These six essays outline the views of key theorists who defined the debate over the Spanish imperial presence in the New World and Italy from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. In his chapter on legitimizing the Spanish conquest of the Indies, Anthony Pagden turns to Francisco de Vitoria and the Salamanca school of Thomists who argued that Spain had no justification for depriving indigenous peoples of their land and liberty. On the opposite side were those steeped in humanistic jurisprudence such as Vasco de Quiroga, bishop of Michoacán, and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who believed the Indians forfeited their natural rights because of their crimes against nature.
For Italy the author singles out Paolo Mattia Doria, Antonio Genovesi, and the odd, misanthropic priest, Tomasso Campanella, all three disillusioned by the Spanish dominance of southern Italy in the ancien régime. Campanella pled for a new universal empire ruled over by a prudent monarch dedicated to serving his people and making them happy. Doria and Genovesi believed Spain had transformed a free society in Naples into an impoverished tyranny. By replacing trust with honor as the dominant societal value, the Spanish regime undercut the basis for commercial expansion, which, Pagden asserts, may explain the economic backwardness of southern Europe in modern times.
In the New World Pagden focuses on the late seventeenth-century Mexican savant, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the Jesuits Francisco de Clavigero and Juan Pablo Viscardo, and Simón Bolívar. By extolling the civil values and grandeur of ancient Mexico, Sigüenza attempted to give both creoles and Indians a common identity to compensate for their “shared fatality of extra-Spanish birth” (p. 91). A century later Clavigero for Mexico and Viscardo for Peru did the same, although they also stressed the evils of Spanish conquest and colonization. As one of the first colonials to advocate complete independence, Viscardo wanted restoration of an older order that combined the virtues of Castile prior to Philip II and the Inca empire, Tawantinsuyu. For his part Bolívar’s task was to fashion a new body politic for Spanish America, which he saw as a republic based on virtue to preserve the greatest possible sum of happiness, the greatest social security, and the highest degree of stability” (p. 146).
Overall the essays make stimulating reading and demonstrate Pagden’s special ability as a political theorist to seek out subtle nuances. Two minor caveats. No central framework seems to unite these six discrete essays, except perhaps the implicit assumption that Spanish imperialism everywhere was ridden with defects, truly the incarnation of evil, shortsightedness, and mismanagement. Also, the book ends too abruptly with no conclusion comparing, contrasting, or integrating the various imperial theories discussed so thoroughly by the author.
