The Conquest of History. Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Conquest of History. Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century Josef Opatrný The Conquest of History. Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. By Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. In his latest work, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara explores a topic that has attracted evergrowing interest of experts on nationalist issues in recent years, namely the place of history in the thinking and arguments of groups participating in the processes that lead to the building of modern nations. Whether such entities are, as Benedict Anderson termed them, “imagined communities,” or, according to Miroslav Hroch, communities whose birth was affected by powerful social forces, they are characterised by the incorporation of their own history – often more fictitious than factual – into a discourse aimed at both members of these communities, and members of other communities considered alien, dangerous or even hostile by the spokesmen of the former. It comes as no surprise that Christopher Schmidt-Nowara is tracing the place of history in Cuban, Puerto Rican and Philippine nineteenth-century societies, societies and period that have been the long term subject of his studies. The varied image of history in metropolitan and colonial historiographies, political journalism and other texts of a political nature is analysed in five chapters. This is done not only by using the example of the similarity between two significant personalities of Spanish and Carribean history, Columbus and Las Casas, but also that of Puerto-Rican and Cuban pre-history. Characteristically, both Columbus and pre-Columbian settlement have captured, as early as before the mid-nineteenth century, the attention of certain spokesmen of the Creole society on Cuba. In the 1840s, Pedro Santacilla published several articles in which he, as an amateur historian, described the idyllic life of the Indians before the arrival of the Spanish. These “Cubans” lived happily in peace, surrounded by lush nature which provided anything their villages needed. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara does not present Santacilla’s view of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Cuba, but he does analyse later works by other authors whose perception of the Indians of both Carribean islands was the same as Santacilla’s. What the author considers to be a serious problem with the Creole or - as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara calls them - “National Histories,“ is the place of Cuban and Puerto Rican inhabitants of African descent in society and history. He states repeatedly that their incorporation into the history of national communities did not occur until much later. The conclusion of the work does not follow the chronological account of the other parts. In the introduction to the last part of the text, Schmidt-Nowara describes certain moments of the commemorative events that took place on the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of Puerto Rico by the Spaniard Juan Ponc de León. He notes that in the nineteenth century the Puerto Rican patriotic community paid very slight attention to Juan Ponce de León but that towards the end of the century the person of the conquistador was overshadowed by Columbus. How did it happen that in a mere decade Juan Ponce de León had become, in the eyes of a part of the Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking elite, a personality whose importance for Puerto Rico was acknowledged not only by Casino Español (an association of Spanish immigrants to the island) but also by Cámara de Delegados, a body created by the United States to be the representative of the population of the island, the statute of which has been a source of no minor problem for American politicians and public ever since 1898? Christopher Schmidt-Nowara sees the cause namely in the cardinal change of the situation on the island. The Spanish colonial regime collapsed in 1898 and Puerto Rico came under United States sovereignty. The aspirations of the Puerto Rican elite for a better status than the one it had in the Spanish colony were not fulfilled, thus the man who was there at the birth of Spanish Puerto Rico became an important part of the history of a layer of society for which earlier he had meant nothing. And so...