Colonial Latin American history and global history: proposals on the uses of historical knowledge

Abstract

I would like to thank the members of the Colonial Latin American Review committee for their generous invitation to participate in this conversation. I gather that what is expected of me is an outside view of the future of this field from the perspective of a specialist in the history of the Spanish empire interested in global history (we were also asked to be provocative). The fundamental question, I think, is how studies of colonial Latin America can help our society, and what can make them attractive, not only to us but to other citizens? Today, attention to Ibero-American cultures and their histories is increasing and the number of people who speak Spanish or Portuguese is growing. Interest in native American languages and societies is also on the rise. But the impression in some countries—as in the case of England, and perhaps Italy—is of decline, due to academic markets’ constrictions and institutional priorities. When it comes to the US, the impression is that there are more Spanish speakers, but I wonder to what extent colonial Latin American studies are expanding at the same pace and specialists have a greater presence in the public sphere. Of course, Latin American societies continue to be intrigued by their own past, but there too the feeling is that studies of more recent times are favored. The political uses (and abuses) of colonial history are also evident everywhere. While in the United States monuments to Columbus are torn down, in Seville the word ‘traitor’ appears on a statue of Bolivar, or in Madrid videos and movies represent the first circumnavigation of the world with triumphalist phrases or just aim at substituting a Black by a Golden Legend narrative. Everywhere, history seems the victim of remembrance, one of the backbones of our societies but also a selective and emotional way of seeing the past that can be simplified and manipulated according to spurious interests. Can a global perspective on colonial history help in this situation? Although it has been a debated topic, many specialists today understand that there is no necessary opposition between area studies and global history and that a global analysis of the local or the regional—let us say colonial Latin American societies—is necessary, and vice versa. People also understand that global history is a perspective that does not have as its sole and necessary objective the great debates on globalization, but rather is equally useful for answering questions about certain societies in themselves. On the other hand, perhaps Jeremy Adelman was right when he warned us that global history could be a new ‘Anglo-Spheric’ view of the world (Adelman 2017). Yet one