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Pacifics, imaginative and literal, in world history: the Spanish perspective
Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 68e69
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review article Pacifics, imaginative and literal, in world history: the Spanish perspective Rainer F. Buschmann, Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507e1899. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, xi þ 292 pages, £60 hardcover; Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., James B. Tueller, Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian, 1521e1898. Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2014, xii þ 182 pages, US$47 hardcover. Conceptually, world history is the study of transnational/regional/ cultural phenomena, usually focusing on interchange or utilizing a comparative approach. Whereas world history courses and projects have been gaining in number in the last quarter century, their coverage has been wide but not necessarily global. Most works have focused on Eurasia and parts of Africa, with fewer addressing the Americas and Oceania. Rainer F. Buschmann tries to make world history more inclusive in two recent publications focused on Iberian interaction with the conceptual and literal Pacific from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries: a single-author monograph, Iberian Visions, and, with fellow historians Edward R. Slack Jr. and James B. Tueller, the jointly-authored Navigating the Spanish Lake. Together, these books seek to uncover how Spain and its empire administrated and imagined the Pacificdwork that helps to better integrate Pacific History into larger investigations of migration, imperialism, and cultural transformation. Much like world history, Pacific History has its beloved and wellstudied topics. These include exploration from Magellan to Captain Cook. Studies of Spanish involvement in these long-range sailing ventures is usually limited to the sixteenth century, with naval capacity and imperial overreach cited as reasons for limited participation after the early seventeenth century. Furthermore, a focus on the so-called voyages of discovery contributes to the persistent historiographical problem of the Black Legend, wherein the Spanish conquista and later colonial management is painted as backward and barbaric as compared to the more ‘enlightened’ attempts of northern Europeans. Buschmann is determined to reevaluate the role of the Black Legend, by scholars past and present, in his intellectual and political history of Spanish engagement with the Pacific region from 1507 to 1899. The author is the first to admit the difficulty of this task; when he went looking for the Pacific in Spanish archives, he found little proof that the Consejo de Indias and other administrative bodies were indeed interested in the area. Only when he reevaluated the questions he was asking and reoriented his approach did he find the Pacific popping up, almost always attached to Spanish discussions of the Americas. The Pacific was not an independent geographical body for Spanish intellectuals, rather it was part of a vast Iberian colonial program that stretched from Lima to Manila. Starting with the late-sixteenth century, Buschmann reviews Pacific engagement via expeditions, especially those of Pedro Fernández de Quirós, as well as via administrative attempts to evaluate http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.02.008 0305-7488
Spain’s voluminous archival sources. Geographic knowledge was heavily politicized after Columbus’ voyages, contributing to the general policy of Spanish secrecy toward their maps. However, pilots and manuscripts did circulate, part of the strategic release of information by the Spanish Crown. It was not imperial overextension that led to Spanish disengagement with active exploration of the Pacific post-Quirós, but scholarly skepticism of the very existence of geographic chimeras. It is this dependence of the Spanish on archival, received knowledge that would differentiate them from other European intellectuals, as well as contribute to the perception that Spanish scholars were not interested in new discoveries. Far from being disengaged, however, Spanish politicians and historians remained active in evaluating new, encountered knowledge about the Pacific as part of a desire to protect their colonial holdings from foreign incursion. This clash between revealed (archival) knowledge and encountered knowledge would set Spain apart from its rival empires. For example, in 1749, and again in 1764, Spanish officials cited archival knowledge to attempt to halt British expeditions. They were successful in 1749, not so later in the century. Even into the nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals relied on their deep archival holdings to prove their claims to the Pacific as an extension of the Americas, as the examples of historians José Vargas Ponce and Martín Fernández Navarette show. Unlike the British and French, there was little Spanish appreciation for non-evangelical or political ethnography, as it was seen as less useful for colonial administration. This is not to say that the Spanish were closed to new information entirely; they did embrace chronometers as well as plan surveying and botany expeditions. Political tensions and print censorship often led, however, to limited publication, keeping Spanish concepts from circulating outside an elite circle of Spanish savants. Furthermore, these cartographic and navigational innovations were combined with revealed knowledge aimed at emphasizing the novelty of the Americas. The Spanish did not want to portray the Pacific as a new and separate sea of islands, as the Franco-British did. The travels of Alexander von Humboldt constituted an extra-Spanish rediscovery of the Americas, but his publications came just as Spain was losing the ‘terrestrial anchor’ (p. 185) to its Pacific empire. After the independence movements in the Americas, Spanish intellectuals would shift their approach to embracing the Pacific as a sea of islands, claiming Spanish Micronesia in the face of German encroachment. However, the Spanish-American War ended all conceptions of the Spanish Lake in 1899. Such a short summary does not do justice to Buschmann’s extensive research and detailed narrative covering four centuries. He is at his best when tracing ‘Spanish intellectuals’ proactive defense of their possessions with the pen as well as the sword’,
Review article / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 68e69
putting him in line with other scholars in recent years who stress ‘a vibrant rather than declining empire throughout the eighteenth century’ (p. 9). His novelty is to refocus the more general reevaluation of Spanish intellectual vitality on the Mar del Sur, showing ‘the Pacific, island as well as littoral, as a nexus of global historical concerns’ (p. 9). Covering such a long period of time, however, leads certain points to be under-analyzed. The largest of these points is the complicated bugbear of Spanish publication, or the lack thereof. While Buschmann argues successfully that Spanish intellectuals were able to access foreign accounts and reinterpret them, there is not a sustained interrogation as to why the Spanish Crown chose to pursue internal reports and diplomatic channels instead of entering into publication, the preferred medium of geographic claim for the French and British. If the Spanish were so dedicated to defending their claims, why time and again did the state censor the critical engagement of its scholars? Possible answers are touched upon throughout the monograph, yet a more direct explanation as to why the Spanish state did not succeed in disseminating their competing version of the Pacific could use more clarification. More broadly, the dichotomy between revealed (archival) and encountered knowledge, while a helpful analytical device, makes it difficult to see how those approaches interacted as well. Part of this polarization between types of knowledge may stem from the fact that ideas and individuals are often reintroduced between chapters, a repetition which distracts, hardens the argument, and hides the nuances in the epistemological thesis. These critiques arise from possible editing issues, but also from the expansive, yet concise, nature of the narrative. This scope and writing style is generally to be lauded, but causes some lingering questions nevertheless. Of course, one book cannot do everything, nor should it attempt to do so. As Buschmann states in his introduction, his monograph primarily discusses an intellectual Pacific that has political ramifications, but admits that there is little about the lived experience of the Pacific, especially its indigenous inhabitants. In Navigating the Spanish Lake, Buschmann, Slack, and Teller rehash Buschmann’s conceptual Pacific, tempering it with a literal Pacific as well. This literal Pacific is defined by the creation of and competition (European and Asian) with the Manila Galleon trade, as well as Spanish colonization of the Marianas and other island groups. The imagined Pacific stems largely from ideas explained in Buschmann’s monograph, but the authors add the argument that due to New Spain’s administration of the Philippines, the Spanish Pacific was largely Hispanicized, not Iberianized. This ‘archipelagic Hispanization’ allowed Chinese, Micronesian, Mexican, and a few peninsulares to forge new, dynamic cultural ties that still have echoes today. Chapters two and the epilogue offer distilled versions of Iberian Visions. Chapter one takes a macrohistorical approach, explaining the political and intellectual approaches to maintaining a Spanish mare clausum (closed sea). The conclusion of the chapter argues that while historians have focused on the dreams of Europeans about Pacific islands, the islanders themselves had different views of their geographical features. Whereas islands may have been
69
isolated in European minds, they were not in indigenous ways of knowing. This idea of preserving indigenous agency, so important to recent Pacific Studies, is repeated in chapter four, which discusses the local and global forces that combined uniquely to shape the culture of the Marianas from the time of European contact. Chamorros and others who live on the Marianas, navigate different cultural and historical intersections in their quotidian lives, as shown through an examination of religion, surname patterns, and demography. Chapter three offers a smaller-scale focus on the creation of a Chinese Mestizo regiment in the Philippines, the Real Príncipe of Tondo, offering a critical analysis of the construction of race in the process. Even the history of one regiment reveals the global currents that pass through the early modern Pacific, showing how ‘Manila was an Asian city wearing a European mask’ (p. 63). Such observations about cultural transmission and transformation, and their effects in the lives of Chamorros, Chinese mestizos, and Spanish intellectuals, are explained lucidly throughout the short volume. The mixture of historical methodologies and approachesdcultural, military, intellectualdmake this an excellent choice for a World History, Pacific History, or global Historical Geography survey course. Whereas the overview nature of the book does not allow for indigenous voices to necessarily express themselves, their inclusion alongside other peoples, as well as the discussion of violence in chapters three and four, make the book topical for those interested in teaching history from below. Iberian Visions, by contrast, is most likely to interest advanced researchers working on corollary topics. Both books, although not comparative in their methodologies, challenge other scholars to more precisely interrogate just what makes oceanic basins unique, and what ties them to the littoral or the continental. Together, the texts effectively challenge the geographical limitations adopted in practice by Atlantic History in the past two decades. The focus on transmission, transaction, and transformation that have made Atlantic History so impactful is not a methodology that should be, or can be, limited to the Atlantic Basin. As Buschmann, Teller, and Slack explain, ‘The history of the Marianas and the Philippines manifests the history of Pacific islands, no longer Atlantic but world history’ (p. 28). This is not to argue that all history is World History, nor that Atlantic History should fold in a more global focus. It is simply to comment, alongside the authors of these two volumes, that it is the scholar’s job to question the geographical constraints they place on their fields of study, not to mention to question how peoples in the past have created their own geographical constructs. Both of these books show competing versions of the Pacific: Franco-British, Iberian, Hispanic, Chamorro, etc. Showing the divergence and convergence of how humans shape space, and how space shapes humans, suggests that these books could be used fruitfully to start discussions focused on the Pacific specifically, and global interactions more generally. Katherine Parker University of Pittsburgh, USA
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review article Pacifics, imaginative and literal, in world history: the Spanish perspective Rainer F. Buschmann, Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507e1899. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, xi þ 292 pages, £60 hardcover; Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack Jr., James B. Tueller, Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian, 1521e1898. Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2014, xii þ 182 pages, US$47 hardcover. Conceptually, world history is the study of transnational/regional/ cultural phenomena, usually focusing on interchange or utilizing a comparative approach. Whereas world history courses and projects have been gaining in number in the last quarter century, their coverage has been wide but not necessarily global. Most works have focused on Eurasia and parts of Africa, with fewer addressing the Americas and Oceania. Rainer F. Buschmann tries to make world history more inclusive in two recent publications focused on Iberian interaction with the conceptual and literal Pacific from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries: a single-author monograph, Iberian Visions, and, with fellow historians Edward R. Slack Jr. and James B. Tueller, the jointly-authored Navigating the Spanish Lake. Together, these books seek to uncover how Spain and its empire administrated and imagined the Pacificdwork that helps to better integrate Pacific History into larger investigations of migration, imperialism, and cultural transformation. Much like world history, Pacific History has its beloved and wellstudied topics. These include exploration from Magellan to Captain Cook. Studies of Spanish involvement in these long-range sailing ventures is usually limited to the sixteenth century, with naval capacity and imperial overreach cited as reasons for limited participation after the early seventeenth century. Furthermore, a focus on the so-called voyages of discovery contributes to the persistent historiographical problem of the Black Legend, wherein the Spanish conquista and later colonial management is painted as backward and barbaric as compared to the more ‘enlightened’ attempts of northern Europeans. Buschmann is determined to reevaluate the role of the Black Legend, by scholars past and present, in his intellectual and political history of Spanish engagement with the Pacific region from 1507 to 1899. The author is the first to admit the difficulty of this task; when he went looking for the Pacific in Spanish archives, he found little proof that the Consejo de Indias and other administrative bodies were indeed interested in the area. Only when he reevaluated the questions he was asking and reoriented his approach did he find the Pacific popping up, almost always attached to Spanish discussions of the Americas. The Pacific was not an independent geographical body for Spanish intellectuals, rather it was part of a vast Iberian colonial program that stretched from Lima to Manila. Starting with the late-sixteenth century, Buschmann reviews Pacific engagement via expeditions, especially those of Pedro Fernández de Quirós, as well as via administrative attempts to evaluate http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.02.008 0305-7488
Spain’s voluminous archival sources. Geographic knowledge was heavily politicized after Columbus’ voyages, contributing to the general policy of Spanish secrecy toward their maps. However, pilots and manuscripts did circulate, part of the strategic release of information by the Spanish Crown. It was not imperial overextension that led to Spanish disengagement with active exploration of the Pacific post-Quirós, but scholarly skepticism of the very existence of geographic chimeras. It is this dependence of the Spanish on archival, received knowledge that would differentiate them from other European intellectuals, as well as contribute to the perception that Spanish scholars were not interested in new discoveries. Far from being disengaged, however, Spanish politicians and historians remained active in evaluating new, encountered knowledge about the Pacific as part of a desire to protect their colonial holdings from foreign incursion. This clash between revealed (archival) knowledge and encountered knowledge would set Spain apart from its rival empires. For example, in 1749, and again in 1764, Spanish officials cited archival knowledge to attempt to halt British expeditions. They were successful in 1749, not so later in the century. Even into the nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals relied on their deep archival holdings to prove their claims to the Pacific as an extension of the Americas, as the examples of historians José Vargas Ponce and Martín Fernández Navarette show. Unlike the British and French, there was little Spanish appreciation for non-evangelical or political ethnography, as it was seen as less useful for colonial administration. This is not to say that the Spanish were closed to new information entirely; they did embrace chronometers as well as plan surveying and botany expeditions. Political tensions and print censorship often led, however, to limited publication, keeping Spanish concepts from circulating outside an elite circle of Spanish savants. Furthermore, these cartographic and navigational innovations were combined with revealed knowledge aimed at emphasizing the novelty of the Americas. The Spanish did not want to portray the Pacific as a new and separate sea of islands, as the Franco-British did. The travels of Alexander von Humboldt constituted an extra-Spanish rediscovery of the Americas, but his publications came just as Spain was losing the ‘terrestrial anchor’ (p. 185) to its Pacific empire. After the independence movements in the Americas, Spanish intellectuals would shift their approach to embracing the Pacific as a sea of islands, claiming Spanish Micronesia in the face of German encroachment. However, the Spanish-American War ended all conceptions of the Spanish Lake in 1899. Such a short summary does not do justice to Buschmann’s extensive research and detailed narrative covering four centuries. He is at his best when tracing ‘Spanish intellectuals’ proactive defense of their possessions with the pen as well as the sword’,
Review article / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 68e69
putting him in line with other scholars in recent years who stress ‘a vibrant rather than declining empire throughout the eighteenth century’ (p. 9). His novelty is to refocus the more general reevaluation of Spanish intellectual vitality on the Mar del Sur, showing ‘the Pacific, island as well as littoral, as a nexus of global historical concerns’ (p. 9). Covering such a long period of time, however, leads certain points to be under-analyzed. The largest of these points is the complicated bugbear of Spanish publication, or the lack thereof. While Buschmann argues successfully that Spanish intellectuals were able to access foreign accounts and reinterpret them, there is not a sustained interrogation as to why the Spanish Crown chose to pursue internal reports and diplomatic channels instead of entering into publication, the preferred medium of geographic claim for the French and British. If the Spanish were so dedicated to defending their claims, why time and again did the state censor the critical engagement of its scholars? Possible answers are touched upon throughout the monograph, yet a more direct explanation as to why the Spanish state did not succeed in disseminating their competing version of the Pacific could use more clarification. More broadly, the dichotomy between revealed (archival) and encountered knowledge, while a helpful analytical device, makes it difficult to see how those approaches interacted as well. Part of this polarization between types of knowledge may stem from the fact that ideas and individuals are often reintroduced between chapters, a repetition which distracts, hardens the argument, and hides the nuances in the epistemological thesis. These critiques arise from possible editing issues, but also from the expansive, yet concise, nature of the narrative. This scope and writing style is generally to be lauded, but causes some lingering questions nevertheless. Of course, one book cannot do everything, nor should it attempt to do so. As Buschmann states in his introduction, his monograph primarily discusses an intellectual Pacific that has political ramifications, but admits that there is little about the lived experience of the Pacific, especially its indigenous inhabitants. In Navigating the Spanish Lake, Buschmann, Slack, and Teller rehash Buschmann’s conceptual Pacific, tempering it with a literal Pacific as well. This literal Pacific is defined by the creation of and competition (European and Asian) with the Manila Galleon trade, as well as Spanish colonization of the Marianas and other island groups. The imagined Pacific stems largely from ideas explained in Buschmann’s monograph, but the authors add the argument that due to New Spain’s administration of the Philippines, the Spanish Pacific was largely Hispanicized, not Iberianized. This ‘archipelagic Hispanization’ allowed Chinese, Micronesian, Mexican, and a few peninsulares to forge new, dynamic cultural ties that still have echoes today. Chapters two and the epilogue offer distilled versions of Iberian Visions. Chapter one takes a macrohistorical approach, explaining the political and intellectual approaches to maintaining a Spanish mare clausum (closed sea). The conclusion of the chapter argues that while historians have focused on the dreams of Europeans about Pacific islands, the islanders themselves had different views of their geographical features. Whereas islands may have been
69
isolated in European minds, they were not in indigenous ways of knowing. This idea of preserving indigenous agency, so important to recent Pacific Studies, is repeated in chapter four, which discusses the local and global forces that combined uniquely to shape the culture of the Marianas from the time of European contact. Chamorros and others who live on the Marianas, navigate different cultural and historical intersections in their quotidian lives, as shown through an examination of religion, surname patterns, and demography. Chapter three offers a smaller-scale focus on the creation of a Chinese Mestizo regiment in the Philippines, the Real Príncipe of Tondo, offering a critical analysis of the construction of race in the process. Even the history of one regiment reveals the global currents that pass through the early modern Pacific, showing how ‘Manila was an Asian city wearing a European mask’ (p. 63). Such observations about cultural transmission and transformation, and their effects in the lives of Chamorros, Chinese mestizos, and Spanish intellectuals, are explained lucidly throughout the short volume. The mixture of historical methodologies and approachesdcultural, military, intellectualdmake this an excellent choice for a World History, Pacific History, or global Historical Geography survey course. Whereas the overview nature of the book does not allow for indigenous voices to necessarily express themselves, their inclusion alongside other peoples, as well as the discussion of violence in chapters three and four, make the book topical for those interested in teaching history from below. Iberian Visions, by contrast, is most likely to interest advanced researchers working on corollary topics. Both books, although not comparative in their methodologies, challenge other scholars to more precisely interrogate just what makes oceanic basins unique, and what ties them to the littoral or the continental. Together, the texts effectively challenge the geographical limitations adopted in practice by Atlantic History in the past two decades. The focus on transmission, transaction, and transformation that have made Atlantic History so impactful is not a methodology that should be, or can be, limited to the Atlantic Basin. As Buschmann, Teller, and Slack explain, ‘The history of the Marianas and the Philippines manifests the history of Pacific islands, no longer Atlantic but world history’ (p. 28). This is not to argue that all history is World History, nor that Atlantic History should fold in a more global focus. It is simply to comment, alongside the authors of these two volumes, that it is the scholar’s job to question the geographical constraints they place on their fields of study, not to mention to question how peoples in the past have created their own geographical constructs. Both of these books show competing versions of the Pacific: Franco-British, Iberian, Hispanic, Chamorro, etc. Showing the divergence and convergence of how humans shape space, and how space shapes humans, suggests that these books could be used fruitfully to start discussions focused on the Pacific specifically, and global interactions more generally. Katherine Parker University of Pittsburgh, USA