If one surveys the available literature wondering which was the favorite object of study of those who first wrote about history in nineteenth-century Spanish America, the answer is clear. Most scholars tend to agree it was “the nation.” Well, to be more precise, the joint processes of nation building and state formation.Footnote 1 In Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s words, “history-telling in the Americas has been in fact a constellation of national histories.”Footnote 2 Indeed, according to Germán Colmenares, the possibility of writing a transnationally connected history of the Americas was “alien” and even “undesirable” for nineteenth-century intellectuals. Spanish American nations, Colmenares goes on, conceived of themselves as “fragments” derived from the collapsed Spanish Empire and “rejected the idea of having something in common with the other fragments.” Each one of these “fragments,” in other words, was thought to have a “unique history.”Footnote 3 Now, while a growing body of literature has increasingly challenged or refined this assumption, the nation-centered approach continues to dominate the study of historical discourse in nineteenth-century Spanish America. And this case is particularly marked in the work of historians who have studied the intellectual history of what today is known as “the Southern Cone” (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), a region that positioned itself as a true vanguard of Spanish American intellectual production throughout most of the nineteenth century. The “foundational” debates of Chilean historiography in the nineteenth century, to borrow Iván Jaksic’s wording, were about the “foundations” of Chile as a nation-state, tout court.Footnote 4 This is the prevailing academic consensus.
It is important to acknowledge, however, that transnational connections have not gone unnoticed in the scholarship. In fact, an increasing number of recent studies have examined dynamics of intellectual exchange and collaboration across borders within the continent. Edward Blumenthal, for example, has traced and reconstructed the mobility networks, largely triggered by political exile, that served as the basis for the articulation of political thought between Chile and Argentina from 1810 to 1862.Footnote 5 For her part, Nicola Miller has written about the circulation, appropriation, and critical examination of European Enlightenment classics like Rousseau and Herder between Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during the same period, paying particular attention to how local intellectuals used—or did not—their ideas amid their attempts to transform their societies by strengthening sovereignty, republicanism, and democracy.Footnote 6 Others have paid attention to the role played by individual Spanish American thinkers in this context. Joaquín Trujillo-Silva, for instance, has written about the interconnectedness in Andrés Bello’s ideas on law, liberty, and empire, especially on how Bello envisioned the regulation of language (what Trujillo-Silva calls gramocracia or “grammocracy”) as a necessary means to consolidate Spanish American sovereignty, stability, and governability after colonial rule.Footnote 7 Looking beyond borders at both etic and emic levels has thus proven to be not only possible but indispensable to properly understand the extraordinarily diverse, rich, and complex landscape of knowledge production in nineteenth-century Spanish America.Footnote 8
In light of this recognition, although I concur that elaborating national histories was one of the main matters of concern for Spanish American intellectuals in this period, I contend that historians have traditionally overestimated the centrality of this focus. The overly enthusiastic interest in the nation as an analytic category has contributed to the occlusion of some of the most novel and thought-provoking interventions made by Spanish Americans to the history of global historical thought in the nineteenth century. Making this claim, to be perfectly clear, I do not deny that Spanish American intellectuals shared a clear and strong interest in imagining, controlling, and expanding their nation-states. What I want to stress is the need for a shift of perspective to do justice to the outstanding intellectual creativity and ambition of some of the most influential intellectuals in post-colonial Spanish America by bringing to the fore the global dimension of their historical and political thought.Footnote 9 Drawing upon Juan Maiguashca’s response to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s depiction of historicism as an inherently Eurocentric “metanarrative of progress,” I think that the crux of the matter here lies in avoiding generalizations by focusing on the truly divergent worldviews presented by European historicism and its Spanish American counterparts. As Maiguashca put it, “rather than following to the letter European historicism,” which conceived nations as “internally unified” monads, Spanish Americans “came to think of them as grand projects that would bring together civilizations, ethnicities, and classes long in conflict in a given territory.”Footnote 10 As a consequence, the rise of Spanish American historical discourse in the nineteenth century—assuming Maiguashca is correct—did not always enclose itself within the confines of the “one-nation–one-sate” model that became hegemonic in Europe. Conversely, it was open-ended and borderless to its core. Following this thread, in the coming pages, I will examine a series of historical and conceptual consequences that follow from this seemingly subtle—yet crucial—distinction.
My argument is that the first experiments in historical writing in Spanish America had an explicit and purposeful global scope. In order of priority, Spanish Americans were first interested in thinking globally about humanity, then transnationally about the Americas, and lastly about their individual “nations.” Moreover, at a conceptual level, these intellectuals’ interest in national history relied upon a more fundamental interest in theoretical riddles of universal scope, such as how to define and use concepts like “colonialism,” “progress,” “democracy,” and “republicanism.” National history, to phrase it differently, was a secondary subject of interest for the intellectuals who dominated the public scene after colonialism. The main hurdle to be reckoned with during the first decades after Independence was how to redefine Spanish America’s position, as a whole, within the greater scheme of “universal history” that European Enlightenment proponents had imposed, or at least projected, at a world scale. In this manner, echoing Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, post-colonial Spanish Americans moved towards the synthesis of “alternative forms of universalism.” Through the promotion of transnational networks of intellectual collaboration, they created visions of the globe that sought to displace, debunk, and replace colonial and neocolonial alternatives.Footnote 11
To illustrate this claim, I have divided my argument into two parts. In the first section, I show that some of the first attempts to write about history in Spanish South America shared a strong interest in continental history and a widespread—although often contradictory—anticolonial agenda. Then, in the second section, I show why and how Spanish American intellectuals wrote about world history from antiquity to the nineteenth century at the same time and on several occasions, even before writing about the history of their home countries. The time frame I consider runs from the 1830s to the 1860s, which is when Spanish Americans started to systematically debate the theory and method of historical research, the philosophy of history, and the role of historical discourse in the construction of would-be democratic republican regimes. The cases I examine were all part of a closely integrated network of intellectuals who connected the cities of Santiago, Valparaíso, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo with the rest of the subcontinent through their travels, exchanges, and collaborations. This network, as Maiguashca has shown, became the center of Spanish American intellectual production during this period.Footnote 12 And the nodal point of this network was the “Chilean Laboratory.”
The concept of the “Chilean Laboratory” was introduced by Annick Lempérière to make sense of the fact that Chile, a formerly provincial margin of the Spanish Empire that before 1812 did not even have a single printing press, became the nerve center of post-colonial intellectual exchange.Footnote 13 As Ana María Stuven explains, Chile became this “exception” within the region because of its institutional, political, and economic stability compared to the unrest experienced by most Spanish American countries by the end of the 1830s.Footnote 14 Despite the striking social inequalities and the authoritarianism reigning in Chile, especially during the conservative presidency of Manuel Bulnes (1841–51), the country experienced a certain opening—emergence, really—of the public sphere. In this context—“exceptional” or not—of relative peace and tolerance, it is generally agreed by historians that Chile became a vibrant intellectual hub where post-Independence letrados from all corners of Spanish America (mainly Argentina, but also Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and other countries) joined efforts to reimagine their relationship with the legacies of colonialism and the future of their young republics.Footnote 15 Therefore, although it would not be accurate to sustain that the main cases I analyze in the coming pages (José Victorino Lastarria, Francisco Bilbao, and Juan García del Río) represent all of “Latin America” (a concept that was not even in use before the 1850s), it is safe to claim that they played a vital role within the network of intellectuals that led Spanish American intellectual production during the first three decades after the Revolutions of Independence.
Dismantling the “colonial system”
Many significant Latin American contributors to the history of the historical and social sciences remain largely unacknowledged or even unknown to academics today, including within Latin America itself. One exception, though, at least for those familiar with postcolonial studies and the so-called “decolonial turn,” is Peruvian sociologist and political theorist Aníbal Quijano (1930–2018). Quijano, who became well known for his critical work against Eurocentrism and imperialism, left his mark—among many other intellectual achievements—by introducing the conceptual distinction between “colonialism” and “coloniality.”Footnote 16 According to Quijano, colonialism refers to the direct political, economic, social, and cultural domination that European powers established over the peoples of what we now call the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. In contrast, coloniality alludes to the enduring legacies of colonialism that persisted after its “formal” defeat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As defined by Quijano, although inseparably tied to the expansion of capitalism and imperialism, coloniality is a fundamentally cultural form of subjugation based on the systematic repression of the “beliefs, ideas, images, symbols, and knowledge” that Europeans perceived as a threat to their colonial interests and ambitions. In other words, coloniality refers to a set of mechanisms conceived to thwart the overall cultural production of the dominated, thus destroying the conditions of possibility of resistance or the emergence of alternative worldviews.Footnote 17
Currently, students of Latin American history might not find much novelty in any of what I just outlined. Quijano’s ideas are widely known, after all. Less known, however, is that a series of concepts strikingly aligned with the conceptual apparatus elaborated by Quijano were, to a large extent, already in use in nineteenth-century Spanish America. Indeed, quite similar ideas were first introduced by another Peruvian intellectual about 170 years before. Refuting the belief that the lexicon of “decolonization” appeared in France during the 1830s as a reaction against the conquest of Algeria, Mark Thurner has recently demonstrated that the concept had already been coined by José Faustino Sánchez Carrión (1787–1825) in 1822.Footnote 18 The exact words Sánchez Carrión used in a letter published in Lima under the pen name of El Solitario de Sayán were the verb descolonizar (to decolonize) and the nouns coloniaje (colonialism) and sistema colonial (colonial system).Footnote 19 Sánchez Carrión used these concepts to label and attack the long-lasting effects of the colonial past in his country. The author’s purpose was to raise awareness of the need to break free from what he regarded as a still-prevailing “colonial system” by “decolonizing” Peruvian “customs” so that the people could “flourish” and their “enlightenment” attain its “maximum potential.”Footnote 20 As Thurner suggests, this goal was shared by many in post-colonial Lima. One of them was Bernardo Monteagudo (1789–1825), an Argentine intellectual and politician who participated in the revolutionary movements in the River Plate, Chile, and Peru. Unlike Sánchez Carrión, who was a republican, Monteagudo advocated for a constitutional monarchy.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, beyond their political disagreements, both agreed on the need to wage “war” against coloniality in the ways of thinking and behaving of the masses.Footnote 22 In decades to come, this critical use of terms like “colonialism” and “colonial system” became the standard gloss in Peruvian historical writing to denote “the epoch of Spanish domination.”Footnote 23 And, as I will show now, Peru was not solitary in this regard.
From the late 1830s onwards, the call to decolonize customs spread transnationally and took a more explicitly Americanist scope. This expansion was facilitated by the development of a network of intellectuals who, as mentioned above, circulated between cities like Valparaíso, Santiago, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic sides of South America through their writings and travels—often due to exile. One of the main figures within this network was Esteban Echeverría (1805–51), a political theorist, writer, and publicist who became the intellectual leader of the so-called Argentine generation of 1837. The generation of 1837, to put it bluntly, was a group of liberal and republican intellectuals and educators committed to the consolidation of the Independence process at political, economic, and cultural levels.Footnote 24 In Echeverría’s words, written from exile in Montevideo, the central facet of their “movement” was the “complete divorce of everything colonial” and the “foundation” of new “social beliefs” over the “democratic principle of the American revolution.” This task, Echeverría recognized, was “hard” and “slow” but “necessary” for the constitution of “each one of the American nationalities.” Such transformation in customs, moreover, was “indispensable” for the emergence of an American literature that could be more than a “reflection” of the Spanish or the French.Footnote 25 Aligned with Sánchez Carrión and Monteagudo, Echeverría stressed that the “social beliefs” that post-colonial Spanish Americans had to modify included religious, moral, philosophical, and political assumptions. Their cultural transformation had to encompass all constitutive elements of their worldview because, as the notion of “colonial system” suggests, Spanish Americans had realized that the multifaceted cultural legacies of colonialism were strongly “tied together” as “links” in a chain that constrained “individual and social consciousness.”Footnote 26 Consequently, despite having secured political sovereignty, Spanish American republican regimes had been contradictorily superimposed over the mental structures left by centuries of colonialism.Footnote 27
This “new generation” of South American thinkers, as they called themselves to highlight their ambition of “renewing” their societies after Independence, shared a particularly strong interest in promoting historical studies to achieve their goal.Footnote 28 And most of them, from Echeverría, Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–84), and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88) in Argentina to Francisco Bilbao (1823–65) and José Victorino Lastarria (1817–88) in Chile, agreed that fostering the study of European philosophies of history, alongside writing their own locally rooted “philosophical histories,” would help them to unravel the meaning and direction of what they regarded as an ongoing revolutionary process. A case in point is Lastarria’s first historical treatise, Investigaciones sobre la influencia social de la conquista y del sistema colonial de los españoles en Chile (Investigations into the Influence of the Conquest and the Spanish Colonial System in Chile), published in 1844. Lastarria’s Investigaciones is particularly illustrative of the intellectual production in this context for two main reasons. First, he was one of the best-connected and most influential figures in the Chilean Laboratory and the transnational intellectual network that developed around it. Lastarria, for example, was one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called generation of 1842, the Chilean equivalent to the Argentine generation of 1837, and became a close collaborator with the Argentines who went into exile in Chile escaping the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas in the 1840s amid the civil war between unitarians and federalists in the River Plate. Second, no other thinker in the Southern Cone elaborated so explicitly, critically, and extensively the conceptual framework on “colonialism” and the “colonial system” used by Sánchez Carrión in the 1820s. Many welcomed, praised and even idealized the potential of promoting the study and writing of philosophies of history, but few ventured to do so in such a systematic manner as Lastarria in his Investigaciones.
Indeed, one of the most salient features of Investigaciones is how often, from introduction to conclusion, Lastarria thematizes and justifies his “philosophical method.”Footnote 29 Lastarria’s central point was that to comprehend and dismantle the legacies of the colonial system and effectively decolonize Spanish American societies, the pure accumulation of historical data and description of events was not enough. Such a systemic problem required a systematic response. To overcome the alarming wave of instability and factionalism that followed the end of the Wars of Independence, they needed to scrutinize the causes and effects of enduring colonial mental, cultural, and institutional structures.Footnote 30 In this sense, for Lastarria, historical writing was unapologetically normative. Openly grounded in present politics, it had a clearly stated futurist dimension. As he put it, “Let’s look at what our history was to see what it should and will be.”Footnote 31 As a matter of fact, Lastarria never concealed his openly liberal political agenda; he was looking into the colonial past to find solutions to present obstacles to progress. He was certain that the transformations promoted by liberals and republicans ultimately failed because they were not effectively “rooted in the heart of society.”Footnote 32 And, as Lastarria stressed, when there is no “reciprocity” between the customs of societies and their political and economic models, those models can only subsist in perpetual crisis.Footnote 33 This is precisely what he sought to tackle by looking for a harmony between history and theory. In contrast to what others had done, then, Investigaciones is much more than a public call to “decolonize customs.” It is a study of how customs had been colonized in the first place, offering an in-depth investigation into the process of synthesis and reproduction of the web of colonial customs that, two decades after Independence, continued constraining the political imagination of Spanish Americans.
At first glance, the title and structure of Investigaciones suggest that it is simply a book about Chile. Nevertheless, given the continental character of the “colonial system” that the author was trying to disentangle, understand, and expose, the scope of the work is much broader. Lastarria goes back and forth throughout the book, offering comparisons with other Spanish American countries, suggesting trends and common patterns, and searching the history of the colonial period for what we would now call “transnational” neocolonial structures. Looking beyond borders was unavoidable to develop his argument. As Lastarria put it,
Thinking about this important matter, as much as I wish to focus on our motherland, it will not be possible for me to stop referring to all Spanish America, because in the time of colonialism, the history of which I examine, all Americans were one people, a homogeneous people, who came from the same origin and marched toward the same end: the name of foreigner was not by then meaningful in our language of brothers.Footnote 34
The transnational dimension of Lastarria’s historical and political thought, I must note, extends well beyond Investigaciones. His commitment to Spanish American integration remained a constant throughout his life, as he made explicitly clear in his autobiography, Recuerdos Literarios (Literary Memoirs), first published in 1878 and substantially expanded in 1885.Footnote 35 Probably the best example of the Americanism Lastarria introduced in Investigaciones is La América, a massive work he published in three parts between 1865 and 1867, where he reinforced his commitment to Spanish American intellectual emancipation with the same zeal and conviction that he had shown since his famous inaugural speech at Santiago’s Literary Society of 1842.Footnote 36 In La América, Lastarria criticized the fact that the expansionist “industrial interest” of Europeans, particularly when shielded by their “theory of races,” blinded them. He argued that their obsession with maximizing economic profit at all costs rendered Europeans unable to recognize, understand, or value the cultural richness and potential of Latin American countries.Footnote 37 Furthermore, he denounced how most of the books and articles written by Europeans about the Americas were ill-intentioned, superficial, and based on misleading, false, or contradictory data. He assessed the available literature, especially that published in French, as somewhere in between “marvellous” and “grotesque”Footnote 38—hence his lifelong collaborative agenda to foster the study of the Americas by Latin Americans themselves. Aligned with his Investigaciones and subsequent work, in fact, La América presents a general survey about the “vices” that the “colonial system” had left in Latin America as a whole.Footnote 39 There, he spends several chapters analyzing in greater depth a series of cases from Mexico and Colombia to Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, alongside Argentina and Chile.Footnote 40
Yet, again, it had been in Investigaciones that Lastarria had made his most incisive critique of the “colonial system.” His criticism was so fierce that the fact that some of his contemporaries found it biased, exaggerated, and unfair should not come as a surprise.Footnote 41 Evaluating the Spanish colonial legislation, Investigaciones argues that the guiding idea of the “courts and the rulers of the colonies” was to maintain “America in a blind dependency on Spain in order to extract all possible advantages.”Footnote 42 Drawing on the Spanish Black Legend, Lastarria claims that the imposed legislation was a “true nigromancy” devised to satisfy the “whims” and “interests” of the colonizers. “Everything,” he goes on to stress, was conditioned by the “arbitrariness” of the colonial magistrates.Footnote 43 Agriculture, commerce, and industry, as well as any possible source of autonomy and prosperity, would have been intentionally “held back” to prevent Spanish American “development.”Footnote 44 Lastarria, moreover, was one of the first to denunciate, together with Bilbao, how the coloniality in customs that had originated in laws and institutions was maintained and reinforced by the “theocratic and religious power” that still operated in the republican period. It was a control mechanism to “keep the people unchanging and ignorant,” repressing the masses “perpetually.”Footnote 45 As he had also noted in his inaugural speech at Santiago’s Literary Society two years before, it was “not enough” for the Spanish colonizers to “deprive Americans of liberty of action.” They also did their best to deprive them of freedom of “thought.” According to Lastarria, Spanish masters were “convinced” that nothing could be more “dangerous” for their interests than the “free development of the mind” of their colonial subjects.Footnote 46
While, as a piece of historical research, the book was programmatically transnational in reach, as a philosophical treatise, Investigaciones had a broader, universal scope. The case Lastarria was making was that colonialism was not only a crime against Chileans or Spanish Americans. As Bernardo Subercaseaux has shown, for Lastarria, colonialism represented a crime against human nature because it violated the fundamental human need and right to strive for perfection freely.Footnote 47 Indeed, the main political issue Lastarria raised from the introduction of Investigaciones was how to protect free will from determinist thinking in a post-colonial setting.Footnote 48 The purpose of his philosophy of history was to unravel how to emancipate the minds of the formerly colonized and foster their agency to end their intellectual dependency and enable their capacity to act rationally and freely in their best interest. Lastarria was indeed critical of the determinism he saw among some of his peers in the Chilean Laboratory. He refused to be one of “those historians who limited themselves to narrating events, considering them inevitable [fatales]” and who “abstained” from judgment on the ground that those events would be “beyond the reach of human consciousness.”Footnote 49 As he explained,
The series of moral causes and effects that constitute the great code to which humanity is subdued by its own nature is not so strictly fatal as to operate without any participation of Man. Moreover, the action of those causes is totally void if Man does not promote it with his doings. He takes such an effective part in his destiny that neither his fortune nor disgrace are, in most cases, more than the necessary effect of his actions; that is to say, of his liberty. Man thinks independently, and his conceptions are always the origin and foundation of his will.Footnote 50
For Lastarria, however, there are two—opposite—forms of determinist thinking that can potentially dissolve agency: first, to assume that everything in history is contingent and therefore meaningless, and second, to believe that providence drives all historical events.Footnote 51 The problem, Lastarria thought, is that those nations that “blindly surrender themselves to the arms of fatality” end up losing their “unity.” When “peoples” consider history as nothing more than a series of “isolated facts” or divinely predetermined facts, without trying to understand the “natural and necessary connections” between them, political communities cannot direct their own progress.Footnote 52 Alternatively, philosophically assessing the “great book of their life,” peoples can learn that the coming and going of “goods and disasters” are not due to forces beyond human understanding and control.Footnote 53
Ultimately, the complex circumstances the new generations were attempting to “control” were marked by the difficulties they encountered in trying to build solid foundations for their projects of democratic republics. All of those who introduced and elaborated the conceptual framework of “colonialism,” “colonial system,” and “decolonization,” from Carrión to Lastarria, saw an opposition between democracy and the remains of the colonial past. Most intellectuals understood this tension as a dichotomy. It was coloniality or democracy. The one threatened the very existence of the other. The divisive question, then, was how to keep coloniality at bay. In practice, the crux of the matter was how much “freedom” these “national builders” were willing to give to the “masses.” Although some were reluctant to open the public sphere and expand political rights, Lastarria did not leave any space for doubt. Democracy was the end but also the means to “regenerate” Spanish American political culture. As such, it had to be introduced as soon as possible. As he put it in 1842, “Our fathers did not harvest the ground where they sowed democracy because they could not do it. They were forced to put it into practice while still unprepared. But the present generation, more by instinct than conviction, applies itself to harvest it [democracy], seeming to be headed to complete the work.”Footnote 54 For him, democracy was the only way out of the coloniality of knowledge and power, the only way to “restore” the Spanish American path towards “perfection.”
Lastarria’s democratic views were shared by more than a few, most notably Bilbao in Chile and Echeverría in Uruguay. According to Echeverría, democracy was the “principle” that gave “unity” to his generation’s political thought. It was the core political value of their movement.Footnote 55 For them, establishing a democratic regime meant expanding political and social rights as much as possible, just like revolutionaries in the United States and France had tried to do. Nonetheless, for Echeverría, equality meant something much more ambitious, robust, and substantive than a formal political promise. It meant effective equity to a degree no political community in history had accomplished yet. What they wanted, in his exact words, was the “complete intellectual, moral, and material” transformation of society.Footnote 56 Materializing this radically utopian conception of democracy might have seemed too far away, almost unattainable to most of his contemporaries, and certainly undesirable for many. However, for most of the “new generation,” the full realization of democracy was ultimately unavoidable. The idea that Spanish America was where democracy would find its most perfect materialization was a historical necessity, what Echeverría called a “logical deduction from the study of the past.”Footnote 57 It was a lesson from the philosophical observation of history. This radical conception of democratic republicanism, as James Sanders has demonstrated, was the manifestation of a broader, growing political discourse that began to gain traction in the 1840s from Mexico and Colombia to Chile and Uruguay.Footnote 58 The central tenet of this discourse, which Sanders calls “American republican modernity,” sustained a solid commitment to universalism by defending all people having equal political and social rights, regardless of class, race, or nationality.Footnote 59 Spanish Americans who endorsed it, Sanders explains, saw themselves as the vanguard of the Atlantic world because it was in their continent, and only there, that the political ideas of the Enlightenment had truly “survived, thrived, and evolved.”Footnote 60 While Europe—and the rest of the world—lagged in the past under the rule of tyrannical monarchs and aristocrats, the Americas embodied the hope and future of modern politics.Footnote 61
Such a radical, progressive and even idealized vision of democracy, though, was opposed by many.Footnote 62 In fact, according to Sanders, it was particularly defied by other figures of the same generation in Argentina, like Sarmiento and Alberdi.Footnote 63 So, even though Echeverría wrote in the name of his “generation,” it is doubtful that most of his fellow intellectual revolutionaries would have been willing to endorse the full extent of his political views. As William Katra explains, Echeverría’s “faith in the masses” was far from the norm; most were more concerned than enthusiastic about a rapid expansion of political rights.Footnote 64 Democracy, according to the skeptics, would have to follow in due time. Its implementation had to be taken as a highly treacherous open-ended process to pursue progressively but with caution. Alberdi, for example, famously claimed that the “general will” and “reason” are two things that imply each other so that the “limit” of sovereignty is the “collective reason of the people.”Footnote 65 Where the people is not “rational,” sovereignty is “not possible,” and neither is democracy.Footnote 66 That is why for him, Sarmiento, and many others, the future of humanity—not just of Argentina—relied upon popular education.Footnote 67 In a similar vein, the founding members of Santiago’s Literary Society attested that although the “principle of popular sovereignty” was widely accepted in their country, it “was not yet effective” because it lacked the support of popular enlightenment. Without popular education, democracy could only be the “bedrock” of their republican system of government as a formal, unfulfilled promise. In the end, the main objective of the exchanges and collaborations between this group of Spanish American intellectuals was to fix this problem.Footnote 68
Despite these differences regarding the advantages and disadvantages of establishing democratic regimes, one issue is clear, then. Spanish American intellectuals committed to the promotion of historical studies—especially those centered around the Chilean Laboratory—agreed on the need to democratize access to knowledge. They concurred that Spanish American polities urgently needed an expansion of literacy and schooling, as well as the widespread diffusion of modern literary and scientific knowledge as extensively as possible.Footnote 69 Dismantling the colonial system and advancing democracy were, for them, intricately intertwined. Yet they also recognized the crucial point that to fulfil their objective, merely thinking continentally was not enough.
Phagocytizing “Europe”
The deconstruction of the colonial system to lay the foundations for truly democratic republics required more than cross-border collaboration. Intellectuals based in the Chilean Laboratory or connected to the transnational network that grew around it reckoned that to fully consolidate the Spanish American emancipation process at cultural and intellectual levels they had to go global. And that is precisely what they set forth to do by rethinking and rewriting “universal history,” what historians today call “world history” or, in a more expansive sense, “big history.” The aim of our actors, to put it in their terms, was to “place” Spanish America within the so-called “scale of civilization” to determine their “position” in the global “race to progress.” Few intellectual conundrums seemed more pressing during the first half of the nineteenth century than determining their relation to, or position within, “Western civilization.” In a series of methodological experiments, intellectuals linked to the Chilean Laboratory criticized—and at times mocked—the methods European authors used to write the history of humanity during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And, as a response, they proposed their own accounts of the relationships between the histories of the Americas and Europe while also touching, albeit tangentially, on the histories of Asia and Africa. Thus Spanish Americans appropriated the idea of “Europe,” making it more flexible by transforming it to fit their visions of how being “modern” and “civilized” could look like from a so-perceived rebellious periphery of “the West.” Now, for the sake of clarity and to avoid anachronisms, instead of “the West” as a well-defined entity, in what follows I will refer to “Western” culture and history. And instead of the rather slippery “idea of the West,” I will opt to analyze Spanish American representations of the idea of Europe. In doing so, I will restrict myself to the categories used by my actors. After all, as Alastair Bonnett, Christopher GoGwilt, and Georgios Varouxakis have pointed out, the idea of the West that we are familiar with today is relatively new. It did not exist in the first decades of the nineteenth century and became globally dominant only between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth.Footnote 70
Spanish American engagements with and appropriations of the idea of Europe were highly ambivalent. They constantly oscillated between the most fervent anticolonialism and unapologetic manifestations of Eurocentrism. Although some intellectuals, like Lastarria, acknowledged and even idealized their precolonial past, openly defending the histories and political rights of indigenous peoples in the present, others did quite the opposite. Sarmiento’s, of course, is the best-known case of a utopian yet racist conception of “progress.”Footnote 71 As a matter of fact, the Argentine reviewed Lastarria’s Investigaciones, praising the Chilean’s critique of the Spanish colonial system as “full of lucidity,” except for what he regarded as an idealized vision of the “savages.” Sarmiento confessed in his review his feeling of “repugnance” for the “Araucanos” (the Mapuche people). In his exact words, Mapuche caciques like Colocolo, Lautaro, and Caupolicán were “nothing more than a bunch of disgusting Indians, whom we would have made hang and would send to hang now.”Footnote 72 There was no place for them in the new Spanish America that was rising over the ruins of colonialism. In a similar vein, although a bit more subtly than Sarmiento, Alberdi claimed that there was no history before Independence. As he phrased it, “we do not have a history … our society is an embryo.”Footnote 73 At least for them, Spanish colonialism was their prehistory, and republicanism was the proper beginning of their history.
Moreover, Spanish American critiques of their cultural heteronomy did not aim for the absolute erasure of the Spanish background. On the contrary, intellectuals recognized themselves as heirs of a Western cultural tradition they did not entirely neglect. Their objective was to adapt that background to render it functional to their political projects within and beyond the state, both locally and transnationally. When Lastarria criticized the influence of colonial institutions and laws, for instance, he was careful to distinguish between the “unfair,” “repressive,” and “fanatical” Spanish legislation and what he saw as an always beneficial Roman law.Footnote 74 And when Bilbao published Sociabilidad Chilena (Chilean Sociability), a demolishing critique of conservatism in Chilean society that caused an authentic public scandal and forced him into exile, he was cautious in distinguishing between Catholicism and “true Christianity.”Footnote 75 While he denounced the hierarchic “authoritarianism” of the Catholic Church that repressed individual consciousness through traditions and institutions, he prophesied that a truly democratic and liberal religious thought was called to redeem humanity—not just “modern” Chile.Footnote 76 In Bilbao’s words, “equality in liberty is the universal religion; it is the government of humanity; it is the future unity” of the world.Footnote 77 So, even though Bilbao wrote about “destroying” the legacies of colonialism, he did not mean to eliminate everything they had “inherited” from Spain.Footnote 78 The most challenging task these intellectuals consciously faced was precisely to figure out what to take and what to reject from European influences. What they wanted was to gain greater control over the dynamics of power within that relation, transforming and expanding what they regarded as their Western cultural matrix. For some, that “transformation” and “expansion” considered the histories and worldviews of Indigenous peoples. For others, it implied their suppression. Still, in most cases, Spanish Americans were contesting the globally hegemonic conception of modern time that put the idea of Europe at the end and center of human progress.
In his critique of the coloniality of power, for example, Bilbao equated European colonialism to the Middle Ages, the Middle Ages to barbarism, and barbarism to the Orient. And he was not alone in doing so. In her latest book on “the politics of temporalization,” as a matter of fact, Nadia Altschul investigates “how, why, and by whom certain elements of the contemporaneous were named as pertaining to the ‘past’.”Footnote 79 Altschul examines how figures from Sarmiento and Mary Graham to Euclides da Cunha and Gilberto Freyre reflected on those “elements” of Spanish American reality that, from their perspective, “lingered” in the “Middle Ages.” Following Chakrabarty, she criticizes the idea that some societies or cultures could be “behind” or “forward” in time as if there existed an objective point of reference to judge their “civilizational status.” Instead, she argues for the “radical contemporaneity of humankind.”Footnote 80 Interestingly, though, there is much more to unveil about global nineteenth-century contests over who was deemed to be “ahead” or would eventually “win” the “race to progress.” Drawing on inspiration from Altschul and Sanders, in the remainder of this section I will expand their line of argument by further substantiating that what the main generations of intellectuals in the Chilean Laboratory were trying to do in developing their own historical thought was to place Europe as the embodiment of an antiquated past condemned to be surpassed, and the Americas as the embodiment of an unstoppable future that would put an end to the global hegemony of Europe. As I already said, the “local” in the sense of a “national” or “proto-national” component was unquestionably present in their historical thought. However, from the 1830s to the 1860s their main preoccupation was much broader, more ambitious, and more “universal” than is normally assumed.
One of the best—and most understudied—cases of cosmopolitan intellectual ambition in this context is El Museo de Ambas Américas (The Museum of Both Americas), a journal-styled literary experiment published in Valparaíso (1842) by Juan García del Río, a politician, diplomat, and journalist from New Granada who became the true embodiment of enlightened transnationalism in Spanish America during the Age of Revolution. The son of a Spanish monarchist loyal to the crown, García del Río was born in Cartagena de Indias in 1794 and died in Mexico in 1856. As a child, he was sent to study humanities in Cadiz, returning to the Americas in 1812 to become an active precursor of the Independence process. In 1814, he was appointed secretary of the Colombian ambassador in London, where he would forge a friendship with Bello, who had traveled from Caracas to the United Kingdom as part of a diplomatic mission to uphold the interests of the Spanish American revolutionary movements.Footnote 81 In London, García del Río also represented the governments of O’Higgins and San Martín as their secretary of foreign relations. He worked as a diplomat in Britain until 1817, when he accepted an invitation to join the diplomatic service in Chile. In Santiago, aside from his role as “senior officer” in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, he also worked as a journalist, founding the newspapers El sol de Chile (The Sun of Chile) and El telégrafo (The Telegraph). Although El sol de Chile circulated briefly, El telégrafo effectively contributed to the promotion of republicanism at a critical time, right after the decisive victory of the Army of the Andes against the royalist forces in the battle of Chacabuco.Footnote 82
Influential as it was, however, García del Río’s first stay in Chile did not last long. In 1820, he joined San Martín’s campaign to liberate Peru, who named him minister of foreign relations. Together, they signed the establishment of the Peruvian National Library in 1821. And after San Martín retired in 1822, he crossed the sea one more time to resettle in London.Footnote 83 There, García del Río began to collaborate intellectually with Bello and others, taking part in the Society of Americans, which sought to promote Spanish American intellectual production from Europe. In 1829, García del Río returned to the Americas, where his intellectual drive only grew stronger. That year, back in Bogota, he published his Colombian Meditations, a treatise of political philosophy where he predicted that “the day would come” when the Spanish American “intellect” would “emancipate itself,” while arguing in favour of a constitutional monarchy led by the “Libertador” Simón Bolívar.Footnote 84 Unfortunately for García del Río, the idea of strengthening Spanish American integration through a political model akin to the one adopted in Brazil would also clash with reality. After Bolívar’s political downfall and death in 1830, García del Río had to cross borders once again. He moved to Ecuador and then Peru, later to arrive in Chile for a second time in the 1840s to become an active member in the local intellectual milieu. It was in this context, after all these journeys across the Americas and between the Americas and Europe, that the Colombian published El Museo in Valparaíso.
As an editorial project, El Museo sought to “make available” to the largest possible number of people in the subcontinent “the substance of so many works that is difficult and expensive to acquire.” Its goal was to “popularize doctrines” and the state of the art of “modern literature” in the broadest sense of the word.Footnote 85 El Museo, it must be noted, was one in a series of encyclopedic experiments in which García del Río contributed to generating and democratizing access to “modern knowledge” in Spanish America. Previously, during his time in London, he had collaborated with Bello on the publication of two other “journals” of a similar kind: Biblioteca Americana o Miscelánea de Literatura, Artes y Letras (American Library or Miscellany of Literature, Arts, and Sciences), published in 1823, and El Repertorio Americano (The American Repertoire), published between 1826 and 1827. The objective that linked Biblioteca Americana and El Repertorio Americano, as María Ramírez Delgado has pointed out, was to contribute to the Spanish American mental emancipation process.Footnote 86 And the same, I must add, applies to El Museo. The latter, as a matter of fact, is one of the most programmatic documents left by the series of transnationally connected initiatives to “decolonize customs” in the Southern Cone. Like the societies and clubs that gathered in literary salons from Santiago to Buenos Aires, it was a reaction against the intellectual legacy of Spanish colonialism.Footnote 87 In this sense, it was similar to Biblioteca Americana and El Repertorio Americano. This time, however, García del Río drew a particularly extensive and suggestive connection between the need for Spanish American integration and the theory and practice of history.Footnote 88
El Museo’s articles cover a wide range of topics. Some are pieces on European authors, from Aristotle to Victor Hugo, as well as famous political figures in world history, from Atahualpa and Simón Bolívar to Washington and Robespierre. Others examine diverse subjects, from the idea of love to the state of British debt, from studies on education, hygiene, and agriculture to a comparison of the isthmuses of Suez and Panama. Most of these articles are primarily expository. However, García del Río’s authorial voice and intellectual stance stand out particularly strongly in two sets of articles that are evenly distributed across the three volumes: “Ojeada al continente americano” (A Glance over the American Continent) and “La historia considerada como ciencia de los hechos” (History as a Science of Facts). Carefully “plaited” across the three volumes, these series of articles constitute the backbone that holds together the narrative structure of El Museo. In “La historia considerada como ciencia de los hechos,” for example, García del Río offers an overview of European historical thought. Simply put, there he presents a literary review of the best-known sources for the study of ancient, medieval, and modern historiography. His survey sought to orient the Spanish American readership amid the rapid expansion of historical discourse in the nineteenth century. The modern study of history, he warned, was “far from gaining in veracity what it had gained in extension.” There existed “as many historians about a single fact” as different interpretations of it.Footnote 89 And such a proliferation of methodological schools, styles, and theories was making it increasingly difficult, even for the most “enlightened” in the world Republic of Letters, to discern which readings were worthy of consideration, which were not, and which had to be approached with a few caveats in mind. The enlargement of data availability had become puzzling.
The situation of historical studies in France was illustrative of this global tendency. García del Río explained that since the institutionalization of history at the Collège de France and the Imperial University in 1810, and, more importantly, after the July Revolution of 1830, history “reigned” without opposition in “literature, theatre, and the academies.” The establishment of the Historical Institute and the French Historical Society was only the best-known among many other examples.Footnote 90 And this trend was parallel to the one occurring almost simultaneously in Spanish America during the last decade. Historicism was sprouting globally. García del Río mapped the available literature on “universal history,” commenting and categorizing figures like Chateaubriand, Guizot, Thiers, Sismondi, Michelet, and de Staël according to their theoretical stances, topics of preference, writing style, and political preferences. Exhaustive as it is, not only “modern” French “specimens” are exhibited in García del Río’s “museum.” We also find there “ancient” European “classics,” from Herodotus and Thucydides to Lucretius and Livy. Among the “modern” British, García del Río mentions Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, and even Walter Scott because it was historical discourse and not just historiography that interested him. In a similar vein, German names like Herder, Müller, Hegel, and Humboldt can be spotted, as well as a few Italians like Guicciardini and Vico. Prescott, the American historian of Spain, Mexico, and Peru, is also exhibited in the “Museum of both Americas.”Footnote 91
García del Río’s survey of Western historical thought sought to raise awareness of the epistemic biases and flaws of European historical writing while pushing Spanish American historians to develop their own political and intellectual stances from the peculiarities of their historical realities. This issue was most pressing considering the massive expansion of historical literature towards the mid-nineteenth century. In this context, being neutral was not desirable nor even possible. Whoever did not learn to swim in such a vast sea of data was doomed, sooner or later, to drown. As García del Río noted, “it is true that impartiality can be abused,” as it is possible to “abuse all good things.” If taken to its extreme, impartiality could lead to “skepticism,” “indifference,” “selfishness,” and “frigidity.”Footnote 92 His stance was clear. Historians’ locus of enunciation must always be transparent; they must always take political and theoretical stances, consciously, and expressly. In his exact words, “History must also have its faith, and I do not exclude with this word the critique, this is, the moral tendency of history … It is necessary to subdue consciousness to high moral and philosophical thoughts.”Footnote 93 History had to be directed, with purpose and determination, to waken and strengthen the agency and autonomy of the citizenry, the freethinking and historical consciousness of the people.Footnote 94 In fact, aligned with other proponents of “philosophical history,” from Bilbao and Lastarria to Echeverría and Sarmiento, García del Río’s historical thought had a futurist, utopian, and even messianic core to it.
Although García del Río is not a particularly systematic thinker, and even though the style of his work is more encyclopedic than philosophical, El Museo offers much more than a review of the available literature on “universal history.” In other series of articles, like “Ojeada al continente americano” (A Glance over the American Continent), “El Nuevo Mundo” (The New World), and “Consideraciones sobre el destino de la humanidad” (Considerations on the Destiny of Humanity), he develops his own “grand narrative” of world history. There we find the Colombian’s overarching view of how the human mind had “evolved” globally from antiquity up until the nineteenth century. The author’s main point is twofold: first, that the Americas embody the “end” of human history, and second, that the New World’s manifest destiny is a “mandate” of nature. As it starts, though, García del Río’s plot does not seem to differ much from typically European teleological histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Voltaire’s or Hegel’s. He acknowledges the existence of “laws” in the “moral” and “physical” realms that would be “sanctioned” by providence and believes that, hindrances and setbacks aside, these laws would delineate a straight path of “progressive perfection,” advancing human “education” and “ideas” from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome, and through the Middle Ages to modern times.Footnote 95 Yet, in contrast to his European counterparts, García del Río’s account decenters the “Old World,” depicting it as irretrievably insufficient in natural, cultural, and political resources to continue humanity’s general advancement toward perfection.Footnote 96 The Americas, in contrast, emerge in his narrative as a “new field” that would enable the flourishing of the human species; “new in physiognomy, new in crops, new in animals, and even in [respect to] the intelligent being.”Footnote 97 In his view, it was inevitable for the Americas to become the “world’s garden, the emporium of commerce, the mansion of liberty, the pride of humanity.”Footnote 98
This drive to rethink “universal history” was recurrent in the Chilean Laboratory and the transnational network that sprang from it. García del Río, in fact, was far from being an exception.Footnote 99 Nevertheless, while many made efforts to position Spanish America in world history—and more than a few employed discursive strategies to debunk Eurocentric theories of historical development—hardly anyone was as incisive, sharp, and relentless as Bilbao. The commitment to the use of the philosophy of history as a means of decolonization was a constant in Bilbao’s intellectual trajectory from Sociabilidad Chilena (1844) to La America en Peligro (America in Danger) (1862) and El Evangelio Americano (The American Gospel) (1864), and closely linked to the reasons behind his recurrent comings and goings between Santiago, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Paris.Footnote 100 In Paris, for instance, Bilbao engaged with a series of intellectuals from different backgrounds, including renowned French figures like Michelet, Quinet, and Lamennais; other Spanish Americans, such as José María Torres Caicedo (1830–89); and Eastern Europeans, like Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855). At the time of the Revolutionary Spring of 1848, as Rafael Mondragón has demonstrated, Bilbao participated in the establishment of Le tribune des peuples, a radical newspaper where he elaborated on the connection between socialism and anticolonialism. There, these intellectuals gathered to rethink and write about shared experiences between the peripheral condition of Spanish American republics and the stateless nations of Western Europe.Footnote 101 During his time in Paris, in 1856, Bilbao was among the first to use the concept of “Latin America” to denounce the invasion of Nicaragua by filibusters from the United States while calling for greater transnational integration and collaboration in a region that, after more than three decades of independent life, had not been able to get rid of the seemingly never-ending threat of imperialism. Thus the concept of “Latin America” emerged in direct opposition to “Anglo-Saxon America,” as a reaction against the expansionism of the United States of America.Footnote 102
Later, criticizing the French invasion of Mexico in 1861 and the subsequent imposition of Maximilian of Habsburg as “emperor” in 1864, he denounced French imperialism as being sustained in the “theories of their historians” and the work of their “novelists,” who artificially—yet quite effectively—positioned France as the only true “representative of civilization” to “absolve” themselves of their unjustifiable “attacks” on other peoples.Footnote 103 The “origin” of this “theory,” Bilbao noted, was “Germanic.” According to him, the French had only “plagiarized” and “applied” to their country what German philosophers had supposedly “demonstrated” for theirs.Footnote 104 This is not to say that Bilbao assumed that all German philosophers were the same, of course. His generalization was rhetorical.Footnote 105 Indeed, he had a quite specific thinker in mind. Bilbao traced the source of the problem back to certain readings of Hegel, who had famously argued that humanity progressed in a linear way from the “Orient” to the “West,” advancing from lesser to greater degrees of “perfection” and “freedom” until the “incarnation” of the so-called “Absolute Idea” in the Prussian state.Footnote 106 According to Bilbao, all of this was obviously nonsense. “Few doctrines,” he stated, are more “absurd” and “ill-fated” than this “vulgar” theory of “progress.”Footnote 107 But the French, he alleged, found Hegel’s rather delusional narrative of “universal history” quite appealing and useful. In his words,
There is more than an error in this. There is something that indicates weakness or the prostitution of thought, pretending to control the facts to legitimate them and get them accepted. The extension and depth of the evil in this respect is unbelievable and incalculable. With this simple theory, there is an answer for all doubts, a justification for all mistakes, and an absolution for all crimes.Footnote 108
The whole thing was a hoax to justify European imperialism, Bilbao argued. Thinkers like Cousin had essentially copied Hegel’s philosophy of history, incorporating only one substantial change: putting their homeland in the place of Germany.Footnote 109 Bilbao ridiculed how thinkers from European countries soon followed the French in adopting Hegelianism to invent narratives of “universal history” that put them, and only them, as the ultimate expression of human civilization.Footnote 110 Even the Spaniards, Bilbao mocked, “inserted their shameful history” in a variation of Hegel’s “theory.” At this pace, he continued, even “Gascons and Andalucians” were expected to come up with a grand narrative of their own to “explain that all they have done has been to serve humanity.”Footnote 111 Be it as it may, Bilbao was confident that this Eurocentric idealism would, sooner rather than later, be proven wrong. He noted how the latest advancements in the humanities and social sciences were already rendering European philosophies of history obsolete. “The philosophical, religious, legislative, literary, and artistic discoveries that with the name of Orientalism are revealed every day,” he wrote, “have embarrassed European science.”Footnote 112 Even Herder and Vico, who had been so thought-provoking in Spanish America after Independence, had lost their appeal.Footnote 113 According to Bilbao, then, Europe and the Americas embodied opposite philosophies of history. While European philosophies of history were marked by determinism and a lineal conception of progress, America’s philosophies of history were rooted in the values of freedom and pluralism.Footnote 114 Well, at least that is what Bilbao wanted us to believe.
That Bilbao’s narrative is visceral, Manichean, and partisan is beyond doubt. It would be an understatement to characterize Bilbao’s opposition between the “Old” and “New” Worlds as exaggerated—and the same applies to García del Río. These intellectuals’ vision of the Americas was textbook hyper-idealistic and messianic. Nonetheless, it is precisely within these hyperboles and contradictions that we find some of these authors’ most interesting philosophical interventions. Now, to make sense of these interventions, we must turn back to the broader context because, as a matter of fact, Bilbao had not always been as critical of Hegel’s philosophy of history. His skepticism toward Hegelianism grew sharper in the late 1850s and early 1860s, as North American and European neocolonial ambitions increasingly threatened Spanish American sovereignty. Bilbao’s critique, then, was not really directed at Hegel himself, nor at European philosophy at large. Rather, he was diagnosing and challenging what he saw as a growing ideological manipulation of racialized grand narratives of historical development that served to justify both formal and informal imperialist ambitions. In fact, by the time of his return to South America from his exile in France in 1857, he had been drawing on inspiration from Hegel for decades (most likely via Cousin). And he never fully abandoned a certain degree of proximity to key tenets of German idealism. Before the 1850s, as it happens, he had been trying to turn Hegelian dialectics against Eurocentrism, colonialism, and imperialism while putting it at the service of American democratic republicanism and cosmopolitanism. In Bilbao’s words,
America is destined to be the altar of human fraternity in all the varieties of moral and natural creation. It is the reunion point of all human elements, north and south, Orient and Occident, the black, the indigenous, the white, the unity of association and the independence of the Protestant … A new world, synthesis of the previous worlds, where it seems that all the elements of the lives of the peoples have flown into to produce the definitive formula for human evolution …Footnote 115
Bilbao’s conception of progress seems to have been intended to transcend the principle of noncontradiction by collapsing the limits between the historical and the normative. In the Americas, he prophesied, in the land where democratic republicanism was “destined” to flourish, humanity would finally become what it ought to be. It was there, in the American republics, that all human beings, regardless of their racial background, ethnicity, political orientation, and religious beliefs, would finally be freely accepted as equals.Footnote 116 The “New World,” he wrote, was destined to become the “synthesis of humanity,” where the long-yearned-for ideal of “harmony” in diversity would be finally attained.Footnote 117 Its political model, combined with its rich cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity, endowed the Americas, particularly Spanish America, with a “universal character” that Europe could never achieve.Footnote 118 “The unity that we look for,” Bilbao made clear, “is the association of free personalities, men and peoples, to achieve universal fraternity … this is the idea that we can call the center of the American movement.”Footnote 119 Hence the urgency of Spanish American unification and the need to protect their nations from foreign interventionism. The ongoing movement for Spanish American emancipation was, in the end, a movement for the liberation of humanity. Its scope was not only continental. It was universal.Footnote 120
Conclusion
This article has argued that some of the first Spanish American intellectuals who wrote about history after the Revolutions of Independence were not primarily or exclusively interested in the histories of their individual countries. Instead, the emergence of post-colonial historical discourse—and, more specifically, Spanish American experiments in the “philosophical” writing of history—was a transnational phenomenon closely linked to the development of a decolonizing lexicon. Intellectuals saw the synthesis of this conceptual apparatus as functional to the generation of the necessary conditions for the successful establishment and preservation of democratic republics at a continental level. This is what influential thinkers from Sánchez Carrión to Bilbao genuinely hoped. Although some intellectuals were skeptical about the expansion of democracy as a political system, even those who advocated for constitutional monarchism, like Monteagudo and García del Río, shared a strong commitment to Spanish American integration and the need to enact progress by transnationally democratizing access to knowledge. Yet it was not only continental transnationalism that attracted the attention of this group of intellectuals’ historical and political thought. What interested them most was to develop their own narratives on world history and the history of “the West,” from antiquity to the present. In doing so, they wanted to reposition Spanish America within “universal history,” thus challenging, mocking, and transforming globally hegemonic hierarchies of “historical progress.”
This series of Spanish American interventions into modern historical thought, however, was packed with contradictions and ambiguity. The rise of a critical post-colonial historical consciousness frequently oscillated between the most fervent anticolonialism and a persistent Eurocentrism in rather uncanny ways. A detachment from the idea of Europe, whether as an object of admiration or of contempt, depending on whom we read and in what context, seemed unthinkable for Spanish American intellectuals. And we can find this conflicting dualism at the core of the main critiques received by the first Spanish American philosophers of history, both locally and from Europe. One of the first and most famous was Bello’s response to Lastarria’s Investigaciones, which he actually wrote on the occasion of an academic contest at Universidad de Chile initiated by Bello, who was then rector.Footnote 121 Bello criticized Lastarria for being too ideological and not offering enough evidence to sustain his claims.Footnote 122 It was one thing to be “original” and rightly critical of the colonial past, but it was quite different to distort the truth at whim. Bello thought that doing so demonstrated a lack of methodological rigor, but, more importantly, it was politically dangerous in a context where vital institutions and laws of the young republic were rooted in Spanish political culture. In Bello’s words, “it is the duty of history to tell facts as they occurred,” regardless of the inclinations, wishes, and preferences of the historian who reconstructs them.Footnote 123 Bello agreed with Lastarria on the idea that the Spanish Empire “perpetuated” its colonies’ dependency, hence impoverishing its overseas domains—and Spain itself in the process.Footnote 124 Nonetheless, Bello noted, Lastarria exaggerated when he depicted the Spanish rule in the Americas as a “ferocious tyranny.”Footnote 125 According to Bello, Spain “enchained” the “arts,” free “thinking” and even “agricultural fertility” of America, but its political system imposed obstacles and limitations, not “torture nor blood.”Footnote 126 Bello thought that reproducing the Spanish Black Legend was not helpful in solving Spanish American problems after Independence. For Bello, such a stance was factually erroneous, misleading, and impractical. In any case, it is worth noting here that, as Jaksic pointed out, Bello was not defending or justifying Spanish colonialism by taking this position.Footnote 127 He was criticizing Lastarria’s partisan way of writing on methodological grounds.
Another critique of Spanish American philosophers of history who sought to debunk the coloniality of knowledge and power came from Paris. In this case, it was Lamennais writing to Bilbao. It is worth noting here that, since his youth, Bilbao had long admired the leading Parisian thinkers of his time, whom he later met in person during his exile in Europe. In 1843, for instance, he published a translation of Lamennais’s “On Modern Slavery,” introduced by a preface where the Chilean asserted his will to contribute to the circulation of ideas that he thought would be useful to “transform” society and “liberate the people.”Footnote 128 However, in a letter from 1846, Lamennais criticized how Bilbao had been conducting his studies on the philosophy of history. In his words, “I fear that you are wasting too much time and giving too much importance to pure metaphysics, to ideology, as Napoleon called it. In my opinion, there is no more sterile field of study. Abstract science has no value if it is not linked to the science of what is real or to sciences that depend on observation.”Footnote 129 In this respect, Lamennais and Bello were on the same page in warning intellectuals in the Chilean Laboratory that neglecting rigorous, evidence-based approaches to understanding their historical realities, against their best intentions, posed an alarming threat to the subcontinent’s post-colonial autonomy. Be that as it may, beyond their agreements and disagreements, the crucial point at stake here is clear. If there was something about historical discourse in nineteenth-century Spanish America that was setting off alarms, it was its radical and even excessive incisiveness, ambition and scope—not its lack of these qualities.
Acknowledgments. A special thanks to my former PhD supervisors, Nicola Miller and Thom Rath, for their invaluable guidance and advice. I also extend my gratitude to the National Research and Development Agency (ANID) in Chile for funding my PhD studies at University College London.
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