Viajeros Europeos Amrica Hispana Xviii Xix

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SPANISH AMERICA IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN TRAVEL COMPILATIONS: A NEW "ART OF READING" AND THE TRANSITION TO MODERNITY JORGE CAÑIZARES ESGUERRA Illinois State University ABSTRACT By the mid-eighteenth century sixteenth-centurySpanish American testimonies on the New World suddely lost credibility with European audiences.This study seeks to explain this curious episode and traces it to new developments in ways to create and validate knowledge in early modern Europe. The genre of travel accounts proved instrumental in undermining the authority of Spanish accounts. Editors of travel compilations devel- oped a "new art of reading" that privileged "internal" over "external" criticism. If in the past editors apportioned credit according to the number, character, and social stand- ing of witnessesand favored knowledge gathered personally through the senses, by the mid-eighteenth century editors read accounts in the light of contemporary social theo- ries : those accounts that proved inconsistentwith the theories of politicaleconomy were dismissed.The reliability of sixteenth century Spanish eyewitnesses on the grandeur of the Aztec and Inca civilizations was called into question because these witnesseswere deemed incapable of regulating their perceptions through reason (good taste). Since the new art of reading deployed by editors of travel compilations emerged out of a close dialogue between Europe and its colonies, this study shows the deep colonial roots of European modernity. From 1806 to 1808 the literate public of New Spain was treated to pas- sionate historiographical discussions in the pages of Diario de Mixico (Mexico's Daily). In an article published in July 1806, a writer who went by the pen name of "El Bullidor" maintained that according to the laws established by the "immortal" Adam Smith, ancient Mexico had been sparsely populated, thus contradicting everything said by six- teenth-century Spanish historians.' Had "El Bullidor" known his Smith better, he would have realized that Smith himself had broached this very topic in 7he Wealth of,Aation3, in 1776, in which he concluded that according to the laws of political economy, " [the Spanish] story of this

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viajeros europeos, america, XVIII, XIX

Transcript of Viajeros Europeos Amrica Hispana Xviii Xix

  • SPANISH AMERICA IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN TRAVEL COMPILATIONS:

    A NEW "ART OF READING" AND THE TRANSITION TO MODERNITY

    JORGE CAIZARES ESGUERRA Illinois State University

    ABSTRACT

    By the mid-eighteenth century sixteenth-century Spanish American testimonies on the New World suddely lost credibility with European audiences. This study seeks to explain this curious episode and traces it to new developments in ways to create and validate knowledge in early modern Europe. The genre of travel accounts proved instrumental in undermining the authority of Spanish accounts. Editors of travel compilations devel- oped a "new art of reading" that privileged "internal" over "external" criticism. If in the past editors apportioned credit according to the number, character, and social stand- ing of witnesses and favored knowledge gathered personally through the senses, by the mid-eighteenth century editors read accounts in the light of contemporary social theo- ries : those accounts that proved inconsistent with the theories of political economy were dismissed. The reliability of sixteenth century Spanish eyewitnesses on the grandeur of the Aztec and Inca civilizations was called into question because these witnesses were deemed incapable of regulating their perceptions through reason (good taste). Since the new art of reading deployed by editors of travel compilations emerged out of a close dialogue between Europe and its colonies, this study shows the deep colonial roots of European modernity.

    From 1806 to 1808 the literate public of New Spain was treated to pas- sionate historiographical discussions in the pages of Diario de Mixico (Mexico's Daily). In an article published in July 1806, a writer who went by the pen name of "El Bullidor" maintained that according to the laws established by the "immortal" Adam Smith, ancient Mexico had been sparsely populated, thus contradicting everything said by six- teenth-century Spanish historians.' Had "El Bullidor" known his Smith better, he would have realized that Smith himself had broached this very topic in 7he Wealth of,Aation3, in 1776, in which he concluded that according to the laws of political economy, " [the Spanish] story of this

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    populousness and high cultivation [of ancient Mexico] is in great meas- ure fabulous. 112

    In April 1808, Diario de Mixico again made public an inflammatory article. An author by the name of Sadagier maintained that the his- tory of ancient Mexico written by the Jesuit Francisco Clavijero rcad more like a "ridiculous novel than a reliable history This attack would have suprised the Mexican Jesuit, for Clavijero wrote his his- tory while in exile in Italy in the 1770s to protest the rise of a skeptical European school, to which Adam Smith belonged, bent on dismiss- ing Spanish and Amerindian sources. Clavijcro plausibly but mislead- ingly presented his work as the result of some thirty years of study and meditation on Indian documents, a single-handed effort to understand the scripts of dozens of codices housed in the Mexican libraries of the Jesuit order. What Clavijero did, in fact, was transform Juan de Torquemada's baroque prose into fluid neoclassical narrative to suit the taste (buen gusto) of his time. Torquemada, an early seventeenth cen- tury friar, had summarized a century of Franciscan scholarship on Meso- american history and had collated dozens of prc- and post-conquest indigenous sources written by rival Nahua nations in Amerindian scripts and in the Roman alphabet. Torquemada reconstructed the many cycles of civilization that preceded the Aztec as he chastised Francisco L6pez de G6mara, jos6 de Acosta, and Antonio de Herrcra for presenting a shallow version of local history that wrongly denied Mesoamerica a lengthy civilized past. Clavijero embraced Torquemada's version of the Mexican past. Yet for all its derivative character, Clavijero's history proved an immense success, particularly among Creoles, white Spanish American colonists who felt politically and economically dis- placed by peninsular Spaniards, setting off a craze of patriotic anti- quarian research in Mexico. Thus the readers of the Diario the Mexico were not about to sit quietly and let the criticisms of "El Bullidor" and Sadagier pass.? {

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    In an ironic letter published in May 1808 a patriot by the pen name of "El Desengafiado" posed the terms of the debate sharply. On the one hand, he argued, there were those who thought that the histories of

    Torquemeda, Clavijcro, and other distinguished local antiquarians were chivalric novels that caused the youth to suffer delirious visions like Don Quijote. Such "novels" deserved therefore to be burned. On the other hand, there were those who had spent many years of their lives in careful research but who now found their credit and reliability questioned. For "El Desengafiado" the debate was ultimately about

    credibility and a vicious method of criticism. How could the unani- mous testimony of witnesses (beginning with Cortes) and the learned vicws of scholars now be so easily dismissed

    The debate did not stop in 1808. In 1811 1 the Cortes of Cadiz received a brief from the Consulado of Mexico City, a merchant guild controlled by prosperous Spaniards, urging the new legislative assem- bly, summoned by the Spanish elites to broaden political participation both at home and in the colonics in the wake of Napoleon's invasion of Spain, not to extend the right of political representation to Creoles, Indians, and mestizos.' Mexico, the Consulado argued, had no more than 100,000 virtuous, hard-working citizens eligible to be represented, most of whom were born in Spain. As for the rest of the people living in Mexico, the Con.sulado described them as six million orangutan-like creatures. Such venom was to be expected from a guild whose officially sanctioned monopoly on trade was being threatened by the ongoing constitutional debates in Cadiz. Not expected, however, was the way the Consulado chose to couch its argument, namely as a historiographical critique.'

    The merchants' document was first and foremost a lengthy exercise in source criticism. The merchants knew that Creoles had developed a sense of entitlement and corporate identity by the manipulation of their collective past. Creoles had long fought to present their lands not as colonies but as kingdoms, autonomous political entities loosely con- nected to a Spanish universal monarchy. To be such, kingdoms needed

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    lengthy, illustrious histories, and Creoles in Mexico and Peru had found in the Aztecs and Incas thcir own classical traditions."

    The Consulado was perfectly aware of this tradition. So the document vented scorn on Lorenzo Boturini, a mid-eighteenth-century Italian antiquarian who, following '1'orquemada and Vico, had sought to recon- struct the cycles of Mesoamerican civilization using mythology as an alternative documentary source.9 Without ever citing Boturini, the merchants referred to his work as "hallucinatory and insubstantial" and his evidence as worthless, mere ".sandeces" (follies).lo The document also dismissed Antonio Solis, the late seventeenth-century Spanish best-selling author whose efforts to cast the conquest of America as comparable to the Macedonian expansion to Egypt, Persia, and India led him to present the Aztecs as virtuous Persians and Cort6s as a modern Alexander. Since the goal of the document signed by the mer- chants consisted in denying the right of Creoles, Indians, and mesti- zos to be counted for purposes of political representation, the Consulado zeroed in on the demographic history of the Indies. According to authors such as Boturini and Solis, the merchants argued, ancient Mexico had been densely populated. But the laws of history and polit- ical economy proved these views to be hallucinations.

    The document insisted that to be densely populated a community needed to practice complex agriculture, which in turn evolved as a result of having iron tools, beasts of burden, metal currency, and writ- ten laws. Since even Boturini and Solis had acknowledged that the Mexica did not enjoy any of the above technologies, it was therefore clear that the cultivated land of the Aztecs had never reached a capac- ity to sustain large populations. Flying against all the evidence mus- tered by early colonial Spanish historiography, the merchants denied that the Mexica had big urban centers; in the merchants' version of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs was a miserable collection of adobe huts. The merchants found in the politics of human perception an argument to explain the gap between reality and early Spanish colonial representations. Self-interest, the desire to cast their deeds as

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    heroic, had blinded the conquerors, making them see palaces where there were none." I

    The stories I have related indicate that a passionate historiographi- cal debate rocked the scholarly communities of Europe and Spanish America from the time of Smith and Clavijero until the Spanish American wars of independence. They also indicate that this debate was not a rarefied intellectual exercise without political ramifications, and that a central concern of those involved was to explore human perception to account for the fit, or lack thereof, between reality and representation. Here I seek to study the origins of this curious late

    eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discussion on the historio-

    graphical authority of Spanish American colonial sources by tracing the debate to the methodological arguments presented by eighteenth- century editors of travel compilations.

    My goal is also more ambitious. This paper makes several contri- butions. First, my study proposes a typology of travel compilations, a heuristic model to approach this European early modern genre. Second, I argue that the study of eighteenth-century travel compilations brings us closer to a sharper understanding of the intellectual changes in- volved in the transition from early modernity to modernity. Popular and often scholarly interpretations as well point to the role played by the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution in the rise of European modernity. As restless minds launched an attack on tradition, empiri- cal observation and the orderly and systematic collection of matters of fact came to replace ancient textual authorities. The accounts of schol- ars like Richard Popkin have demonstrated the depth and import of the revival in the early modern period of ancient forms of philosoph- ical skepticism. To address the uncertainty created by the skeptical revival, it has been said that new strategies to create and validate knowledge emerged, Baconian empiricism among the most popular and significant." Eighteenth-century travel compilations challenge this useful yet flawed account, for they show that as the century wore on European scholars denied empirical experience the power ever to attain knowledge and maintained that the empirical collection of data was the path to certain error, not the golden road to knowledge. As I explore the criteria followed by editors of travel compilations and the reasons that motivated some of them to dismiss eyewitness reports on

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    the grandeur of the Inca and Aztec civilizations, I shcd light on the history of objectivity and the social construction of truth, a new and vibrant area of research. Third, I maintain that in order to understand the fashioning of collective identities in Latin America one needs a global framework. Since the Latin American elites have traditionally fashioned proto-national and national identities not only in relation to the agency of subalterns but also in a dialogue with Europe's dis- paraging views on the "tropics," historians need a more nuanced and thorough understanding of these interactions. Post-colonialists have argued that an interdisciplinary and global study of colonies and metrop- olises sheds light on the origins of categories that scholars have long assumed to be narrowly local European phenomena. This paper adds to the case made by post-colonial historians.

    Travel compilations are a genre as old as the Renaissance. Early modern European overseas expansion led to the rise of this new genre that sought to systematize and make available to wide audiences the experience of conquistadors, sailors, pilots, merchants, missionaries, and bureaucrats who described exotic, overseas settings to home audiences. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century compilations such at those edited by Giovanni Ramusio, Richard Eden, Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and Melchisedec Thcvenot sought to quench the thirst of audiences ever more prone to scrutinize long-held beliefs in light of the customs of peoples whose societies and creeds followed widely different principles.

    By the late seventeenth century, the study of travel accounts was presented as an alternative to formal scholarly pursuits. John Locke recommended the reading of travel reports as the main window onto the study of human understanding. John Harris, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the editor of an important early eighteenth-century com- pilation of travel accounts, contrasted learning gained through "severe" studies and learning gained through the reading of travel reports. Travel accounts, he argued, exposed the source of "ignorance and mistakes" of the ancients, "[for they] reason[cd] themselves into notions which experience shows us to be false." By exposing the reader to a "per- petual variety of subjects," travel accounts showed pedants the "folly of pursuing a single scheme of science."'3 Travel accounts, thus, seemed

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    to have contributed to what Lorraine Daston, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer have referred to as the creation of the category of "matters of facts," namely, uncontested evidence whose function in Baconian natural histories was to falsify hypotheses and to show the folly of all system builders. 11

    The popularity attained by travel reports led, in turn, to an explo- sion of publications of new and old unpublished accounts, and to the appearance of fake and fictional ones. Facing hundreds of reports, edi- tors of travel compilations had now to make hard choices. Editorial criteria, however, varied according to the nature and purpose of the compilation.

    Three different forms of travel compilations appeared in the course of the eighteenth century. First, there were those who followed in the

    footsteps of Hakluyt, Purchas, and Ramusio. They presented the most authoritativc sources in some kind of chronological and regional order. The 1705 edition of Harris's Navigantium (or Compleat collection of vryages) and Montfraisier's Hi.stoire universelle de.s voyages best represent this tradi- tion." For all the seeming simplicity of this strategy, the determination of what counted as an authoritative source implied a process of selec- tion. Harris, for example, developed a methodology to thresh the chaff from the wheat. Travelers who spent many years in a foreign land were more credible than those who passed by quickly, so too were those who had written their reports immediately after their trip, because, according to Harris, fading memories tended to play tricks on the imag- ination. Credibility was also related to learning, social standing, and the national and/or personal interests motivating the author's report." There was nothing extraordinary about Harris's strategy, it was sim-

    ply an extension of traditional Renaissance source criticism to compi- lations of travel accounts.

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    1'hings got slightly more complicated as editors set out not to make mere compilations but to write narratives that were altogether new texts, syntheses of many accounts. In these new syntheses the creation of a separate narrative out of often contradictory accounts not only avoided repetition but identified contradictions among reports of trav- elers who had visited the same land. Borrowing their techniques from Renaissance philologists, editors acquired and collated original manu- scripts, identified contradictory accounts in all available printed reports, apportioned credit to opposing testimonies, and constructed a single authoritative synthesis, a reconstruction by a traveler endowed, as it were, with many eyes. "Instead of a great many imperfect accounts, which the authors separately afford," John Green maintained, "[the reader] will be furnished with one complete description, compiled from them all."" It was this synthesis that allowed Green to claim that his compilation should in fact be considered a new system of modern geog- raphy and history. John Green's, Abbe Prevost's, and Abbe Laporte's were the most popular. These three editors wrote in response to one another and Green and Prcvost in particular fought protracted method- ological battles. Yet the three maintained an essentially similar approach that consisted in boiling all available accounts down to a single cred- ible version.

    A third, more philosophically-oriented strategy also appeared. Here travel accounts were entirely subordinated to larger philosophical pur- poses. Harris's second edition of 1744 began this trend. Seeking to fend off those critics who had argued that travel accounts and travel itself were dangerous, for they perverted the youth and "kindl[ed] a wild and ungovernable humour in the minds of young people," Harris argued that travelers and readers needed tutors to take true advantage of the trip. In the same way that travelers had tutors to "correct their extravagancies and restrain their impetuosity and oblige them to make observations as would otherwise escape them," readers needed smart editors not to get lost in a sea of entertaining but disjointed facts." The thread that would help orient young minds, Harris believed, was the history of commerce. According to Harris, travel accounts could

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    be used to show the history of global commercial interactions, the his- tory of the civilizing and unifying power of commerce." However, he could not deliver a philosophical history of commerce, and limited him- self to writing synthetic accounts of places in which descriptions of ports, volume of trade, and natural resources became paramount.

    Charles de Brosses succeeded where Harris failed. Although Brosses's was a rather traditional compilation of travel accounts to the "Southern Seas" organized in strict chronological order, his goal was radical and innovative. He used travel accounts to identify the best place to cre- ate a new form of colonial establishment, one entirely based on trade and commercial exchange and committed to the philosophical study of new places, not their destruction. This forerunner of the ideology of nineteenth-century European colonialism collected reports only to conclude that Polynesia was the place where the French should create this new commercial utopia." Pierre Joseph Andr6 Roubaud, on the other hand, wrote a history of the world using mostly travel accounts as his sources. In 1770 Roubaud argued in his Histoire Gnrale that Asians, Africans, and Americans lacked writing or that their sources were either inaccurate or unavailable and that therefore only a criti- cal reading of travel reports could provide the material upon which to reconstruct indirectly their histories.2'

    This third genre of travel compilations, besides offering the above examples of European arrogance, merits closer attention, for it helps us understand why by the second half of the eighteenth century the authority of Spanish sources came under a head-on assault. Spanish sources, to be sure, had for many years been under suspicion. In the course of the eighteenth century, for example, philosophical travelers to the Andes identified what they thought were contradictions in sources like Garcilaso de la Vega, the Peruvian mestizo whose version of the Inca as a classical polity enjoyed wide circulation in Europe. The single

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    most respected eighteenth-century European traveler to Peru, Charies Marie de La Condamine, who spent ten years in the Viceroyalty of Peru, made Garcilaso's contradictions explicit and argued that the gap between Garcilaso's portrayal of the Inca past and the wretchedness of the Indian present was so huge that no amount of theoretical expla- nation of the ill effects of Spanish colonialism on the human spirit could help bridge In a memoir on Inca ruins delivered to the Academy of Sciences of Berlin in 1746, La Condamine contrasted Garcilaso's descriptions of Inca palaces with his own study of Inca antiquities and voiced skepticism as to the reliability of many of the mestizo's observatioi-is. 23

    Yet for all the rising suspicion of Spanish American colonial sources in European learned circles, editors of travel compilations were not about to dismiss them. The fact that Spanish America was a place that had remained traditionally closed to northern Europeans made editors of compilations dependent on Spanish reports. John Green, for exam- ple, argued that the identification of error in and the reconciliation of differences among contradictory accounts forced editors to rely on "writ- ers of the country to which the fact relates" when only one or two were available." According to Green, criticism was only possible when large numbers of reports existed and their accounts could be compared and checked. Moreover, editors relied on Spanish accounts because most of them came from eyewitnesses; this was an editorial gesture typical of scholars trained as humanists. By the second half of the eight- eenth century, however, with the rise of a philosophical approach to the compilation of travel accounts Spanish testimonies lost credibility.

    To understand this sudden shift we need first to explain two cate- gories for evaluating and apportioning credit to testimonies that were introduced in the eighteenth century in the debates over miracles, par- ticularly by Hume.?5 "External" criteria focused on the character of the witnesses (social standing, education, motives). "Internal" criteria,

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    by contrast, stressed the coherence of the witnesses' testimony. Philo- sophical studies of travel compilations began to emphasize the inter- nal over the external, that is, to apportion credit to reports on the merit of the story itself, and not on the evaluation of the character of the reporter. 16 Two late eighteenth-century philosophical compilations writ- ten by the Dutch Cornelius de Pauw and French Abbe Raynal will help clarify this transition and will show why Spanish authors suddenly lost all credibility.

    Cornelius de Pauw (1739-1799) was a prolific and very influential author of the late eighteenth century. His various philosophical inves- tigations on ancient Americans, Egyptians, Chinese, and Greeks went through countless editions and were the subject of endless debate at salons and academies on both sides of the Atlantic in the late eight- eenth century. Yet today he has been nearly forgotten. Although this curious amnesia is itself an issue worth explaining, I want to focus on De Pauw's Recherches philosophiques sur les Amricains, which appeared in Berlin in 1769 while De Pauw was visiting the court of Frederick II, lured briefly as a private reader to the Prussian monarch. I argue that De Pauw conceived his Recherches as a new approach to the study of travel accounts. Dismissing those who merely compiled travel reports, Dc Pauw understood his mission to be the deconstruction of travel accounts to get to pressing philosophical questions.2'

    At the time De Pauw set out to complete his Recherche.s, Europe was awash in reports about the New World and the debates sparked by these reports. Sailors, merchants, pilots, missionaries, and bureaucrats confirmed the existence of Amazons and Patagonian giants. Reports of communities of hermaphrodites in Florida, "albinos" in Darien, and Indian blacks in Guyana were gaining importance in Europe as schol- ars grappled with new theories of heredity to explain the origins of racial variations. Revived accounts on American cannibalism provided ammunition to many parties pitted in furious ideological struggles over alternative visions of human nature. Descriptions of America's singular fauna and flora and of the seemingly uniform bodily complexions of American Indians were played off in biblical debates by those who sought either to defend Adam or to toss him out of world history.

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    There is no space here to discuss De Pauw's analyses of each of these wondrous phenomena; suffice it to say that he subjected each to an excruciating philosophical deconstruction in which the coherence of the testimony more than the character of the witness became central as the organizing critical principle.

    Consider, for example, his analysis of reports on Amazons, repub- lican communities of warrior women who kidnapped neighboring males to mate and who left only daughters alive. Debates over the exist- ence of these warriors had flared up in the wake of La Condamine's publication in 1745 of his Relation abrge d'un vo_yage fait dans tintreur de l'Amirique mridionale. La Condamine, who had sailed out to Peru to settle a learned dispute between Cartesians and Newtonians over the shape of the earth, returned empty-handed, eight years too late to have any impact on the resolution of the debate and with a dismal record to show, including one member of the expedition killed by the mob of the city of Cuenca, located in today's Ecuador.?B To save his rep- utation and to attract large Parisian audiences, La Condamine organ- ized his journal around highly contentious issues: Did the mythical golden city in the Amazon basin, El Dorado, and communities of republican female warriors, Amazons, really exist? Was there a con- nection between the Amazon and Orinoco rivers?

    La Condamine cast his journal as an attack on the conclusions reached by the Spaniard Joseph Gumilla, a Jesuit charged with the missions of the Orinoco who in 1741 published in Madrid a natural and civil history of the region. Gumilla denied the existence of a connection between the Amazon and the Orinoco; however, he main- tained that the existence of El Dorado was no fiction but a beacon- ing reality.'9 La Condamine dismissed Gumilla's views as the product of a traveler who was both too skeptical and too credulous. According

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    to La Condamine, Gumilla on the one hand had chosen to dismiss substantial evidence by reputable eyewitnesses proving the connection of the two rivers. On the other hand, he had given too much credit to the testimony of a handful of Indians on the existence of the myth- ical golden city of El Dorado. But for all these criticisms of Gumilla, La Condamine willingly embraced the reports of Indians when it came to the existence of Amazons. Since all the natives who claimed to have seen thc female warriors spoke languages that were mutually unintel-

    ligible and thus could not have colluded among themselves to deceive unwary European travelers, La Condamine chose to believe them. He thought that the ultimate test for the existence of Amazons, however, was not the testimony of the senses, something that could be deceiv- ing, but reason. Gumilla, for example, had described a snake that could attract a cow with its breath and then eat it, something so outrageous that according to I,a Condamine, "I would still be doubtful even if I

    thought I had seen it.""' Since the senses were deceitful, La Condamine based his claim for the probable existence of Amazons on philosoph- ical grounds. Male Indians treated their wives so badly that it made perfect sense to have communities of runaway women. If it was pos- sible for runaway slaves to form maroon societies, it was even more possible, La Condamine argued, for indigenous women to create com- munities of females, because they were even more exploited than African slaves.3'

    De Pauw thought highly of La Condamine. According to De Pauw, the French Academician was one of the few truly reliable witnesses who had penetrated the obscure Spanish American empire, a veritable black hole for learned, accurate reports. 32 Yet De Pauw proved merci- less regarding La Condamine's theories on the existence of Amazons. According to De Pauw, communities of females living in aristocratic republics, hijacking males once a year to inseminate them, and killing their male children did not make much sense. It was true, De Pauw conceded, that there were cases of females capable of practicing infan- ticide, but they were isolated cases. Communities of mothers killing their offspring went against human nature, for nature had made mothers

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    nurturing. It was therefore a contradiction to claim that Amazons were both mothers and warriors. Finally, to clinch his critique of La Condamine, De Pauw argued that females were capable of ruling as monarchs but incapable of ruling republics where power was admin- istered by many.33 De Pauw also chastised La Condamine for believ- ing Indian oral testimonies, for people liked to believe things that were clearly false, such as stories about vampires and demons. "Peoples all over the world," De Pauw reminded I,a Condamine, "arc the same; they are infants incapable of seeing and reporting." "A philosopher," he concluded, "should [therefore] not stop to consider their testimonies any more that he believes the deposition of an imbecile."3{

    This elaborate philosophical analysis of sources led De Pauw to deconstruct Spanish accounts of Amerindian empires. According to De Pauw, the only source that was worth addressing on the history of the Inca was Garcilaso de la Vega. Garcilaso de la Vega had maintained that the Inca kept their records in quipus, knotted strings, not alpha- betical writing. He had also argued that the great legislator Manco Capac had turned the savages of Cuzco into civilized agriculturalists, that the eleven rulers who followed Manco Capac had all been sage and prudent, spreading civilization and a humane religious solar cult all over the Tawaninsuyu as the empire expanded through gentle conquest. Garcilaso de la Vega, finally, had argued that the Inca had palaces, cities, universities, astronomical observatories, and pious and prudent laws. De Pauw read Garcilaso de la Vega carefully and attacked most of the premises of the mestizo writer, not his character or reputation

    According to De Pauw, it was inherently contradictory to maintain that the Inca had enjoyed wise laws while they lacked writing, for laws existed only when they were written and codified. According to De Pauw, unwritten rules were not laws because they changed according to the whim of the times and the imagination of tyrants. There were other serious logical flaws in Garcilaso de la Vega's narrative. The claim that one man, Manco Capac, had single-handedly transformed highland savages into civilized creatures in one generation was patently

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    absurd. The most recent successful example of the transformation of savages into settled civilized agriculturists, Dc Pauw argued, was that of the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, and it had taken the Jesuits no less than fifty years to succeed, backed by harsh policies to prevent the Indians from escaping. Societies, De Pauw argued, did not evolve by leaps, but, like nature, they were organized on the principle of pleni- tude, moving in a stage-like sequence-evenly, harmoniously, and slowly. Based on his principle of slow social progress, De Pauw main- tained that Garcilaso's chronology of the Inca was absurd. Garcilaso had argued that forty years after the death of Manco Capac the new ruler had built astronomical observatories in Cuzco to determine sol- stices and eduinoxes. To evolve from a state of savagery to sophisti- cated astronomical knowledge required more that forty years, De Pauw argued. Finally, based on his principle of the harmoniously integrated evolution of social institutions, De Pauw inisted that the Inca could not have been an advanced agricultural society without having at the same time iron, money, and writing, all technologies they lacked.

    De Pauw zeroed in on other inconsistencies in Garcilaso's account as well. For example, Garcilaso had presented Inca rulers as patri- archal yet prudent, preoccupied with the welfare of the majority. But how could rulers have been prudent and gentle when the Inca had never developed institutions to balance and check the power of their monarchs? A fair, gentle patriarch was, De Pauw argued, a contra- diction in terms. So too was the idea that the Inca fought just wars even as they engaged in conquests. Even if one granted to Garcilaso that the Inca had in fact been fair, prudent, and gentle, what were the chances, De Pauw ironically asked, of getting twelve such states- men in a row? De Pauw applied the same unrelenting critical tech- niques to tear apart all Spanish versions of the history of Mexico. Curiously enough, these very techniques led De Pauw to conclude that the Mexica were older than Spanish historians had led everybody to believes

    De Pauw's Recherches triggered a groundswell of opposition by Euro- pean scholars operating under more traditional critical paradigms. Dom Pernety, Gian Rinaldo Carli, and an anonymous author by the pen name of Douceur wrote lengthy treatises. Pernety simply fell back on Renaissance critical principles that privileged the authority of witnesses

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    and compiled a two-volume work with excerpts by sixteenth-century Spanish witnesses that demonstrated that the climate and soil of the American continent was temperate and benign and not degenerate, cold, humid, and barren as De Pauw had argued.3' To challenge De Pauw, the Italian political economist Carli argued that Spanish sources were reliable because they were "public." According to Carli, Cortes's letters to Charles V describing 'I'enochtitlan, for example, were trust- worthy because had Cortes lied, his enemies both in the Indies and in Spain would have denounced him before the emperor.38 Dou- ceur also responded in an early modern key. He argued that his views carried more weight that those of an armchair philosophe like De Pauw because the latter had never been to America. "As for the rest," Douceur maintained in a passage intended to ridicule De Pauw's reliance on the testimony of naturalists and academicians like La Condamine over that of sailors and merchants, "if all the geometri- cians and academicians of Europe say black when I see white, I just do not believe them. 1139

    In the court of enlightened opinion, however, De Pauw was the vic- tor. For one thing, he was invited to write the article "America" for the Supplement of the Encyclopedie in which he found space once again to vent his passionate critique of the ability of the untrained and domes- ticated senses ever to comprehend the world.10 There is no room here to trace the impact of De Pauw's critical techniques in the Enlighten- ment, suffice it to say that at least in Western Europe his views carried the day. I have already mentioned the case of Adam Smith's philo- sophical critique of Spanish sources written in the wake of De Pauw's publication.41 Another example, more relevant for the purposes of this paper, is the case of Abbe Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique de.s deux Indes, a philosophical compilation which became one of the

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    leading bestsellers of late eighteenth-century France, and played a signi- ficant role in articulating political discontent among the French urban "public" on the eve of the Revolution."

    Scholars have correctly read Raynal's Histoire as a work written col- lectively by a socil de gens de lettre that counted Diderot among its most significant members. Scholars have also correctly argued that this col- lective Histoire sought to offer a new colonial ideology and a powerful republican critique of France's Ancicn R?gime."' Raynal's Histoire, how- ever, was also a more modest, derivative text, namely a philosophical compilation of travel accounts. From the beginning of his career as a

    provincial youth finding his bearings in Paris, he became closely ac-

    quainted with the genre. From 1747 to 1752, as literary correspondent to the duchess Dorothee at the court of Saxony-Gotha, Raynal penned numerous critical reviews of contemporary travel compilations and travel accounts .4' He solved his dissatisfaction with all available com-

    pilations finally by writing his own: the Histoire philosophiqueY' Raynal's Histoire, however, had clear precedents in Harris's Navigantiurn and in Charles de Brosses's Histoire des )Vavigatiotis, both texts which had already set out to prove the civilizing and integrative role of commerce and trade.

    What is of interest here is that Raynal's Histoire changed substantially as it went through three different editions. It is my contention that many of the changes were due largely to the assimilation of De Pauw's

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    critical insights. In the first edition of 1770, in books six and seven, Raynal tackled the philosophical history of Mexico and Peru. In book six, he thought highly of the Mexica, precisely because he chose to believe the Spanish accounts, but he identified a tension in the Spanish sources. According to these sources, the Mexica lacked technologies such as writing, iron tools, and beasts of burden; however, these very sources claimed that the Aztecs had been able to build majestic cities, palaces, and temples. De Pauw would have immediately tossed out these reports as self-contradictory and unreliable. Raynal, however, thought differently and concluded that the Mexica was a nation of

    unparalleled genius, capable of amazing architectural feats with very limited resources. 16

    Raynal maintained the same exaggerated admiration for Amerindian civilizations in book seven devoted to Peru and to the Inca. Raynal argued that Manco Capac, the Inca ruler who had made Peruvians civilized, was one of the greatest legislators in human history, surpassed only by Confucius, who had made the Chinese virtuous without recourse to superstitious religious cults.'' Raynal embraced Garcilaso wholesale and presented the Inca as a virtuous society, one of the most humane polities in the historical record."

    By 1774, however, this apologetic view of the Aztecs and Inca was drastically modified as Raynal embraced De Pauw's dismal view of the value of Spanish sources in the second edition. Thus, the same incon- sistencies in Spanish sources that had led Raynal in 1770 to hail the Mexica as a most creative people became by 1774 the source of Raynal's skepticism. Such inconsistencies (namely, the reported lack of tech- nologies such as iron tools, writing, and domesticated beasts of bur- den, combined with the reportedly majestic nature of Aztec temples and cities), Raynal argued, echoing De Pauw, were the product of the unphilosophical, undisciplined perceptions of Spanish authors.19

    In his treatment of the Inca in the second edition, Raynal intro- duced a curious division between Spanish accounts regarding the Inca polity and descriptions of Inca material culture. Spanish descriptions of Inca roads, aqueducts, fortifications, palaces, temples, and cities were incredible and were to be dismissed as the product of a feverish imag-

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    ination. These accounts contradicted contemporary evidence by learned witnesses such as La Condamine, Frazier, Ulloa, and others who had not found sufficient extant material evidence." Curiously enough, Raynal maintained that Spanish sources were reliable when it came to the descriptions of the Inca polity. According to Spanish accounts the Inca had no knowledge of private property; land was assigned to individ- ual families to tend but never to sell, transfer, or dispose of at will. According to Spanish sources, however, the Inca were prosperous agri- cultural societies. The absence of private property, Raynal thought as a typical political economist, was a recipe for poverty and arrested

    development, not agrarian prosperity. There was another inconsistency in the Spanish sources as well. The sources, particularly Garcilaso, painted the Inca rulers as prudent, gentle patriarchs, always caring for the welfare of the majority. Yet they failed to describe any institutions designed to check and balance the power of these absolute monarchs. De Pauw had already identified this incoherence and had dismissed the Spanish accounts altogether. Raynal, however, read more deeply in the sources and found in them a solution to these contradictions. Inca agricultural prosperity in the absence of private property and Inca gentle patriarchalism in the absence of balancing institutions was pos- sible because state revenue had come from land allotted to the Inca, not from personal tribute. In the Inca polity as sketched by Spanish sources, the monarch was forced to treat laborers well to work his land. Labor tribute also meant that revenue was not elastic, putting a limit on the "orientalization" and corruption of the court, and thus on Inca tranny. 5 Since he used Spanish sources to reconstruct this com- plicatcd system of indirect balances, Raynal concluded that the sources were trustworthy because the Spaniards were simply too ignorant to have invented such a complex system; feverish, patriotic, and ignorant imaginations like those of Spaniards could not have invented such a philosophical political utopia. 52 The trope that the very ignorance of Spanish observers vouched for the limited reliability of Spanish sources lingered on. It became a key critical principle in William Robertson's History of America and in Alexander von Humboldt's works on Amerindian antiquities and on European maritime history."

    The impact of De Pauw's critical techniques continued throughout

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    the century and can be revealed even in compilations of travel accounts written by Spaniards themselves. Pedro de la Estala's Viagero universal, published in forty-three volumes between 1795 and 1801, was origi- nally intended as a translation of the compilation by Joseph dc Laporte, Le voyageur franois, published in forty-two volumes in Paris between 1768 and 1795. Laporte had offered a seamless narrative synthesizing most available travel accounts, particularly to the Middle East and

    Europe. After completing a close translation of Laporte's first five vol- umes, however, Estala grew restive and began to introduce important changes to the original. For example, he took advantage of having access to numerous new reports on Spanish America and expanded the narrative on the New World. The changes Estala introduced to

    Laporte's volumes on Mexico and Peru are revealing, for he focused

    exclusively on the contradictions found in the Spanish accounts of the Mexica and the Inca. Whereas Laporte had offered a rather typical view of the Mexica and Inca as somewhat modified classical polities, Estala echoed De Pauw, concluding that "with the pardon of these

    respectable [Spanish historians on America], I do not believe one half of what they boast."51 Estala attributed the perceptual distortions suffered

    by Spanish witnesses to the deprivations they first suffered in the Caribbean. In contrast to the miserable conditions in which they found the Indians of the Caribbean, the adobe huts of the Mexica the con-

    quistadors encountered seemed like palaces. De Pauw introduced a new "art of reading" in which the credibil-

    ity of sources was judged by whether they contradicted theories of social development. In the early modern period, as Julian Franklin has

    convincingly demonstrated, Renaissance humanists developed an art of

    reading whose central concern was the evaluation of the testimony of witnesses; it was an "art" overly preoccupied with apportioning credit

    according to the social standing and motivation of witnesses. 57 This, to be sure, was to be expected from literate elites who belonged to soci- eties organized on the principle of corporate privileges and in which

    scholarship depended on the favor and patronage of social superiors."

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    Humanists were very aware of the frailties of human perception. After all, they had been at the forefront of the revival of skepticism in early modern Europe. Humanists privileged the study of rhetoric precisely because they understood that knowledge was about persuasion, not cer-

    tainty. It was in the nature of humanists, therefore, to be critical of the

    epistemological value of human perception.5' Yet the "art of reading" they developed was one aimed at spotting forged documents, not at

    identifying inconsistencies in the testimony of untrained eyewitnesses; philology, in fact, developed as a collective editorial effort to get rid of

    reports that had demonstrably not been written by witnesses. S8 The success of De Pauw's views, therefore, is revealing of deep changes in

    European sensibilities. If in the early modern period authority derived

    mostly from the personal and empirical experience of the reporter, the transition to modernity was built on a deep distrust of knowledge gained through the senses. According to enlightened philosophes like De Pauw, to have good taste meant to belong to the party of those who were able to train themselves to detect the tricks played by the imagination on their bodies and minds, an ability that they thought Spaniards utterly lacked.

    But the debates that appeared in the pages of Mexican periodicals in the early nineteenth century and were publicized in the Cortes of Cadiz in 1811 1 show that De Pauw's views not only triumphed, but also were transmuted into the language of a political party vying for

    power and desperate to sustain a crumbling colonial order. 'I'his paper shows that the understanding of ideological developments in the colonies as wcll as the evolution of European historiographical techniques were

    part of similar and parallel developments. It therefore reinforces the call of post-colonial historians to treat the history of colonies and metrop- olises as part of a mutually interacting whole; a call that even applies to European intellectual history, which more often than not has been done in exquisite isolation from the rest of the world.-7"