Abstract
Mauro José Caraccioli’s Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire makes an important and timely call for rethinking the geographical, conceptual, and political limitations of the history of modern political thought as it is commonly studied and taught in Europe and North America. And it does so by studying 16th-century imperial Spanish natural history and its contributions to the development of modernity, the scientific revolution, and early modern political theorizations and practices of government, empire, medicine, and sciences amongst others. At the core of Caraccioli’s brilliant intervention is the claim that many early modern theoretical insights into nature, society, sciences, and our collective experiment with governance emerge from within the Spanish imperial encounter with the New World – although the formative character of this encounter for Western modernity at large is immensely understudied, if not altogether ignored in conventional theoretical accounts. The agents of Spanish expansion whose theories, arguments, and actions are analyzed with insightful detail in Caraccioli’s book – the royal chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, imperial doctor Francisco Hernández de Toledo, and missionaries including the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, Franciscan friar Bernadino de Sahagún, and Jesuit historian José de Acosta – are in this context recovered as founding thinkers of a new model of engaging with the world and its inhabitants.
In my contribution to this forum, I would like to highlight two distinct but interrelated strands of analysis that I see as structuring Caraccioli’s important book. The first is the argument for extending what is commonly referred to as the history of political thought canon, and more specifically the political theory of empire. It is as part of this intervention that Caraccioli advances the book’s central methodological framing of natural history as a genre of political thought that has the distinct capacity to speak to ‘the dual ends of imperial extraction: resource accumulation and knowledge appropriation’. 16 The political theory of empire in particular, as Caraccioli further argues, suffers from neglecting this genre of political thinking which offers poignant insights into the relationship between empire and ecology. The second strand of analysis shaping Writing the New World is a revisionist rethinking of the political logic, character, and the legacy of early modern Spanish conquest of Americas. Caraccioli asks: How do we study, remember, and ultimately makes sense of this imperial venture, the consequences of which have indeed been world-transformative? To my mind, the question becomes even more salient when considered in conjunction with yet another rupture that preceded the Spanish conquest of the New World – and one that too was ‘religious, political, and epistemological’ in character: the end of the 7th-century long Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula with the 1492 conquest of Granada by Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. 17 As anthropologist Charles Hirschkind’s recent book The Feeling of History reminds us, this rupture proved decisive for the development of Spain’s imperial project, and ‘the career of European modernity more broadly’. 18 In my comments below, I thus reflect briefly on each of these strands of analysis, and then turn to the question about Islam and the role of Muslims in shaping the historical and political processes analyzed in Writing the New World, which remains missing from the book’s otherwise fascinating narratives.
Theory and Exclusions
One of the most important interventions of Caraccioli’s book is its forceful critique of ‘acts of scholarly exclusion’ marking the canons of early modern political thought and empire as well as the origin story of modernity. 19 Time and again, Writing the New World shows us how significant the contributions of Imperial Spain’s ‘chroniclers, explorers, and especially missionaries’ have been for the emergence of these now canonized histories and ideas. 20 Ignoring this important chapter in the emergence of modernity and modern political thought certainly results in a distorted and diminished account of this vital historical period. Caraccioli is, of course, not alone in raising this critique. 21 A similar call for making histories of political thought and political theory of empire more inclusive, more capacious, and ultimately more democratic has for a while also been raised by other political theorists and historians. Political theorist Jennifer Pitts similarly observed, for instance, that political theory of empire remains highly Eurocentric, with theorists rarely studying ‘non-European empires, such as the Chinese, the Mughal, and the Ottoman’. 22 Within the broader discipline, the most notable outcome of such critiques has been the emergence of the subfield of comparative political thought. With contributions from scholars professing investments in diverse geographical, philosophical, linguistic, methodological and political traditions of thought and practice, this emergent scholarship has emphasized the significance of decentering the conventional Eurocentric focus and biases of political theory. 23
While Caraccioli does not engage with the broader methodological discussions and controversies concerning what ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ in this context entails, Writing the New World similarly raises for its readers important questions about what it would mean to think with, and teach, such an expanded political theory canon. I would like to thus note a few of questions that the book provoked for me, although I do not have the time or space to engage them any further here. Over the course of reading Writing the New World I was especially drawn to the issue of the concrete forms that an extension of the political theory might take. If the goal is to include more diverse voices and contexts within the canon, how, I wondered, do we ultimately decide whom to include, and how do we include them? For instance, do we prioritize thinkers who wrote in English – like Mohandas Gandhi, for example –, or whose works had already been translated into English? Further, do we need these newer figures and contexts to have affinities, or at least points of contact, with our existing canonical figures and questions? One can expect, for instance, thinkers like Ibn Tufayl or Gandhi to be more readily accessible to Western audiences – and therefore easier to include within existing canons – given the fact that their theories had already been – at least partially – appropriated by some Western thinkers including Daniel Dafoe and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the case of Ibn Tufayl, and American pacifists and of course Martin Luther King, Jr., amongst others, in the case of Gandhi. So, in some ways, they are already familiar, ‘recoverable’, and even dear, to our canons. But how to situate thinkers, ideas, and ideals that do not necessarily have such affinity with our existing canonical concerns, contexts, or ways of thinking? Are Euro-American political theorists and academia at large prepared to undertake the necessary linguistic mobilization and learning to actually diversify – globalize – disciplinary canons in this way? Might the ‘inclusion’ of these diverse texts and contexts generate alternative, even conflicting canons? And perhaps most significantly, what to do about canonicity as a conceptual, theoretical, and political problem? Why do we need canons – diverse as they may be – and which purposes do they ultimately serve? Writing the New World may not offer immediate answers to such questions but I certainly appreciated Caraccioli’s provocation for us to continue exploring these issues.
Second, and relatedly, there is a persistent critique of the dominant depiction of early modern Spanish imperialism as it unfolded in the New World as sheer domination, brutal extraction, and untampered violence in Caraccioli’s book. While the author is careful to note the intensely violent nature of the form of domination, dispossession, and imperial power that Spanish forces indeed exercised in the Americas, he also seeks to show how this domination also entailed the appropriation, and by extension, preservation of some indigenous knowledge, even contributing to the era’s scientific and naturalist innovations. Caraccioli notes, for instance, that the missionaries, the physicians, the scholars, and the men of empire sent to the Americas to chronicle the wonders and horrors of this new world as they understood it did not all have ‘evil intentions’, adding that some seemed to have genuinely sought to ‘let the wonders of the earth shine’. 24 Others invented and practiced new methods of empirical inquiry, ethnographic research, and scientific knowledge as part of this process, albeit often through an ambivalent conversation with the native populations and knowledges that they encountered. Alongside its brutal contributions to the emergence of a new repertoire of genocidal political violence, in other words, Writing the New World provocatively shows that Spanish imperial power also involved innovative inquiries into, and experimentations with, nature.
I sympathize with this push for a more complex understanding of the links between innovation and imperial violence at this historical juncture, and think that this revisionist thinking speaks also to the conceptual dilemmas concerning violence and its theorization. How, for instance, to theoretically frame exercises of violence that claim to ‘benefit’, or ‘contribute’, to science, the collective good, democracy, world peace, and so forth, after having learned of the particular imbrications of violence and innovation in the period traced in Caraccioli’s book? In which ways do the legacies of this historical episode impact our understanding of colonial violence and empire? With such concerns in mind, I would therefore have welcomed a more detailed analysis of what is politically and theoretically at stake in salvaging more nuanced accounts of imperialism’s contributions to modernity, scientific revolution, and our understanding of indigenous peoples and knowledges that were ultimately decimated by it.
Finally, and building upon the above discussed question of scholarly exclusion and inclusion, I wonder where Islam and Spain’s Islamic – and imperial – past fits in this book’s narrative. Writing the New World indeed references the impact of Iberia’s Muslim and Jewish pasts in shaping the character of Spanish imperialism that emerged after the Reconquista, but only in passing, and refrains from linking its analysis of Spanish imperialism to this crucial earlier history. Caraccioli acknowledges, for instance, the anxieties generated by Europe’s racialized perception of Spain as ‘backward’, ‘superstitious’, ‘feminine’, and essentially ‘non-European’, while also noting the racialized and civilizational comparisons frequently made between the Moors and Amerindians in the accounts of the Spanish missionaries and imperial actors as they narrated the wonders and the horrors of the New World. 25 But the broader political context and significance of these observations are not addressed in the book. This not-so-distant memory of Muslim Iberia is neither linked, in other words, to the broader question of the character of Spanish imperialism or the political theory of empire, nor accounted for in terms of the book’s broader call for making the history of political thought and modernity more inclusive. The problem has partly to do with the difficulties that al-Andalus at large generates for Spanish and European historiography. As Hirschkind observed, the issue ‘in broad strokes’ is about ‘finding a place for Islam and Judaism within a historical space that had been politically and epistemologically constructed on the premise of their elimination’. 26 Precisely because of this, one cannot but wonder how Spain’s 700-hundred-years-long Muslim rule and Islamic and Judaic legacies – now largely denigrated or disavowed – had worked to shape early modern political passions in an imperial, and exclusively Catholic Spain. Writing the New World would have benefitted from a more robust engagement with this issue and this past – an engagement that could have further strengthened the book’s methodological claims concerning scholarly exclusions and their politics as well. As I conclude my comments on this otherwise fascinating book, with which I am eager to engage more in the future, I would like to thus invite Caraccioli to consider helping us think though this important question in the future.