This book is a meditation on Spanish history and Spanish colonization of the New World in the tradition of such pensadores as José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. By De Ventos’s own admission (viii), he presents a “somewhat traditional and clericalist view of the colonization of the Americas.” Conceding that Spain left “a trail of underdevelopment, fragmentation, and caciques” in her former colonies (pp. 64-65), he insists that the unique character of Spanish “colonization-evangelization,. . . [is] as distinct from the racist character of classical conquests as it is from the instrumental attitude of the Anglo-Saxon ones.” It was a colonization based on “a deep-seated conviction about the equality of man” that produced “a new race and a new culture.” According to the author, that belief in the equality of all people also inspired the Laws of the Indies, which, although “never quite carried out,” were designed “to defend the freedom of the natives against the criollo oligarchy.” The Jesuit missionary effort to synthesize “the modern imperatives of development with the Christian principles of equality and liberty” is singled out for special praise. The author also attempts a systematic contrast of the Spanish and English colonizations and closes with a suggestion to Latin Americans that the Spanish democratic experience under the leadership of the Socialist Felipe González and King Juan Carlos I “could perhaps guide them along the road to the synthesis being tested here between traditionalism and socialist voluntarism.”
Today, while much of Western social science accepts the premise that colonialism and imperialism were profoundly harmful to the peoples they subjected, while the “Vision of the Vanquished” pervades much writing on the subject and grips the popular mind, in Spain an apologetic spirit continues to dominate interpretations of Spain’s work in America. Granted its greater moderation and urbanity, De Ventos’s book differs little in substance from the many apologias for Spanish colonialism that have issued from Spanish presses in the twentieth century. The reasons for the tenacious hold of that apologetic spirit on Spanish academic thought and writing about the country’s colonial experience merit, I believe, a careful historiographic investigation.
