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Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World by Irene Silverblatt
vonmustache's review against another edition
Read intro and conclusion, the rest I skimmed.
Silverblatt follows other social theorists of modernity, particularly Arendt, in describing the “subterranean stream” of the western cultural legacy that forged the modern world. She highlights two features of supreme importance, race thinking and bureaucracy, and identifies both of them in the Spanish colonial project in America.
The inquisition, she argues, was a modern bureaucracy - guided by supposedly modern principles of rationality, staffed with meritorious office holders, subject to review and administration. The bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state was to some extent first tested out in this context.
This rational bureaucracy was then instrumental in defining the social relations of the modern state along “racial” lines. The inquisition’s systematic targeting of Jewish, Portuguese, Indigenous, and African subjects of the colonial state helped to bind race and “blood stains” to religion, nationality, and social status. The colonial enterprise defined the three major categories of personhood in America (Spanish, African, or Indian) in racial terms that corresponded to their caste.
In this way the state institution of the inquisition helped generalize the particular interpersonal social relations that had formerly defined the colonial world. The state created categories of being that became all-pervading, used even by opposition groups as organizing banners. Abstract categories such as “Indian”, “African”, or “Spaniard” were invented and institutionalized as tools of domination to help ground myths of Spanish exceptionalism. The colonialist tools of bureaucracy and race thinking, introduced early on by the Spanish, would then be used to great effect by the English and French.
There are of course other features of modernity of signal importance that are not discussed in this work - I’m thinking of secularism, which is most certainly not a characteristic of the inquisitions - but perhaps Silverblatt would say that this is not part of the “subterranean stream” of western legacy. Whether one agrees with her or not hinges in great part on what one considers as the foundations of modernity. I also wonder about the progression of the twin harbingers of modernity - bureaucracy and race thinking - through the Atlantic World. Did they begin in Europe, and blossom in America? Or did they dominate America first and then work backwards?
In conversation with: Arendt “Origins of Totalitarianism”, Foucault “Discipline and Punish”
Silverblatt follows other social theorists of modernity, particularly Arendt, in describing the “subterranean stream” of the western cultural legacy that forged the modern world. She highlights two features of supreme importance, race thinking and bureaucracy, and identifies both of them in the Spanish colonial project in America.
The inquisition, she argues, was a modern bureaucracy - guided by supposedly modern principles of rationality, staffed with meritorious office holders, subject to review and administration. The bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state was to some extent first tested out in this context.
This rational bureaucracy was then instrumental in defining the social relations of the modern state along “racial” lines. The inquisition’s systematic targeting of Jewish, Portuguese, Indigenous, and African subjects of the colonial state helped to bind race and “blood stains” to religion, nationality, and social status. The colonial enterprise defined the three major categories of personhood in America (Spanish, African, or Indian) in racial terms that corresponded to their caste.
In this way the state institution of the inquisition helped generalize the particular interpersonal social relations that had formerly defined the colonial world. The state created categories of being that became all-pervading, used even by opposition groups as organizing banners. Abstract categories such as “Indian”, “African”, or “Spaniard” were invented and institutionalized as tools of domination to help ground myths of Spanish exceptionalism. The colonialist tools of bureaucracy and race thinking, introduced early on by the Spanish, would then be used to great effect by the English and French.
There are of course other features of modernity of signal importance that are not discussed in this work - I’m thinking of secularism, which is most certainly not a characteristic of the inquisitions - but perhaps Silverblatt would say that this is not part of the “subterranean stream” of western legacy. Whether one agrees with her or not hinges in great part on what one considers as the foundations of modernity. I also wonder about the progression of the twin harbingers of modernity - bureaucracy and race thinking - through the Atlantic World. Did they begin in Europe, and blossom in America? Or did they dominate America first and then work backwards?
In conversation with: Arendt “Origins of Totalitarianism”, Foucault “Discipline and Punish”