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66 *~G?e heretical" was much more than a dimension of religious doctrine: J. it played a critical role in the making of the modern world. In the seventeenth century, Spanish religious and secular bureaucrats - modernity's vanguard - fashioned institutions to rule over colonized peoples and over the subjects of a slowly emerging nation. "Race-thinking" was at the core of these imperial and national designs, and "the heretical," as it turns out, was intrinsic to race-thinking. Evangelizers preached messages of social order, with a racial and religious cast, to indigenous peoples living in Peru's countryside, while Peru's Inquisitors determined membership in the elusive, but worldwide, club of "authentic, racially-pure, Old Christian, Spaniards" - Spaniards without the heretical stains of Jewish or Moorish ancestry.1
Hannah Arendt, whose account of the origins of fascism I find very suggestive, combed Western history for a precedent that would have eased the way for "civilized" peoples to embrace Hitler's barbarity. Arendt found that antecedent in nineteenth-century imperialism and identified two dimensions of colonial control that would have laid the groundwork for the horrors to follow: (1) bureaucratic rule and (2) race-thinking - racial ideologies that turned bureaucrats into members of a superior, white-European caste with authority traversing the globe. Colonial rule's inherent violence was cloaked in an aura of "rationality" and "civilization," and Arendt believed that this hidden violence, its "subterranean stream," was as intrinsic to Western modernity as its vaunted Enlightenment ideals. Arendt thus placed colonialism - and its companion ideologies of "race-thinking" and "civilizing" - at the heart of modern experience.2
Arendt believed that colonialism's governing principles were launched by nineteenth-century imperialism, but, as I have argued, Arendt's chronology was off by two centuries. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, Spain's cuttingedge bureaucrats were installing civilization - defined by and inseparable from Catholicism - along with race-thinking designs throughout its widely dispersed colonies. If we take the first wave of the European empire as the origin of modernity, we have a better grasp of the weight of religious orthodoxy - that is, the weight of religious heresy - in the construction of very modern concepts of "civilization" and "race."
Placing modernity's roots in the seventeenth century is controversial, and conceptualizing the Inquisition as one of its vanguard institutions...