Colonialism and Nation-Building in 19th Century Spain

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DOI: 10.1177/0265691404042507

2004 34: 191European History QuarterlyChristopher Schmidt-Nowara

Nineteenth-Century Spain'La EspaÒa Ultramarina': Colonialism and Nation-Building in

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‘La España Ultramarina’: Colonialism andNation-building in Nineteenth-century Spain

Spain suffered two devastating movements of decolonization inthe nineteenth century, brought on by the Spanish-American revolutions (1809–26) and the wars against Cuban and Filipinopatriots that ended with intervention by the United States(1895–8). Historians of modern Spain have given far greaterattention to the latter moment than to the former; 1898 is one ofthe iconic dates in Spanish history, forcing reflections by anyscholar of the modern period. As one prominent historianobserved amidst the wave of publications that surged forth dur-ing the centennial of 1898: ‘Since then, and for a lengthy periodof time, every españolito has felt obligated to reckon with ’98.’1

Yet, amidst the copious writings there remains a strangesilence; while talking incessantly of the loss of the colonies, historians have said almost nothing about the colonies them-selves. This omission appears all the more glaring in light ofrecent discussions about modern European colonialisms thatemphasize the dynamic political, cultural and economic inter-actions between colonies and the metropolis. Colonialism wasnot something that happened off-stage during the development ofEuropean conceptions of citizenship and the nation, but wasalways implicated profoundly in these processes.2

I would like to pursue these insights by showing the connec-tions between colonialism and the articulation of national identityin Spain between decolonizations. Lately, the making, inventionand imagining of ‘the idea of Spain’ have received careful andsophisticated attention; but the role of the colonies in these politi-cal and ideological projects has gone unexamined. While I concurwith many of the methodological assumptions of these works —derived largely from Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

European History Quarterly Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, ThousandOaks, CA and New Delhi (www.sagepublications.com), Vol. 34(2), 191–214.ISSN 0265–6914 DOI: 10.1177/0265691404042507


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Pierre Nora3 — I differ by arguing that a retrenched colonialism,in its interface with nationalism, attracted and appeased powerfuleconomic, political and intellectual forces throughout thePeninsula. Indeed, colonialism was a major vector for imaginingthe nation and its history.4

In presenting this argument, two aspects of colonialism andnation-building in the nineteenth century are explored. First,there is discussion of the centrality of the colonies (especiallyCuba and Puerto Rico) to the political economy of the liberalregime that was consolidated in the 1830s. Spanish producersexported their goods to protected colonial markets and migrantsto the Caribbean became major planters and merchants, whilesome who returned (indianos) invested their earnings in Spain’snascent industrial economy. These sectors of metropolitan society actively defended their interests, representing the coloniesas part of the ‘national market’ whose loss would violate Spain’s‘national integrity’.

Second, the way in which the colonies figured into the ‘imag-ined community’ of Spanish nation-builders is shown. The densehistorical literature and archives created by Spaniards over thecenturies to justify, explain and govern the Spanish Empireserved as models for nineteenth-century patriots who were seek-ing to craft national histories after the destruction of the oldregime. Furthermore, in nineteenth-century parlance the colonieswere ‘la España ultramarina’, integral parts of the Spanishnation-state. In the view of Spanish intellectuals, politicians,colonial officials and business leaders, the colonies were bound to the Peninsula not only by the ‘national economy’ but also bycenturies of Spanish rule that had implanted language, religionand political institutions in the Caribbean and Pacific, effectivelyassimilating, culturally and biologically, the conquered peoplesinto the march of Spanish history.

Reshaping Spanish Colonialism

A recent work on Spanish responses to the ‘Disaster’ of 1898 hasposed an intriguing question. Why did Spaniards respond withsuch passion to the defeat of that year and with such apparentindifference to the loss of the majority of the Empire in theSpanish-American revolutions in the 1820s? After all, as José

192 European History Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 2



Alvarez Junco points out, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippinesrepresented a miniscule percentage of the vast empire that hadbeen constructed in the early modern period. He concludes thatSpanish response to the Spanish-Cuban-American War was ‘aclear case of exaggeration’, ‘an erroneous perception’ of theimportance of the rump empire to Spain’s political and economicfortunes.5

Arguably, both elements of Alvarez Junco’s argument are inneed of revision. First, the fervid reactions to military defeat in1898 reflected an understanding of the central role of the colonialempire in Spain’s economy, as well as the pain of losing what wasperhaps the single most important colony in Spain’s long historyof rule in the Americas: Cuba. Alvarez Junco is correct to notethat studies of economic responses to 1898 have shown thatSpain recovered quickly and successfully from the loss of thecolonies. Moreover, more Spaniards migrated to Cuba in the firstthird of the twentieth century than in any period of direct Spanishrule. Yet contemporaries in Spain had no way of predicting theseoutcomes. As this article will show, their anguished response haddeep political, economic and intellectual roots.6

Second, the assumption that Spaniards responded passively tothe break-up of the majority of the American Empire in the 1820sis incorrect. To the contrary, the Spaniards’ responses wereactive, decisive and diverse. Both Alvarez Junco and MartinBlinkhorn have argued that Spaniards were indifferent to thecolossal colonial losses of the 1820s because they viewed the‘Indies’ as the personal possessions of the Spanish monarch, notas integral parts of Spain.7 However, several studies have shownthat many Spaniards were greatly preoccupied with the colonialquestion during the Spanish-American revolutions. For mer-chants and producers throughout the Peninsula, the Americaswere not the king’s patrimony but their market for their flour,wheat, oil, wine, and textiles, all of which were transported intheir ships in voyages financed with their capital. Thus, the con-sulado of Cádiz, the most important merchant guild in Spain inthe early nineteenth century, responded energetically to the colonial wars by taking upon itself the task of raising troops andtransporting them to the Americas.8

The most vigorous, and most clearly understood, responses towar and decolonization were the economic decisions made bymerchants and producers on the Spanish periphery. In particular,

Schmidt-Nowara, ‘La España Ultramarina’ 193



Cuba figured as one of the cornerstones in the reconstruction ofthe Spanish economy after years of colonial, European, and civilwars. The Spanish-American revolutions forced Spanish pro-ducers and merchants to find new markets in the early nineteenthcentury. Until the French revolution, the American colonies wereby far the single biggest market for Spanish manufacturers andagriculture, receiving some 40 per cent of Spanish exports, whilemercantilist trade policies also favored the interests of Spanishmerchants and carriers. With those lucrative protected marketslost through war and separation, Spaniards recast the exporteconomy. Europe came to play a larger role in the Spanish econ-omy, especially France and England which for most of the nine-teenth century each absorbed about 30–35 per cent of Spanishexports. However, after those European markets, Cuba steadilyremained Spain’s third largest export market, accounting forabout 15–20 per cent of Spanish goods. As under the old regime,high tariffs and duties privileged the entry of Spanish goods andthe services of Spanish merchants.9

Reconfiguration of the export economy was only one aspect ofcolonial retrenchment. More important was the internal restruc-turing of the colonies, especially Cuba and Puerto Rico, in thefirst half of the nineteenth century. Slavery was the key in themaking of the biggest plantation economy in Spanish-Americanhistory. Between 1780 and 1867 (the year that the Cuban slavetrade was finally suppressed), Cuba imported approximately780,000 slaves. To get some sense of how unique Cuba was, it istelling to note that between the early sixteenth century and thelater eighteenth century, all of Spanish America combinedimported approximately 700,000 slaves.10

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, contemporaries (suchas the Cuban planter Francisco Arango y Parreño) were awarethat the growth of Cuban sugar and slavery was unprecedented inSpanish colonial history.11 For most of its rule in the Americas,Spain had built a mercantilist system that was geared principallytowards bullion extraction from the imperial centers, Mexico andPeru. However, Cuba’s wealth derived from its insertion into theworld market of sugar and slavery; this was a commercially-based colonialism that resembled more closely the colonialexploitation practiced by the British and French in colonies suchas Barbados, Jamaica and St Domingue.12

The Spanish-American revolutions accelerated this process,




which included Puerto Rico from about 1815, as Spanishinvestors concentrated their interests on the more stableCaribbean colonies. Many Spaniards played a prominent role inthe development of colonial slavery in the early to mid-nineteenthcentury. Indeed, some of the major planters (hacendados) of theperiod were Spaniards such as Julián Zulueta and FranciscoIbañez, perhaps the two largest slave-owners at the time ofCuban slave emancipation in 1886. Long after many Creolesdemanded the suppression of the slave trade, Spaniards such asZulueta, Ibañez and Juan Manuel de Manzanedo began import-ing slaves in record numbers and using them to open large-scaleplantations in the province of Matanzas, just east of Havana.While many of these Spanish planters remained in Cuba, therewere probably more Spaniards who made their fortune throughslavery, the slave trade, banking or commerce and returned toSpain to invest in property, manufacturing and firms linked to thecolonial trade. These indianos often rose to prominent positionsin Spanish society and politics. For example, Manzanedo was the wealthiest man in Madrid in the later nineteenth century: he became a senator and received the title of Marquis deManzanedo. After a successful career in Cuba, the CantabrianAntonio López y López became the founder of the CompañíaTrasatlántica, a huge company that dominated business with thegovernment as it pertained to the colonies. He invested inBarcelona’s developing manufacturing sector and was eventuallygiven the title of Marquis de Comillas.13

Spanish merchants, producers and immigrants received con-siderable support from the liberal regime. In the 1830s, Spanishliberals chose to retrench on the national and colonial fronts andto retreat from the radical democratic project of the Cortes ofCádiz (1810–14) and the Constitution of Cádiz (1812), the holygrail of Spanish liberalism in the first third of the nineteenth century. This political shift was the result of the death of KingFerdinand VII in 1833, a fierce defender of the old regime whohad refused to recognize the Constitution of Cádiz upon hisreturn from being held in captivity by Napoleon in 1814.Although Ferdinand’s throne passed to his infant daughter Isabel(under the regency of her mother María Cristina), Ferdinand’sbrother, Don Carlos de Borbón, contested the inheritance andlaunched a major insurgency against his niece’s claims. The keyissues that separated the Carlists and Isabel’s supporters con-




cerned the future of the Spanish state and economy: should Spaincontinue under the old regime, the besieged absolutism ofFerdinand, as the Carlists wanted, or should Spain finally makethe transition to a constitutional monarchy and introduce capital-ist property relations, as the liberal defenders of Isabel hoped?These competing visions of Spain divided the Peninsula for theremainder of the decade, as the civil war dragged on.14

The Carlist challenge had major implications at home, forcingSpanish liberals to abandon the radicalism of Cádiz and theLiberal Triennium (1820–3) and to elaborate a moderate regimethat resembled more closely the cautious constitutional monar-chies of other mid-nineteenth-century European countries.Although the 1812 constitution was briefly restored in 1835, thenew Cortes decided to revise it significantly. What resulted fromthe new 1837 constitution was a more conservative regime:rather than the universal male suffrage of Cádiz, the franchisewas restricted to property owners; rather than a unicameral legis-lature, the new government was bicameral with a senate ofappointed members. In subsequent constitutional revisions, liberals made even bigger compromises with the old regime byvesting sovereignty not in the people alone, but in the people andthe Bourbon monarchy; these compromises gave the Crown apowerful voice in everyday politics by making it the practicalexecutive with the right to name governments and dissolve theCortes.15

The economic reforms of the 1830s were more subversive.Recent studies have shown that the Spanish government hadbegun to chip away at old-regime forms of property in the latereighteenth century, especially aristocratic and ecclesiastical landentailments, in an effort to modernize the agrarian economy. Theliberals of the 1830s pursued this policy at full speed, abolishingentailments and putting massive amounts of aristocratic (andespecially ecclesiastical) property up for sale to private buyers.While the resulting transfer of property did not create the broadclass of small, profit-oriented farmers that was envisioned bysome reformers, it did smash the Church as major economic player and set in motion a steady, if not spectacular, rise in agricultural production over the course of the nineteenth century.It also antagonized the Carlist camp, whose supporters ralliedaround the defense of the Church and resisted the restructuringof the agrarian economy.16




Carlism and political retrenchment had major implications forthe colonies as well. One senses a powerful paranoia in the politi-cal reports from the colonies in these years. Captain generalssuch as Miguel Tacón, who governed in Cuba between 1834 and1838, saw themselves menaced by Carlists, Creole separatists,rebel slaves and English abolitionists. After abolishing slavery inthe British Caribbean (1834–8), the English abolitionists wouldset their sights supposedly on Cuba and Puerto Rico. As Tacónput it in one of his dispatches to Madrid: ‘all work against theinterests of Spain.’17

The mood in Madrid was receptive to such dire reports.Consolidation of the new regime concerned the liberals of the1830s, especially as the Carlist War raged across northern Spain.Moreover, after the Spanish-American revolutions, Spanish dis-trust of the Creoles ran high, even in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Thereasoning of Ramón de la Sagra, a colonial bureaucrat and natural scientist who had spent many years in Cuba, appealed tothe Cortes’ desire to maintain the colonial status quo. He arguedthat it was too risky to undertake political reforms in the coloniesduring a moment of crisis. In particular, the expansion of theslave population in Cuba, which imported approximately180,000 slaves during the 1830s, made the introduction of theSpanish constitution imprudent. In his view, Creole planterswere content to pursue their economic interests and to leavepolitical reform for a later day:

What alarms the inhabitants . . . of European race is not the tranquil exerciseof liberty, nor its influence in all social transactions, but the public exercise of political rights: popular elections, freedom of the press, the division ofauthority; in short, the consequences of the feverishness that characterizes freepeoples and which are dangerous in slave countries. The public exercise ofpolitical rights is a true insult to those classes still deprived of civil rights, amockery of their abject state and their servitude. There, such an example canbe fatal.18

Although Sagra took it upon himself to speak for the Cubandominant class, Creole attitudes were mixed. Some Cuban intellectuals concurred with Sagra that ‘[c]onstitution, liberty,equality are synonymous. To these terms, slavery and inequalityare repulsive. Only in vain can we seek to reconcile these con-trary terms’;19 but others pointed to historical and contemporaryexamples, such as ancient Athens and the US, to show that liberty and slavery were compatible. In either case, most Creole




élites did not believe that the growth of slavery should prompttheir exclusion from the Cortes.20

Nevertheless, Madrid did choose to exclude the colonial élitesfrom the program of political reform. The deputies of 1837 followed Sagra’s recommendations against the political incorpo-ration of, and constitutional rule in, the colonies. This marked a significant rupture with the colonial policies of Cádiz and theLiberal Triennium, when Spain had tried to incorporate‘Spaniards’ from the colonies into the new polity under the samelaws. Now, however, the more conservative mood of Spanish liberalism dictated political order above all else. Not only werecolonial deputies excluded from the Cortes in 1837, but increas-ingly, political control came to be located in the office of the captain general. In the event, the new regime subjected Cuba,Puerto Rico and the Philippines to exceptional rule for more thanthirty years as the Cortes sporadically contemplated the ‘speciallaws’ that would govern la España ultramarina.21

The new colonial order faced several major challenges over thecourse of the century, including three wars with Cuban patriots(1868–78, 1879–80, 1895–8). Opposition existed within Spain,too, as there was disagreement within the political class over thebest manner in which to govern the colonies, i.e. whether throughexceptional rule or the full incorporation of the colonies into theSpanish constitution as equal provinces. The moment of mostprofound confrontation erupted with the convergence of metro-politan and colonial revolution in 1868, what came to be knownas the September revolution (1868–74) in Spain and the TenYears’ War (1868–78) in Cuba.22

One of the most pressing questions that faced the revolutionaryregime in Madrid in 1868 was the fate of Antillean slavery.Several factors produced an acute crisis: slave emancipation inthe US (1865), the founding of the Spanish Abolitionist Society(1865), renewed Anglo-American pressure on the Spanish gov-ernment to abolish slavery and the slave trade, the abolition of theslave trade to Cuba (1867–70), and the increasingly abolitionistbent of the Cuban insurgency. The new regime came to powerwith a broad liberal and democratic domestic agenda and wastempted to begin dismantling colonial slavery. But the furiousresponse from planters in the Antilles and business groups inSpain made the government hesitate. In the end, Cuban slaverywas not abolished until 1886, almost twenty years after the




Spanish and Cuban revolutions put it on the political agenda.23

The breadth of the Spanish response to the possibility of slaveemancipation gives some sense of the centrality of colonial slavery and markets to Spanish liberalism and conceptions of thenation during the nineteenth century.

Whenever the government debated legislation regarding colo-nial slavery, or the Spanish Abolitionist Society held public rallies in Madrid, Barcelona and other major Spanish cities, pro-slavery groups immediately answered with petitions and publicmeetings of their own to oppose abolition. Who were thesegroups? In Spain, most came from agricultural, commercial and manufacturing centers: merchants and industrialists fromBarcelona, Santander, Bilbao, Valencia and Vigo, among othercities; and cereal-growers from Valladolid and Seville. In short,they were those groups that had turned their trade towards Cubaafter the Spanish-American revolutions and that feared any dis-ruption of the colonial economy, especially in the form of slaveemancipation.24

Most opponents of slave emancipation couched their defensein nationalist terms. They were defending not only their protectedmarkets but more importantly the ‘national integrity’.25 Interest-ingly, the language of the nation cut across the peninsula.Perhaps the most vociferous defenders of ‘la España ultramarina’were indianos, merchants and manufacturers in Catalonia. In thenineteenth century, colonialism worked as an important rallyingpoint for the peripheral bourgeoisie; Catalans and Basques impli-cated in the colonial project defended and promoted the Spanishnation as fiercely as any Castilian.

This defense of slavery and the colonial regime demonstrateshow colonialism could reconcile the tensions inherent in nation-building in the Peninsula. For most of the century, Cataloniasought greater administrative decentralization from Madrid,although these demands did not decant into a nationalist move-ment until the very close of the nineteenth century. Barcelonanlawyers’ defense of Catalan common law against Madrid’sattempts to create a uniform civil code is an example of the multiple friction points that existed between Madrid and differ-ent regions in Spain, especially Catalonia and the Basqueprovinces. But when addressing the issue of colonial reform,most Catalan representatives were staunchly centralist, insistingthat Madrid protect the ‘national market’ in the Antilles and




resist Creole demands for political autonomy and trade liberal-ization.26

A most vocal articulator of the essential unity between Spainand the colonies was the premier lobbying group for Barcelona’sleading merchants and manufacturers: the Fomento de laProducción Nacional (later known as the Fomento del TrabajoNacional). In one of its anti-abolition petitions, the Fomentoargued that increased commerce between Spain and the ‘provin-cias de Ultramar’ would ‘put an unbreakable seal on the greatnationality that still flies its flag in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, andin America’.27 That aggressive defense of empire continuedthroughout the century. Pedro Bosch y Labrús, the president ofthe Fomento in the 1880s, not only defended the status quo butsaw imperial expansion as crucial to Spain’s future:

[F]or all the talk of universal peace and the fraternity of peoples, the brutal reality is that, as Bismarck said, la force prime la droit. This has always beentrue in the past, as it is in the present and probably will be in the future. Weaknations will never be truly and effectively independent.28

The Fomento and other peninsular groups did not act alone in defending slavery and empire. Associations formed in thecolonies, especially in Havana, took the leading role in coordi-nating Spanish and Antillean resistance to slave emancipation.Here, we see the strong connections between colonies andmetropolis that shaped the Spanish political order. Major Spanishplanters such as Zulueta and slave traders such as Manzanedocoordinated the Hispano-Antillean defense of slavery. Basingthemselves in Havana and Madrid and allying themselves withimportant figures from the Spanish military and political élite,such as General Francisco Serrano y Domínguez, the colonialinterests effectively rallied supporters — landowners, merchants,manufacturers and indianos — from throughout the Peninsula topetition the Spanish government and to take to the street in support of slavery. One such example was a petition against pro-posed legislation sent from Barcelona and signed by ‘Womenborn in the Antilles’. Like most of the anti-abolitionist petitionsand proclamations of the period, the authors claimed that theydid not support slavery itself but opposed slave emancipationbecause of its potentially disastrous social and economic effects:‘we are wives and mothers and our hearts instinctively sense thatsomething serious hides behind the proposed reforms’.29




The events of the September revolution, as well as the decision-making of Spanish politicians and merchants in the 1820s and1830s, demonstrate that the vociferous protests of 1898 were notunprecedented; indeed, their roots lay deep in the nineteenth century and were entangled with efforts to define and imagine the nation. Challenges to the colonial order had the potential tomobilize Spaniards throughout the Peninsula and across theAtlantic in defense of their political and economic interests. Farfrom being an exaggeration, the vehemence expressed by intel-lectuals, businessmen, politicians and soldiers in 1898 was struc-tured by the retrenched political economy of Spanish liberalism— an order that was shaped not only by agrarian change and thebeginnings of industrialization in Spain, but also by the dramaticreshaping of the colonial regime during and after the Spanish-American revolutions, most notably through the spectaculargrowth of Cuban slavery and sugar. Moreover, defenders of thestatus quo decried reforms as threats to the ‘national market’ andthe ‘national integrity’. The explosive reaction to the ‘Disaster’ of1898 was born of the energetic responses to decolonization in the1820s and the linkage between the new colonial order and nation-building. Recognizing these links provides some answers toAlvarez Junco’s provocative question.

Colonialism and National History

More than crude economic interest and political calculation wentinto the remaking of Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century. Historians of other European colonialisms (especiallythe British, French and Dutch) now argue that, while overseasexpansion and colonization certainly had economic and geo-political motivations, the consequences of conquest were varied.Not least, the colonial crucible was a space in which Europeansdeveloped new forms of scientific and scholarly knowledge, themost well-known case being the disciplines that composed‘Orientalism’.30 Recent work also makes a strong case that thecolonial encounter played a defining role in shaping concepts atthe heart of European liberalism and republicanism, includingcitizenship, the nation and the family.31

That the colonization of the New World forced Spaniards toreorder their conceptual universe is well understood for the




early-modern period, but this ongoing process has been exploredlittle in the historiography of modern Spain.32 However, it is suggested that colonialism continued to play a key role in forgingthe ideologies of Spanish modernity. In particular, as Spanishpatriots sought to construct a new nation-state and national imaginary out of the wreckage of the old regime, they made useof narrative and rhetorical strategies and documentary sourcesthat had been developed to comprehend and justify the empire.

This blurring of the lines between ‘nation’ and ‘colonies’ wasapparent in the battles over slavery during the September revolu-tion. When the defenders of slavery invoked ‘national integrity’,their abolitionist opponents often denounced them as crass hypocrites who cloaked their greed in patriotic colors.33 YetSpanish abolitionists and anti-abolitionists alike generally con-curred in their definition of the nation’s limits, even if they dis-agreed over how it should be governed and how wealth should begained. Across the political spectrum, there was consensus thatthe colonies were not separate countries or nations with their ownhistories. Rather, they were integral parts of the Spanish nation-state and formed chapters in the march of Spanish history. Inother words, colonial history was national history.

José Alvarez Junco’s most recent work offers important toolsfor conceptualizing the crafting of patriotic histories that foldedthe colonies into the narrative of Spanish history. Building on theinsights of The Invention of Tradition and Imagined Communities,Alvarez Junco argues that national history was ‘a collective saga of founding fathers adorned with heroes and martyrs, alldefenders of an essential community, forming a crucial part of ashared culture that integrated the individuals of the new nation-states’.34 In Spain, patriotic historians revived the Numantines(numantinos), Don Pelayo and El Cid as early geniuses anddefenders of the Spanish nationality. However, in so doing theyconfronted a dearth of historiographical precedents. AlvarezJunco has noted that nineteenth-century historians could relyonly on the works of foreign historians or Juan de Mariana’s venerable work for histories of Spain; indeed, the stirrings of anational historiography originated in the desire to rebut the ‘orientalism’ of French and British historians.35

The present author agrees with Alvarez Junco’s characteriza-tion of the anxieties of patriotic historians in the nineteenth century and their desire to defend Spain against foreign histories




and historians.36 However, it can also be argued that these anxieties and responses have a longer history, especially if welook at the rivalry between Spaniards and other Europeans overwriting the ‘history of the New World’, a subject carefullyexplored by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra.37 Spaniards in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries wrote monumental historicalworks to comprehend, describe, justify and criticize Spanishdeeds in the New World. Oviedo, Las Casas, Gómara andHerrera were historical giants upon whose shoulders their nineteenth-century acolytes could build a new historiography,although it was one constructed in the name of the nation ratherthan the empire. Moreover, patriots could turn to an extremelyrich eighteenth-century revival of histories of Spanish explorationand colonization, epitomized by Juan Bautista Muñoz’s Historiadel Nuevo Mundo (1793) and often written in response to foreigncritics who used Spain and its American colonies as negative foilsfor their definitions of economic rationality, science and politicaljustice.38

Patriots such as Muñoz and his fellow Valencian GregorioMayans called for an intellectual revival that built on the geniuses of the Spanish Renaissance, such as Antonio deNebrija, Juan Luis Vives, and Cervantes, rather than borrowingwholesale from French and English intellectual trends as someilustrados advocated. For a historian such as Muñoz, this meantrejecting foreign histories of Spanish colonialism — for example,William Robertson’s widely-admired The History of America(1777) — and crafting a definitive history of the New World withthe use of Spanish sources. That ambition drove Muñoz to placeSpanish historiography on firm national foundations. In prepar-ing his Historia del Nuevo Mundo, of which he was able to pub-lish only one volume, Muñoz scoured Spanish archives andlibraries for sources that shed light on the age of Spanish explo-ration and colonization. In so doing, he created not only the richmanuscript collection that still bears his name at the RealAcademia de la Historia in Madrid but also organized Spain’smajor colonial archive, the Archivo de Indias in Seville, a stan-dard reference point to this day for any historian of early Spanishcolonialism.39

Although Muñoz expressed skepticism about the accuracy ofsixteenth-century Spanish chronicles, a skepticism he shared withthe northern European critics that he generally scorned, his




contemporaries busily edited and published historical accountsthat had languished in archives for centuries. For example,Andrés González de Barcia, one of the founders of the RealAcademia Española, published works by Fernando Colón,Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Alvar Núñez Cabeza deVaca, among others.40 His fellow academician, Juan de Iriarte,also explicitly linked the retrieval of Spain’s historical and liter-ary tradition to a rejuvenated patriotism: ‘[Foreigners] affirm that all Spanish science can be reduced to two verses and four syllogisms.’ The patriot’s response should be to ‘praise the greatmen of our nation by resurrecting their memories’.41

Historians of the nineteenth century carried on these innova-tions, but with greater efficacy. Institutional and court rivalrieshad hindered the publication of numerous histories in the eighteenth century. In contrast, nineteenth-century historianspublished voluminous collections of documents, monographsand new editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century histories.For example, Martín Fernández de Navarrete, director of theReal Academia de la Historia Española, published the first volume of his Colección de los viages y descubrimientos quehicieron por mar los españoles desde fines del siglo XV in 1825,fully twenty-five years before the first volume of ModestoLafuente’s Historia General de España which Alvarez Junco identifies as the first effective step in the crafting of a patriotichistoriography.42

Indeed, foreign historians, including the great US hispanistsWashington Irving and William Hickling Prescott, and theGerman scholar of the New World, Alexander von Humboldt,relied heavily on Spanish authorities and sources in writing theirhistories of Spanish colonization and American prehistory. Forexample, Irving’s popular Life and Voyages of ChristopherColumbus (1828) was a synthesis of Navarrete’s Colección de los viages, while Prescott consulted the Real Academia de laHistoria’s manuscript collections and Spanish historiography towrite his histories of the Catholic kings and the conquests ofMexico and Peru.43 In a letter to the Spanish politician and manof letters, Francisco de Paula Martínez de la Rosa, Prescottacknowledged his debt to Spanish scholarship:

The kindness which I have experienced from your countrymen, and especiallyfrom the venerable Navarrete, in facilitating the historical investigations on




which I am now occupied, binds me still closer to the nation whose gloriousachievements have so long been my study and the object of my admiration. I have fully endeavoured in my history of the Catholic kings to pay the full tribute of respect which I owe to the scholars who have gone before me in myresearches — honored names — Clemencín, Navarrete, Llorente, Marina,Sempere . . . 44

Meanwhile, Humboldt praised the labors of Muñoz andNavarrete as major additions to knowledge of the New World’shistory, vindicating the great sixteenth-century chronicles andhistories of Oviedo, Acosta and others as invaluable works onpre-conquest American civilizations.45

Rather than arguing that historians had to create a patriotic historiography virtually from scratch, and in response to foreignperspectives, it is suggested here that many of these tensions —and the strategies for resolving them — were already present inthe histories of ‘la España ultramarina’. By looking at the inter-action between metropolis and colonies, we can see that theempire bequeathed to nineteenth-century patriots a deep layer of scholarly authority, historical sources, responses to foreign criticsof Spain and rhetorical styles for forging national histories.Moreover, empire shaped the very contours of the nation’s ‘imagined community’ in the nineteenth century. Historians fromacross the political spectrum tacitly agreed that the remainingcolonies were a part of the national territory because Spain hadrecreated itself overseas.

While the present author recognizes fully that there was con-siderable difference between the historical visions of a republicansuch as Emilio Castelar, and a conservative Catholic such asMarcelino Menéndez Pelayo, it can also be argued that when seenin dialogue and contention with Creole histories of Spanish colonization, these works display telling similarities. The same istrue not only across politics but also methods, from MenéndezPelayo’s study of Spanish-American poetry to Miguel Rodríguez-Ferrer’s anthropological study of Cuba.46 In the nineteenth cen-tury, colonial patriots, such as the Puerto Rican Agustín Stahl orthe Filipino José Rizal, crafted their own national histories thatemphasized the pre-conquest, indigenous roots of their ‘nations’.In both Cuba and Puerto Rico, the African contribution to thenation also became part of the conversation, although generally inmuted tones.47

In contrast, the impact of Indians and Africans on the




Americas and the peculiarities of national cultures were of rela-tively little interest to Spanish ‘Americanists’. Rather, theirworks were studies of the Spanish nation in the Americas. Therewere two overlapping versions of this national narrative. On theone hand, Spain had swept aside the savage peoples of the conquered lands and created a more perfect civilization in theirstead. On the other, Spain had assimilated, Indians and Africansinto the Spanish nationality, both culturally and biologically.This latter vision was an extension of nineteenth-century under-standings of the Peninsula’s own history, as Joshua Goode hasrecently shown. According to anthropologists such as ManuelAntón, Spaniards were not a pure race but an ‘alloy’ of the peoples who had traversed Spain over the centuries, a process offusion that the conquerors repeated in the Americas and thePacific.48 While there were differences between these renderings,both implied that, despite the yearnings of colonial patriots, thecolonies did not have distinct national histories — their historybegan with the Spanish conquest.

For example, the republican politician and scholar EmilioCastelar vacillated between the two versions of Spain’s impactupon the New World. At times he emphasized the emptiness andpristine quality of the Americas before the conquest. That empti-ness allowed the Spaniards to recreate a more perfect Spanishcivilization in virgin territory. America was:

[A] land of progress, of liberty, of democracy, of the republic, of all the newideals. They were more easily realized in that Nature without ruins, in that society without memories than here in this overworked Nature where we carrywithin ourselves, in our very spirit, as in an immense cemetery, so many dead.49

That refined spirit of Spanish liberty was the moving forcebehind the Spanish-American wars of independence in the earlynineteenth century. The war between Creoles and peninsularSpaniards (peninsulares) was not one between the colonized andthe colonizer but between son and father:

Look at the names of those who fought for American independence . . . and youwill see that the Bolívars, the Itúrbides, the Egañas, the Hidalgos belonged toour Spain’s most conservative classes and regions, children of our magistratesand governors.50

However, Castelar did have to admit that more than Spaniardslived in the Americas. There were indeed Indian civilizations thatthe Spanish had conquered over the course of the sixteenth




century. In his historical rendering, Spain built over these flawedcivilizations and assimilated the Indians into the laws and customs of Spain and Europe. Castelar compared Spain toGreece and Rome in its historical role. Like its predecessors,Spain eradicated the barbaric rites of conquered peoples, such ashuman sacrifice, and welcomed them into a superior civiliza-tion.51 Unlike its contemporary European rivals, especiallyEngland, Spain based its colonizing mission on assimilation andbenevolent treatment of the Indians, a mission most clearlyexpressed by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. Whilemany patriotic historians in the nineteenth century recoiled fromLas Casas because of his fierce criticisms of the conquistadors,Castelar and many other scholars embraced him as the avatar ofSpain’s civilizing mission. The lesson to be learned from LasCasas was not Spanish brutality but Spanish benevolence andbelief in human equality. As Castelar argued: ‘[I]nstead of exter-minating the Indians and pushing them into the wilds as ourproud Saxon rivals did, we accepted them into our society.’52

Thus, whether representing the colonies, past or present, as anempty Eden or as lands peopled by benighted barbarians,Castelar implied that the colonies had no history before 1492;their history was Spanish history. In the blunt words ofWenceslao Retana y Gamboa, Spain’s leading nineteenth-century historian of the Philippines: ‘The history of the Philip-pines is little more than the history of its conquerors.’53

This interpretation of Spanish history found its way into con-temporary debates over colonial policy. Its presence is hardlysurprising, since so many of the nineteenth-century’s mostprominent historians of Spain overseas, such as Retana, CesáreoFernández Duro and Antonio María Fabié, had served in thecolonial bureaucracy in various capacities. Fabié was a protégéof the conservative political leader Antonio Cánovas del Castilloand served as Ministro de Ultramar in 1890. He was also a lead-ing scholar of Las Casas, publishing a two-volume study of LasCasas’s writings in 1878. In a congress of American history heldin Madrid in 1881, Fabié had distinguished himself as a stoutdefender of Las Casas against hostile Spanish commentators.Before a broad European and American public, Fabié held upLas Casas as the guiding spirit of the Spanish conquest. His constant and vociferous attacks against encomienda and therepartimiento de indios, two forms of exploiting unfree Indian




labor that were used by the Spanish, eventually led to their sup-pression by the monarchy. Instead of exploiting or exterminatingthe Indians,

the Spaniards [had] the honor (and I believe that this is the occasion to say it) of being the only conquering people in America to have conserved theindigenous races in their dominions and to have fused with them.54

The Catalan man of letters, Víctor Balaguer, who served asMinistro de Ultramar three times in the later nineteenth century,shared Fabié’s vision of Spanish colonization. Spain fused withthe conquered peoples and assimilated them into the Spanishnationality. Balaguer’s particular interest in colonial matters wasthe Philippines, Spain’s major Pacific colony, which he hoped todevelop to the benefit of Spanish and Catalan business during theRestoration. He was the organizer of the large ExposiciónFilipina that was held in Madrid’s Retiro Park in 1887. In com-menting on Spain in the Philippines, Balaguer argued that theweakness of the connection between Peninsula and archipelagocould be overcome if Spain followed the examples of its coloniz-ing mission in the Americas, by fully incorporating the peoples ofthe Philippines into the Spanish race and nationality. Spainshould ‘hispanize the country by the extension of the peninsularrace. By mixing with the indigenous, it will give rise . . . to a mestizo people, energetic and hard-working, from which we canexpect much.’55 The fusion of races would ‘put in harmony theinterests of both, to the benefit of all, following the healthy precept of our wise laws that the colony should always be the continuation of the metropolis by the extension of the race’.56

National Integrity, National History

Balaguer’s imagining of a renovated colonialism in the Philip-pines pulls together the two strands of the argument presentedhere. First, Balaguer was an active defender of Spanish andCatalan interests in the colonial economy. Cuba was the majortarget of Spanish economic reconstruction after the Spanish-American revolutions, while Puerto Rico also developed a plantation economy of unprecedented scale after three centuriesof Spanish rule. Moreover, in the final third of the nineteenth cen-tury, Spanish interests (especially in Catalonia) turned towards




the Pacific, led by Antonio López’s Compañía Trasatlántica,whose origins lay in the exploitation of the Antilles.57 For mer-chants and manufacturers in Catalonia, the remaining colonieswere part of their national market: a Spanish market that attractedand appeased leading economic sectors throughout the Peninsulabetween the two moments of decolonization (the Spanish-American revolutions and the Spanish-Cuban-American war).As the pro-slavery mobilizations of the September revolution —adumbrations of events in 1898 — indicated, defense of the colo-nial economy in the name of ‘national integrity’ was a rallyingpoint that attracted loyalty from every corner of Spain as well asboth sides of the Atlantic.

Second, Balaguer considered reformed colonial rule not onlyfrom the vantage point of economic exploitation but also from ahistorical perspective on Spanish colonization. Implicit in hisargument about racial identity between colony and metropoliswas the belief that Spain recreated itself in its colonies throughthe implantation of Spanish institutions and customs and throughmiscegenation: forms of assimilation that historians believed distinguished a humane Spanish colonialism from the barbarousconduct of the British. Thus colonial history was a re-enactmentof the Peninsula’s own venerable history.

In conceptualizing the connection between colony and metrop-olis in national terms, Balaguer, Castelar, Fabié and myriadother representatives of Spain’s intellectual and political classdrew upon structures of knowledge that had been forged over thecenturies of conquest and colonization. The thicket of historicalliterature bequeathed by the early generations of Spanish colo-nizers such as Las Casas and Oviedo was crucial. But perhapseven more important were the endeavors of eighteenth-centuryilustrados such as Muñoz who sought to defend Spanish deedsand knowledge of those deeds by writing patriotic histories,bringing to light unpublished manuscripts, and by creatingarchives and collections to define and preserve those histories.Thus the crisis in the patriotic imagination wrought by the‘Disaster’ of 1898 should not be underestimated: not only hadSpain’s ‘national integrity’ been violated by military defeat, but aglorious and densely-written chapter of Spain’s ‘national history’had come to a traumatic and definitive close.




Notes

1. Santos Juliá, ‘El 98: los últimos patriotas’, Babelia (literary supplement ofEl País) 4 October 1997, 14.

2. For an innovative argument and overview, see Ann Laura Stoler andFrederick Cooper, ‘Between Colony and Metropole: Rethinking a ResearchAgenda’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire:Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA 1997), 1–56. See also PeterHulme, ‘Subversive Archipelagos: Colonial Discourse and the Break-up ofContinental Theory’, Dispositio, Vol. 14 (1989), 1–23; Stuart Hall, ‘When Was the“Postcolonial”? Thinking at the Limit’, in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds, ThePostcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London 1996), 242–60;Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through theNation (Durham, NC 2003). Although historians of modern Spain have not pursued this line of inquiry, scholars of early-modern Spain were among the inno-vators. See John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge1970).

3. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition(Cambridge 1983); Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,Myth, Reality (Cambridge 1990); Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Leslieux de mémoire’, Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–25; and Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev.ed., London 1991).

4. Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity inSpain, 1875–1975 (Berkeley, CA 1997); E. Inman Fox, La invención de España(Madrid 1997); Carlos Serrano, El nacimiento de Carmen: Símbolos, mitos y nación(Madrid 1999); José Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa: La idea de España en el sigloXIX (Madrid 2001). It is not being suggested here that there is no work on colonialism; on the contrary, this field is now flourishing. Instead, it is questionedwhy the recent studies on nationalism have remained mute on the subject. For asampling of scholarship on the nineteenth-century colonial regime see, in additionto the works cited in this article, Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, Miguel Puig-Samperand Luis Miguel García Mora, eds, La nación soñada: Cuba, Puerto Rico yFilipinas ante el 98 (Madrid 1996).

5. José Alvarez Junco, ‘La nación en duda’, in Juan Pan-Montojo, ed., Másse perdió en Cuba: España, 1898 y el fin de siglo (Madrid 1998), 411.

6. On Spanish migration to Cuba in the twentieth century, see Maluquer deMotes, Nación e imigración: los españoles en Cuba (ss. XIX y XX) (Oviedo 1992).This massive wave was already underway in the late nineteenth century followingslave emancipation in Cuba (1886). On the Spanish economy after 1898, seeLeandro Prados de la Escosura, De imperio a nación. Crecimiento y atraso econ-ómico en España (1780–1930) (Madrid 1988); Jordi Maluquer de Motes, Españaen la crisis de 1898: De la Gran Depresión a la modernización económica del siglo XX(Barcelona 1999).

7. Martin Blinkhorn, ‘Spain, the “Spanish Problem” and the Imperial Myth’,Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15 (1980), 5–6; Alvarez Junco, ‘La naciónen duda’, 411–12.

8. Michael Costeloe, Response to Revolution: Imperial Spain and the SpanishAmerican Revolutions, 1810–1840 (Cambridge 1986), ch. 3.




9. Prados de la Escosura, op. cit.; Josep Maria Fradera, Indùstria i mercat: lesbases commercials de la industria catalana moderna (1814–1845) (Barcelona 1987);Jordi Maluquer de Motes, ‘El mercado colonial antillano en el siglo XIX’, in JordiNadal and Gabriel Tortella, eds, Agricultura, comercio y crecimiento económico enla España contemporánea (Barcelona 1974), 322–57.

10. Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census (Madison, WI 1969), 25.11. See Dale Tomich, ‘The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arango y Parreño,

Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba’, Comparative Studies inSociety and History, Vol. 45 (2003), 4–28. For a recent synthesis that emphasizesthe novelty of colonial exploitation in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, seeFrancisco Scarano, ‘Liberal Pacts and Hierarchies of Rule: Approaching theImperial Transition in Cuba and Puerto Rico’, Hispanic American HistoricalReview, Vol. 78 (1998), 583–601.

12. See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 1492–1800: Fromthe Baroque to the Modern (London 1997), for an overview of slave regimes in theNew World. On the making of Cuban slavery, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals, ElIngenio (3 vols, Havana 1978); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: theTransition to Free Labor, 1865–1899 (Princeton, NJ 1985); Laird Bergad, CubanRural Society in the Nineteenth Century: the Social and Economic History ofMonoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, NJ 1990). See also Stanley J. Stein andBarbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making ofEarly Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD 2000) on the political economy of Spanishrule in Mexico and Peru.

13. Bergad, op. cit.; Angel Bahamonde and José Cayuela, Hacer las Américas:las elites colonials en el siglo XIX (Madrid 1992), chs 4 and 6; and Martin Rodrigoy Alharilla, Los Marqueses de Comillas, 1817–1925: Antonio y Claudio López(Barcelona 2000).

14. For an overview of the period, see Miguel Artola, La burguesía revolu-cionaria (1808–1874) (9th edn, Madrid 1983).

15. Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1975 (2nd edn, Oxford 1982), 155–209.16. See Ramón Garrabou, Jesús Sanz and Angel García Sanz, eds, Historia

agraria de la España contemporánea (2 vols, Barcelona 1985); Richard Herr, RuralChange and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime (Berkeley, CA1989); Josep Maria Fradera, Jesús Millan and Ramon Garrabou, eds, Carlisme imoviments absolutistes (Vic, Catalonia 1990); and Jesús Millán García-Varela, Elpoder de la tierra: la sociedad agrarian del bajo Segura en la época del liberalismo:1830–1890 (Alicante 1999).

17. Havana, 4 April 1837, Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Asuntos Políticos, legajo 132, número 17.

18. Ramón de la Sagra, Apuntes destinados a ilustrar la discusión del artículoadicional al proyecto de Constitución que dice ‘Las provincias de ultramar serán gob-ernadas por leyes especiales’ (Paris 1837), 31.

19. Félix Varela, ‘Memoria que demuestra la neccesidad de extinguir la esclav-itud de los negros en la Isla de Cuba, atendiendo a los intereses de sus propietar-ios, por el presbítero don Félix Varela’ [1822], in José Antonio Saco, Historia dela esclavitud de la raza africana en el nuevo mundo y en especial en los paísesAmerico-hispanos, Vol. 4 (Havana 1938), 16.

20. José Antonio Saco, Examen analítico del Informe de la Comisión especialnombrada por las Cortes, sobre la exclusión de los actuales y futuros diputados de




Ultramar, y sobre la necesidad de regir aquellos países por leyes especiales (Madrid1837).

21. Jesús Raúl Navarro García, Entre esclavos y constituciónes (Seville 1991);Josep Maria Fradera, ‘Why Were Spain’s Special Overseas Laws NeverEnacted?’, in Richard Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, eds, Spain, Europe and theAtlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge 1995), 335–49.

22. On the September revolution and the Ten Years’ War, see C.A.M.Hennessey, The Federal Republic in Spain (Oxford 1962); Raúl Guerra y Sánchez,La Guerra de los Diez Años (1868–1878) (2nd edn, 2 vols, Havana 1986).

23. See Scott, op. cit. Puerto Rican slavery was abolished in 1873 by Spain’sFirst Republic. While opposition to abolition was also fierce there, the muchsmaller scale of Puerto Rican slavery (in 1868 there were approximately 40,000slaves in Puerto Rico and more than 350,000 in Cuba) facilitated more dramaticaction by the Spanish Abolitionist Society, founded by Puerto Ricans in Madrid,and the colonial state. See Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Anti-slavery:Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh, PA 1999), chs 2 and 5–7.

24. On pro-slavery mobilization, see Jordi Maluquer de Motes, ‘El problemade la esclavitud y la revolución de 1868’, Hispania, Vol. 31 (1971), 56–76;Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, ‘National Economy and Atlantic Slavery: Pro-tectionism and Resistance to Abolitionism in Spain and the Antilles, 1854–1874’,Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 78 (1998), 603–29.

25. See, for example, Juan Güell y Ferrer, ‘Rebelión cubana’ [1871] in hisEscritos económicos (Barcelona 1880).

26. On tensions between Madrid and Barcelona in the nineteenth centuryregarding codification, see Stephen Jacobson, ‘Law and Nationalism inNineteenth-Century Europe: the Case of Catalonia in Comparative Perspective’,Law and History Review, Vol. 20 (2002), 307–47. On colonialism and protection-ism in Catalonia, see Miquel Izard, Manufactureros, industriales y revolucionarios(Barcelona 1979).

27. ‘La Junta Directiva del Fomento de la Producción Nacional’, Barcelona,12 December 1872, Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), Sección de Ultramar(hereafter AHN/U), legajo 3554.

28. Pedro Bosch y Labrús, ‘Conveniencia de un concierto económico entre lasdistintas naciónes de raza española’ [1889], in Manuel Fugés, ed., Discursos yescritos (Barcelona 1929), 897.

29. ‘Mujeres nacidas en las Antillas’, Barcelona, 8 January 1873, AHN/U,legajo 3555.

30. Hulme, op. cit.; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York 1978); DipeshChakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differ-ence (Princeton, NJ 2000).

31. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s ‘History ofSexuality’ and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC 1995).

32. Elliott, op. cit.; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the AmericanIndian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (2nd edn, Cambridge 1986).Important exceptions for the modern period include Josep Maria Fradera,Gobernar colonias (Barcelona 1999); and Javier Morillo-Alicea, ‘Imperial PaperTrails’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, (forthcoming).

33. For example, see the speeches by the abolitionists Rafael María de Labra




and Gabriel Rodríguez published in Una sesión de la Tertulia Radical de Madrid(Madrid 1873).

34. Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa, 196–7; Hobsbawm and Ranger, op. cit.;Anderson, op. cit.

35. Ibid., ch. 4.36. On foreign histories and representations of Spain, see also Richard Kagan,

‘Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain’,American Historical Review, Vol. 101 (1996), 423–46.

37. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World:Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World(Stanford, CA 2001).

38. On the eighteenth century, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the NewWorld: the History of a Polemic (trans. Jeremy Moyle, Pittsburgh, PA 1973), chs5 and 6; and Cañizares-Esguerra, op. cit., esp. ch. 3.

39. Cañizares-Esguerra, op. cit., 190–201.40. Ibid., 155.41. Iriarte, quoted in Cañizares-Esguerra, op. cit., 156.42. Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa, 201.43. On Irving’s work, see Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of

American Literature, Vol. 2 (New Haven, CT 1955), 39.44. Letter from William Hickling Prescott to Francisco de Paula Martínez de

la Rosa, 1 January 1841, in Roger Wolcott, ed., The Correspondence of WilliamHickling Prescott, 1833–1847 (trans. Roger Wolcott, Boston, MA 1925), 192–3.

45. Cañizares-Esguerra, op. cit., 55–9. As Cañizares-Esguerra argues, Hum-boldt vindicated these sources against several decades of intense criticism byEuropean philosophes, such as Cornelius De Pauw, who dismissed the earlySpanish chroniclers and historians as reliable sources.

46. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de la poesía hispano-americana (2vols, Madrid 1911–13); Miguel Rodríguez-Ferrer, Naturaleza y civilización de lagrandiosa isla de Cuba (Madrid 1876).

47. Agustín Stahl, Los indios borinqueños (Puerto Rico 1889); José Rizal,Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas por Doctor Antonio de Morga (Paris 1890).

48. Joshua Goode, ‘The Racial Alloy: the Science, Politics, and Culture ofRace in Spain, 1875–1923’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of California(1999).

49. Emilio Castelar, Historia del descubrimiento de América (Madrid 1892), 24.50. Ibid., 13.51. Ibid., 592.52. Emilio Castelar, ‘Prólogo. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’, in Carlos

Gutiérrez, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Sus tiempos y su apostolado (Madrid 1878),xxxvi. On Las Casas and nineteenth-century historiography, see ChristopherSchmidt-Nowara, ‘The Specter of Las Casas: José Antonio Saco and the Per-sistence of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba’, Itinerario, Vol. 25 (2001), 93–109.

53. Wenceslao Retana, ‘Contra un documento . . . dos’, La Política de Españaen Filipinas (Madrid 28 April 1891), 65–6.

54. Antonio María Fabíe in, Congreso Internacional de Americanistas. Actas dela cuarta reunión. Madrid — 1881, Vol. 1 (Madrid 1882), 121.

55. Víctor Balaguer, Islas Filipinas (Madrid 1895), 7–8.56. Ibid., 8.




57. For a cogent summary of the changing political economy of Spanish rule in the Caribbean and Pacific, see Josep Maria Fradera, Filipinas, la colonia máspeculiar: la hacienda pública en la definición de la política colonial, 1762–1868(Madrid 1999), 17–69.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

has taught at Fordham University since 1998.He is the author of ‘Imperio y crisis colonial’,in Juan Pan-Montojo, ed., Más se perdió enCuba: España, 1898 y el fin de siglo (Madrid1998), and Empire and Anti-slavery: Spain,Cuba, and Puerto Rico 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh,PA 1999). His book, The Conquest of History:Spanish Colonialism and National Histories inthe Nineteenth Century is forthcoming. He ison the editorial board of Illes i Imperis andSocial History.




Colonialism and Nation-Building in 19th Century Spain

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