Liberty Matters

Early Spanish Empire in North America

By: Paul Schwennesen, Gabriela Calderon de Burgos, and Henry T. Edmondson III


Did a Spanish Enlightenment predate and influence later English and Scottish Enlightenments? 

Sections

Paul Schwennessen points to Miguel de Cervantes’ The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, as well as the Jesuit School of Salamanca, including individuals such as Juan de Mariana and Francisco de Vitoria, as evidence for a distinct Spanish movement. Gabriela Calderón de Burgos complements and extends Schwennessen’s perspective by focusing on the role and influence of the Spanish Empire and Catholic monarchy. Henry T. Edmondson III adds to the chorus for Cervantes' great importance but questions how far to tip the scales in favor of Spanish colonizers by pointing to highly critical contemporaries. All the authors agree that this historical period is often examined and used for purposes other than disinterested scholarly inquiry. This series aims to improve the questions about and understanding of this important time and place.

Lead Essay The Spanish Enlightenment

Paul Schwennesen

“Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts given by heaven to mankind. To her, neither the treasures held in the earth nor those covered by the sea can compare.”
– Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes (1616)
Those of us within the Liberty community, especially among the North Atlantic nations, often suffer from an excessively Anglo-centric myopia; our language (and thus the thinking, in the Wittgenstein sense) is trapped within Anglophone boundaries. John Locke, for example, is widely touted as the “Father of the Enlightenment,” despite the fact that he cribbed a great deal of his foundational philosophy from Baruch Spinoza and leading lights of the Salamanca School, Juan de Mariana and Francisco de Vitoria. This is not to suggest that we are woefully unaware of contributions from outside the English sphere, but rather to recall to our collective consciousness the deeper roots of what we now term the liberal project. It takes extra effort to peer beyond the linguistic horizon and recognize that many ancestral liberal impulses sprang from the sun-drenched soils of Iberia.
Take, for example, Miguel de Cervantes. Though we grant him a certain glancing homage, few English speakers have read him in the original or are aware of his profound personal attachments to the cause of liberty, abstractly understood. Even if aware of his contributions, many tend to assume he was an anomaly, a lone advocate speaking to a late medieval culture ill-prepared to understand or accept his positions—a man ahead of his time, as it were—writing before things “really got going” in England. But in fact this rather gets it backward: His tremendous popularity in early-modern Spain reflects the fact that what we now consider “modern” conceptions of human dignity, individual liberty, and rule of law were quite firmly established in the dark days we associate with the “pre” Enlightenment.
It’s worth noting, by way of background, that Cervantes spent some five years enslaved in Africa, a prisoner in the baños (dungeons) of Algiers. When he speaks of liberty, then, as “one of the most precious gifts,” he speaks from experience. Before this, in 1571, he had led a twelve-man skiff in the Battle of Lepanto—arguably one of the greatest naval engagements in military history—and was wounded in the left arm so badly he never regained its use. In 1575 he was swept into the pirate hold of a Barbary frigate and spent some of the prime years of his life in slave labor and dank cells, hoping against hope for a reprieve. It came, eventually, through the intercession of Catholic Trinitarian monks, an order specifically devoted to ransoming Christian slaves in Africa, the Middle East, and Moorish Spain.
Indeed, it is the Catholic Church, for all its modern associations with illiberality, that helped shape and encourage many early liberal impulses (while admittedly stifling others). Especially within the mid-16th-century Spanish Empire, a vigorous scholarly and political debate raged over the nature of individual rights and limits on secular power. The Jesuit School of Salamanca was a major source of intellectual grist for this mill: Francisco Vitoria, one of the school’s early founders, was a staunch defender of individual human dignity and rights (including indigenous people’s rights in the New World) as well as one of the earliest promulgators of formal notions of free trade and private property rights. Juan de Mariana, said to have been a formative intellectual influence on Cervantes, was one of the first to recognize (and decry) inflationary monetary policy stemming from abusive central authority and to make the case that a “King” does not commit arbitrary violence against his own subjects–only a Tyrant can do that.
Thus we see in Don Quixote a famous scene featuring a dozen galley slaves, chained by the neck and handcuffed to one another. Sancho Panza informs Don Quixote that they are, “…men sentenced by the king and forced to row in his galleys.”
“What do you mean forced?” asks Don Quixote. “Is it possible that the king is forcing anyone?”“I’m not saying that—” replies Sancho, “only that these are people who, because of their crimes, are sentenced to serve the king in galleys, by force.”

“So, no matter,” retorts Don Quixote, “these people are being taken away by force and not of their free will?”

“That’s right,” says Sancho.

“In that case,” says the knight-errant, “here’s where I can do what my profession requires: to set forced actions right and to succor and aid poor wretches.”“Be careful, your grace,” warns Sancho, “for Justice, which is the king himself, isn’t using force or striking out against these people, but rather is punishing them for their crimes.”
Upon investigation, Don Quixote finds that these “crimes” are ludicrously suspect—a mere pretext for manning the galley oars: criminal confessions extracted under torture, petty victimization by unscrupulous magistrates, and trivial indebtedness are standard. The irony of all this “kingly” justice was not lost on Cervantes’ audience, which was primed to read its appeal to common-sense notions of justice and liberty. The book, though panned by many elites, was a sensation in its time. Seven or perhaps even eight editions were printed in the first year (1605) alone, an unheard-of level of popularity for the era. The work was eagerly embraced by the “common” reading public who loved it both for its antic humor and acid wit.
But most importantly of all, it was loved for its subtle advocacy for liberty. Cervantes wrote directly into a rich cultural tradition that had been grappling (in decidedly modern fashion) with the complexities of individual rights and limits on state authority for generations. Cervantes’ advocacy for fundamental human dignity and natural right struck a resonant chord in Spanish society, a society shaped by the unsettling influences of the Reconquista, the inquisition, and the discovery of an unanticipated New World.
Indigenous People’s Rights in the Americas:
Many of the Spanish Enlightenment’s more interesting features can be discerned in the complex tapestry of conquest. If you are anything like the majority, the image that comes to mind of the conquest of the New World is of swarthy, swashbuckling bullies, mad for gold, lusting for power, and ruthlessly domineering toward indigenous peoples. This caricature is built (as stereotypes generally are) on a promontory of truth. There are, after all, enough documented instances of brutality to buttress such a jaundiced retrospective, but like most caricatures it also misses most of the complexity and richness of real life. One of the missing truths in this simplified popular conception is just how surprisingly liberal (failures notwithstanding) Spain was to the indigenous societies of North America. Especially today, when “slavery” and “colonialism” are white-hot topics in the ongoing culture wars, it is a surprise to discover that many Spaniards (even conquistadors) were not only sympathetic to indigenous people’s rights, but actively sought to defend them.
The Dominican and Franciscan orders were especially effective political advocates for a “humane” conquest in the Indies, and heavily shaped official policies there. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar, was named “Defender of the Indians” (a paid royal position) and spent his life carefully documenting infractions against indigenous people’s rights. The Spanish court itself was keen to end abuses against indigenous peoples as seen, for instance, in Hernando De Soto’s 1537 royal authorization to embark on his exploration of Florida:
[“We,” The King], having been informed of the evils and disorders which occur in making discoveries and new settlements…a general provision of chapters is ordained and dispatched, respecting what you will have to observe in the said settlement and conquest…for the good treatment and conversion to our Holy Catholic Faith of the natives of it…
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s appointment in January 1540 to command a mission to explore what is now the American Southwest, is similarly remonstrative:
In regard to treatment of the native Indians of the lands through which you may travel…we order you to observe and fulfill the directive [for benevolent treatment] which we have ordered given to the persons who go, as you are going, to reconnoiter and pacify lands and new provincias… under [pain of] penalties referred to in the directive.
Such orders were not mere cynical lip service. Many a conquistador was charged with mistreatment of indigenous peoples and forced to legally account for his actions. Coronado, for instance, was forced to defend himself for years in court, convening innumerable witnesses to testify that he had forbidden his army from touching “so much as an ear of [Indian] corn” without their express permission and willing barter. Though such defenses might seem suspiciously convenient and self-serving to modern ears, thorough review of pesquisa testimony shows that the principles of adversarial jurisprudence were upheld scrupulously. Conquistadors who failed to bring such exculpatory evidence were fined, banished, or imprisoned as the cases of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, and even Christopher Columbus amply demonstrate.
This attention to indigenous people’s rights was held by more than just clerical elites or official functionaries: conquistadors themselves were often deeply critical of trespasses against indigenous peoples. “Why,” asked conquistador Rodrigo Rangel of his leader Hernando De Soto, did he “not settle down to a colony, but rather disturb and devastate the land and take away the liberty of all the natives?” Conquistadors were generally attentive to, and often keen to redress, cruel abuses against what they saw as the natural liberty of indigenous peoples. Melchior Pérez, a participant in Coronado’s expedition, testified in court that he “doubted the word” of a fellow conquistador (García López de Cárdenas), deploring his mistreatment of indigenous peoples caught in the siege of Tiguex, saying that his actions were intolerable and cruel. In the De Soto expedition, an anonymous Gentleman “from Elvas” writes scathingly:
Those who were cruel, because they showed themselves inhuman, God permitted their sin to confront them, very great cowardice assailing them in sight of all..
Conquistador chronicles sometimes relayed the various “speeches” and conversations with indigenous peoples in ways that reveal as much about the Spanish understanding of liberty as about the indigenous people themselves. Chief Tascaluça, “lord” of the Mabila kingdom (modern-day Alabama), is described in 1540 thus:
…about giving obedience to the king of Spain, Tascaluça replied that he himself was king in his own country and there was no necessity for becoming the vassal of another who had as many as he. Those who put themselves under a foreign yoke when they could live free he regarded as very mean-spirited and cowardly. He and all his people protested that they would die a thousand deaths to maintain their liberty and that of their country. And he gave that reply once and for all.
Tascaluça surely did not speak these exact words (“yoke,” for one thing, was incomprehensible to a society without large domestic livestock), yet the sentiment was no doubt accurate. More to the point, the sentiment resonated with a Spanish reader, one that was primed to be sympathetic to liberty.
The Spanish empire, for all its nascent liberality, was not, of course, a shining beacon of human freedom (nor, for that matter, was the English one of Locke’s day). For a variety of complicated reasons this early Spanish Enlightenment did not flourish as it might have. But without it, the English and Scottish Enlightenments may well have never coalesced either. The political revolutions that ultimately enshrined so many of our modern liberties owe much of their formative influence to the intellectual ferment present in 16th and 17th century Iberia.
There were enormous moral failings, to be sure and the point here is not to whitewash examples of deplorable illiberal acts. The point, rather, is to show how surprisingly respectful the Spanish could be (even by modern standards) toward the peoples were so evidently bent on conquering. Though this counters today’s understanding of colonialism generally, and the conquest in particular, the fact is that Spanish treatment of indigenous people in the Americas was not the monolithically brutal affair it is so often portrayed to be. In short, it is time to update the caricature. Part of ‘getting our history right’ means not infantilizing indigenous peoples as passive victims, nor portraying Spaniards as diabolical thugs. Such two-dimensional ‘good-guy/bad-guy’ history is not only inaccurate, but also taints our modern political discourse. We need instead to rescue living, breathing human stories from what E.P. Thompson called the “enormous condescension of posterity,” and see the basic humanity in our common history.
 “Liberty is one of the most precious gifts given by heaven to mankind.” Gracias a los cielos y a nuestros antepasados también – Thanks be to heaven, and to our Spanish forebears as well.

Response Essay The forgotten Hispanic liberal tradition

Gabriela Calderon de Burgos

Dr. Paul Schwennesen does a great job of rescuing the Iberian tradition of classical liberalism. He rightly argues—with a particular emphasis on Miguel de Cervantes, the School of Salamanca, and the treatment of Indian Americans in the overseas kingdoms of the Spanish Empire—that liberalism has deeper and wider roots than what many anglophones realize.
I will focus more on the other side of the Atlantic to complement Dr. Schwenssen´s essay. The Founding Fathers of the Latin American republics —the offspring of the Spanish Empire— were born and raised as Spanish-American subjects of the Catholic Monarchy, drank from the same enlightenment fountain as the Founding Fathers north of the Rio Grande and, particularly, from a classical liberal tradition that predates that of England, Scotland and France.
The commonplace narrative of the Latin American republics is that they have been plagued ever since their independence from Spain by “caudillismo”, religious fanatism, militarism, statism and centralism. Furthermore, these plagues are commonly assumed to have derived from a caricature of what the Spanish Empire was. This caricature, popularly known as the Black Legend,[1] is prominent in books about Spain´s history. This phenomenon extends to most books on the history of Hispanic America, where illiberal culture was supposedly transmitted at birth to its offspring.[2]
But as Schwennesen rightly points out, being conquered by the Spanish was not abhorrent in its totality and, in fact, included an innovative consideration for the rights of the conquered and the ethics of the conquest itself. The most vehement defenders of this caricaturized version of the past are some Hispanic Americans themselves. For example, both the former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his dauphine and successor Claudia Sheinbaum demanded from King Phillip of Spain apologies for the conquest of what is now Mexico.[3]
History at the service of power
This topic has interested me since I can remember, partly because I was born on October 12 and because it used to be commemorated with a day off from school in my country Ecuador, back when it was commonly referred to as “The Day of Race,” in reference to Hispanic heritage. In Spain, some still remember this date with pride as “The Encounter of Two Worlds.” Nonetheless, both in and outside of Spain, a more negative notion of said events has become more popular. According to the Mexican government´s website, Columbus´s discovery is now officially remembered in some countries as “The Day of Indigenous Resistance.”[4]
Granted, there is plenty to condemn about the Spanish Monarchy, as well as other empires. Slavery, widespread censorship, lack of religious freedom, to name a few. However, a fairer and more accurate judgment of the past would also include its positive aspects. The British ethicist Nigel Biggar from the University of Oxford explains in his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning[5] that portraying only the bad and ignoring any positives of the British Empire “makes good sense politically—provided that the end justifies any means, and you have no scruples about telling the truth.” He adds, “The unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present.”
The Spanish historian Tomás Pérez Vejo argues that the purpose behind the total condemnation of Spain´s conquest of the Americas served a purpose —that of legitimizing the creation of the new states— and had a very clear consequence—erasing the diversity of ideas within the empire:
“We are prisoners of a history made by and at the service of the states. Perhaps the time has come for its ‘denationalization’. Contemporary nation-states needed, in their process of inventing a nation that would give them legitimacy, to construct a mythologized and homogeneous national memory. To this end, they carried out what we can call, without any exaggeration, a genocide of local memories, family memories, etc., a statement that does not mean condemning these memory policies…The genocide of memories was possibly inevitable and undoubtedly successful.Enough time has passed, however, to allow us to have an appraisal that is not marked by the urgencies of the political agenda. Returning to the wars of independence has, from this perspective, the will to recover part of these forgotten memories. We are what we tell ourselves we are. Our mental universe is made of stories that we forget, remember and distort.”[6]
Pérez Vejo sought to show how much our view of the three centuries of viceroyalties within the Spanish Empire has conditioned our view of current Latin American societies, its problems and possible solutions. He claims several alternatives were indeed considered between 1810 and 1821, so coming back to analyze the wars of independence would not only reveal that they really were civil wars, not wars of independence, and that would allow us to widen our understanding of the present and our options for the future.
Among the forgotten alternatives lost in the fog of revolutions was the Hispanic classical liberal tradition. What characterizes this tradition? First, the reconciliation of the apparently conflicting concepts of reason and faith and of the need to reform while respecting traditions and customs. Second, a preference for local government within a federated kingdom or, afterwards, a national government limited, in both cases, with checks and balances. Third, the co-existence of diverse races and, at some point, creeds. But these liberal traditions have been mostly forgotten and are now perceived by most as imported.
The great Venezuelan liberal Carlos Rangel, in his book The Latin American Their Love-hate Relationship with the United States[7] said that the history of Iberian America during the period of the Catholic Monarchy tends to be a source of embarrassment because we are a product of the official imperial policy of “mestizaje” (crossbreeding) and the negative interpretation that has resulted from such a policy: that we descend from both the conquistadors and the conquered, the first always being the villains and the latter always their victims. This overly simplified version of the past leads us to a persistent victimization in our culture. It also leads us to an unhealthy separation from our western roots.
The fake divorce from the West
Most authoritarian projects in Latin America have tried to portray classical liberal ideas –such as the right of property, the rule of law and the separation of powers, and freedom of expression and association— as pernicious imports from our Western conquerors. First the Spanish, then the Americans. Rangel explained that the old European myth of “the good savage” supposedly uncorrupted by civilization, the supposed proof of “human innocence” before “the fall”, was a popular fable in the XIX century. This narrative of “the good savage” versus “the bad foreign conqueror” has served those in power to keep most of the countries in the region from advancing towards more inclusive institutions and open societies.
Yet in spite of this myth´s power, when you look at everyday customs you realize we are very much a part of the West, not just because we are influenced today by Hollywood and all the popular culture fads from both the United States and Europe, but also because we share many of the ideas that made open societies possible in the West.
Usually, it is thought that whatever liberal tradition made it to Hispanic American republics was almost solely from an Anglo-Saxon or French source. Also, it is normally thought that there was no significant contribution from Hispanic sources for the political changes that paved the way for modern Europe and the United States. However, do you know what book John Locke, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Francisco de Miranda —one of Venezuela´s Founding Fathers— had in common? It was the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana´s (1536-1624).
The General History of Spain
Did you know that the famous “No taxation without representation” is a paraphrase by Locke in his Two Treatises on Government (1689) of Mariana´s On the King and the Royal Institution (1599).[8]
John Adams was also a fan of this book; his copy is still available at the Boston Public Library.[9]
Furthermore, because of the “controversies” in the city of Burgos in 1504 and those in the city of Valladolid in 1551, where the rights of the indigenous peoples were debated, ius gentium or “law of nations” was born. For this reason, there is a room —the Council Chamber— in the United Nations honoring the salmantine Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546) as “the founder of modern international law.”[10]
These curious coincidences reveal the existence and significant influence of the relatively unknown Spanish Enlightenment of the 16th century, referred to today as the School of Salamanca, which Dr. Schwennesen has rightfully credited.
Which Western Tradition?
To the south of the United States, we grow up learning that our republics were founded upon the principles of either the French Revolution and Rousseau´s ideas or on those of the American Revolution. However, if one reads the independence proclamations on both sides of the Atlantic, the whole of the Spanish Empire revolted against a usurpation of power by Napoléon Bonaparte and swore allegiance to the principles of the sovereignty of the governed according to Francisco Suárez´s (1548-1617) ideas, another Jesuit from the School of Salamanca.
It was this theologian, philosopher and jurist whose work we see crystallized in the multiple declarations of independence within the Catholic Monarchy. His pactum translationis was about the origin of civil authority. Thus, when in the Iberian Peninsula and in the overseas kingdoms many proclamations appeared to establish “juntas” (boards) and “cabildos” (townhalls) we witnessed, according to historian Carlos Stoetzer, “the purest Hispanic traditions.” He explained Suárez´s pact:
“Since the sovereign was a prisoner of the French [in 1808] and thus unable to exercise the power that the people had transferred to him, authority reverted to the popular source, and the people were justified in assuming civil authority until the return of the king or finding another constitutional solution as a permanent solution to the monarchical crisis.”[11]
Suárez´s pactum translationis is in line with an even older Hispanic tradition: that of the “Fueros de León”, a charter or set of laws issued by King Alphonse V in 1017 that limited government power. Though this Hispanic legacy does not imply a representative form of government, it did contain its seeds. As Leonard P. Liggio explained in his essay “The Hispanic Tradition of Liberty”:
In the flowering of Liberalism in the early nineteenth century, one of Hayek’s favorite authors, Benjamin Constant, raised a serious question. He challenged what he perceived to be Charles Dunoyer’s determinist view of progress. Constant asked: If we believe that economic and technological improvement is accompanied by improvement of moral sentiments, how do we explain the fact that while all of the more advanced peoples of Europe – French, Lombards, Flemish, Dutch, Germans, and Austrians, – accept the tyranny of Napoleon Bonaparte, it was the Spanish peasants alone who rose up against the French occupation, and exhausted and then destroyed Napoleon’s rule? Constant saw the Spanish peasants as the liberators of Europe.[12]
Furthermore, this belief that the people under the Hispanic Monarchy had at that point been the standard bearers of liberal principles —which is why Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic rebelled against Napoleon Bonaparte and in defense of the Crown— was the reason why many classical liberals still believed that progress was possible even within the Empire. Argentinean historian Carlos Rodríguez Braun affirms that the evident collaboration between the “ilustrados” (enlightened), the partisans of independence and the government “constitutes a problem that the nationalist historiography has not been able to solve.”[13] The Commerce Consulates or “Consulados de Comercio” are a prime example of such collaboration. These were created under royal auspices and from those influential offices, many such as Manuel Belgrano and Juan Hipólito Vieytes from the Río de la Plata region and José Ignacio de Pombo from Cartagena de Indias promoted reforms within the empire that would further trade liberalization, lower taxes, demand equality under the law, protection of property rights and freedom of expression.
The Classical Liberal Tradition in Spanish America
A more nuanced understanding of the history of the Spanish Empire and its offspring reveals a rich classical liberal tradition that, even though it has not prevailed in most parts of the Hispanic world, did exist. And it was expressed at different times and in different places in some of the most important institutions and by some of the most prominent members of Spanish and Iberian-American society.
Endnotes
[1] Roca Barca, María Elvira. Imperiofobia y la leyenda negra. 3ra. 2017. Reprint, Madrid, Spain: Siruela, 2018.
[2] Ríos Saloma, Martín F; Tomás Pérez Vejo, Luis Francisco Martínez Montes, José María Ortega Sánchez, María Elvira Roca Barea, and Guadalupe Jiméznez Codinach. La disputa del pasado: España, México y la leyenda negra. Edited by Emilio Lamo De Espinosa. 1ra. Madrid, Spain: Turner, 2021.
[3] BBC News Mundo. “AMLO solicita por carta al Rey de España y al Papa que pidan perdón por la conquista de México,” March 25, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-47701387.
BBC News Mundo. “México y España: Cómo justifica Claudia Sheinbaum su decisión de no invitar al Rey Felipe VI a su toma de posesión (y qué tiene que ver la historia entre ambos países),” September 25, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cvgl75xy352o.
[4] De información agroalimentaria y pesquera, servicio. “Día de la raza y el Nuevo Mundo.” https://www.gob.mx/siap/articulos/dia-de-la-raza-y-el-nuevo-mundo?idiom=es/#:~:text=El%20D%C3%ADa%20de%20la%20Raza,Espa%C3%B1a%20y%20los%20Estados%20Unidos.
[5] Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. 1st ed. William Collins, 2023.
[6] Pérez Vejo, Tomás. Elegía criolla: una reinterpretación de las guerras de independencia hispanoamericanas. Kindle. Editorial Crítica, 2019.
[7] Unfortunately translated with too much leeway from its original and better suited title in Spanish: From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary.
Rangel, Carlos. The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States. 2nd ed. Routledge, 1987. https://www.routledge.com/The-Latin-Americans-Their-Love-hate-Relationship-with-the-United-States/Rangel/p/book/9780887386923?srsltid=AfmBOoq5Uko4qjMWx7toLf_j5Magshh9AwLXlAwVAAn_vptSUIjRaOe3.
[8] “…the king cannot impose new taxes without first having the consent of the governed” 
--Juan de Mariana, On the King and the Royal Institution (1599)
“They must not raise taxes on the property of the people, without the consent of the people”
---John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (1689)
[9] Mariana, Juan de. De Rege et Regis Institutione Libri III: Ad Philippum III Hispaniae Regem Catholicum. Eiusdem De Ponderibus & Mensuris Liber: 1611. Available here: https://archive.org/details/joannismarianaeh00mari/page/n5/mode/2up.
[10] The Council Chamber. United Nations: https://www.un.org/ht/node/36366
[11] Stoetzer, O. Carlos. El pensamiento político en la América española durante el periodo de la emancipación (1789-1825). Vol II of II volumes. Madrid, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1966, p. 67.
[12] Liggio, Leonard, “The Hispanic Tradition of Liberty”. The Philadelphia Society, January 12, 1990. https://phillysoc.org/liggio-the-hispanic-tradition-of-liberty/
[13] Rodríguez Braun, Carlos. “Early Smithies Economics in the Spanish Empire: J.H. Vieytes and Colonial Policy.” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 4, no. 3 (1997): 444–54. https://www.carlosrodriguezbraun.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/4/files/2011/05/vieytes.pdf.

Response Essay Vitoria, Las Casas, and the Americas

Henry T. Edmondson III

In his essay “Prequel to Liberty in Spanish America,” Dr. Paul Schwennesen rightly points our attention to the contributions that key 16th century Spanish figures made to the broader 18th century transatlantic Enlightenment, most especially their contribution to the concept of liberty, property rights, and freedom of conscience. Though the Spanish enlightenment is usually dated to the early 18th century, when the failing Hapsburg dynasty gave way to Bourbon royalty. Schwennesen explains, though, that the 18th century Spanish enlightenment was preceded by influential 16th Spanish intellectual powerhouses, members of the “School of Salamanca, principally Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana and political philosopher, jurist, and cleric, Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, the founder of the so-called “School of Salamanca.”
He also calls upon Spain’s 16th century literary giant, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, whose magnum opus and wildly popular Don Quixote provides a literary indication of the importance of liberty in Spain, with its “common-sense” appeal to limitations on power and property rights. Schwennesen rightly notes that Cervantes was “ahead of his time.”
In his appeal to Cervantes, and as he probably knows, Schwenessen needn’t have stopped with Don Quixote. Undoubtedly, he is familiar with Cervantes’ appealing Exemplary Stories, most often overshadowed by Don Quixote. This collection of short studies was precocious as well. For example, “Rinconete and Cortadillo” is the tale of two homeless teenagers who join a band of juvenile petty thieves in Seville, the entrepôt between Spain and the Americas. While at first the two enjoy the unrestrained freedom with their new friends, they ultimately realize there is a difference between “liberty” and “libertine” and so they set out to find meaningful authority in their lives.
In addition is Cervantes’ relatively unknown deathbed saga, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story, often simply called the Persiles, which he completed only three days before his death and considered it his most important work. Schennesen notes the importance of the influence of the Catholic church, not only on Vitoria and Mariana, but we can say on Cervantes himself who became a Third Order Franciscan several years before his death. The Persiles relates a journey to Rome where the protagonists provide yet another meaningful perspective on an experience of liberty that is subordinate to one’s spiritual obligations.  The two protagonists are “led by destiny and choice to the holy city of Rome, and until we reach there, we have no identity at all nor any liberty to use our free will. If Heaven leads us to walk that holy ground and worship its sacred relics, then we’ll again be able to exercise our now restrained wills. . . . “
Schwennesen further argues that along with provisions, horses, and weaponry, the conquistadors brought, however imperfectly,  a  notable principle of liberty to the Americas. Here, his argument becomes more challenging as he himself acknowledges that he is swimming upstream against conventional notions of ruthless invaders, pictured lyrically in the Procol Harum ballad, “Conquistador.” Composer and front man Gary Brooker says the title figure “reeks of purity.” Never mind Booker’s mispronunciation of the song title, the song has aged well.
Conquistador your stallion stands in need of companyAnd like some angel's hallowed brow you reek of purity
I see your armour-plated breast has long since lost its sheen
And in your death mask face there are no signs which can be seen
As evidence of the liberality of the conquest of Mexico and Central America, the author notes the role of Bartolomé  de las Casas who was appointed to oversee the welfare of the indigenous New World peoples. It was his role to document “infractions” committed by the Spaniards against the natives, although “infractions” seems quite the euphemism.
Since Schwennesen has invoked the Spanish friar in support of his thesis, he is, so to speak, “fair game. “ The title of Las Casas’ well-known, bitter history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas is A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,  which he wrote in frustration at his ineffectiveness in carrying out his duties to prevent violence, conquest, slavery, and genocidal murder. It was his final, desperate attempt to stop the Spanish inhumanity in the new world.
The book was quickly translated into the major principle European languages and was dedicated to the Hapsburg Prince Phillip II, later to become King Phillip II. According to the book’s preface, it is the “anatomy of a genocide” and upon publication was quickly translated into every major European language. In his prologue, Las Casas explains his motivation in writing the account to Prince Phillip. It is in the hope of preventing
“[a]ny repetition of the atrocities which go under the name of ‘conquests‘ [which], if no move is made to stop them, will be committed time and again, and which are of themselves iniquitous, tyrannical, contrary to natural, canon, and civil law, and are deemed wicked and are condemned and proscribed by all such legal codes. I therefore concluded that it would constitute a criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss of life . . . and so resolved to publish an account of a few such outrages (and they can be only a few out of the countless number of such incidents that I could relate) in order to make that account the more accessible to Your Highness.”
Las Casas’ account is difficult reading. His recount of atrocities on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) rivals the terror that Iris Chang recounts in the disturbing The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II about the Japanese invasion of the ancient city in 1937-1938. Las Casas writes,
They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, sliced open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of the axes.
The Dominican continues,
They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while threw them over their shoulders into a river. . . .  They slaughtered anyone and everyone in their path, on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords.
The Spaniards combined inhumanity with sacrilege “erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burn them alive thirteen at a time, in honour of our Saviour and the twelve Apostles.”
In Cuba, the Spaniards indulged in “the same outrages, the same wanton destruction the same wholesale slaughter, the same atrocities as they had elsewhere” such that “it is beyond human capacity to compile an accurate log” of the atrocities. In the Province of Nicaragua, natives were enslaved and literally worked to death so that the population of the island was reduced from hundreds of thousands to five or six thousand.
Las Casas records similar episodes in “The Province and Kingdom of Guatemala,” “The Province of Cartagena,” “The Kingdom of Venezuela,” “The Great Kingdoms and Provinces of Peru,” “The Kingdom of Venezuela,” “The Mainland in the Region Known As Florida”—and more. The author concludes that it was “a chaos worthy of Lucifer himself” and just as damning, “the Spanish have taken no more trouble to preach the Christian faith to these peoples than if they had been dealing with dogs or other animals.”
Comparatively unknown is “La Conquista Erótica de las Indias” (“The Erotic Conquest of the Indias”) by Argentinian Ricardo Herren, which he subtitles “La maratonica actividad sexual de los conquistadores españoles segun las mismas cronicas de la epoca” (The Marathon-like Sexual Activity of the Conquistadors According to the Records of the Period Itself.”). It was not unusual for one Spaniard to sire dozens of children in the Americas. That libidinous activity, he explains, was shared by the enlisted and officers alike, so that, in a relatively short time, the DNA of the Americas was permanently altered.
Schwennesen acknowledges that “[t]here were enormous moral failings, to be sure and the point here is not to whitewash examples of deplorable illiberal acts;” however, he still maintains that [d]espite the evidence he provides he insists that the Spanish were “surprisingly respectful toward the peoples they were so evidently bent on conquering.” Once again, “surprisingly respectful” seems, to put it charitably, euphemistic. Schwennesen admits, “Whether this is a “whitewash” or not would require more exploration, more study, and more debate.” Indeed. He cites the statements of disapproval by Spanish royalty and asserts they were not cynical.” But some were. The trials of a few, for example, Coronado, were noteworthy, but were they sincere, or just staged for public consumption? Schwennesen also acknowledges that “such defenses might seem suspiciously convenient and self-serving to modern ears.” It seems that, to the degree that liberty was imported to the America’s it was far “more honor’d in the breach than in the observance,” to put it mildly.
The reader is indebted to Dr. Paul Schwennesen for drawing  attention to the contribution of Mariana and Vitoria. I’m especially grateful for his inclusion of Francisco de Vitoria because only a short time ago, I served on a dissertation defense committee for a student at La Universidad Francisco de Vittoria, a fine, private, Catholic, institution in Madrid. I am one of those who am far too ignorant of these Spanish intellectuals’ contribution to the Enlightenment, and to the American Founding and I am now committed to reading Mariana’s history of Spain and several of Vitoria’s works as well.
Whether the Spanish conquest of the Americas is the best forum to pursue this interest seems an open question.

Conversation Comments Did Precolumbian Empires Influence Spanish Liberty?

Paul Schwennesen

Gabriela Calderón de Burgos and Henry T. Edmondson III make excellent points about the Spanish Enlightenment. It seems that though we all agree Spain charted important new territory in the early political landscape of liberty, we still grapple with the seeming failure of liberty to “launch” under the Spanish flag in the Americas. Is there perhaps something more at play? I’ll suggest (tentatively) that it may have had something to do with the political landscape before Spain’s arrival.
A quick glance at a historical map shows that Spain was almost exclusively “successful” in its initial conquest only where there were sedentary, hierarchical societies in which they could interpose their forefathers’ model of medieval vassalage. The least free places in Latin America today are the former strongholds of the Inca, Aztec, and Maya after all, and the coincidence seems more than passing. This is not to lay modern illiberality exclusively at the feet of pre-Columbian empires, but it is surely a factor with historical reverberations.
After all, though Calderón rightly points out that the legacy of liberty in Hispanic America is mixed at best, and Edmonson notes Spain’s failures to live up to its espoused proto-liberal values, it is not at all clear why this might be the case. The tortured historical flirtations with autocracy from Bolivia to México remind us that, yes, while Hispanic popular attachment to liberty predates England’s Magna Carta by centuries, the “Spanish Enlightenment” has unfolded in complicated and contradictory ways. But is it a structural failing with the Spanish effort itself or merely a historical accident? While it is true that Cuba today is the least free place in the Americas, Chile tops the charts along with Canada on Freedom House’s index of national freedom. It is noteworthy that by the same index, Spain and Portugal today are more free than the United States.
Is the failure of liberty to flourish in so much of modern Latin America related, as Edmonson implies, to the atrocities of the conquest– “a chaos worthy of Lucifer himself” as Bartolome de las Casas famously termed it? It is a tempting thesis, to be sure, but there are two points which militate against such a sweeping conclusion: first, the primary sources we rely upon as evidence for Spanish colonial atrocities were written by the Spanish themselves within a complicated tableau of competing internal politics. Their accounts, therefore, need to be read with a certain caution. Las Casas himself, for instance, led a Dominican political cabal dedicated to wresting power away from his theological rivals, the Franciscans, in a millenarian race to “save” tens of millions of souls. Fray Toribio of Benavente (Motolinía), a Franciscan monk who spoke fluent Nahuatl and dedicated himself to the baptism of entire communities, felt that Las Casas rather overplayed the narrative of ruthless conquistadors to bolster his court prestige and sect’s political power.  Moreover, the self-condemning narratives of Spaniards were eagerly taken up, translated, and broadcast by English antagonists (Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582) comes to mind) in the intense propaganda campaigns swirling about the Reformation.
Second, even if we take the accounts of conquest brutality at face value, such heinous crimes can hardly be taken to explain the failing of the Iberian liberal project as a whole. After all, the Scottish Enlightenment, which few would deem a failure, arose from the ashes of its own colonial debacle in Panama (the Darién disaster of New Caledonia), and English colonial activities in North America aren’t generally known as an exercise in forbearance either.
No, we need something more comprehensive to explain liberty’s erratic growth from Iberian rootstock. Spanish popular attachment to liberty is clearly no more tepid than in the Anglosphere. From the Comunero Revolt on, Spaniards have demonstrated an abiding attachment to liberty and in this regard, Miguel Cervantes was not “ahead of his time” but abundantly a man of his times. So we cannot assume the failing lies in some cultural element unique to Iberians.
Similarly, it is surely unrelated to the relatively delayed independence from the Spanish Empire. After all, only some 30 years elapsed between 1776 and the declarations of independence starting with Colombia, while Canada managed to maintain liberty under the very empire the United States revolted against.
What can we conclude, then, if anything, about la Libertad in the Hispanic vein? Perhaps we might concede intellectual defeat and conclude that a nation’s embrace of freedom is, in the end, a matter of historical contingency. After all, the story is far from complete: Javier Milei’s efforts in Argentina may have a greater impact on the growth of liberty than Trump’s experiments in the Land of the Free. But throwing our hands in the air and saying the trajectory is one determined only by the fickle winds of fate seems a dissatisfying cop-out.
Perhaps, at least in the Americas, Hispanic liberty suffered the most where Spain effectively transported its feudal model into the imperial structures that predated the conquest. This revivified European illiberality then echoed and redounded through the ages, leaving today’s messy trail in its wake. It is not a comprehensive answer, but it certainly is one we should not ignore.

Conversation Comments Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas and propaganda

Gabriela Calderon de Burgos

Both Dr. Schwennesen and Dr. Edmondson have brought up friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566). The former, as evidence of how the Spanish Monarchy sought to end abuses against indigenous peoples and the latter as evidence of how inhumane its treatment of them was. However, none of them has questioned de Las Casas validity as an eyewitness testimony or his role as an early promoter of universal human rights.
Enrique Díaz Araujo questioned the friar as a legitimate source and he did so by compiling the opinion of many of his contemporaries and several historians between the 17th century and 20th century.[1] To give just one of the many examples of contemporary judgements consider what the then solicitor in Cuba, Pánfilo de Narváez y Antonio Velázquez, said of Las Casas in 1516: “This cleric is a lightweight, of little authority and credibility. He talks about what he doesn't know or hasn't seen.” Among the many critical judgments over the next centuries, we can point out that these came not just from the anti-Black Legend camp but also from those who were very much anti-Spanish Empire, such as William H. Prescott.[2]
María Elvira Roca Barea claims in her Imperiofobia y leyenda negra (Siruela, 2018)[3] considers Las Casas’ Brevísima relación as a quintessential example of Black Legend propaganda:
Only having fallen into the hands of propaganda has friar Bartolomé been able to become an apostle of human rights. His atrocities know no bounds: from justifying human sacrifices with the argument that it is the same as mass, except that the Indians are not able to metaphorically be in communion with their god, to defending the slave trade: so that the tame Indians do not have to work, the best thing is to bring in blacks who, as they have no soul, can be used for anything.
Edmondson claims that the Brevísima was “quickly translated into the major principal European languages”. However, Roca Barea notes that though the first edition was published in Seville in 1551, the first translation —into French— appeared more than 25 years later (1578). This first foreign language edition, as others that would come later, happen to coincide with specific historical moments. The French translation of 1578 corresponds to the Eternal Edict signed between the rebels in The Netherlands and John of Austria in 1577, then governor of the Spanish Netherlands.[4] Likewise, the English translation of 1583 was published five years before Phillip II´s armada attempted to dethrone Elizabeth I. Yet another English translation in 1656 was intended to justify the British military conquest of Spanish Jamaica during the Anglo-Spanish War of 1655-1660.
Roca Barea concludes that one of the lasting consequences of friar Bartolomé´s work is that of contributing significantly to the birth of the myth of the supposed indigenous Eden: “Rousseau's noble savage is genetically Lascasian. It doesn't matter if the native is a cannibal or a headhunter. His state of nature makes him intrinsically good.” Roca Barea says Aztec culture was totalitarian:
The Aztecs spent a good part of the year hunting people from neighboring tribes to sacrifice them in festivals that lasted three months and in which between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed each year. The subjugated tribes of the region lived in terror, waiting for the day when that monstrosity would end. And it ended with the arrival of the Spanish, but not without the essential collaboration of many tribes....Neither Las Casas nor Rousseau ever felt, not even respect, but mere curiosity about the Indians. For both, all Indians are the same Indian, which is the quintessential expression of the European conviction that only we have been granted the gift of individuality.
This brings us to Francisco Pérez de Antón´s critique of Las Casas, which focuses on a controversy he had with the lesser-known Bishop of Guatemala Francisco Marroquín (1499-1563).[5] Pérez de Antón claims that Marroquín and Las Casas were “like water and oil.” Marroquín arrived in Guatemala when he was 30 and stayed there for the rest of his life, as opposed to Las Casas who never settled in any place, “always causing trouble.” Marroquín defended human rights for all, while Las Casas denied these rights to blacks, even proposing their importation and enslavement. Pérez de Antón adds:
More than a protector of the Indians, Las Casas aspired to be their messiah... Marroquín protected the Indians, not only with equal vigor and greater competence than Las Casas, but also by always seeking to create a climate in which Indians, Spaniards and mestizos could live together in a common space.
The Spanish Conquest of the Americas was, as all other conquests, not free from abuses. But up against those evils, Marroquín worked quietly to humanize and rectify them.
There is no whitewashing of the Spanish Conquest in recognizing that there was a Spanish Enlightenment. However, many have attempted to brush over equal or arguably greater abuses elsewhere by giving too much airtime and credit to caricatures of the Spanish Empire.
Endnotes
[1] Díaz Araujo, Enrique. Las Casas visto de costado: Crítica bibliográfica sobre la leyenda negra. 2nd ed. Guadalajara, México: Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, 2022. https://archive.org/details/diazaraujo.lascasasvistodecostado/page/n5/mode/2up.
[2] Prescott quoted in Díaz Araujo: “He was not an eyewitness to the events in New Spain, and he was very willing to believe anything that might contribute to his purpose and to overload, if I may say so, his argument with accounts of bloodshed and carnage, which by their very extravagance carried with them their own refutation”.
[3] Roca Barea, María Elvira. Imperiofobia y La Leyenda Negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y El Imperio Español. 3rd ed. Siruela, 2018, p. 310-321.
[4] In this edict, John had agreed to remove Spanish forces from the Netherlands, recognize feudal privileges of the different cities and dominions and to stop the process of administrative modernization in exchange for the indisputable acknowledgement of the King´s sovereignty —Phillip II of Spain— and the restoration of Catholicism. Though the edict appeared to have calmed the waters, a river of propaganda ensued to keep alive the secessionist sentiment and the Brevísima came in handy.
[5] Universidad Francisco Marroquín, one of the most classical liberal universities in the world, bears his name.

Conversation Comments Gabriela Calderón de Burgos’ Scholarly Development of Paul Schwennesen’s Essay

Henry T. Edmondson III

In her response to Paul Schwennesen’s initial essay, Gabriela Calderón de Burgos helpfully writes in support of his theme by expanding the discussion to the politicization and oversimplification of the history of Spain in the Americas. “A more nuanced view” of the  history of the Spanish influence in Latin America reveals a “rich classical tradition” that existed even if it did not “prevail.” She introduces into this forum the contribution of another member of the School of Salamanca, Francisco Suarez, and his principles of the sovereignty of the governed, which at times animated the revolutions for independence in South America.
Calderón de Burgos quotes prominent ethicist Nigel Biggar of the University of Oxford who appropriately notes that Great Britain is also simplistically characterized as unmitigated tyrants. In Britain’s case, the issue must be addressed even more conscientiously given the expanse of Britain’s empire, much of it still in existence due to the Commonwealth, and even more to the point, the nations like Canada and New Zealand who still recognize the king as the Head of State. In that pursuit, at some point an apologist for the British Empire must meet the challenge of the dark periods of Great Britain’s history as well, for example,  the two “Opium Wars” (1839-1842; 1856-1860) between the British Empire and China’s Qing Dynasty.
Calderón de Burgos underscores Schwennesen’s attention to the influence of the School of Salamanca on the American Founders, and their apparent interest in, for example, Juan de Mariana’s The General History of Spain, a copy of which was owned by John Adams. She notes that John Locke, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson had this book “in common.” Since both Schwennesen and Calderón de Burgos support their argument by noting the apparent influence the School of Salamanca had on the American Founders, it would be helpful to further investigate that influence more concretely.
It seems that in addition to Mariana’s History of Spain, Adams also sought out Mariana's 1599 work “De Rege et Regis institutione.” He acknowledges receipt of one of Mariana’s books  in a letter to Thomas Brand Hollis on April 9, 1788, although he does not specify which of the volumes he has received:
Dear Sir,I have, to day, received your kind letter of the 7th and the valuable books that accompanied it. Mariana, Corio, and Ramsay, for which I most heartily thank you.
In a letter to John Taylor, dated December 14, 1814, Adams is more expansive in his recognition of Mariana:
But to come nearer home, in Search of causes which “arrest our Efforts.” Here I am like the Wood cutter on Mount Ida, who could not See Wood, for Trees, Mariana wrote a Book De Regno, in which he had the temerity to insinuate that Kings were instituted for good and might be deposed if they did nothing but Evil. Of course the Book was prohibited and the Writer persecuted…I already feel, all the ridicule, of hinting at my poor four volumes of “Defence” and Discourses on Davila, after quoting Mariana, Harrington Sydney and Montesquieu. But I must submit to the imputation of vanity, arrogance, presumption, dotage, or insanity, or what you will…
…because I have still a Curiosity to see what turn will be taken by public affairs in this Country and others. Where can We rationally look for the Theory or practice of Government, but to Nature and Experiment?
Finally, in support of this forum’s recognition of the profound thought of Francisco de Vitoria we might consider Ricardo José Cuéllar Real’s Francisco de Vitoria y las cuestiones de Indias. This helpful monograph organizes Vitoria’s scholarly thought on the controversy in the New World, in which the 16th century Thomist scholar, guided by St. Thomas Aquinas, pursues the controversy over the rights of the indigenous people. One of the first questions he must confront is an understandable one, namely whether the Indians were as fully human as the Europeans. The American Founders and 19th century settlers confront the same difficulty. With the Founders the question had to do with American Indians and American slaves. In both cases, leaders like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recognized that they were trying to ascertain the nature of a defeated people in their subjugated stage. They nonetheless were eager to find evidence that both indigenous and enslaved people were their equals and deserving of dignity and liberty. In the case of American settlers in the mid-19th century, the Americans pushing westward were at times given to wonder if American Indians were sub-human. This was especially true of the most feared tribe, the Comanches. An extraordinary book, Empire of the Southern Moon, (2016) may leave the reader with the same question.
Vitoria also carefully parsed if Spain might legitimately subjugate certain native populations in the Americas because they engaged in cannibalism and human sacrifice. The Jesuit demonstrated how far ahead of his time he stood when he concluded that only those ruling a country could take action against its own citizens; those acting on behalf of another country could not do so. He made one exception: if there were missionaries in indigenous lands and they began to suffer violence at the hands of indigenous peoples, this gave another country the right to intervene.
Proceeding from the Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue of “temperance,” he said that the issue of human sacrifice was, at that juncture, part of the realidad between the Old World and the New World and could not easily be resolved. Finally, on the issue of the Christianization of the New World populations, Vitoria asserted that those so engaged must appeal to the “rationality” of the Indians; they could not rely on force. To those who argued that the Indians were incapable of such reason, Vitoria responded that they in fact were capable of reason by virtue of the Natural Law.

Conversation Comments What came before and after the conquest

Gabriela Calderon de Burgos

Dr. Paul Schwennesen makes an interesting point by considering what came before the Spanish conquest. He says that “the least free places in Latin America today are the former strongholds of the Inca, Aztec, and Maya after all, and the coincidence seems more than passing.” Income inequality is another Latin American ailment laid at the feet of the Spanish Conquest. However, if one looks further back, as Guido Alfani of Bocconi University and Alfonso Carballo of the NEOMA Business School did in a recent study, the much talked about income inequality in Latin America appears to have pre-dated Spanish conquest, given that within the Aztec Empire:
…the richest 1% earned 41.8% of the total income, while the income share of the poorest 50% was just 23.3%...those provinces that had resisted the Aztec expansion suffered from relatively harsh conditions, including higher taxes, in the context of the imperial system—and were the first to rebel, allying themselves with the Spaniards. Existing literature suggests that after the Spanish conquest, the colonial elites inherited pre-existing extractive institutions and added additional layers of social and economic inequality.[1]
Alfani and Carballo's study blurs the utopian vision of the Aztec empire, as Louis Baudin (1928) had previously done with the Inca empire. When Hernán Cortés arrived in what is now Mexico, he did not come across a peaceful civilization, but rather a population subjected to a constant state of war, where the dominant faction subjected it to increasingly extractive taxes and “pro-elite political reforms that exacerbated social stratification throughout the empire. The nobility took possession of the land and controlled the commoners through various mechanisms, which led to a clear demarcation between the landowning class and the landless class.” In some cases, Europeans adapted or maintained pre-existing extractive institutions, such as the tribute system of the Incas in the Andean region.
Coming back to Baudin, his book A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Perú is an expose of how inhumane such a society was. The American edition published in 1961 bears a foreword by none other than Ludwig von Mises which claims that Baudin “did not approach the subject of his studies with any preconceived idea. He proceeds, as the great historians have ever tried to proceed, sine ira et studio”.[2] He adds:
…From the pages of his treatise there emerge shadowy outlines of life under a collectivist regime, the spectre of a human animal deprived of his essentially human quality, the power to choose and to act. These wards of the Inca were only in a zoological sense human beings. Actually they were kept like cattle in a pen. Like cattle they had nothing to worry about because their personal fate did not depend on their own behavior but was determined by the apparatus of the system. They could in this sense be called happy. But theirs was a peculiar brand of happiness…[3]
On what happened during the more than 200 years after independence from the Spanish Empire, we should also give the locals some agency and, thus, a fair share in the distribution of blame.
Endnotes
[1] Alfani, G., Carballo, A. “Income and inequality in the Aztec Empire on the eve of the Spanish conquest”. Nature Human Behavior 7, 1265–1274 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01636-3
[2]  “without anger and bias”
[3] Baudin, Louis. A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru. D. Van Nostrand Company, 1961.

Conversation Comments Spain’s Literary and Political Contributions: An Afterward

Henry T. Edmondson III


In these final comments, I especially appreciate that Paul Schwennessen set the agenda with his well-informed and articulate initial essay. I’m also gratified that I now seem to be spelling his name correctly most of the time. I’m also thankful for the very meaningful contribution made by Gabriela Calderon de Burgos who added a great deal to the discussion. I went into higher education because I wanted to keep learning and I have learned a great deal in this project.
Since Professor Schwennessen aptly began the forum with literature as a way of understanding politics, I’ll end in the same way. One of my favorite short stories in Miguel de Cervantes’ Exemplary Stories is the Colloquio de Los Perros. When I translated the title to a colleague over dinner in Valladolid, Spain, she grimaced—understandably, because the translated title, “The Dialogue of the Dogs,” sounds quite rude compared with Cervantes’ euphonious original title. For one magical night, two canines, Scipio and Berganza, hanging out at the Hospital of the Resurrection in Valladolid, gain the gift of speech. They speak mostly of humans, but in doing so, offer indirect observations on man’s strengthes—but more of his weaknesses.
They begin by noting that humans have the gift of reason, while dogs are considered irrational. But the traits that dogs do possess suggest that man’s reason too often lets him down or is not exercised as it should be because dogs, by contrast, have a long list of virtues that humans do not necessarily lack, but are only exhibited erratically, whereas dogs are consistent in these qualities.
Berganza says, “I have many a time heard tell of our great endowments, insomuch that some, it appears, have been disposed to think that we possess a natural instinct, so vivid and acute in many things that it gives signs and tokens little short of demonstrating that we have a certain sort of understanding capable of reason.” Scipio adds, “What I have heard highly extolled is our strong memory, our gratitude, and great fidelity; so that it is usual to depict us as symbols of friendship.” There are even accounts of dogs “so loyal throwing themselves on the graves of their masters” and “refusing to eat until they die.”
The dogs, moreover, engage in a bit of philosophy, and Berganza notes, with Aristotelian shades, that philosophy is the purpose of leisure. They then proceed to share their respective stories, both of which have to do with their life with people. Without apparently intending to, in all the stories, the dogs experience an array of human foibles and seem, at times, wiser than their masters. Scipio observes, “Be wary with your tongue, for from that member flow the greatest ills of human life.” Berganza later suggests that it is humility that has been the key to his success—or survival.
So, as is the case in other notable works of literature, we often learn more about humans from animals or hobbits or elves than we do by other means. The readings in this forum have ranged from the sublime to the profane. The sublime, the wisdom of the School of Salamanca, has given us principles that give way to the profane. In order for the human race to better itself, and more consistently apply the principles we learn from the Spaniards, we might improve upon the tragedies of this last century, as well as the misfortune of the first quarter of this century by, at times, letting literature be our guide. We might further follow the example of Berganza and Scipio: namely to take opportunities for reflection and meaningful conversation, and it is for that reason that opportunities such as these are so valuable.
Author’s Note: I would be badly amiss if I were not to acknowledge the professionalism, encouragement, and discipline provided by our leaders, Thea Burress and Christy Horpedahl. Thank you.

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