Gabriel Paquette

State-Civil Society Cooperation and Conflict in the Spanish Empire: The Intellectual and Political Activities of the Ultramarine Consulados and Economic Societies, c. 1780-1810

This article examines the intellectual and political activities of civil society institutions in the Spanish empire during the Age of Enlightenment.

The intellectual context of British diplomatic recognition of the South American republics, C. 1800–1830

This article explores the intellectual underpinnings of British diplomatic recognition of the Spanish American Republics in the first third of the nineteenth century.

Review: Matthew Brown, ed., Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, The Bulletin of Latin American Research Book Series, Blackwell: Oxford, 2008; 296 pp.; 9781405179324, £19.99 (pbk):

N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) was one of the most important Danish intellectuals of his time: educator, theologian, historian, poet and politician. This book offers a fine introduction to his life and times. ‘The writings of Grundtvig, whether in prose or verse, have never been attractive to me. They are so exclusively national as to be scarcely intelligible to a foreigner; they lie, if I may say so, outside the European tradition.’ So was the verdict of Edmund Gosse in his Two Visits to Denmark 1872–4 (London 1919). In contrast to his contemporary adversary, Søren Kierkegaard, Grundtvig never won international fame. Only among some historians is he known for being one of the first scholars to take a serious philological interest in the Beowulf manuscript, a spin-off from his passion for Norse mythology and saga literature. What first of all makes Grundtvig interesting to people outside Denmark is that he is a wonderful specimen of that European breed of nationalists so common in his time. He shaped a conglomerate Weltanschauung of man’s relation to nature, God, world history and the nation based upon the German idealist philosophy of history and British political liberalism. Grundtvig’s complexity is illustrated by the fact that, at one stage of his life, he was an ardent spokesman for both absolutist rule and the abolition of slavery. Bradley’s book contains 132 contemporary texts – letters, excerpts from diaries, memoirs, articles and books – together with extensive commentaries. It offers a first-hand portrait suitable also for English speakers encountering Danish intellectual history for the first time. (Another approach has just recently been made possible thanks to Jon Stewart’s A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark [Copenhagen 2007].) An annotated index totalling 250 pages actually constitutes more of an encyclopaedia of Danish cultural history in the 19th century and is highly useful. The book is the first volume of what is to be a series of translations into English of texts by Grundtvig.

Ordering the New World

Ordering the New WorldIn New World Orders: Violence, Sanction and Authority in the Colonial Americas (Pennsylvania, 2005), John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey have compiled an outstanding and stimulating collection of essays whose subjects span the Americas and contribute to a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding of how colonial authority was constituted and maintained in Europes Atlantic colonies. Taken collectively, the essays compel scholars to reexamine the relationships among violence, sanction, and authority and to reconceptualize how these served to forge, and subsequently maintain, social order in colonial contexts.As Smolenski indicates in his lively and lucid introduction, the theme that unites the essays is a common interest in sanction. Sanction, he contends, can mean to permit, authorize, ratify, countenance, encourage, or make legal - or it can mean to penalize for the violation of a legal rule or norm . . . sanction encapsulates the process through which order is produced through the distribution of punishments and rewards (3-4). One of the salient points to be gleaned from the introduction is that the study of colonial institutions must be examined alongside the processes by which such institutions were maintained, the constant creation and re-creation of colonial power (15). This requires, as Smolenski rightly indicates, an appreciation of how thoroughly entwined conceptions of colonial legality and sovereignty were with extralegal discourses of race, gender and civilization (14).The eleven essays following Smolenskis provocative introduction are remarkably wide-ranging: Christopher Tomlins examines English colonial discourse; Richard Price studies three narratives of death and creation in Caribbean rim-land history; Kimberly Gauderman focuses on marital discord and social order in colonial Quito; Cecile Vidal investigates private and state violence against slaves in Louisiana under French rule; Sharon Block analyzes constructions of rape and race in early America; Mark Meuwese sheds light on resistance to Dutch authority in northeastern Brazil; Cynthia Radding compares the birth of two cultures of resistance in Mexico and Bolivia; Matthew Dennis examines links between sorcery and sovereignty; Tamar Herzog analyzes conceptions of citizenship in the early modern Spanish world; Gene Ogle considers the spectacle of duels and beatings in Saint Domingue; and Ann Twinam compares informal and official understandings of whiteness in colonial Spanish America.Several of the essays collected in New World Orders merit special, extended consideration. Gaudermans The Authority of Gender: Marital Discord and Social Order in Colonial Quito is a gem and persuasively reincorporates the Spanish imperial periphery into the broader debates that engage eighteenthcentury scholars. Gauderman shows that womens use of the criminal justice system in Quito poses questions about the connection between gender norms and the creation and maintenance of authority and social order. As she points out, society empowered women with the juridical capacity to litigate independently from and even in opposition to men, including male kin, as part of a cultural strategy to maintain social stability through decentralizing relations of authority (79). Husbands convicted for domestic violence or adultery routinely faced severe punishments including imprisonment, confiscation of their property, fines, loss of office, forced labor, and long exile. This was not due, of course, to enlightened ideas of womens rights, equality between the sexes or fairness (91), but rather to the states aim to prevent individual men from forming enclaves of patriarchal authority beyond the reach of its power.Herzogs Early Modern Spanish Citizenship: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Old and the New World brilliantly reconstructs the manner in which Castilian local citizenship (vecindad) was modified in the New World in order to open local communities to Spanish newcomers and exclude from them all non-Spaniards, including foreigners and individuals of Indian, African or mixed ancestry (205). …

Deconstructing Legitimacy: Viceroys, Merchants, and the Military in Late Colonial Peru (review)

This book, based on decades of meticulous research, is a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on the late colonial period, a period whose intellectual vitality is now being recognized after many decades of neglect. Focusing on the escalating conflict between the merchant guild and the last viceroys of Peru, Marks offers a richly textured portrait of the political culture of the Old Regime. From its inception, the Spanish empires smooth functioning was premised on bargaining between political authorities and local elites. Indeed, the longevity of the empire may partly be attributed to the persistence of mechanisms for diffusing conflict and generating consensus.