Content area
Full Text
The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. xvi + 278 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.95)
In The Conquest of History, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara examines the creation of national histories by intellectuals and politicians in Spain and its colonies, from the 1810s, when Spain lost the majority of its American empire, to 1898, when the United States took over its remaining colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. This is a peculiar time period, as the simultaneous destruction and continuity of empire forced elites in Spain and in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to reconsider the origins and meaning of Spanish conquest and colonization. But their quest was different. Whereas Spaniards looked for the reasons of their empire's fall, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos sought explanations for their continuing colonization and imagined a distinct future. They turned for answers to the same body of sources: the chronicles, letters, and natural histories written by the conquerors in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Yet their reading differed: Spaniards drew a history of assimilation of the indigenous societies into the Spanish nationality; colonial patriots stressed indigenous resistance as a basis for the building of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipino nationality, looking into their country's precolonial past for that purpose. This quest was complicated by sharp divergences among colonial historians about the future of their country: independence, autonomy within the Spanish empire, or annexation to the United States. To make matters even more complex, all of them, Spaniards and colonials alike, measured the history of the Spanish empire against the British empire, which had also lost its thirteen American colonies in 1783 but had regenerated and grown bigger since then. And...