findings spurred young scholars to undertake similar investigations in other regions of Mexico. The resulting spate of rural studies includes such important works as William B. Taylor’s Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (1972), Charles H. Harris’s A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the Sánchez Navarros, 1765–1867 (1975), Herman W. Konrad’s A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucía, 1576–1767 (1980), and Eric Van Young’s Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (1981). These works deepened the impression of Mexican rural diversity. Standing apart from microhistorical studies of the Harris and Konrad type is Murdo MacLeod’s broad Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (1973), the story of the economic rise and fall of a region.

Rural studies of Spanish South America are less numerous, but convey the same impression of diversity and divergence from traditional notions regarding the colonial hacienda. Robert G. Keith’s study of the evolution of agrarian society on the central Peruvian coast, Conquest and Agrarian Change: Emergence of the Hacienda on the Peruvian Coast (1976), underscores the variations in hacienda size and productivity from one part of the region to another. Similarly, Susan E. Ramirez’s forthcoming Provincial Patriarchs: Land Tenure and the Economics of Power in Colonial Peru, stresses the varying patterns of size, function, labor system, and profitability among the estates in the northern coastal province of Lambayeque; an impressive feature of the book is its analysis of the interplay of political, economic, and social forces to show, for example, how landowners coopted royal officials entrusted with the distribution of Indian labor and land to benefit their own landholdings. Nicholas Cushner has published a trio of works on Jesuit economic activities in Spanish South America.⁵⁷ Like Konrad’s study of Santa Lucia, Cushner’s books suggest that Jesuit enterprises generally may have been more profitable than lay enterprises because of the advantages inherent in their institutional auspices, including high reinvestment rates, the vertical, integrated character of the enterprises, and perhaps more rational management. The net result of the recent upsurge of rural studies has been the discovery of a “polymorphic hacienda”⁵⁸ that reflects the great regional variations in productive potential and access to labor and markets, among other variables, in the vast Spanish empire in America.

Before we leave the subject of rural studies, one other comment may be in order. Impressed by the discovery of conditions in particular times and places that contradict the traditional generalizations concerning the hacienda and its labor systems, some scholars have made a premature rush to judgment about those generalizations. Recent discussion of debt peonage is a case in point. Struck by findings that in central Mexico in the eighteenth century credit advances to rural laborers were often more of an inducement than a bond, with the size of advances reflecting the bargaining power of labor in dealing with employers, and that some hacendados made no special effort to recover peons who had fled without paying their debts, some historians have “quite given up”⁵⁹ on the notion of debt peonage. Yet even a cursory review of the literature leaves no doubt that debt peonage was alive and well in colonial Spanish America even in the late eighteenth century, when population increase had reduced its importance as a means of securing and holding labor.⁶⁰

By contrast with the explosion of rural studies in recent years, colonial mining has attracted relatively little attention from United States scholars. Older studies of value include the works of the geographer Robert C. West on mining in Mexico and Colombia, Clement Motten’s study of the impact of the Enlightenment on Mexican silver production, and Walter Howe’s book on the Mexican mining guild.⁶¹ By far the most important work on colonial mining of the last two decades is Peter J. Bakewell’s Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (1971), whose findings cast doubt on Woodrow Borah’s thesis regarding the relation between labor shortages and silver production and François Chevalier’s thesis regarding the flight of failed miners to “self-sufficient’’ estates. Levels of silver production and the movement of treasure are key elements in the debate regarding the “century of depression’’ postulated for New Spain by Borah three decades ago. John J. TePaske and Herbert Klein have enriched that debate with an important article, “The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in New Spain: Myth or Reality?”⁶² TePaske and Klein have also provided an important tool for the study of the colonial economy by compiling and publishing account summaries for the royal treasuries of Alto Perú, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and the Río de la Plata.⁶³ A field that is attracting growing interest is colonial demographic history; a collection of essays edited by David J. Robinson, Studies in Spanish American Population History (1981), suggests the variety of approaches and statistical sources employed by its practitioners.

Perhaps because of the strong empirical, antitheoretical bias of the social studies in the United States, theoretical problems of the colonial economy have held little interest for North American scholars. This is true, for example, of the debate over the “feudal” or “capitalist” nature of the colonial economy, a matter of much concern to European and Latin American scholars. A weakness of some United States historians who have grappled with the problem is their failure to provide adequate working definitions of feudalism and capitalism. Nicholas Cushner, for example, cites the presence of private land ownership, commercial monoculture, “major features of a wage-labor system,” and the like, to prove that “agrarian capitalism” existed in the eighteenth-century Province of Quito. Arguments of this kind could be used to prove that capitalism existed in ancient Rome. On close inspection, the “major features of a wage-labor system” prove to be a mix of forced (mita) labor and debt peonage that Cushner calls “an Indian analogue of black slavery” and “degrading enslavement of Indian workers.”⁶⁴ To call an economic system based on such labor arrangements “capitalist” is to deny the term any specific, distinctive meaning. The same problem of inadequate definition hampers Eric Van Young in his effort to determine whether the Mexican colonial hacienda fits the feudal model. Van Young rejects the application of that model to the Mexican case, among other grounds, because the Mexican hacienda did not conform to “the explicitly legal framework of the classical European feudal model, with its complex claims of sovereignty and reciprocity.”⁶⁵ To insist, however, that feudalism requires the presence of the European feudal manor, with its associated legal baggage of sovereignty, reciprocity, and so on, is to insist that feudalism never existed outside of Western Europe. A less rigid or formal approach to the problem—I have in mind, for example, Ruggiero Romano’s recent essay on “American Feudalism,”⁶⁶ which suggests forced labor, an insufficient monetary base, and the lack of a large, dependable internal market as some diagnostic traits of a feudal economy—may offer a better point of departure in attempting to determine whether the Mexican colonial hacienda was feudal, capitalist, or something in between.

I turn now to the new social history,⁶⁷ a broad field whose subject matter and boundaries are difficult to define. More or less arbitrarily, I shall assign to this category those writings that deal primarily with Hispanic or hispanicized social groups, both upper and lower class. The breadth of subject matter of some recent works makes them difficult to classify: a case in point is a book of modest size and format, but rich in content, Essays in the Political, Economic, and Social History of Colonial Latin America (1982), edited by Karen Spalding. A major focus of these essays is on the role of the state in regulating the colonial economy and in avoiding or mediating conflict between peninsular and creole elites.

The new social history has largely absorbed the traditional administrative and institutional history. An example is the late John Phelan’s The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire (1967), which studies relations between local elites and Quito’s audiencia and how those elites influenced the audiencia’s decisions. Political and social history also merge in Peggy K. Liss, Mexico under Spain, 1521–1556: Society and the Origins of Nationality (1975). To the same category of sociopolitical studies we may assign the audiencia studies of Mark Burkholder and David S. Chandler, which trace the rise and fall of creole domination of major audiencias in the eighteenth century;⁶⁸ and the series of monographs, commencing with Lyle N. McAlister’s pioneering essay, The “Fuero Militar” in New Spain (1952), that reach varying conclusions with respect to the degree of independence and influence achieved by the newly created creole military of the Bourbon period.⁶⁹ The subject of the military is closely linked to the great popular revolts of the late eighteenth century, which have attracted increasing scholarly attention here and abroad.⁷⁰ In his last work, John Phelan offered a revisionist view of the Comunero revolt, arguing that it was neither a frustrated social revolution nor an early effort to achieve independence, but an attempt to restore the “unwritten constitution” that governed relations between people and crown.⁷¹

Writers of the new social history commonly draw on anthropological and sociological theories to illuminate problems of colonial social structure and dynamics. An example is John K. Chance’s Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca (1978), which shows, among other findings, how the phenomenon of “passing” from casta to creole status modified the formal hierarchy of race and class. Recent studies of colonial elites stress the importance of kinship networks, fusing creole and peninsular families on the highest social level, as a means of cementing elite alliances and preserving and enhancing economic and political advantages. Works in this genre include Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence (1976), which shows that the Mexican nobility was more flexible and adaptive to the revolutionary process than had been supposed; Susan Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires (1978), which studies the operations of fourteen great porteño merchant houses; and John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City (1983), an extraordinarily informing work that presents “the primary patterns of behavior in both business and society” of a wide range of entrepreneurial groups in what was then the largest city in the Americas.

Other features of the new social history are its preference for notarial records, court testimony, wills, and the like as source material over more formal documents like government decrees and regulations; and its frequent use of prosopography or collective biography—the study of the lives of a cluster of individuals belonging to a particular social group in the effort to determine that group’s patterns of social behavior and ideals.⁷² James Lockhart displayed virtuosity in the use of these new resources in his Spanish Peru, 1532–1560 (1968), a “collective biography of a society,” demonstrating that contrary to traditional belief, in that society “every stratum of Spanish society and every region of the Spanish mainland was represented in force”;⁷³ and in The Men of Cajamarca (1972), a “collective biography of the 168 Spaniards who captured Atahualpa in 1532.

A beginning has been made in the study of colonial women’s history. Lockhart devoted a chapter to Hispanic women in his Spanish Peru, and William L. Sherman has a chapter on “Indian Women and Spaniards” in his Forced Indian Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (1979). Two leading workers in the field of women’s history are Asunción Lavrin and Edith Couturier. In their article on women’s socioeconomic role in colonial Puebla and Guadalajara, they concluded that colonial women enjoyed more economic independence than has been supposed, that there was repression; but repression was not the whole reality, and that it did not totally impair women’s ability of expression.”⁷⁴ We now have a full-scale study of Hispanic women in colonial Peru, Luis Martín’s Daughters of the Conquistadores (1984). Martín confirms the opinion of Lavrin and Couturier and goes farther, claiming that “it would be hard to find any social group in which social freedom was so visible as it was among the Spanish women who lived in the colonial cities.” He describes the Peruvian nunnery as “a fortress of women, a true island of women, where, under the cloak of marianism, women could protect themselves from the corroding and dehumanizing forces of Don Juanism.”⁷⁵ A caveat is in order; Martín’s subjects are upper-class Hispanic women, surrounded by slaves and servants, who scorned and sometimes abused their Black and Indian sisters. Aside from the chapter in Sherman’s book, cited above, we have as yet little information on lower-class colonial women.⁷⁶

For that matter, historians have only begun to explore the lives of the so-called inarticulate masses, male or female, Black, white, Indian, or mixed-blood. A pioneering work in this neglected field is a collection of essay-biographies, Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (1981), edited by David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash. The Spanish American subjects include a Buenos Aires shoemaker and guild organizer; an Aztec priest who tried to organize a heretical underground; two rebellious slaves; and a Mexican mestiza pulque dealer. The editors do not claim that these and other ordinary people whose lives are told in this book were “exceptionally wise, heroic, or virtuous”; they do insist, however, that they were not the mere objects of history, but its makers.

Another neglected field is intellectual history; I regret that I cannot cite any work of intellectual or cultural history of the last two decades of a quality to compare with Irving Leonard’s superb Baroque Times in Old Mexico (1959) or John Phelan’s insightful The Millenial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (1958).⁷⁷ The reasons for this neglect are obscure, since challenging subjects abound; witness, for example, Jacques Lafaye’s remarkable foray into Mexican intellectual history, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (1976).

I close by expressing my conviction that the present generation of historians—especially our younger scholars—is exploring the political, economic, and social history of colonial Spanish America in greater depth, with greater realism, and with more attention to the role of the masses in the making of that history than have its predecessors. Surveying the long trajectory of United States studies of colonial Spanish America, we are justified, I think, in feeling considerable satisfaction with what has been achieved and some optimism about the future prospects of our field.