Colonization and conquest, a comparison

Although a pan-American examination of the various “Conquests” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be refreshing and revealing, as Patricia Seed had shown, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’s Puritan Conquistadors falls short of that goal. The subtitle, Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 does not offer much help in terms of explaining the book’s thesis and contents. Canizares-Esguerra argues that the English Puritans and Spanish Catholics in the Americas are often examined separately due to a modern idea of “proto-nationalism.” In short, the author implies, we tend to separate the conquests because we are reading history in retrospect, with a foreknowledge of the different paths colonial North America and colonial Latin American would eventually take. Ultimately, Canizares-Esguerra argues that “British Protestants and Spanish Catholics deployed similar religious discourses to explain and justify conquest and colonization: a biblically sanctioned interpretation of expansion, part of a long-standing Christian tradition of holy violence aimed at demonic enemies within and without” (9).

Canizares-Esguerra’s premise is original and certainly worthy of further discussion. It also contain problems, one of which is that there were no “British” Puritans, as the Kingdom of Great Britain was not established until 1707. This may seem a quibble, but it is indicative of the pitfalls in comparative history—a seemingly small error may indicate a larger misunderstanding of very different contexts. He is quite right to assert that “theological differences manifested themselves concretely in the ways these two religious communities approached colonization” (15). These processes of conversion, after all, were binary opposites. The Conquistadors demanded conversion from every new willing or unwilling subject; the Puritans often denied salvation to their own kin, if sufficient evidence of God’s favor was not visible in the actions and words of the repentant. These are not small differences. Drawing on written and visual sources, Canizares-Esguerra claims that the “martial, epic tone” appears in the writings of both Spaniards and Puritans, and he has the sources to support the claim. What he does not adequately support, in my view, is his argument that the English Protestants and the Spanish Catholics, for their similar energies, shared the same interpretation of who Satan was and how he manifested his evil powers in the world. While conceding that his selected courses “emerged in unique social and political contexts and was devised o persuade particular audiences and to address social agendas,” he pointedly refuses to take these contexts into account. What is the historian’s job if not to incorporate social, cultural, and political contexts in the analysis of a source, in order to better explain the past? His reason? “I seek to reconstruct a worldview that is essentially violent, alien, and offensive to our modern sense of what is physically possible” (17). In other words, he offers no real reason. Perhaps he thinks the reader will be confused by the additional information. Or perhaps the various contexts of the writings would weaken his argument.

I do not intend to be overly critical. Indeed, his comparative analysis of the English and Spanish “satanic epics” such as Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and Pedro de Quiroga would make a fine article on its own. “The satanic epic in England,” he writes, “thus came back full circle, back to Iberian models, because, paradoxically, the Puritans fully embraces every trope of the Iberian genre” (82). However, although he convincingly argues that many ideas of heaven, hell, angels, and demons were incorporated into both Protestant and Catholics works of literature, this does not equate to similar motivations for the colonization and conquest of the New World. The English migrations to Virginia and Cape Cod (and it should be remembered that the Mayflower landed a thousand miles off course; it was aiming for Jamestown) were not intended to conquer anybody. Cortes knew there were indigenous civilizations in the interior of Mexico, and sought to make them the King’s vassals. The initial flight of the Puritans, on the other hand, was extralegal; they were delighted on learning much of eastern Massachusetts had been cleared for them by pestilence (which they believed ordained by God).

In short, Canizares-Esguerra’s work misses the point. The reason the Puritans ad Conquistadors have traditionally been studies separately is because they represented very different approaches to the European exploration and settlement of the Americas. Although comparative history has its merits, Puritans Conquistadors, to my mind, represents the dangers of pressing a comparison too far.