The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World

Abstract

Nicole Legnani's The Business of Conquest is an intriguing examination of the rhetorical constructions of law and empire in the Spanish Atlantic world. Legnani argues that conquest, although it had real consequences, was a type of fiction or artifice. She reads polemical texts by Felipe Guáman Poma de Ayala, Bartolomé de Las Casas, José de Acosta, and others, as well as chivalric novels and legal documents such as the Requerimiento and contracts, within the framework of the “Capitalocene.” Drawing on the work of Jason W. Moore, she locates the origins of planetary destruction in the long sixteenth century and explores the anxieties created by economies of both moral and material values. Legnani is most interested in slippages and tensions between love (caritas) and greed (cupiditas) in what she describes as a joint venture between crown and church.The Business of Conquest adroitly demonstrates how authors used contingency. They struggled to tell history right and to depict themselves as moral actors in their own narratives. Some of this was done through erasure. For example, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo omitted his past as a slave brander in the prologue of his chivalric novel Claribalte, which in turn erases the New World and its peoples (p. 110). This leads Legnani to pose the question of how abolishing Indigenous slavery might have helped to render it invisible—at least to some segments of imperial society. Meanwhile, Las Casas used syntax. For him, ignorance—described in the subjunctive and conditional—was what led to the horrors of the conquest.Legnani also considers the ways that Lascasian advocacy for self-determination diverged from the arguments of José de Acosta, even as both authors used similar organizational methods in their texts and as both treated love and interest as synonyms. While Las Casas promoted Indigenous self-determination and the idea that evangelizers should be willing to embrace perilous missionary work and go into Indigenous communities unarmed, Acosta saw himself as missionizing among barbarians and contended that evangelical activities deserved armed protection. Legnani argues that, for Las Casas, plundering tombs was of questionable legitimacy at best. She shows how Acosta condemned unbridled rapacity but viewed grave robbing as an activity that could fulfill God's work. In his cost-benefit analysis, Acosta saw martyrs as a limited resource and blamed Las Casas for pitting the church against the crown. Because her argument hinges on how the ideas of Las Casas haunted Acosta's work, this is an asymmetrical treatment that gives greater space to Lascasian notions.The final chapter returns to Indigenous authors. Here Legnani examines the attempt by Peru's curacas to create an Indigenous aristocracy by ending the encomienda system and preventing Indigenous lands from being given to Spaniards. In what she terms “a bidding war,” the curacas and their advocates, Las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomás, offered over 2,000,000 ducats “to purchase something from King Philip II [that they also argued] was not his possession to give or take away: namely, sovereignty over the lives, livelihoods, and lands of the Indians of Peru” (p. 185). She returns to her framework of love and contends that the text denies either shared love or common interests. This chapter also veers into the Inquisition case of a heretical friar and culminates in a discussion of the pishtaco as “an unnatural creature” that “gestates within the empire's reliance on the (ab)uses of biopower and terrorizes by rendering the human body for consumption” (p. 217).One of the perplexing things about this book is its omission of some kinds of love from the analysis of how amor became an umbrella term that “reconciled cupiditas and caritas” (p. 71). Since marriage, especially for elites, might be seen as another kind of joint venture with stakes in both the moral and material economies, it seems odd that there is no consideration of this. There is no real contextualization of the borrowed term “loving violence” in the second chapter. During the sixteenth century, Europeans were widely engaged in what Reformation scholar Alexandra Walsham called “charitable hatred” in her 2006 book. One wonders how this broader willingness to persecute in order to save might have influenced authors like Acosta. This same chapter might have also benefited from further development in its treatment of Charles V's guilt and engagement with recent scholarship on the emperor, including the historiographical debates about his vision of empire.Nonetheless, this is a fascinating study of early modern discourses. Literary scholars and historians of colonial Latin America and global Catholicism, as well as advanced graduate students in those fields, will find this study thought provoking and full of interesting information about tropes and ideas.