In the blog
posted on 1/1 (happy new year to all!!) I engaged with one of my major obsessions:
the wish to promote a dialogue between historians working on empire, most
particularly, those interested in Anglo and Spanish America (and their
successor states). Clearly, many among us reject the once-upon-a-time
distinction between “good” colonialism and “bad” colonialism. This distinction sent
many generations to the idea that Anglo-colonialism was a settlers’, peaceful
colonialism, whereby Spanish colonialism involved conquest and destruction.
Yet, despite scholarly rebuttal, raising kids in the US and teaching here had
me constantly witness the persistence of these very ideologically-driven images.
It had led me to believe that these ideas – already invoked during the colonial
period—were central also to the way some Americans imagined the westward
expansion (and hence, my engagement with Turner’s Frontier thesis), as well as American
history at-large. In this process of “romancing and repulsion,” as some
scholars have identified it, Spain (and Spanish America) functioned as an alter
ego of the emerging USA. I often asked myself: as a mother and as a legal historian
of Spanish America teaching in the US, how should I deal with this legacy?
My answer
was the type of exercise I suggested in the first blog. It involves an operating
assumption that early modern (and even 19th century) legal cultures
were much more cosmopolitan than we give them credit. Law was not a national
affair, and neither were religion or the republic of letters. The scholars of
the school of Salamanca, cited presently as fundamental to the development of
the early Law of Nations, for example, were not Spanish authors writing to a
Spanish audience. They were Christian theologians, writing to a Christian
community not yet divided along confessionary lines and certainly not
partitioned along national jurisdictions. Neither was Locke a British creation.
He was a pan-European intellectual, who was nurtured as well as contributed to
debates taking place across the continent. Whether they called it Natural law
or the Law of Nations, the law he and others referenced was a common heritage
that tied Europeans together, sending them back to Roman and Canon law.
The
independence of the USA (as well as the independence of the Latin American
states) of course introduced major changes, yet much of the old law and old
practices persisted. In other words, though in the 19th century separate
roads were taken, many of them still led in the same direction, at least with
respect to expansion and empire.
Because I
also work on European legal history (and recently published a book on the
topic), in the next three blogs, my intention is to “abandon” empire and
discuss instead the laws of Europe. There, I am particularly interested in
asking whether there is a European law that is different than the sum total of
the individual laws of the individuals European states. Can we tell the story
of the emergence of law in Europe without successive chapters on Italy,
Germany, France, England, Spain, and the like? If we did, what would this narrative
include? I am also intrigued by affirmations of English exceptionalism. Were
the laws of England truly distinct from the rest of Europe? If so, in what way?
After I engage
with these questions – that form the bulk of my most recent work—I plan to return
to colonialism and empire. My intention is to discuss the relations between
historians interested in native peoples and historians interested in empire as
well as to observe how citizenship operated in the early modern period on
imperial scale.
I hope to
finish this journey, sometime late in the month, with an entry on research and productivity,
including some preliminary conclusions on what I have learned thus far (and
what I hope to still learn in the future).
Welcome, and
thank you for giving me this opportunity!
