Creating the Early Atlantic World. (Review Essay).

Sanders, James E.

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra. How to Write the History of the New World: Historiographies, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xviii + 450 pp. + 12 pls. $55. ISBN: 0-8047-4084-4.

Barbara Fuchs. Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiii + 211 pp. $54.95. ISBN: 0-521-80102-8.

Alison Games. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. xiii + 322 pp. $22. ISBN: 0-674-00702-6.

Peter Russell. Prince Henry 'The Navigator:' A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. xvi + 448 pp. $16.95. ISBN: 0-300-09130-3.

Benjamin Schmidt. * Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxix + 450 pp. $64.95. ISBN: 0-521-80408-6.

The study of the Atlantic World has recently emerged as one of the fastest growing new fields of debate for historians. New seminars, lob lines, articles, and books now regularly appear under the rubric of Atlantic history. What the phrase Atlantic history will come to mean is still undefined. Will it signify just a geographical region--the study of the peoples and lands bordering the eponymous ocean? To what era does it belong? Already it seems there is a temporal consensus that Atlantic history begins with the fifteenth-century explorations (logical enough) and ends in the very early nineteenth century (arbitrary and perhaps even nonsensical). More problematically, will Atlantic history actually signify any topical interest--say the development and evolution of capitalism, democracy, and their discontents--or will it just unite any study concerning the epochs and places mentioned above, a new area studies initiative? The five books reviewed here generally suggest the latter, although historians concer ned with the former may find much to interest them.

Atlantic history is, of course, subject to the same currents as the larger historical profession, as the five works to be discussed here attest. Two of these, by Alison Games and Peter Russell (Russell previously reviewed in RQ 54.3:963-64), concern themselves with the material founding of the Atlantic World--its economic, social, and political history. The remaining three, by Barbara Fuchs, Benjamin Schmidt, and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, treat how Europeans (and some Americans) represented the Atlantic--its cultural history. Unfortunately for the reader, these different histories rarely cross paths; the links between the daily lives and struggles of historical actors and their representation in literary and historical writings are left to be explored by other historians.

Setting aside the cultural histories for a moment, it seems appropriate to begin with Peter Russell's Prince Henry 'The Navigator. 'Despite his posthumous aggrandizement, Henry did play an important role in opening the Atlantic World. More significantly, he established some of the trends which would affect the lives of so many in that world, especially Africans (a people largely ignored in the other works, except for Islamic North Africans). Russell's readable biography of Prince Henry casts a critical eye on the expansive Henrican legend, while nonetheless defending the Prince as "the inventor of organized oceanic discovery" (4). While, this may be an overstatement (Zheng He comes to mind), if we narrow our focus to what would become the Atlantic system, Russell has a better case.

Beyond reaffirming Henry's importance, Russell's main goal is to place Henry back in his medieval context, emphasizing his interest in astrology, theology, chivalry, the Reconquest, Prester John, and especially crusading. Russell spends many pages investigating Henry's obsession with crusading (although he was a wretched field commander) and rightly links that obsession with Henry's sponsoring of voyages down the African coast. Russell at times downplays economic motivations too much (while still acknowledging Henry's quick justification for profits), focusing on Henry's crusading and regal ambitions. While Henry had dynastic concerns and no doubt wanted to attack Islamic Morocco from behind (or unite with the Christian kingdom of Prester John), the Portuguese quickly resigned themselves, after a few mostly failed military forays against the Africans, to forego the glories of serving God and seek the more mundane rewards of commerce. Although Russell is generally convincing in establishing Henry and fifteenth-century Portugal's basically medieval character, it is important to note that Henry also represents a break with a medieval past--obsessed with crusading, the Mediterranean, and the East--to a Europe oriented around the Atlantic World to the west.

Russell's promotion of Henry's importance is at times a bit stretched, as decisions that may have come from his father, brothers, or retainers are presented as Henry's. Yet Henry did in many ways initiate the European Atlantic project, uniting his desire for extending Portugal's (and his own) political power with the economic gains overseas trading and conquest would provide. Henry and his project prefigured later developments in many ways, such as sending criminals to populate the outpost in Ceuta, growing sugar on Madeira, establishing the Portuguese fort and trading system, employing a crusading justification for conquest, fighting colonial wars between European powers (over the Canaries) and, most importantly, initiating the Atlantic slave trade. As halting and haphazard as it was, the Portuguese did have a project with very material and political ends, over which, of course, they would lose control. If studies of Atlantic history are to have coherence, investigations of the Atlantic economic system and t he political struggles over the future of the Atlantic World might form a solid base.

Alison Games' Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World also seeks to explore the founding of the Atlantic system, turning to the much-studied peopling of the English colonial Americas. Games' innovation--and the reason for the Atlantic appellation--is that she rightly insists that the English migrations to the New World cannot be understood by only surveying North American mainland colonies, but must also include the far more valuable (from the state's point of view) colonial holdings in the Caribbean. Games argues that migration was central to creating the Atlantic World. This assertion seems obvious, but it remains necessary to emphasize, considering that so many books on the Atlantic, including three in this essay, rarely consider the importance of either the voluntary migration of Europeans or the forcible migration of Africans. The 1630s migration, which led to a faster rate of colonial population growth than any other decade in the seventeenth century, she contends secured the English Atlantic while the home polity headed towards dissolution.

Games' starting point is the 1635 London port records -- records that exist as the Church and Crown sought more control over both the empire and internal migration in England. A total of 4,878 men and women sailed to the American colonies from London in 1635 (most to Virginia, followed by New England, Barbados, Sr. Kitts, Bermuda, and Providence), with an additional 2,629 travelers to the continent. Games first makes use of the demographic and occupational information found in these records. Then, in an impressive display of academic detective work, she uses metropolitan and colonial documents before and after this date to track the lives and careers of the migrants, finding 1,360 of the colonial passengers. Many of these passengers (especially the more wealthy and prominent) appear throughout Games' work, their narratives illuminating the statistical trends appearing in the port records.

Familiar patterns emerge from Games' demographic and archival analysis. Migration was first to London, then after the commonplace failure to establish oneself there, overseas. Both population growth in England and the threat felt by dissenting religious groups pushed men and women to migrate. Not surprisingly, a vast majority of the travelers to the colonies were men (eighty-two percent) and young, although New England had a more balanced sex ratio as more families traveled there. Most people were listed as servants, presumably indentured (although Games could be a bit clearer about this). These young, male servants posed a challenge to colonial administrators. Colonial servitude was distinct from similar institutions in England due to the general commodification of servants. It was of longer duration; there were fewer constraints on the master (no community or servant's kin served as a check on exploitation); and there was less connection to a master's family. Games mentions that young men "dislodged from th e regulating structures of family and parish" (94) created much disorder, but she does not suggest the political visions of these servants, the vast majority of her migrant stream, or their relationship with that other group of hewers of wood and drawers of water, the African slaves. She does point out that one's chances in the 1630s as an ex-servant largely depended on the colony in which one resided. Virginia and Bermuda, having been settled for some time, were dominated by those already established in English society, but in young Barbados (or Maryland), the ambitious but poor still had a chance to work their way up in colonial society (although the coming sugar boom would nip that trend in the bud).

Games devotes a chapter to the religious life of New England and Providence Island. The Church and Crown's interest in controlling religious-minded migration gave Games her 1635 port records, while bedeviling dissenters trying for a fresh life in New England or Providence Island, some of whom had to travel secretly or disguised as servants. Yet in spire of their difficulties in the metropolis, the Puritans thrived in the Americas, especially New England. Games notes that Puritans, persecuted at home especially under Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud's regime, had to adapt to their new role as religious authorities in America. In the 1630s, congregational conflicts in New England and the Caribbean led to the emergence of a Puritan orthodoxy which persecuted its own dissenters. In New England, Providence Island, and Bermuda, Puritanism emerged as a truly Atlantic development.

Finally, Games notes that migration did not end upon arrival in the colonies; many moved on, either internally or between colonies, repeating the pattern of migration in England. Most pursued land, or in New England under the new Puritan orthodoxy, religious space. In New England internal migration was the norm, and Games warns that as constant migration must signify something socially and politically, scholars need to examine critically ideas of community's importance in New England life. This continual migration also prevented any part of the colonial world from evolving in isolation and made the Atlantic colonies "a coherent entity to the English" (206). Yet, while English, the colonies had a cultural heterogeneity absent in the metropolis, as people from all over England mixed with Africans and Amerindians. She also traces the emergence of an Atlantic elite of planters, merchants, and colonial officials, who crisscrossed the oceans. A major contribution of Games' work (beside the painstaking demographic r esearch) is that she demonstrates the origins and everyday workings of the shared histories and intricate links between English Caribbean and North American colonies.

Games suggests commonalities between different European colonies "overrode marked dissimilarities" (10) and while she convincingly shows the common ties of the Caribbean and North American colonies, this assertion shows the limits of so much of the historiography of the Atlantic World that conflates the English Atlantic with the Atlantic in general. Simply adding the Caribbean to studies of North America is a very limited definition of the Atlantic, of course, and it is heartening to see all the other works focusing some or all of their attention on other players: the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and non-English-speaking Americans (although except for Canizares-Esguerra, and to some extent Fuchs and Schmidt, this last group figures less in the reviewed volumes). I do not mean to criticize Games here, as the coherence and scope of her study dictate a focus on English colonies. Less justifiable, in all the reviewed texts, is the neglect of Africa and Africans. Russell openly states that his book does not deal wi th the Henrican voyage's impact on Africa, but, rather, those voyages' impact on Europe. Games does not pay enough attention to African slaves and their importance in the New-World colonies (such as their relation to the numerous servants), especially given the unformed nature of slavery in the Atlantic at this time. Yet the presence of Africans and their representation is certainly under-theorized by Canizares-Esguerra and Schmidt as well. Only Fuchs treats Africans (and not African slaves in the Americas, but, rather, Islamic North Africans or Moriscos in Spain) as meriting attention for their role in creating the Atlantic -- even if only as "others" for Spanish and English formulations of national identity.

Barbara Fuchs' Mimesis and Empire wants to explore "how mimesis confounds the homogenizing, exclusionist goals of the state" (12). She argues that cultural and literary mimicry should be understood not as a carbon copy but, rather, a carnival mirror that distorts and alters the original image. What appears to be acculturation (Amerindians using Spanish literary devices and language) is actually a challenge to European authority by using that authorities' own tools. 'While imitation is often understood as a behavior forced on colonial subjects by imperial rulers, Fuchs argues that mimesis undermined national identities by showing similarities between cultures and challenging ethnic and religious boundaries that were supposedly fixed. Mimesis contested a national and imperial identity based on "exceptionalism" and "ethnoreligious homogeneity" (164). The use of mimesis by New-World Amerindians, Moriscos, and pirates as a strategy of inclusion challenged the imperial control of knowledge and writing, and, more im portantly, threatened to usurp imperial identity. Fuchs addresses these problems by exploring what identities Spain and England assigned to its others, how these others responded in the case of Spain's colonial subjects and its persecuted Morisco population, and how these ascriprions and responses affected imperial identities. Possibly the book's most important contribution is Fuchs' convincing insistence on the centrality of Europe's long confrontation with Islam in defining identity in both the Old and, surprisingly, New Worlds.

Fuchs shows, for example, how the "hybrid identity" (65) of the New-World writers Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala posed a challenge to colonizers by employing the discourse of colonialism to their own ends. Garcilaso, a mestizo who claimed to be of Incan descent, identified himself as a Spaniard who had fought against the Morisco rebels to justify his claims in Spain. Poma appropriated the logic of empire and the Spanish idea of purity of blood to argue for racial separation of Spaniards and Amerindians in the New World, which should properly be ruled by an Incan. Fuchs convincingly asserts these strategies created a "resistant subjectivity" (99). Represented by the Spanish as only objects, these writers imitated Spanish arguments to define themselves as historical agents, or subjects. Moriscos also tried to blur the Spanish/Morisco binary by using mimesis to achieve cultural syncretism and promote their own hybrid identity as part of Spanish society. The work is most powerful when s he shows how Moriscos succeeded in getting some Spaniards to value Moorish contributions to Spanish culture (achieved when such attempts were viewed as sustaining a local, Christian identity versus a centralizing stare).

Piracy and kidnap narratives, as Fuchs' analysis demonstrates, also formed and challenged both English and Spanish identity. Fuchs contends piracy began as an Elizabethan mimesis of Spanish empire, but came to threaten English trade and identity as pirates mixed with Islam on the Barbary Coast. Fuchs does not examine actual pirates, but, rather, pirate plays, which she claims show how the boundaries between Christian/Muslim, English/Turk, merchant/pirate were quite fragile and open to dispute. A similar story emerges in the Spanish narratives of capture in North Africa, which stress how one could not tell an "authentic" Spaniard from a pirated copy, revealing the fragility of Spanish identity.

Yet piracy was a complex social, economic, and political phenomenon, involving much more than mimesis of empire. The use of pirate plays and literary work in general calls attention to some of the problems in Fuchs' work (as well as that of Schmidt and Canizares-Esguerra). Fuchs reads many of her texts with probing insight and imagination, and the breadth of her knowledge is very impressive. Yet the reader is often left wondering if the literary mimesis Fuchs explores had much relevance to power relations in Spain or New-World empires. In a simple question that could be equally Posed to Schmidt and Canizares-Esguerra, how much did the scribblings on the page affect happenings in the empires?

Take the case of Alonso de Ercilla's epic La Araucana, in which the Spaniard Ercilla seeks the counsel of an Araucanian (Amerindian) magician to prophesy about events in Europe. Fuchs argues, "The mimesis of prophecy grants the conjuror greater power than the conjured" (40). Is power really involved here? The magician is imagined by Ercilla. The real Araucanians' power lay not in their ability (in fact their inability) to mimic European texts, but in their society's organization, cohesiveness, and military prowess, which allowed them to fend off Europeans for centuries. While this episode might well reflect Ercilla's own "ambivalence about imperial expansion" (45), it does not seem related to colonial power dynamics. More convincing is Fuchs' innovative argument that the Araucanian threat in Chile to empire reinforced and reflected Spanish fears of a still potent and challenging Islam in the Mediterranean.

Similarly, Fuchs analyzes Miguel de Luna's La verdadera historia del Rey Don Rodrigo, which celebrates the Moorish conquest of Spain, as a mimesis of a tradition of invented histories, one that inverts the usual Spanish deprecation of their Moorish past. Fuchs' interpretation is innovative and learned, but she needs to demonstrate if these literary adventures had any larger effect. After all, as she notes, the Moriscos were expelled. While it is important to show alternative readings, one must be careful not to underestimate the success of empire and the creation of an imperial identity that while challenged and fractured (as Fuchs suggests) still functioned for many Spanish (and English) colonialists and especially the centralizing state.

Perhaps all this is beyond Fuchs' intent or interest. Yet her own work does show how literary and temporal power mixed, as when Spain banned romances in the New World due to the fear Amerindians would not distinguish between fantastic and authoritative texts, particularly religious texts, and thus Spanish rulers and missionaries would lose a part of their arsenal of power. Similarly, Russell notes how the Portuguese made a policy of kidnapping Africans they came across in their voyages to serve as translators. Schmidt describes how Jan Huygen van Linscho ten's publication of navigation directions to the East Indies (he had traveled to Goa) opened up that world to the Dutch. Early on, the future of the Atlantic World--who would control it and what it would mean--was tightly linked with control of knowledge and representation and the power that knowledge engendered. Yet most of the time these connections are merely suggested (or stated) rather than explained and explored.

As with Fuchs, Benjamin Schmidt's Innocence Abroad also deals with representations of the Atlantic World, though focusing on the Dutch. Schmidt argues that the Dutch vision of the New World reflected as much about the Dutch, their politics and identity, as about the Americas--indeed the Dutch imagined the New World before ever venturing there. The Dutch used the image of Spanish tyranny over Amerindians to illuminate their own struggles with the Spanish in the Netherlands and to create their own "imagined community" (xxiii).

In the early sixteenth century, Dutch writers, editors, and printers celebrated the astounding deeds of Spanish adventurers and missionaries. However, by the 1550s, competition over the Americas led to competing narratives about the New World, while the emergence of the Reformation and Calvinism intensified tensions with the Spanish. The French and Italians first attempted to "maneuver the 'noble savage' of the New World to attack ignoble practices of the Old" (43). The Dutch began to present the New World as a Golden Age of innocent (if cannibal) Amerindians and rapacious Spaniards. The Dutch then used Spanish tyranny in the New World to justify their own revolt against Habsburg rule in the 1560s and 1570s. The Dutch argued that they would suffer the same fate as the Amerindians, and indeed already suffered similar repression, including the Inquisition and the violation of their privileges and properties. They portrayed the Duke of Alba as a conquistador. Interestingly, the Spanish themselves may have used t he analogy--they needed to govern the unruly Netherlands like the New World (although this is less clear as the Dutch invented so many forgeries in which the Spanish plot to depopulate and enslave the Netherlands).

By the 1580s and 1590s, representation shifted from just Spanish tyranny to also emphasize the wealth and potential value of America, as now a truce with Spain seemed more likely. These visions inspired the Dutch to travel into the New World and make contact with the Amerindians they had so intricately imagined as religious-freedom-seeking-Dutch-like traders. By the early 1600s, those wanting to continue war with Spain argued that extending combat to the Americas would defeat the source of Spanish wealth (used to fund military operations in the Netherlands), while helping and sustaining the oppressed Amerindians. The Dutch also had planned a hypothetical alliance with Islam: "Better a Turk than a Papist" (though at other times they cast the Turks, a la Fuchs, as a tyrannical "other") (104).

But Amerindians made better allies than the Turks rhetorically, as they had no problematic historical or religious identity -- they were a blank slate for the Dutch imagination. Of course, when the Dutch actually tried to unite with the Araucanians of Chile, they failed miserably. Real and imagined Amerindians had little in common.

In the 1620s and 1630s the Dutch abandoned the trope of American innocence (and ideas of alliance with Amerindians), as they began their own colonial efforts. Some Dutch continued to demonize the Spanish and urge continued warfare, but added a new focus on potential New-World profits. However, America also began to appear threatening to Dutch propriety for many writers. By the 1650s, many Dutch viewed the West Indian Company as incompetent, corrupt, and tyrannical; they cast its products of sugar and tobacco as vain and debilitating luxuries. Finally, by the late seventeenth century, the British and French (with whom the Dutch were at war) replaced the Spanish as New-World villains (Spain now became a victim, like the Dutch, of English pirates).

Schmidt's book is expansive, well thought out, supremely well documented, and sumptuously illustrated. Throughout he shows the importance of the Atlantic World to forming European identity in the understudied Dutch case. However, he does leave some interesting questions unasked. How did the Dutch represent (or fail to represent) images of Dutch tyranny (torture and exploitation of Amerindians) and how much effect did this have? If the image of innocent America was so crucial to creating Dutch identity, how did this startling reversal, after the Dutch became the colonizers, affect them? How did the slave trade fit with ideas of innocence after the Dutch captured the Portuguese El Mina trading post on the Gold Coast?

The importance of interpreting the New World went far beyond the Dutch struggle to write meaningful (for them) histories of the Americas. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's ambitious How to Write the History of the New World argues that contests over representation of the Americas shaped many modern historical sensibilities, while providing an alternative narrative to Euro- and Anglo-centered historical traditions. Canizares-Esguerra's beautifully illustrated book, based on intensive research in Britain, France, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, is likely to inspire many to rethink their understandings of eighteenth-century intellectual history. Canizares-Esguerra begins his argument by examining how Northern European scholars in the eighteenth century developed a "new art of reading" in the Enlightenment (1). This new epistemology cast doubt on sixteenth-century descriptions of the New World (previously the main source for American histories), since they had been written by Spanish authors now viewed as ignorant religious fanatics. Authors such as Cornelius de Pauw and William Robertson argued that only trained "philosophical travelers" could accurately and objectively describe new lands and gather the relevant facts, especially concerning natural history (12). This new art of reading also examined (and found wanting) the internal consistency of the Spanish travel accounts. Northern Europeans now rewrote New-World history, abandoning the classical analogies earlier used to describe pre-Columbian civilizations. Instead, they viewed Amerindians as representing an earlier stage of human development through which Europe had already passed.

Previously, an older "Renaissance" tradition had relied on firsthand reporting for historical authority, emphasizing the social standing of the witness (20). Sources produced by the Amerindian nobility were especially valued (such as that of Garcilaso mentioned above). The Renaissance focus on images also accepted non-alphabetical forms of writing as useful historical sources. As more modern Europeans asserted that "writing evolved gradually from primitive painting to alphabets" (95), Amerindian scripts lost their authority and became seen as reflecting a lesser mental state. Indigenous sources were no longer considered suitable for registering human events (as in the Renaissance) but only useful "to reconstruct a philosophical history of the mind" (113). Of course, this is the same goal of Canizares-Esguerra and so much postmodern scholarship -- not to trace more physical historical processes, but to follow the development of mindsets and discourses.

Spanish intellectuals neither ignored nor unthinkingly internalized these critiques, but pioneered in writing new histories of the Americas (although most were never published due to internal power struggles in the Spanish Academy and Court). Competing academic circles argued over how to best respond to the new art of reading and to write modern, patriotic histories. One group embraced foreign modernity and textual interpretation, while denigrating Amerindian sources, but refrained from critiquing Spain. The other group criticized the Spanish present, but embraced the Spanish humanist past, and to some extent the historical sources Northern Europeans rejected. The Spanish scholars used the new tools of internal textual analysis to defend against charges of genocide and Northern European critiques of the Spanish mind (thereby also defending Spanish colonialism against British, French, and Dutch intrusions).

Out of these debates, Canizares-Esguerra argues, emerged many of the historiographic developments attributed to Leopold von Ranke. Canizares-Esguerra makes the fascinating claim that many of these ideas were first elaborated in Spain. "If anybody in Europe should be either praised or denounced for introducing a positivist obsession with painstaking archival research as a precondition for writing history, it is [Juan Bautista] Munoz" (193). During this time the Spanish created the Royal Academy of History and the massive Archive of the Indies, celebrating the primacy of archival versus published sources, which were seen as too contaminated by propa ganda. Yet Canizares-Esguerra does not deal with the implications of the fact that many of the authors he studies were not published, and hence while he traces their mindset, he needs to theorize more about how influential his thinkers actually were.

Meanwhile, in the New World (or New Spain) a "patriotic" creole historiography emerged, celebrating colonially produced knowledge and learning. Creole clerics and expelled Jesuits pioneered this "patriotic epistemology" (204). They longed for the aristocratic politics of the ancien regime (not for a new nation) by celebrating the precolonial past and the accomplishment of the Church and creole scholars. In writing their histories, they dismissed the accounts of Amerindian and Spanish commoners, but celebrated the testimonies of indigenous or clerical, creole elites.

By returning to a humanist tradition of respect for witnesses of high social standing, Canizares-Esguerra argues this project was a critique of the new Enlightenment epistemology that rejected non-philosophical accounts, no matter the author's social location. This critique went much further, however, also dismissing the system building and speculation of Northern European writers, while appropriating the "new art of reading" to examine internal contradictions in texts. Equally important, the Spanish and Spanish-American "patriotic epistemology" criticized foreign travel accounts as misleading and facile, produced by outsiders that could not understand the culture and languages of the areas through which they wandered and who had been duped by their Amerindian informants. This critique, Canizares-Esguerra declares, prefigured postcolonial studies. Gacetas de literatura was founded in 1788 in order "to demonstrate the epistemological limitations of outsiders in comprehending the nature and history of the New W orld" (282). Northern European Enlightenment language and controversies were nor simply transferred to Spain and the Americas; writers used these ideas, but also developed in their colonial environment a critique of Eurocentric epistemologies.

The last section of this work describes a "Spanish American baroque" paradigm (306) -- a tradition of reading religious images as hieroglyphic and Neoplatonic symbols. Canizares-Esguerra argues that the significance of these "baroque" writers has been ignored because of their strange historical interpretations, but scholars have in consequence overlooked "the aggressive modernity" of the critiques produced by the Spanish-American baroque (320). For example, Jose Ignacio Borunda advanced "modern views" by claiming the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe was not etched by God on an Amerindian's cloak, but brought by Sr. Thomas from the Orient to teach Amerindians Christianity (319). Yet Canizares-Esguerra never explains why this is "modern" except that it served "to undermine the authority of tradition" and to denigrate indigenous texts as useless, much as "modern" Northern European (and many Spanish) scholars had done (319). Similarly, Ramon Ordonez y Aguiar posited the Mayan ruined city of Palenque had been a multiethnic international commercial hub bearing Moorish, Roman, Hebrew, and Egyptian influence; in addition it could be identified as the biblical city of Ophir (he also sought to prove the Maya Popul Vuh was a distorted copy of the Pentateuch). Whether these interpretations "were wrong is beside the point" (344). Canizares-Esguerra states that these two baroque thinkers and the practitioners of "patriotic epistemologies" could be useful today in order to "begin decentering the Euro- and Anglocentric models that dominate the field" (344).

Canizares-Esguerra celebrates the Spanish-American critique of the Enlightenment as creating an epistemology that might inspire today's scholars, while noting how this critique "reinforced the corporate privileges of ancien regime polities" (267). If we look forward to the nineteenth century, however, the aristocratic Spanish humanist vision he champions became associated with conservative visions to regenerate the nation-state by embracing elite Spanish culture, while ostracizing Amerindian, Afro-Latin American, and radical republican elements. "Patriotic epistemologies" may well have engendered a tradition in which postcolonial elites cast themselves as victims to foreign powers, while eliding the power and privileges of their own positions vis-a-vis subalterns in their societies. (See Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, "Founding Statement," in The Postmodern Debate in Latin America [1995].) New works on nineteenth-century popular politics across Latin America have shown how popular liberals seized "En lightenment" concepts, made them their own, and accomplished much. So while it does seem elites could do much with their patriotic epistemologies (such as rejecting Eurocentrism) they also excluded, as Canizares-Esguerra notes, almost all contemporary mestizos and Amerindians (while only lionizing those of the noble past).

A unifying theme in all of these books and other works suggests that so many of the ideas and processes we think of as being European and North American--the settling of the thirteen colonies, concepts of European identity, modern tools of historiography, radical critiques of capitalism (Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker), and nationalism (Benedict Anderson)--are really Atlantic in scope or origin. If the trends in Atlantic history bear out, I suspect many other ideas and processes we think of as being Northern European in origin (including elements of the Enlightenment beyond Canizares-Esguerra's epistemological concerns) will seem less and less a European construct and more and more the contested child of the Atlantic World.

* Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670, winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize 2003.