The Geopolitics of Evil

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’s Puritan Conquistadors is brilliant. Canizares-Esguerra makes two important arguments about the colonial history of the Americas. First, the colonial Europeans shared a Christian fanaticism that transcended the gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism, and that ultimately derived from Spanish culture. Second, the Spanish experience in the Americas is the normal and central experience in the colonial Americas, and that the British experience should be seen as peripheral — and indeed, the British understood their colonial venture in terms of the Iberian experience. Canizares-Esguerra demonstrates that for the Europeans in the Americas, the Devil was a very real figure, that the exorcism of demons from the New World was a common phenomenon for both Puritans and Franciscans, and that Europeans frequently understood the Americas to be an inverted Garden of Eden. From this perspective, the European project in the Americas takes on the semblance of a holy war, as many contemporaries saw it.

Canizares-Esguerra’s arguments are convincing. It is clear that Christian fanaticism was a shared attribute among European colonials regardless of their denominational or national affiliation. Canizares-Esguerra’s evidence demonstrates that the British experience should not be seen as exceptional or isolated from the Continental experience, and certainly indicates that any lingering teleological ideas of a triumphal march towards enlightened democracy should be abandoned. In the end, Puritan Conquistadors advances the project of Atlantic history into the realm of religious zeal and makes a compelling case for the importance of the Spanish experience in the Americas for the British understanding of the New World.