Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment
2009; Arkansas Historical Association; Volume: 68; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-1213
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies in Latin America
ResumoBarbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. By David J. Weber. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 466. Acknowledgments, note on translation, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.) David Weber, whose work over a long career has established him as one of the most acute scholars of the Hispanic world, here analyzes changes in policy toward aboriginal populations that came about as a result of the Bourbon ascendancy in the homeland during the eighteenth century. Voltaire and his crowd would have puzzled over Weber's subtitle. To them, Enlightenment would have been a phrase at war with itself, convinced as they were that Spaniards were not only an intellectually bankrupt people, but one with a particular viciousness toward native peoples (Weber begins his study with an apt quotation to that effect by George Washington's Secretary of War Henry Knox, and he could have chosen many more). Yet as Weber shows, the fact is that progressive thinkers and administrators dotted the country at that time. They developed in their Sistema a richly textured view of Amerindians as rational beings capable of acting like European consumers and producers, a of thinking [that] would have remarkable influence on Spanish relations with independent Indians in the realms of religion, war, commerce, and diplomacy (p. 51). Bourbon reformers inclined to the view that the traditional system, with its emphasis upon religious conversion not as a product of civilized behavior but instead as a conduit to it, was a worn-out effort, and were ready to experiment with different approaches. They thought about many possibilities, implementing not a few, and Weber gives these efforts a thorough airing. While the full range of experiments (the activities of Bernardo de Galvez in the north will be of particular interest to readers of this journal) cannot be covered in a brief review, one of them, the mid-eighteenth-century project of Viceroy Revillagigedo the Elder in Nuevo Santander, may convey a fair impression of how far some of these reformers were willing to go in throwing out the past in favor of a better way. Searching for a fresh approach, Revillagigedo took a long look at- of all things-the English way of relying upon colonists rather than missionaries-colonia over provincia-to do the civilizing work, and decided to give it a try in a place where the failed past was obvious. In the stretch of land between Tampico and the Nueces River the Indios Chichimecos, an especially intractable group with far less unity than the their Spanish name would imply, had burned towns, wrecked industries, perverted mission Indians, and generally brought a halt to the business of empire. Revillagigedo picked as his agent for the new way Jose de Escandon, a soldier-businessman with some experience and plenty of energy. Escandon did not ban the Franciscans-the representatives of the old of doing things-choosing instead to deny them their usual juridical and economic instruments of control and putting their missions in close proximity to the towns. …
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