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buermann's review against another edition
4.0
It's a history of the origins of Western ethnology in the Jesuit enterprise of evangelizing the Americas, which the author never deigns to call cultural and linguistic genocide (Pagden gets in a "linguistic imperialism" on p.182), but the full extent of which is still being documented, e.g. the mass child graves presently being exhumed in the old Canadian Indian residential school system.
The debates among Spanish intellectuals about the nature of the Americans they found themselves ruling over sound a lot like any contemporary debate among Euro-American intellectuals about whom to bomb next. In place of spurious allegations of cannibalism you can just insert a complaint that the enemy is using 'human shields' or 'developing weapons of mass destruction'. Francisco de Vitoria even argued that the Spanish had a right to treat the Americans like serfs because the Americans violated the natural law -- 'love thy neighbor' -- by being inhospitable to their new neighbors, who were merely extending a friendly greeting when they kept forcing the existing tenants onto encomiendas. It strikes me as roughly analogous to the contemporary policy: 'They hate us for our freedom, so we'll occupy them until they love us.' But then why would I expect that logic to ever change? Who will liberate empire from the timelessness of its own inverted rationalizations?
The writing is really quite good and frequently engaging, but I'm going to dock a star for the subject matter's endless turbidity in the waves of this or that author's application of Aristotelian logic to their categorizations of slaves and barbarians. It might be a better book if those tedious and repetitive arguments had been pulled out into a separate chapter for comparison, to see what meaning can be teased out of the thinkers' (often seemingly trivial) differences.
The debates among Spanish intellectuals about the nature of the Americans they found themselves ruling over sound a lot like any contemporary debate among Euro-American intellectuals about whom to bomb next. In place of spurious allegations of cannibalism you can just insert a complaint that the enemy is using 'human shields' or 'developing weapons of mass destruction'. Francisco de Vitoria even argued that the Spanish had a right to treat the Americans like serfs because the Americans violated the natural law -- 'love thy neighbor' -- by being inhospitable to their new neighbors, who were merely extending a friendly greeting when they kept forcing the existing tenants onto encomiendas. It strikes me as roughly analogous to the contemporary policy: 'They hate us for our freedom, so we'll occupy them until they love us.' But then why would I expect that logic to ever change? Who will liberate empire from the timelessness of its own inverted rationalizations?
The writing is really quite good and frequently engaging, but I'm going to dock a star for the subject matter's endless turbidity in the waves of this or that author's application of Aristotelian logic to their categorizations of slaves and barbarians. It might be a better book if those tedious and repetitive arguments had been pulled out into a separate chapter for comparison, to see what meaning can be teased out of the thinkers' (often seemingly trivial) differences.
lukescalone's review against another edition
3.0
This is a very smart book, although I'm not certain that the subtitle is particularly suitable. The book question that looms over the book is: "How did the Spanish legitimate their rule in America during the 16th century?" Pagden offers a thorough intellectual history shot through with Aristotelian psychology and bitter debates by Spanish intellectuals. The story goes something like this:
When the Spanish first arrived in the Americas, they weren't sure what to make of its life--whether fauna, flora, or human. Initially, they believed they were in Asia and classified plants and animals according to European systems. However, when things did not fit, the categories could be modified, allowing them to bring things like tomatoes and llamas into their sense of the world. Recognition that America was an entirely new continent did not drastically change their systems of classification, but it did raise new questions about how to classify the humans there. In legitimating their rule, the Spanish argued that indigenous peoples in the Americas were "natural slaves," not fully formed and therefore fully subject to Spanish rule.
This suited Spanish authorities well, as it gave them free reign to do whatever they wanted in the region. However, as news about Spanish brutality to indigenous peoples became more prominent in Spain, intellectuals in universities effectively rebelled and sought out new ways of legitimating Spanish rule while minimizing the amount of damage that might be done to American Indians. Likely the most important intellectual who sought to transform the Spanish system was Bartolomé de las Casas--who lived in the Americas and hired Mexica assistants, although he treated them badly--while the most important intellectual who sought to maintain the current order was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda--who lived most of his life in Southern Italy and never crossed the Atlantic.
Ultimately, Bartolomé de las Casas won the debate, but through quite restrictive means. Rather than classifying Amerindians as "natural slaves" in Aristotelian psychology, he made the argument that they are better classified as "children" and need the Spanish to (at least temporarily) help them grow into maturity. Woof, it's still a pretty messed up conclusion, but much better than Sepúlveda's claims. By making this case, las Casas also inaugurated the transition towards "relativism" in thinking about non-European peoples--don't ask me how, I didn't fully understand it.
It's easy to get lost in the details in this book and it seems almost necessary to have some sort of sense of Aristotle's thought, at least in basic terms, as well as some knowledge about the outpouring of information that came with the Italian Renaissance. Pagden does his best to situate his subject within this context, and I think he did the best he possibly could, but this is very much a text for scholar's who know the literature. It's worth reading for that purpose, but I don't see this book having a major effect on how I see the past.
When the Spanish first arrived in the Americas, they weren't sure what to make of its life--whether fauna, flora, or human. Initially, they believed they were in Asia and classified plants and animals according to European systems. However, when things did not fit, the categories could be modified, allowing them to bring things like tomatoes and llamas into their sense of the world. Recognition that America was an entirely new continent did not drastically change their systems of classification, but it did raise new questions about how to classify the humans there. In legitimating their rule, the Spanish argued that indigenous peoples in the Americas were "natural slaves," not fully formed and therefore fully subject to Spanish rule.
This suited Spanish authorities well, as it gave them free reign to do whatever they wanted in the region. However, as news about Spanish brutality to indigenous peoples became more prominent in Spain, intellectuals in universities effectively rebelled and sought out new ways of legitimating Spanish rule while minimizing the amount of damage that might be done to American Indians. Likely the most important intellectual who sought to transform the Spanish system was Bartolomé de las Casas--who lived in the Americas and hired Mexica assistants, although he treated them badly--while the most important intellectual who sought to maintain the current order was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda--who lived most of his life in Southern Italy and never crossed the Atlantic.
Ultimately, Bartolomé de las Casas won the debate, but through quite restrictive means. Rather than classifying Amerindians as "natural slaves" in Aristotelian psychology, he made the argument that they are better classified as "children" and need the Spanish to (at least temporarily) help them grow into maturity. Woof, it's still a pretty messed up conclusion, but much better than Sepúlveda's claims. By making this case, las Casas also inaugurated the transition towards "relativism" in thinking about non-European peoples--don't ask me how, I didn't fully understand it.
It's easy to get lost in the details in this book and it seems almost necessary to have some sort of sense of Aristotle's thought, at least in basic terms, as well as some knowledge about the outpouring of information that came with the Italian Renaissance. Pagden does his best to situate his subject within this context, and I think he did the best he possibly could, but this is very much a text for scholar's who know the literature. It's worth reading for that purpose, but I don't see this book having a major effect on how I see the past.
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