Anthony Pagden Research Articles

On reading the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot: exploring tensions between European expansion and Enlightenment values

This contribution will engage with a key question concerning the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot, viz. What can the ideas and the writings of these two philosophes still teach us today? In our discussion we will focus first on Raynal’s Histoire and its 18th-century Europeans, their commerce and colonies outside Europe, with special attention to what at the time was almost a paradigm case: the global maritime merchant empire of the Dutch. Secondly, we will consider what Diderot’s many contributions have added to the Histoire’s power and impact, especially his critique of European colonial, commercial and civilisational endeavour around the world. At the time, as Diderot and Raynal gave voice to the discontents arising from the ongoing global expansion of Europe, their Histoire – as Jonathan Israel has shown in his magnum opus – became a major vehicle for the dissemination of their Radical Enlightenment. The question that will concern us here is the one posed by Anthony Pagden: What relevance do those radical ideas still have in our postcolonial and globalised world of today, where the former colonial empires and their peoples are today writing back themselves, clamouring to be heard?

To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique

Reviewed by: To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique Patrick J. O'Banion To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario. By David Thomas Orique, O.P. [Latin American Originals, Volume 13]. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 127. $24.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-271-08098-7.) David Orique has done a great service by providing a very readable and useful translation of Bartolomé de Las Casas's 1546 Confesionario. The basis for his translation of this remarkable document, surprisingly the first ever into English, is the 1552 version published from Seville. Orique adds annotations in footnotes to help readers along and prefaces the document with three short chapters. The first places the Confesionario within the larger context of the Spanish Atlantic world and provides an account of Las Casas's early life and transformation into a defender of Native Americans in the New World. The second chapter explores the specific context within which Las Casas, as Bishop of Chiapas, wrote the confessionary and the dramatic responses that ensued from his opponents (including charges of high treason and inquisitorial scrutiny). The third chapter provides a helpful interpretive overview of the document and contextualizes it within the medieval canon law and summa confessorum tradition (although, unfortunately, not the broader early modern context of confessional manuals nor the substantial historiography that they have engendered). The Confesionario itself is an astonishing and brave document written to provide guidance for confessors in Las Casas's diocese. As Orique indicates, it follows the pattern established in Las Casas's earlier labors to tie together restitution, justice, and salvation (p.17). In particular, the Confesionario ordered confessors of conquistadors, encomenderos, slave owners, and, indeed, all Spaniards in the Indies (since he claims there were none who "acted in good faith" [p. 77]) to make restitution for the various ways in which they had robbed, oppressed, mistreated, or perpetrated violence of any kind upon the native inhabitants of the land. This might even entail handing over their entire estates. Failure to comply was to be met with exclusion from the Eucharist, a meaningful threat in a society that was organized around the annual Easter Duty and that saw sacramental grace as essential for salvation. By obeying these rules, the bishop asserted, "the conscience of the penitent will be assured, the aggrieved and the deprived will attain justice, and the confessor will fulfill his duty…" (p. 99). As that last phrase suggests, much of the burden for carrying out this program fell squarely on the confessors themselves, who were charged with implementing the [End Page 728] bishop's plan. He bound them to comply, lest by granting absolution they become "companion[s] and participant[s] in the crime and sin of the one who robs and destroys his neighbors" (p. 105). This gestures at the way in which Las Casas was attempting to establish a tightly regulated system of confessional oversight that would allow him to refashion social, economic, and ethical relations within his diocese. Frustratingly, the book does not effectively describe the consequences of that plan. Orique notes that Dominicans in New Spain supported it from 1546 and that, from 1560, mendicants in Peru also came on board (p. 69). But what does this mean? To what extent were conquistadors and encomenderos successfully pressured (if ever) to actually make restitution? One longs for a more explicit answer to this question. Professors will find this short text valuable for a variety of undergraduate courses. I expect that Las Casas's activist bent will intrigue many students. It might be effectively paired with Anthony Pagden's edition of Francisco de Vitoria Political Writings or, indeed, with a number of the "Latin American Originals" published by Pennsylvania State University Press, the series within which this book appeared. Patrick J. O'Banion Lindenwood University Copyright © 2018 The Catholic University of America Press

HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE IMAGINATION IN ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES

“The Enlightenment,” Anthony Pagden writes in the conclusion toThe Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters, “quite simply created the modern world.”1It would have been more prudent to say that the Enlightenment created “the conditions of possibility” of modernity; or, more prudent still, that it was critical to forming certain values and institutions that we (or some of us) consider modern. Precisely because the latter way of putting it is so anemic, it is one of the rare few statements that would be acceptable across the spectrum of opinions in debates over the last half-century about the Enlightenment and modernity. Acceptable, though, only because it provides a terrain for waging a thicket of wars, at once ideological and disciplinary, between a historians’ Enlightenment and a philosophers’ Enlightenment and within each of these camps.

Debates on Civilization in the Muslim World

“Civilization,” which plays a significant role in today’s world, is a termthat has been discussed and debated through the ages and remains so today.In the broader context, and at different levels and contexts (e.g., historical,cultural, and political), it is used to describe “the entirety of collective90human values”; “consequential behavior against barbarism” (or simply “theidea of being civilized”); as a “vision of existence and order”; and, aboveall, as “being an abstraction of modernity and secularism.” One of the mostoft-debated concepts in the social sciences, it has largely been framed byWestern assumptions and concerns; although there are non-Western perspectiveson it as well. A recent addition to the multi-faceted debate on civilizationand modernization vis-à-vis the Muslim world is editor LutfiSunar’s Debates on Civilization in the Muslim World. Sunar is a Turkishsociologist who teaches at Istanbul University.This collective endeavor of (predominantly young) Muslim scholarsseeks to evaluate Muslim views on civilization by challenging the “embeddedprejudices within the social theory” and offering “alternative viewpoints”(p. vii). It presents “a complex assessment of key ideas in themodernist discourse from non-ethnocentric perspectives and offers a newunderstanding of civilization” (p. viii).To achieve this objective, the book has been divided into three mainparts. Part 1, “Defining and Discussing Civilization,” consists of threechapters, by Anthony Pagden, Lutfi Sunar, and Mustafa Demirici, respectively,that review, analyze, and discuss definitions of civilization andmodernity and their “Eurocentric” understandings. Part 2, “Debates on theCivilization in the Contemporary Muslim World,” examines non-Westerncivilizations, efforts to resist against being assimilated in Western perspectivesand dominance. These chapters are contributed by Vahdettin Isik,Cemil Aydin, Necmettin Dogan, Halil Ibrahim Yenigun, Seyed Javad Miri,Mahmud Hakki Akin, and Driss Habti, respectively. Part 3, “Modernization,Globalization, and the Future of Civilization Debate,” features chaptersby Syed Farid Alatas, Yunus Kaya, Murat Cemrek, and KhosrowBagheri Noaparast, respectively. The volume’s overall theme is designed“to expose complex issues for further discussion pertaining to modernization,globalization, (de)colonization, and multiculturalism” (p. vii). As it isdifficult to focus on all the chapters, I provide a brief assessment of someselected ones below ...

The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present by Anthony Pagden

The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present by Anthony Pagden

The Abject Atlantic: The Coloniality of the Concept of "Europe" in Its Maritime Meridian

The Abject AtlanticThe Coloniality of the Concept of "Europe" in Its Maritime Meridian Ashley J. Bohrer "The West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place." —Edouard Glissant (1989, 2) "The production of the unsymbolisable, the unspeakable, the illegible is . . . always a strategy of social abjection." —Judith Butler (1993, 190) When one thinks about the geographical limits of Europe, one is inclined to look to Asia or to North Africa, to the uneasy and shifting boundaries that separate Europe from "the East." When considering the question of borders, it is Europe's relationship to its surrounding landmasses that is considered the most interesting, problematic, and contested. In a volume dedicated to the history of the idea of Europe, Anthony Pagden expresses this sentiment rather clearly: "'Europe' was, and always had been, a highly unstable term. No one has ever been quite certain where its frontiers lie. Only the Atlantic and the Mediterranean provide obvious 'natural' boundaries"(Pagden 2002, 45). This paper is concerned with displacing the certainty that the Atlantic is the boundary of Europe, that Europe is "naturally" bounded there. If we think about the borders of Europe as social, political, aesthetic, economic, cultural, and philosophical, then the Atlantic may prove to be the most unstable, vexing, and problematic of Europe's borders. [End Page 215] In conceptualizing the boundaries of Europe, its edges and its fractures, its frontiers, one rarely thinks about the Western Hemisphere or sub-Saharan Africa. This is perhaps itself a trick of distance, a trompe l'oeil. When one thinks of boundaries and borders, or of limit-spaces, proximity and physical distance are often taken to be their defining characteristic. But as Mignolo and Tlostanova remind us, "'Borders' are not only geographic but also political, subjective (e.g., cultural) and epistemic" (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2008, 218). If one looks to define or problematize the borders of Europe or the borders of the concept of Europe, one must approach the study of those borders beyond the proximate and beyond the merely geographic; the borders of Europe are as much political as physical, cultural as geographical, and epistemological as phenomenological. If we look to define Europe today, we must urgently consider not only what those borders are, what they mean, and how they operate, but also—and this might be the most pressing task—how to incorporate the history of the border into our analyses of Europe itself. This paper proceeds in three sections. In the first, I explore the historical significance of the Atlantic world to the formation of what is now called "Europe." In this section, I take "Europe" itself to be a complex phenomenon, one that refers not only to place but to an entire architecture of ideas, discourses, practices, and peoples thought to make up this place and to give it its meaning. I argue that not only did Europe give itself a form of unity through the process of colonizing the Atlantic world, but that, moreover, the content of "Europe" as an idea, an aspiration, and an imaginary was furnished through the violent conquest and exploitation of the lands and peoples of the Atlantic. I hence conclude that Europe is a thoroughly colonial concept, one that is irrevocably indexed to the history of the Atlantic. In the second section, I explore the concept of the abject, as elaborated by Julia Kristeva and others, to conceptualize Europe's relationship to the Atlantic world. Expanding not only on Kristeva's analysis, but also on Anne McClintock's work on the "colonial abject," I argue in section three for a concept of differential colonial abjection that can respond to the often de-historicized and non-intersectional diagnostics offered by many psychoanalytic readings of abjection. Doing so allows us to take seriously the specificity of the Atlantic world and the process of European colonization. In the conclusion, I return to the concept of Europe as a colonial idea and endeavor, one that continues to frame the way in which we talk about identity, race, and belonging in the contemporary world. The Atlantic Genesis of Europe and Its Modernity To begin to dramatize...

Book Review: The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present, by Anthony Pagden

Book Review: <i>The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present</i>, by Anthony Pagden

The burdens of empire: 1539 to the present

Despite the long history of debate and the recent resurgence of interest in empires and imperialism, no one seems very clear as to what exactly an empire is. The Burdens of Empire strives to offer not only a definition but also a working description. This book examines how empires were conceived by those who ruled them and lived under them; it looks at the relations, real or imagined, between the imperial metropolis (when one existed) and its outlying provinces or colonies; and it asks how the laws that governed the various parts and various ethnic groups, of which all empires were made, were conceived and interpreted. Anthony Pagden argues that the evolution of the modern concept of the relationship between states, and in particular the modern conception of international law, cannot be understood apart from the long history of European empire building.

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, by Anthony Pagden

‘The Enlightenment’ was a term of historiographical art, gradually naturalised in English language usage from the late nineteenth century, widely popularised only from the mid-twentieth in order to create genealogies for modern social and intellectual crusades. Since, in the eighteenth century, ‘enlightenment’ was familiar but ‘the Enlightenment’ was unknown, the latter term can be made to mean whatever a present-day author wishes. Here, Anthony Pagden joins a long line of writers descending from Isaiah Berlin and Peter Gay with a survey written in a frankly normative tone, and with a prominent authorial presence: this is an essay in secular moralising, written to convey the central meaning that Pagden occupies the moral high ground while others do not. ‘If we regard ourselves as modern, if we are forward-thinking, if we are tolerant and generally open-minded … then we tend to think of ourselves as “enlightened”’. The Enlightenment has been ‘identified with an exalted view of human rationality and human benevolence’ (p. vii). ‘It is to the Enlightenment that we also owe the modern conception of the global society’ (p. viii). Key words throughout the book are ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. Who precisely is meant is perhaps revealed in the Preface, which is dated from ‘Paris – Los Angeles – Venice’; and this formula probably does not reflect the life-experience of a persecuted émigré.

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

Two Eternal Cities on a Collision Course?

Two Eternal Cities on a Collision Course? ERICH S. GRUEN A he confrontation of Rome and Jerusalem cannot but quicken heartbeats, trigger associations, stir mem? ories, and spark curiosity. No other cities parade the combi? nation of great antiquity, tenacious traditions, turbulent history, complex cultures, and compelling narratives. Rome may possess the conventional crown of the "eternal city." But Jerusalem has at least as strong a claim on it. In 66 ce con? flictexploded between them, the so-called "Great Jewish Re? volt" (a label, of course, affixed from theRoman perspective) that took on unexpectedly monumental proportions at the time and produced reverberations that continue to re-echo. Martin Goodman's recent book, Rome and Jerusalem, de? mands attention. * Rightly so. Few scholars have the auctori tas to switch confidently and effortlesslybetween the cultures. Few have written as cogently and convincingly on each of them separately and on both in combination. A sweeping sur? vey of the subject by such a scholar, intended to reach an au? dience beyond the specialist researcher and the academic expert, marks an event of real significance. Itwould have re? ceived a wide welcome on any reckoning. But thatwas not enough for the publisher. A subtitle was added, "The Clash of Ancient Civilizations." The contem? porary allusion is patent?and blatant. Samuel Huntington put the phrase inplay a decade and a half ago with his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, a con? troversial book much praised and much pilloried, widely * Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Knopf, 2007), xiv + 598 pages, $35.00. ARION 17.1 SPRING/SUMMER2009 138 TWO ETERNAL CITIES ON A COLLISION COURSE? cited ifnot widely read. The thesis forecast a mighty contest between Western civilization and the cultures of Islam and Asia, a boost (whatever the intention) for neocons, and a target for their opponents. A link to that controversy would certainly capture notice. The publisher's move was a pre? scient one. Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2,joo Year Struggle between East and West (2008) came out at a propitious time. It traced the recurring conflict back to an? tiquity, thus conveniently fanning the flames and giving the ancient world conspicuous currency. Tensions between Eu? ropean culture and the nations of the Near East?not to mention open warfare?made the topic temptingly topical. Knopf's editors knew a good thingwhen they saw it. But Goodman is too good a historian to go in for facile generalizations or simplistic stereotypes. The book, in fact, is not about a clash of civilizations at all. Readers who sali? vated when spotting the subtitle will be disappointed. The phrase appears on just one page of thismonumental volume (perhaps also at publisher's prompting?). At that point (410) we are more than two-thirds of theway through the book. And even then thewords herald a clash to come rather than one that has hitherto featured in the story. Goodman opens with drama. The outbreak of revolt and itscourse, culminating in the destruction of the great Temple of Herod, a calamity of titanic proportions, constitute the prologue of the book. It plunges the reader directly into the centerpiece of the study. Goodman summarizes key events and supplies vivid verbal illustrations of the fighting.A most effective beginning. The prologue concludes with some pointed questions that the book proposes to answer: Why did the disaster come about? Was there anything intrinsic in Jewish and Roman society that made it impossible for Jerusalem and Rome to coexist? Did the tensions already sur? face in the time of Jesus' crucifixion at the hands of a Roman governor? Did the conflict of Jews and Romans spill over into relations between Jews and Christians in the Roman world? Perfectly reasonable questions, and very important Erich S. Gruen 139 ones. But they do not touch on clashes of civilizations. And any relevance to contemporary events is indirect and remote. The first question has gripped scholars and students for many generations. A solution by Goodman is devoutly to be desired. (He offered a different one in the past but has come to reconsider thematter). Yet the issue is shelved...

"Primitive" Discourse: Aspects of Contemporary North American Indian Representations of the Irish and of Contemporary Irish Representations of North American Indians

"Primitive" Discourse:Aspects of Contemporary North American Indian Representations of the Irish and of Contemporary Irish Representations of North American Indians Joy Porter (bio) This article contrasts a number of contemporary incidences of Irish representation of and engagement with Native Americans and their history with two Native American novels and their depictions of Ireland and the Irish, LeAnne Howe's 2001 book Shellshaker and Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 book Gardens in the Dunes. It argues that Ireland's relationship with Native Americans and Native America's relationship with Ireland, particularly at the level of imagery and representation, is more complex than contemporary creative and critical work has tended to suggest. While the voices from Native America or Ireland that represent or refer to each other are small in number, their articulation is often powerful. Furthermore, they unlock a series of representational issues that are important to how each national entity or in the American Indian context, group of sovereign national entities, views itself within the postcolonial world. I present evidence to show that both Irish cultures and American Indian cultures have tended routinely to see each other through a cracked mirror, one reflective of colonial stereotype rather than the historical record. For interesting reasons, voices from each side have chosen to perpetuate ossified myths rather than the changing historical realities that have developed within each set of communities across time. What is needed at this juncture is for a new critical and creative relationship to be forged between Ireland and Native America, one that moves beyond stereotype and misrepresentation and instead engages the rich histories and contemporary cultures of each group of peoples. Today, as Ireland's artists and critics examine [End Page 63] the full texture of postcolonial Ireland and set about placing its stories in rich transnational context, it is more appropriate than ever that they begin to comprehend more fully the American Indian nations whose territory, in the realm of imagination, they continue to invade. Correspondingly, as American Indian artists and critics continue to engage with Ireland, it is important that they also move beyond reiteration of the most pervasive stereotypes about it and instead adopt a more nuanced understanding of the colonizing processes that both sets of peoples have shared. True freedom from colonial ways of thinking requires not only that we dispense with the colonizers' stereotypes about ourselves, but also that we recognize stereotypes applied to others. It is only by moving beyond the partial and telescoped version of history such stereotypes represent that dialogue can begin, a dialogue whose potential to open up new avenues of postcolonial analysis in the twenty-first century could be profound. Failure to dispense with respective stereotype and misrepresentation on either the Irish or American Indian side will hinder understanding of the shared aspects of the Irish and American Indian history of colonialism and perpetuate colonial representational ideas that have always served interests other than those of indigenous communities. Approaches to a Shared Colonial History No two experiences of colonialism are the same, but the links between Irish and American Indian experiences of conquest are nonetheless slowly being unearthed. We have known since 1945 from D.B. Quinn for example, that English colonists in Ireland gleaned ideas about plantations and subjugation from the Spanish empire's successes in the Americas. Early figures such as Walter Ralegh, Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Richard Grenville all benefited from their experience colonizing both the Americas and Ireland. Similarly, Cromwell's approach to Irish subjugation had clear links with Spanish practices and he sold many Irish people into West Indian slavery. Indeed, Ireland can, as Nicholas Canny argues, be seen as a sort of laboratory experiment for the colonizing of North America and as his work with Anthony Pagden reveals, settler communities across time have tended to share a common set of characteristics and to have faced common problems. Certainly, the Irish and American Indians have shared mythologized identities generated by those who sought to culturally dominate them. Both were characterized as practicing cannibalism, bestiality, sexual excess, godlessness, and immorality, and as having common approaches to war, dress, and habitation. A shared American Indian/Irish heritage in this regard can be...

On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru

On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John L. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation, by Barbara Slavin. Power and Succession in Arab Monarchies: A Reference Guide, by Joseph A. Kechichian. Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World, edited by marina Ottaway and Julia Choucair‐Vizoso. Democratization and Development: New Political Strategies for the Middle East, by Dietrich Jung, ed. Worlds at War: The 2,500‐Year Struggle between East and West, by Anthony Pagden.

Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches

ERIC Slauter has taken an inventive approach to two difficult and important questions: how do historians and literary scholars make sense of each other's work, and how can we spark more satisfactory conversations among ourselves? I am grateful to him for the thoughtful analysis he has provided and for encouraging me to consider what interdis ciplinary work may contribute to the study of the world. Carrying on a long tradition of early American scholarship, Slauter has constructed a declension thesis, one in which a field formerly reliant on literary approaches has fallen off. He asserts, for example, that Atlantic history as a whole is apparently moving away from a focus on text-centered evidence. Yet was the field ever so text centered as he sug gests? Slauter identifies Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden's Colonial Identity in the World as a crucial, agenda-setting text for com parative studies and points to this collection's literary and cultural approach. I am a big fan of these essays, but we should acknowledge that the volume's strengths lie in its examination of colonial elites in the western Atlantic. It does not have much to say about Africa or early modern Europe (apart from Ireland), nor does it take us deep into the structure of colonial societies. And though it is certainly true that in the 1980s many historians, inspired largely by the scholarship of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, turned to cultural approaches, it was also still an era of social history, as studies that preceded Canny and Pagden's collection indicate. history's origins reflect the period's multiple strands of inquiry. When I consider the field's beginnings, I think of works such as Philip D. Curtin's heroic effort to calculate the scope of the slave trade in The Slave Trade or his powerful synthesis The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Another crucial text came from the field of historical geography: D. W Meinig's The Shaping of America.1 These books mapped out?in

Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches

ERIC Slauter has taken an inventive approach to two difficult and important questions: how do historians and literary scholars make sense of each other's work, and how can we spark more satisfactory conversations among ourselves? I am grateful to him for the thoughtful analysis he has provided and for encouraging me to consider what interdis ciplinary work may contribute to the study of the world. Carrying on a long tradition of early American scholarship, Slauter has constructed a declension thesis, one in which a field formerly reliant on literary approaches has fallen off. He asserts, for example, that Atlantic history as a whole is apparently moving away from a focus on text-centered evidence. Yet was the field ever so text centered as he sug gests? Slauter identifies Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden's Colonial Identity in the World as a crucial, agenda-setting text for com parative studies and points to this collection's literary and cultural approach. I am a big fan of these essays, but we should acknowledge that the volume's strengths lie in its examination of colonial elites in the western Atlantic. It does not have much to say about Africa or early modern Europe (apart from Ireland), nor does it take us deep into the structure of colonial societies. And though it is certainly true that in the 1980s many historians, inspired largely by the scholarship of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, turned to cultural approaches, it was also still an era of social history, as studies that preceded Canny and Pagden's collection indicate. history's origins reflect the period's multiple strands of inquiry. When I consider the field's beginnings, I think of works such as Philip D. Curtin's heroic effort to calculate the scope of the slave trade in The Slave Trade or his powerful synthesis The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Another crucial text came from the field of historical geography: D. W Meinig's The Shaping of America.1 These books mapped out?in

History, Literature, and the Atlantic World

History, Literature, and the Atlantic World Eric Slauter (bio) During the past decade, literary scholars have produced an impressive list of books and articles in the emerging field of Atlantic literary history. Atlantic historians, however, rarely acknowledge this work and have moved away from the issues of identity and expression that made literary scholarship attractive and central to Atlantic historiography ten or twenty years ago. This phenomenon is a local manifestation of a wider problem affecting the market for literary scholarship in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns within history and the resurgence of historicism within literary studies; call it a "correction" of sorts. While literary studies once served as a major exporter of ideas and methods to the human sciences, especially history, literary scholars now import more from historians than they export to them. To put the point in figurative terms that do not disguise the economic stakes involved, a trade deficit now exists on the side of literary studies. Even as literary scholarship has become markedly more "historical," it has apparently become less marketable to historians. This essay charts the changing status of literature in recent historiography by focusing on historians as much as on literary scholars. It is designed to be descriptive and prescriptive, to diagnose what I see as a problem for historians and literary historians alike, and to offer some suggestions for better field integration and dialogue. Atlantic studies offers a compelling case study because literary scholars are clearly producing more scholarship in this area while historians seem to be consuming less of it. Yet my evidence base will turn at times to the fields represented by the primary readers of the journals in which this essay appears, early American history and early American literature, and my remarks will occasionally refer to disciplinary shifts within the larger enterprises of history and literary studies. Attending more to practice than theory and focusing on scholarship published in [End Page 153] English about colonial and early national North America, the essay invites readers to reflect on what historians and scholars of literature do when they encounter each other, when they interpret literature, and when they use literature to interpret something else. Though early Americanists seem more divided now than ever before, the real division may not be between history and literary studies so much as it is between competing concepts within history and within literary studies about what texts are and do. The three sections of this essay address different ways of conceiving of disciplinary relations. The first section briefly examines the growth of Atlantic literary history and the declining citations to literary scholarship by historians. The second section uses a decade of cross-disciplinary book reviews (that is, reviews in which historians evaluate new books by literary scholars and vice versa) to see what historians and literary scholars actually have to say about each other and how individual readers have constructed disciplinary commitments by confronting work in another discipline. The third section examines the use of literature as evidence in recent documentary collections edited by historians who have been interested in the recoverability of the voices, epistemologies, or subjectivities of Native American peoples described in and by European-authored texts. I conclude by suggesting a few ways of overcoming the growing trade gap in Atlantic scholarship, directing my remarks to both historians and literary scholars. In the past few years, historians have produced histories of the Atlantic world, histories of histories of the Atlantic world, and arguments about the utility of the concept of an Atlantic world, but they have done so largely without reference to current or past literary scholarship. The rise of the Atlantic world as an object of analysis and a site of scholarly contestation is surely one of the most significant developments in the historiography of the last decade. Though the phrase "Atlantic world" appeared in a handful of books and articles in the 1970s and early 1980s, it began to take hold of the historical profession as a phrase repeated annually in the titles of books, articles, and dissertations in the late 1980s, following the publication of Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden's edited collection of essays Colonial Identity in...

Beyond the Sonderweg

12 Historically Speaking ¦ November/December 2007 hensive inclusion. Thus would Abraham Lincoln take the necessary step thatJefferson found impossible to effect. Speaking prior to his presidency on the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln shone this light on the recurring dilemma: I think the audiors of that notable instrument [the Declaration of Independence] intended to include allmen, but tiiey did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects .... They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit .12 Continuous? Perhaps not. But certainly sustained, ever resurgent, recoverable. 1 Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (Routledge, 1992), 71,77-79. ;Joan Gadol, Leon BattistaAlberti: UniversalMan of the Early Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1969), 70-71, 198-200. 1 See my article, "The Sixeteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth's Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe,"Journalof World History 8 (1997): 1-27. * Anthony Pagden, Lords of allthe World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500- c.1800 (Yale University Press, 1995), 11-63; esp. 21-24. 5 HaroldJoseph Berman, Law andRevolution: The Formation of the Western LegalTradition (Harvard University Press, 1983), 199-254. ' Brian Tierney, "Religious Rights: An Historical Perspective" in John Witte,Jr. andJohn D. van der Vyver, eds., Religious Human Rights in GlobalPerspective: Religious Perspectives (Marrinus Nijhoff, 1996), 17-45; esp. 28-29. ' Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, eds. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 246. " Brian Tierney, The Idea of NaturalRights (William B. Eerdmans, 1997), 273, 286-87. * Hugo Grotius, Prolegomena to the Law of War and Peace (Liberal Arts Press, 1957), Sections 6, 16, and 11. 10Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1:13. 11PJ. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The GreatMap of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in theAge of Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 1982), 1. u The Speeches ofAbrahamLincoln, eds. Maureen Harrison and Steve Gilbert (Excellent Books, 2005), 40. Beyond the Sonderweg Sanjay Subrahmanyam John Headley, a well-known specialist of die thought of Martin Luther, Tommaso Campanella, and the ideology of the Spanish Empire, has lately turned to more general reflections within the larger realm of the history of "Western" ideas. Here he poses what appears at first to be a bold challenge . He tells us in effect that we—and he means not the world at large but only those who teach in Anglo-American history departments —have all fallen victim to a form of political correctness over the past couple of decades. (He does not seem currentiy to care what the rest of the world thinks or does in its practice of history: this is quite typical in its own fashion of his Sonderweg). We have apparendy lazily jettisoned three notions that are dear to Headley and his own historical horizon as he has maintained it inviolate over a half century: "the dignity of Western civilization "; the central importance once given to traditional political history; and the key role in history—or at least in the good bits of history— of the Renaissance. Mounting the pulpit provided by this forum, he wishes all of us to repent forthwith and fully rehabilitate all of the above. But before we do that, we must at the very least clearly identify what the real disease is against which Headley wants to inoculate us. It is undesirable rhetorical practice I believe to summon up one's minions for a fight to the death against intellectual Weapons of Mass Destruction that may not even "Entrance of Cortez into Mexico," ca. late 19th century. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-pga-01902]. exist. So where is the enemy and can we be sure that he (or it) even exists? The enemy for Headley, I think, is the vague program called world history, which has been gaining slow but sure ground over Western civilization in U.S. colleges and universities for quite...

"From Fear to Wisdom": Augustinian Semiotics and Self-Fashioning in Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion

“From Fear to Wisdom”:Augustinian Semiotics and Self-Fashioning in Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación Steven P. Liparulo In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen . . . in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. —2 Corinthians 11:26–27 In the penultimate chapter (37) of his Relación, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca gives inordinate narrative emphasis to what might seem a rather unimportant episode in his 1537 return to Spain after his eight-year sojourn in the New World.1 He depicts himself aboard a vessel halfway through its homeward Atlantic crossing, menaced by ships that turn out to be French and rescued by what turn out to be Portuguese ships, initially seen at such a distance their sails can't be read. Since the episode ends with no damage done, we have to wonder why this anecdote dominates the chapter—what work is it doing? In this paper I will suggest that this episode epitomizes Cabeza de Vaca's textual self-image as well as his place in cultural and literary history, and also enacts the vital human processes of truth-seeking, improvising, misreading, and revising: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca floats ambiguously between Old and New Worlds, between the Kingdom of Spain and the Kingdom of God, between medieval and Renaissance, conquest and compassion. Cabeza de Vaca stands as an exemplar of the [End Page 1] go-between, a heterodox whose simultaneity and acts of revision seem to render unstable and incoherent multiple systems of signification and identity. I will also portray Cabeza de Vaca as reader and writer operating within multiple semiotic systems and elaborate on how sign-reading and revision are as much a part of the Relación as a whole as they are of this episode, which fittingly seeks to assure its own truth through the ritual affixing of the author's personal sign (his signature) at the end of the chapter. I will propose an interpretive strategy for the peculiarities of Cabeza de Vaca and the stories that he tells, established through a dialogue between several recent critical works and Saint Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, as it describes a process of interpretation and revision. In his Premio Plural award-winning essay, Juan Bruce-Novoa identifies Cabeza de Vaca as a founder of Chicano literature, and as a character "marked with the sign of Americanness" (17), a go-between "ever traveling between solid zones." This phrasing represents Cabeza de Vaca's liminal character with more sophistication than did Morris Bishop half a century before, when he wrote that "his country was entering upon the difficult Renaissance, the puberty of the modern world" (10). Anthony Pagden further refines the description of both Cabeza de Vaca and America as "in-between." The sheer presence of America, Pagden writes, provided a marker between epochs, a convenient date with which to begin a distinctively modern period in European history, a period in which the vision of human time as the steady unfolding of a divine plan—Saint Augustine's ordo saecularum—was replaced by the image of a constant process of perfection, the evolution of purely human objectives. (European Encounters 11–12) Following Bruce-Novoa, numerous critics have dealt with heterodoxies of both the Relación and Cabeza de Vaca himself, including Beatriz Pastor, Maureen Ahern, and Ann Ortiz. In making such claims, however, these scholars tend to view religion as something incidental or subordinate, considered of value according to some other scale than a religious one. To some extent, this stands as reasonable post-Enlightenment skepticism towards the potential for tyranny inherent in acknowledging and empowering a "transcendent signifier" in a [End Page 2] discourse of religion. But this skepticism in turn causes a problem for interpretation. Bruce-Novoa describes the critical tendency to reductively impose upon Cabeza de Vaca "the structural mark of a binary polarity: one is this or that; the space in between the two poles becomes forbidden, condemned in...

Spectral Armies, Snakes, and a Giant from Gog and Magog

This article is based on a close reading of Ibn Faḏlān's narrative of his forced detention by the King of the Volga Bulghār during which he saw some local mirabilia. I propose to consider the wonders he describes, including his use of the Qur'an as corroboration for some of them, from the point of view of ‘iyān, visual perception, eye-witness testimony. To this end, Ibn Faḏlān's wonders will be compared with several textual forebears, including al-Sindibād, and they will be considered as exempla of what Anthony Pagden has called ‘the Autoptic Imagination’.