Apples to Oranges to More Apples: It's All Comparative

The funny thing about reading for graduate courses, is that sometimes, you lose track of the big picture. I can get so caught up in following the details of an author's argument that I lose track of the relationships between the books I'm reading, or the place of a particular monograph in a larger syllabus. That's what happened this week. I was waist-high in the intellectual weeds of the Holy Roman Empire with Anthony Pagden, when I realized, “It's all comparative, stupid.” 

Now Pagden's monograph, Lords of all the World is all about the idea of empire, and how an idea with a rich intellectual history played out in European colonial projects in North and South America. Pagden looks, in considerable detail, at the way sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European thinkers used Roman ideas of empire, civilization, conversion, and barbarism to explain their own nations' activities across the Atlantic. He suggests that these thinkers were heirs to a very specific, Roman notion of empire, ground territorial expansion; divisions between civilized peoples inside the empire and barbarous ones outside; and the potential for conversion to Christianity/civilization. British, French, and Spanish thinkers employed this conception of empire in ways that were specifically suited to their national experiences of colonialism, but the set of ideas at the root of it all was a common European one.

Fundamentally, Pagden's argument is grounded in a comparative analysis of how three European nations thought about their early empires. That comparative approach to European empires in the New World shows up both in Patrica Seed's Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 and in Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianing the Atlantic, 1550-1700. The conclusions these authors draw, however, could not be more different.

Seed lays out her primary contention in the introduction to Ceremonies of Possession:

“While military might effectively secured their power over the New World, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans also believed in their right to rule. And they created these rights for themselves by deploying symbolically significant words and gestures … While all Europeans aimed to establish their right to rule the New World, their means differed substantially.”

This kind of comparative analysis is, according to Seed, an antidote for “homogenizing colonialism,” or failing to recognize the diversity of ways in which Europeans expressed their right to rule people and lands of the New World. Examining the plural colonizations of Europeans in the New World makes it possible to understand diversity of legal and political struggles facing contemporary indigenous people. Each nation's means for asserting their right to rule emerged from a particular national context and left a distinctive legal and political legacy. Where Pagden sees a common notion of empire employed in differing colonial circumstances, Seed emphasizes the culturally constructed-ness of the European right to rule, and the importance of nationalism in determining how that right to rule was enacted.

At the opposite end of the comparative spectrum is Canizares-Esguerra's argument that Spanish and British conquests were inspired by fundamentally similar motivations: the Devil lived in the New World, and it was the work of the Europeans to drive him out. Colonization, both for the Spanish in Central and South American, and the British in North America, was “an ongoing battle against the devil.” The historiography of the colonization of the New World has obscured these similarities, Canizares-Esguerra suggests. In a “scholarly tradition that has sought to present the United States and Latin America as two ontologically different spaces” British Purtians are characterized as modern, while the Spanish conquistadors are depicted as medieval. In direct opposition to Seed, Canizares-Esguerra argues that an analysis of colonialism rooted in the actions of a nation-state obscures similarities among European colonizers, and stands in the way of a more holistic, Atlantic world perspective on colonization.

Taken in concert, Seed, Canizares-Esguerra and Padgen's studies present three distinct approaches to the comparative study of European empire in North and South America. That these authors take a comparative approach at all highlights a central tension in colonial and post-colonial studies. On the one hand, Ania Loomba, writes in Colonialism / Post-Colonialism, European colonialism “produced comparable (and sometimes uncannily similar) relations of inequity and domination the world over.” At the same time, Loomba argues, “it is impossible for European colonialism to have been a monolithic operation. Right from its earliest years it deployed diverse strategies and methods of control and of representation.” Seed, Canizares-Esguerra and Padgen's evidences both the distinctiveness and the commonalities in European colonial ideology and practice in North and South America. It's comparative, stupid.