Weber, Barbaros

Weber, David J. Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

In the growing historical subfield of borderlands studies, David Weber book, Bárbaros, offers a complex analysis of late eighteenth century borderlands, and an unprecedented examination of the collective Spanish mind through the lens of Bourbon imperial policy toward the indios barbarous (unconquered Indians seen as savages). Weber writes, “Two and half centuries after Columbus’s discovery, Spain continued to claim domination over peoples it neither conquered nor knew…” (12). Even without direct control, these Indian groups on the periphery of Spanish domination carried economic and strategic value for the empire and became a focus of imperial policy in the eighteenth-century. Weber shows how a complex web of native and Spanish relations differed from previous centuries because of a new exchange of Enlightenment principles that steered policies in the new Bourbon reform. This shift towards Enlightenment principles hoped to bring about progress by applying the methods of science in dealing with Indian societies and viewed the Indians as rational beings capable of acting like European consumers and producers (51). However, new ways of thinking about Indians did not supplant the old during the Enlightenment and pragmatism worked differently on the ground where power usually prevailed over ideas and reverted back to hostile means of subjugating the uncivilized and justified Indian annihilation and seizure of lands by reimagining them as savages.

The complex web of Native and Spanish relations in America and the Bourbon policies of reform illustrate two borderlands in this study and a double use of the concept of the “barbarian”. One borderland in America, with the indios barbarous, has already been mentioned but there is a second borderland evident in eighteenth-century Europe. Spain had been stigmatized as “barbarous” due to their sixteenth-century conquest of America and the holocaust of Indians resulting from their hostility. The Spain of the conquistadors had ceased to exist two centuries later, but the “Black Legend” remained. This was the driving force of Bourbon reform which sought to bring fresh ideas from France to make Spain more unified and prosperous, and to erode the demarcation that excluded Spain from the “enlightened” states of eighteenth century Europe (49). In addition, to foreign policy internal steps were also taken in Spain to wipe out the stain of the “Black Legend,” as Weber writes, “The Spanish crown and the Inquisition launched a counteroffensive against writers who disparaged Spain’s sixteenth-century conquest…suggesting that the Indian population of America was low and denying that a holocaust had occurred” (5).

The Spanish crown, operating from the empire’s peninsular center, represented one of several competing interest groups that divided into reform and who shaped and reshaped Indian policy in the twilight years of the Spanish Empire. As Weber depicts throughout his work, Spain’s enlightened despots, “did not so much dictate policies as negotiate them in ongoing dialogues with their own colonial subjects – ecclesiastics, military officers, bureaucrats, common folk, and elites” (9). By the early nineteenth, with the abdication of the Spanish throne to Napoleon, another group takes center-stage that rebelled against the loss of a legitimate ruler and called for greater local autonomy and independence in Spanish-America; the criollos (260). [1 ]

Weber organizes his book to show the new sensibilities of the Enlightenment and how they were implemented or rejected on the shores of America by all the competing interest groups mentioned in the previous chapter. The book has a chronological framework within the thematic chapters that illustrate a Bourbon central dominance in the first half of the book, but shows a shift that eventually leads to criollos revolutionary sentiment. These American-born Spaniards used Enlightenment principles to create their own autonomy that liberated them from the Spanish peninsula and connected their past not to the history of the “Black Legend” but rather to the “Indian’s glorious past” (262).

Chapter one is the most vivid connection of European Enlightenment ideals implemented in American interaction by focusing on the two-year voyages of Alejandro Malaspina. Malaspina joins the ranks of James Cook and Conte de La Perouse in ambitious scientific expeditions in the Age of Reason. “Malaspina’s expeditions,” Weber writes, “ surveyed the natural world - its geography, geology, astronomy, botany, and zoology” (20) and used linguistic evidence of the Indian peoples to more clearly understand the origins of man (24). A shift from Renaissance ambitions to turn Indians into Christians was superseded by the desire to acquire knowledge of Natives more to serve humankind than to advance religion. Using Enlightenment principles, Malaspina found the Indian peoples of interest as both specimens (31-41) and symbols (41-47), and the Criollo scholar, Jose Antonio de Alzate wrote for Malaspina’s expedition that lauded Indians as peaceful but developed vices with Spanish contact. The views of Alzate became part of the foundation of criollos enlightened thinkers which laid the foundation in making, what Canizares- Esguerra calls, a “patriotic Epistemology.”

Chapter two shifted gears to focus on the indios barbarous to show the sophistication of independent Indians – who lived beyond the regions controlled by Europeans – in their understanding of Spaniards. Weber gives much attention to how the horse contributed to the homogenization and expansion of Indian peoples and improved communication between isolated communities to facilitate the spread of ideas and material goods and help forge new identities (61). In this way, the horse could be seen in helping create a proto-Enlightenment of the indios barbarous.

Chapter three returns back to the Spanish crown and Bourbon reform suppressing the “Black Legend” by focusing on secularizing missions and reign in religious orders (which reached its apogee in 1767-68 when Jesuits were expelled). Chapter four and focus on the military and merchants as cultural brokers which show an interexchange not from administrative exchange but as pragmatic borderland negotiations for material gain and tactical military support against mutual enemies. The porous borders between the Spanish and the unconquered Indians is further illustrated in the last chapter which shows the civilization of Indians that cross and incorporate into the Spanish society, and the “Indianization” of poor Spaniards in rural areas who found much familiar with Indian society.

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 11.5pt;">Weber ends his work by comparing the Indian policies of the Enlightened Bourbon reforms with the American criollos Enlightenment Indian policies of the early nineteenth century, and suggests there was more continuity than meets the eye. If Bourbon reform was seen as more benevolent than criollos violent removal policies, it was only because powerful Indian groups seemed beyond overpowering so gentler means of bringing Indians into the body politic became favored. In this way, Weber differentiates between the ideal principles of the Enlightenment and the actual implementation of policies as pragmatic to the conditions at the time. In his view the however enlightened Spaniards became, the notion of the indios barbarous never truly left and even, “the Indian campaign of the last half of the nineteenth century represented a continuation of Spanish policy rather than a repudiation of it” (278).

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="line-height: 115%; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;"> [1] It must be noted that all negotiations between Spaniards, Spanish-American, and independent Indians depended as much on Indian response as on the Spanish initiative, moreover, often the Spaniards and Spanish-American groups often were forced to respond to Indian initiatives in this negotiation and exchange. Weber makes this historical agency clear but it does not take center stage in his analysis.