Customer Reviews

Spain in America (New American Nation)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Charles Gibson's short book "Spain in America" was an unexpected treasure trove of historical insights about the colonial system of empire building as it has occurred in the Americas during the 15-18th Centuries. This book gives historical clues needed to understand why, even though both were colonized by European Settlers, South America differs in its culture and its political institutions so much from North America. This author shows what elements and historical trends the two colonial cultures shared as well as the many differences between them.

Among the shared elements are that the frontiers were extended to the whole continent, the continent was taken over from the indigenous population, African slaves were introduced to provide most of the labor, Native Americans were removed, or exterminated, and elaborate mother country structures were erected.

Among the differences are the obvious ones: South America is Spanish-Indian-Catholic; while North America is Anglo-Protestant. Both were built by slaves working similar crops; both had similar trade relationships with the mother country. In the U.S., Native cultures were destroyed by so-called "civilizing effects" of the British. In South America, full armies invaded and conquered the lands and yet, native cultures for the most part survived and have shown remarkable resilience and vigor. In the English American colonies, democracy found its roots in town meetings and in representative assemblies. In South America, the democratic impulse never took hold, and even today remains more muted. Concern for individual rights, which became a staple and the centerpiece of Anglo-American tradition also did not take hold in South America. There, as was the case in the southern U.S., the concern was more with "frontier honor" than with individual freedom. Another difference is that the French rather than the American Revolution sparked South American Revolutions. However, they were not sparked by mass movements advanced on behalf of worker's freedoms but rather as status revolts between competing upper classes. They were mostly disputes between the settlers in the colonies and their colonial overseers sent from European capitals to oversee the colonies.

The book is well documented, logical and provides many insights into the organization and structure of colonization -- insights that inspire interpretive analyses. As but a few such examples that piqued my interests are the following ones:

1. Spain and Portugal were the pre-eminent superpowers at the turn of the 15th Century. Like other maritime powers, to engage in exploratory expeditions financed by the kingdom, they availed themselves of the best seamen in the world at the time, the Italians. The era of exploration was an integral part of the spirit of the Renaissance; and exploration, conquest and exploitation were a co-terminus trifecta: You could not have one without the others. Owing to a desire to expand their respective empires and enrich the kingdom, both countries excelled at all three. England got into the game almost a century later, and never quite caught up.

2.The model of colonial settlement that the English (who settled North America) used was that left by Spain, not something acquired in England itself. The Spanish model was mimicked and repeated in minute detail by the English settlers that founded the U.S.

3. Exploratory expeditions into the new world were serious, carefully orchestrated, exquisitely micromanaged affairs by the kingdoms back in Europe, designed to establish and maintain control over a pipeline of wealth flowing continuously from the colonies back to the motherland. As a result, ship crews were "stacked" so that they constituted all the elements needed to establish a royal feudal fiefdom and province within the colony. The crews thus were made up not only of farmers, soldiers and craftsmen, but also of clergy, lawyers, surveyors, assayers, real estate managers and tax collectors.

4. Conquest was as much about racial mastery as it was about economic exploitation. Societal hierarchy was little more than the human version of the "Alpha Male syndrome," in which military combat served to establish what races were at the top of the pecking order and which were at the bottom. Owing mostly to the horse and the gun, and the missionaries of the Catholic Church, white European became the "Alpha males" of the colonies. And as still exists throughout Western societies even today, there was a color-coded sliding scale along the status-wise societal hierarchy that went from whites at the top, down to Blacks at the bottom.

5.Since 95% of settlers were men, sexual exclusivity was an unspoken and unacknowledged integral part of the dominance equation: White women were scarce and thus "dear," sought after, and protected by the "Alpha male white man." "Honor," and racial purity developed as an outgrowth of this syndrome and evolved into a very sensitive determiner of social class and status throughout the colonies. So did the mixed offspring of white male on non-white female sexual encounters. As was the case in the motherland, the converse sexual pairings were outlawed.

6. The Catholic Church greatly facilitated all social and economic processes in the direction of maintaining and consolidating the colonial economic, social and political status quo. Contrary to common historical understandings, military combat alone was not the primary modality of conquest, but religious indoctrination coupled with rampant diseases introduced by the colonizers. With the help of the Kingdom, the Catholic Church was able to grab up and accrue immense wealth mostly in land holding acquired from Natives who died of sicknesses, gifts, and legal renderings handed down in the Church's favor by the kingdom. There are books still to be written on the embarrassing role the Catholic Church played in facilitating colonial exploitation and imperialist expansion.

7.Encomienda was a way station somewhere between slavery and freedom that allowed the Conquestadores to exploit native populations without the guilt of outright looting or formal slavery. It never reached North America, because North American colonizers did not come as invading armies of conquerors.

Five Stars

This book was the text for a college course and I found it to be excellently written and chock-full of useful, detailed information. It is a shame that it is out of print.

ALTHOUGH I FOUND SOME OF HIS WORDS MISUSED,THIS TEXT IS VERY INFORMATIVE AND TRULY REVEALS THE OTHER SIDE OF THE "CONQUISTADORES" STORIES.

Although this book has many informative facts about what occurred in the conquest and settlement of Central and South America, I was not pleased with the author's tone throughout the read. It felt as though Gibbons was trying to say that the Native Americans were cruel savages who needed to be westernized voluntarily or through force. He showed minimal effort in describing the plight that disease had on the Natives and constantly tried to defend the Spanish for what they did. He also tried to make De las Casas appear to not know what he was talking about in his defense of the Native Americans, and that Spain was justified in conquering the Americas and enslaving their people. He also goes into more detail than ought to have been necessary in describing the romantic aspect of the conquest, almost making the massacres and genocide sound like a great adventure that he only wished he could have partaken in himself. I felt this book was offensive, especially in the beginning of chapter 3 where he says "It was clear who was the master race," referring to the white conquistadors. It seems as if he wanted to be impartial in his analysis, but when reading his descriptions of Native peoples as "cruel savages," I couldn't help but feel that he was agreeing with those who would say that Native Americans needed to be conquered by Christians. There may have been human sacrifice and war in America, but is this really any worse than the atrocities that were going on throughout Christian Europe during the the 1500's? I felt that he sided with and defended the ideologies of the conquistadors more than was necessary, and did not give a fair and equal treatment to both sides of the argument. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a good and fair analysis of Latin American history.