Essay: How to Write the History of the World

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This is an essay on How to Write the History of the World by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra. Chapter 3 turns is about Spain. Spanish authors, Canizares-Esguerra tells us, were in the forefront of this new historiography. Here Canizares-Esguerra’s reasoning runs counter to the long-standing critical tradition that holds Spain to be in the rearguard if not completely outdated in the movement toward modern ways of understanding the world.

The first two chapters, “Toward a New Art of Reading and New Historical Interpretations” and “Changing European Interpretations of the Reliability of Indigenous Sources,” tell the story of the materialization of a radically “new art of reading that appeared in northern Europe in the mid eighteenth century” (6). Enlightenment thinkers such as Cornelius de Pauw, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, and William Robertson assert that a source’s reliability should be a purpose of its internal consistency, rather than originate from the social standing or learning of the witnesses for which it speaks. This new mode of reading concurrently worked to dismiss testimonies by native peoples of the Americas that had been integral to Renaissance histories of America.

Chapter 3 turns is about Spain. Spanish authors, Canizares-Esguerra tells us, were in the forefront of this new historiography. Here Canizares-Esguerra’s reasoning runs counter to the long-standing critical tradition that holds Spain to be in the rearguard if not completely outdated in the movement toward modern ways of understanding the world. In contrast to this argument, Canizares-Esguerra shows that authors in Spain took the lead in enhance this new art of reading. In particular, Spanish authors argued long and hard that published accounts should be distrusted in historical documents in favor of the more “authentic” windows into historical moments presented by sources that never found their way into print.

Chapters 4 and 5, show how Spanish-American historians offered “forceful epistemological critiques” of previous historical technique that were every bit as powerful as those by historians writing in Spain.

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