Leopoldo Zea, looking toward the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall, speaks of 1492 as the beginning of the “encovery” of America—imperial (and later national, I would add) concealments of what developed during the five centuries following the first consequential encounter of Europeans and native Americans. He calls for contributions to the “discovery” of the historical identity of Spanish America as a more fitting commemoration of 1492 than further studies of Columbus and his fellow navigators (“América: ¿Descubrimiento o encubrimiento?” Cuadernos Americanos CCLVIII: 1, January-February 1985, 102—104).
These first two volumes of the Cambridge History of Latin America (CHLA) are a grand, early step toward Zea’s goal for 1992, at least for readers of English. Conceived as “a high-level synthesis of existing knowledge” that will provide the first large-scale, authoritative survey of Latin America’s unique historical experience” (I, xiv), most of the 34 chapters on the colonial period more than achieve these goals, and with barely a nod in the direction of the early voyages and “Age of Discovery.” Four chapters treat regional Indian societies before European colonization and ten others deal with Brazil, both subjects that are slighted in older, slimmer surveys of Latin America’s colonial history.
The CHLA is an international endeavor directed by the steady hand of a British historian of Brazil, Leslie Bethell. Most of the 31 authors are British or United States scholars, but other Western Europeans and Latin Americans are represented. All are recognized authorities on the subjects they write about here, and many were in their 30s and 40s when they accepted their assignments in the mid-1970s—younger leaders of the abundant scholarship on colonial Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
The table of contents gives the impression of seven discrete, equally important parts: America on the Eve of Conquest; Europe and America; The Church; Population; Economic and Social Structures: Spanish America; Economic and Social Structures: Brazil; and Intellectual and Cultural Life. But as a history of colonial Latin America, the CHLA is mainly two books—one on the politics and institutional developments of Spain and Portugal in America (covering 365 of the 556 pages of text in volume I); the other on social and economic structures (nearly 600 of the 803 pages of text in volume II). The parts on preconquest America, the church, and intellectual and cultural life float loosely on the edges of these core sections.
Of the five solid chapters on preconquest societies and history, only John Murra’s on the Andean region anticipates the colonial chapters—uniting the study of geography and history, keeping postconquest developments in mind, and providing a critical evaluation of sources and what is not now known. The chapters on the church (which could easily be subsumed under Europe and America) and intellectual and cultural life are among the shortest and least connected to the rest of the work. This is mainly, but not entirely, because they are subjects that have been left behind during the rush to social and economic history since 1960. The authors of these chapters did not have scores of recent monographs grounded in new primary sources to draw from, but few of them make good use of the available publications to survey their fields, point out what is not known, or point toward fruitful connections to the larger history of colonial Latin America as we understand it now. The two chapters on the church review familiar topics of the Patronato, spiritual conquest, early defense of the Indians, and eighteenth-century regalism and the expulsion of the Jesuits, but do little to achieve the stated purpose of describing “the process by which a Christian society developed” (I, 552). The chapter on Spanish American intellectual and cultural life skillfully comments on literate creole intellectual life (in ways that seem at odds with James Lockhart’s chapter on social process), but skips over education entirely and has little to say about the “colonial cultural reality” behind “the façade of a unified Christian culture” (II, 680). The chapter on the architecture and art of Spanish America posits architecture as “the key to an understanding of the culture of colonial Spanish America” (II, 709), but delivers only a chronological description of works and artists. It uses few of the standard works by Elizabeth Wilder Weismann, George Kubler, Francisco de la Maza, and others which have contributed to a history of art that illuminates culture and colonization. The last paragraph slopes off characteristically into further minutiae: “ . . . still further south there are a few more artists . . . who should be included in this survey” (II, 744). By contrast, the chapter on Brazilian art has fewer names but gives a clearer sense of relationships between colonial history as a whole and the history of art.
Volume I’s book within a book on the imperial counterpoint of Ibero-America contains eight chapters, three of which deal with Portugal and Brazil. Nearly all of them cover familiar political and institutional developments and, in this sense, could have been written in much the same form 25 years ago. But the fact is that these chapters were not available then and should not be overlooked now by scholars of the colonial period, much less by students and historians from other fields. All are authoritative surveys that balance Europe and America in clearly historical ways, and sometimes draw new meaning from old topics or point toward new questions. John Elliott, in a chapter on the Spanish conquest and settlement, reintroduces the largely forgotten contingency of early colonization by asking where and when Spanish America would move toward conquest and settlement or conquest and movement—two tendencies that were real possibilities in many situations, especially during the sixteenth century. Another comprehensive chapter by Elliott on Spain and America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describes a “comfortably flexible” system and has a memorable discussion of Hapsburg rule in America as “self-rule at the king’s command” (I, 338). Harold Johnson, in his chapter on the discovery and early settlement of Portuguese Brazil, faced a small, generally older secondary literature but makes a notable contribution by working through published primary sources to produce an extensive consideration of settlement in the sixteenth century that provides a better basis for comparison to Spanish American developments than has been available in English before. This, together with other solid chapters on Brazil, give us a good perspective for judging the editor’s statement that Brazil and Spanish America have “two separate histories” (I, xix).
The other chapters on Spain and America, and Portugal and Brazil, generally go beyond bland surveys to make striking, sometimes controversial observations. David Brading develops a forceful and largely convincing interpretation of the eighteenth century which he summarizes on page 439 of volume I: “Far from being the natural culmination of 300 years of colonial development, the late Bourbon era was an Indian summer, a fragile equipoise, easily broken asunder by changes in the balance of power in Europe.” His view of regalist attacks on the position of the church in colonial society as embittering the priesthood but “achieving little in the way of real change” is less persuasive. Nathan Wachtel’s chapter on the Indian and the Spanish conquest elaborates on his earlier views of a “destructuration” and reintegration process for Peru with some additional consideration of Mexico but, like the other chapters in volume I, it informs mainly about the fate and viewpoints of elites—looking out from the top with only an occasional glance down, and not always being clear that this is what his sources allow.
Few of the 13 chapters in volume II on social and economic structures could have been written 25 years ago. They rely heavily on the archival researches of the authors and a substantial and recent secondary literature. In some cases, as in the study of women in colonial Latin America, the fields are too new and the literature too spotty to permit the broad historical surveys of the core chapters of volume I. Others seem more sociological than historical—characterizing isolated periods or the colonial period as a whole from scattered evidence and different places and times; sometimes reading history backwards from better-known later circumstances; focusing more narrowly on internal structures and developments; and being less sure of the processes involved.
This is in the nature of new fields. Nevertheless, all of the essays in this second “book” will inform and guide the study of colonial society for years to come. Despite the differing approaches and quality of evidence of some chapters—full of tables in one case, mainly historiography in another, mainly ideas in a third—there is considerable unity among them that will reward a careful reading. The unity of the best of these chapters depends heavily on the authors’ general understanding of colonial Latin America and their temerity in ranging widely across the field of inquiry. Among the notable chapters is Richard Morse’s on the urban development of Spanish America, which recalls the originality and clear distinctions of his essays of 25 and 30 years ago (for example, the distinction between self-administration and self-government, p. 81; the connection between colonial administrative cities and postindependence decentralization, pp. 97-98; and the idea that “Urban places became important centres for the commercialization of Spanish American society and institutions, but ineffective vehicles for diffusing full-blown ‘capitalism’,” p. 97). Also important is Peter Bakewell’s chapter on the mining of precious metals, which accounts for regional variation; provides a full, comparative appraisal of mining production complete with approximate figures; and gives a clear account of the mining procedures and the crucial historical problem of the sources, cost, and availability of capital. Charles Gibson and Frederick Bowser have written authoritative overviews of main lines of development in the history of Indians and Africans under Spanish rule, while Enrique Florescano and Magnus Mörner have done the same for the rural economy and society of Spanish America. James Lockhart’s chapter on social organization and social change in Spanish America is a particularly original and elaborate contribution—more essay than chapter—that moves toward a clearer, more refined classification of principles and process of organization linking Spanish and Indian “worlds,” and challenging various received ideas.
Gaps, overlaps, and contradictions are inevitable in such a large, collaborative enterprise, but two structural weaknesses of the volumes stand out as unresolved challenges for the study of colonial Latin America in the future. One problem arises because of the presentation of social and economic history according to political periods. Much of the ongoing debate and many insights into the social and economic history of the late colonial period are sheared away by confining the chapters in volume II to the period before the independence wars. The other difficulty is that the two “books” within these volumes—the imperial history (largely political and top-level) in volume I and the internal social and economic structures of volume II—are left to go their separate ways. Connections are sometimes casually made in individual chapters (especially in those of Elliott, Brading, MacLeod, Schwartz, and Russell-Wood), but the interrelationships among events in Europe, colonial state systems, transatlantic trade, and economic and social developments in the colonies generally remain obscure.
