The Spanish crown’s solicitude for its Amerindian subjects
WE, THE KING Creating royal legislation in the sixteenth-century Spanish New World
ADRIAN MASTERS 342pp. Cambridge University Press. £85 (US $110).
SEPÚLVEDA ON THE SPANISH INVASION OF THE AMERICAS Defending empire, debating Las Casas Edited and translated by Luke Glanville, David Lupher and Maya Feile Tomes 448pp. Oxford University Press. £110 (US $145).
IN THEIR BOOK Why Nations Fail: The origins of power, prosperity and poverty (2012), Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson look at Nogales, located on the border between the Mexican state of Sonora and the US state of Arizona. Sonora’s Nogales is poor while Arizona’s Nogales is prosperous. Why? Because, the authors argue, Arizona’s Nogales benefits from a democratic and pluralist system that encourages “inclusive” institutions, which favour productivity, education and technological advancement, while Sonora’s Nogales lingers pitifully under the conditions imposed in the sixteenth century by brutal Spanish autocrats whose sole aim was to “extract” wealth through the ruthless exploitation of the majority for the benefit of a corrupt minority.
It is a commonplace to blame the Spanish conquest for the ills of modern Latin America. But this argument bows to the discredited mythology of nationalist historians, who interpreted three centuries of Spanish rule as a time of retrograde oppression. In reality the conditions of Sonora’s Nogales, like those of most of Latin America, stem from the liberal reforms implemented in the nineteenth century by republican governments that abolished a well-established set of Spanish legislative measures. These measures had succeeded in creating a moral climate in which the Spanish crown was constantly reminded of its obligations towards the indigenous peoples, so much so that the latter felt empowered to fight for their rights all the way to the pinnacle of the judicial system. It was the abolition of this system in favour of the “universal” rights of “man”, in the abstract, that left Latin American communities defenceless against speculators for whom money was the only criterion.
Historians have been aware of this for decades, but seldom has the Spanish legislative system been examined in the exhaustive detail that we find in Adrian Masters’s We, the King: Creating royal legislation in the sixteenth-century Spanish New World. The book begins aptly with a sharp critique of the nationalist – or “liberal”, as Masters prefers to call them – historians who depicted Spanish imperialism as “absolutist, interventionist, centralist, statist and bureaucratic” or “failed and inefficient”, thus encouraging “the emergence of cultures of transgression that still plague the region”. Turning the tables on modern historians who remain in awe of nationalist mythologie
