Did Precolumbian Empires Influence Spanish Liberty?

    

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.