Philosophical History at the Cusp of Globalization: Scottish Enlightenment Reflections on Colonial Spanish America

This article contributes to the evaluation of how historical philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment reflected upon incipient processes and forces of globalization. Drawing upon assessments of colonial Spanish America by late eighteenth-century Scottish philosophical historians, including William Robertson, Lord Kames, John Millar, Adam Smith and David Hume, the article considers the challenges Enlightenment-era thinkers encountered in balancing universal accounts of mankind with extensive human difference in a context particularly defined by European-managed trade and migration flows. By emphasizing the challenges that individual philosophical historians confronted in narrating processes of cultural and national change in the Americas during the early modern period, this article reveals a core tension between two basic components of Enlightenment-era historiography: national character and progress. The ‘discovery’ of the New World has long been heralded as an epochal event. Thinkers from the sixteenth century onwards judged it a sacred historical milestone. Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara [c.1511—c.1566] went so far as to declare it “the greatest thing since the creation of the world, excluding the Incarnation and the death of He who created it” (Gómara 1552, dedication; Burke 1995, pp. 40–41). In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith recast this narrative in terms of global trading relations, naming this discovery as one of the “two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind” (Smith 1776, vol. 2, p. 235), the other being the Portuguese rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. He likewise drew upon circulating early modern paradigms in designating ‘the sacred thirst of gold’ as the force “that carried Cortez to Mexico, and Almagro and Pizarro to Chili [sic] and Peru” (Smith 1776, vol. 2, p. 154). Smith situated the discovery and conquest of the New World as landmark events in the initiation of mercantile globalization, both being driven on by the rapacious desire of Europeans for profit. Yet other Enlightenment thinkers remained compelled by the events as watersheds in the global spread of Christianity. During the Nicholas B. Miller, Universität Potsdam (UP) / Universidade de Lisboa OpenAccess. © 2018 Nicholas B. Miller, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-015 1760s and 1770s, the clerical historian William Robertson, Smith’s friend and associate in Edinburgh, engaged in a systematic attempt to appraise the history of the New World as one of the planting of European social, cultural and religious forms overseas. First published in 1777 in two volumes as the History of America, Robertson’s work placed its attention particularly on “the most splendid portion of the American story”: that of “the discovery of the New World, and of the progress of the Spanish arms and colonies there” (Robertson 1777, vol. 1, p. vi). While the contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment to the practice of history have recently been subjected to renewed attention, the engagement of its historical thought in reference to Spanish America has yet to be considered at length (Sebastiani 2013, pp. 1– 102; Allan 2013, pp. 307–342; Quiro Chueca 2005, pp. 160– 163). This article addresses this gap by examining discussion of colonial Spanish America in historical works composed by a range of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including Henry Home (Lord Kames), John Millar, James Dunbar and James Beattie—along with Robertson and Smith—and thereby offers new insights into the comparative horizons of historical knowledge in the Scottish Enlightenment. In particular, they reveal aspects of these thinkers’ contributions to what David Hume heralded the ‘science of man’, which ostensibly sought to derive practical political lessons from the philosophical synthesis of empirical evidence about societies across the globe and throughout history. The case study of Spanish America affords particular insights into how practitioners of the ‘science of man’ engaged in inter-regional comparison and grappled with the question of conquest-induced change in collective identities, or, as they rendered it, national character. Modes of narrating the Spanish conquest Latin America has tended to be marginalized in historical accounts adopting global frames of analysis. Budding world or global historians—and universal historians before them—have found it difficult to reconcile comparative methodologies based on relatively static core cultural zones (civilizations) with Latin America’s mestizo formation. Rather than constituting a distinct core culture, Latin America tends to be viewed as a contact point of competing traditions: linked on the one hand, through many cultural similarities—from religion to language—to Europe and North America; and perceived on the other hand as a region with a distinct character, separated in terms of economic power and geopolitics from the Western core encapsulated in organizations like NATO (Feres Jr. 2008). 192 Nicholas B. Miller