The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part 1: Erasmus, Luther and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1)
Spain, the Modern Colonial Pioneer
The Irish history industry has marked the new millennium with a spate of publications that have Making Ireland... in their titles. Nicholas Canny established the trend with Making Ireland British. Then there was Making Ireland Roman by the Latinists of UCC, plus articles by Hiram Morgan on “Making Ireland Spanish”, about Philip O’Sullivan Beare, and by Brendan Kane on “Making Ireland European”. Now finally we have Jane Ohlmeyer’s Making Ireland English (which would have been a better title for Canny’s book).
This peculiar focus on the past is, of course, connected with the present. It seems that modern society could not exist at all without its missionary initiatives, aimed at making or remaking the populations. Not all of the missionaries agree with one another’s aims, but overall there is sufficient rough consensus for things to keep going without breaking down. It is open to historians, as it is to sociologists, psychologists, economists and others, to think of themselves as social makers. They will find a welcome in some one of the missionary factions. And they won’t necessarily have to be as frenetic as the well-known TCD Professor of History, whose mode of directing his graduate students (as reported to me) resembles a military operation: find evidence for this, undermine that, prove X, disprove Y.
Nowadays quite a lot of the making is done peacefully, with words and pictures instead of weapons. (Peace must be understood to include a great deal of denigration, humiliation, harassment and bullying.) It is believed that the process will proceed more successfully if people can be got to take responsibility for their own remaking. However, we know that another, more violent kind of social making was much practised in Ireland and large parts of the world from the 16th century, and is practised in many places still. To my mind, the most interesting thing about Ireland is how doggedly the majority population resisted being remade.
The attempt to remake foreign populations as something different – essentially, as Christians and “civil people” – was launched by the Spanish, after an expedition financed by their monarchs had happened upon the islands now known as the West Indies. Spain was the pioneering colonial power. It represented a model for the other strong maritime states of Western Europe, and first of all for its neighbour Portugal, which soon snapped up Brazil. But the Spanish did not merely occupy vast territories, aiming to destroy the local political structures and the local cultures, and causing a devastating population decline in Central and South America, mainly but not entirely by importing new diseases against which the locals had no immunity. They actually discussed what they were doing. They sustained fierce controversies and polemics into the second half of the 16th century. And somehow, in the economy of colonialist culture, the Spanish discussion sufficed, because nobody else had a really animated debate after that. Even Marx was ambivalent on whether colonialism was a good thing or a bad thing.
The polemic in Spain was about what was good and proper practice for the Spanish in their newly occupied lands. The main reformist campaigner, Bartolomé de las Casas, did not take an anti-colonial position during his first few decades. Near the end of his life his standpoint was effectively anti-colonial, since he was calling for the Incas and Aztecs to be restored under a loose Spanish over-kingship, but he reached this position at the end of a long development. As for his principal opponent, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, we can say that his justifications for colonial intervention became classics. Whether or not his thinking was actually transmitted beyond Spain, he can be seen as the first specimen of a type. His main arguments were commonly used afterwards by the ideologists of Britain and other colonial powers.
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, publishing Sepúlveda’s most elaborate work in favour of colonisation through war in 1892, made these interesting comments: “Sepúlveda, a peripatetic classicist, one of those who were called Hellenists or Alexandrians in Italy, treated the problem with all the crudity of pure Aristotelianism, as expounded in the philosopher’s Politics, inclining with more or less rhetorical circumlocution to the theory of natural slavery. His mode of thinking in this part of the book does not differ much from those modern empirical sociologists and positivists who proclaim the extermination of the inferior races, as a necessary consequence of their defeat in the struggle for existence”. Menéndez y Pelayo thought that Las Casas was genuinely the more Christian, though Sepúlveda had made efforts to show the contrary. Nevertheless, “there is also a foundation, based on the philosophy of history and sad human truth, in the new aspect under which Sepúlveda considers the problem”. (1)
I think there are indeed moments when Sepúlveda (and also the historian Oviedo and some other Spanish writers of his time) expresses himself in ways quite like the English Social-Darwinist writers of the late 19th century – not to mention leading English politicians such as Sir Charles Dilke, who once proudly proclaimed that “the Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race”. (2) But Sepúlveda does not mainly take this attitude. More usually he reminds one of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon, insisting that the Spanish have a burden that they are morally obliged to take up: the duty of civilising and christianising peoples who not capable of becoming civil or Christian by themselves.
Immanuel Wallerstein, reviewing the Las Casas/Sepúlveda polemic some years back, observed that no one since the mid-16th century had added very much to the two basic standpoints set out, on how peoples with cultures differing from ours should be dealt with. He also said that after 1945, with the great wave of decolonisation, there was a moment when it seemed that Las Casas’ standpoint had finally triumphed, but the picture looked very different in the 2000s. I would agree with all this.
However, before considering the polemic of the two Spaniards, one must note that at precisely the same time there were other, quite independent movements which aimed at the remaking or reformation of European culture. It is interesting that Sepúlveda, like the Italian Hellenists he attached himself to, did not sympathise with those movements. In fact, he developed as a writer by opposing them.
I am thinking of Lutheranism and Erasmianism – Erasmus of Rotterdam, that phenomenal writer who was the first international literary sensation of the age of printing, with fans from Ireland to Poland, can be regarded as a movement all by himself. Erasmus is usually taken as an example, and Luther as a product, of what is called “humanism”. But the “ism” is misleading. A better term might be one that was wasted on some mediocre French thinkers of the 1970s: “new philosophy”. The new philosophers of the 15th/16th centuries focused on the study of classical Greek and Latin literature, which gave them a stimulus to take a fresh approach to thinking generally.
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