America, América: A New History of the New World, Part I

The author is Yale Professor of History Greg Grandin. I can’t say enough about the book. I’ve only scratched the first hundred pages or so. In a nutshell, it is a history of the Western Hemisphere from the start of Spanish colonization that integrates the history of Central and South America with that of the north. It’s a doorstop of a book, so I’ll be writing on it as I go along. I don’t want to wait to say anything until I finish.

This is an easy book to read, apparently pitched to a broad audience. The narrative is delivered in bite-sized pieces. It’s easy to find logical points at which to put the book down for the moment if you have something else to do.

Spanish colonization was a horror show. Most are aware of that and have also heard of the principal critic, Bartolomé de las Casas, as the man who told the truth about Columbus, but I never knew he was a huge figure with an extensive following, both inside and outside the Church and the Spanish monarchy. Of course Christopher Columbus was an absolute shit.

I kept being reminded of the De Niro movie, The Mission. Opposition to the brutalities of Spanish colonization among Catholic clergy, especially among de las Casas’s Dominican faithful, was real. Some paid with torture and their lives. You get a clear sense of how the drive for plunder and exploitation among the settlers just steamrolled over crises of conscience within the Church. It’s a pleasure to learn about a corner of good in the world, even if its time has passed.

There have been estimates that the indigenous population of the Americas numbered in the tens of millions, most of whom did not survive the combined assaults of plagues and outright conquistador and settler genocide. On top of that of course was the slaughter of Africans bound for slavery in the colonies. Really, we Jews need to get over ourselves.

The Spanish colonization contrasted with that of England. The latter followed by a few decades, by which time plague had wiped out much of the native American population in Massachusetts and Virginia. The incidence of plague helped the English convince themselves that the Almighty had intervened on their behalf, clearing the territory of competitors for land and resources. In the same vein, no parallel body of criticism of colonization emerged in England, again in contrast to the Spanish uproar. According to Grandin, the great English moral philosophers — Hume, Locke, and Adam Smith — could not bring themselves to say much about their own kingdom’s complicity in the slave trade.

I guess I have to confess how little history I know. I had no idea that the Spanish monarchy lent crucial assistance to the American revolution. All I heard about was the French and the Marquis de Lafayette. In supreme irony, as a few observers noted at the time, this proved to be a disastrous move for the Spanish empire, as it set loose an independent USA on Spanish holdings west of the Mississippi.

Napoleon’s conquests in Europe fomented additional major impacts, turning loose a wave of independence movements across South America which tended to be modeled on the American revolution. These had the political advantage of pretending to be defending the rulers that Napoleon’s conquests had removed. The pretense had the disadvantage of clouding the republican enthusiasms underlying the independence movements.

The newly independent republics were faced with a fluid geography in which, separated from its Spanish possession, land was up for grabs. As nations will do, even as sort-of comrades in arms, competition for land ensued, in some cases touching off destructive intra-continental wars.

An interesting sub-plot was the U.S. thirst for Mexican territory, west of the Mississippi. Of interest was that slavery had been abolished in Mexico, encouraging escaped slaves to head south. I’m reminded of the recent book, “Forget the Alamo,” which I believe makes the point that the glorious Texas independence struggle was not trivially tied up with the interest of slave-owners in Texas. The 1619 Project’s hypothesis, much disputed, is that the slave-owners in the thirteen colonies exerted similar influence in favor of the revolution, since Great Britain had abolished slavery.

The political struggles of the new nations of Central and South America elevate the role of Simon Bolivar, evidently one of the more neglected figures in American history.