Debunking the Straw Man: Bringing Spain and Its New World Empire Back into Global History

The shortcomings of Eurocentrism have been strongly attacked in imperial history. Yet, today we have at least three historiographies that seem largely unconnected. Firstly, intellectual and cultural historians have rewritten the histories of the colonized with a much deeper understanding for their agency. But by re-engaging colonial histories with post-colonial and national historiographies they have reinforced a concentration on local specificities rather than on larger themes in a comparative framework.

            Secondly, social scientists have made intense use of history in studies on comparative colonialism in the long run but without attention to more recent historical research. We argue that the consequences of this unfortunate divorce are particularly obvious in notionally comparative work that portrays Spain as a quintessentially ‘unsuccessful’ Empire. A biased characterization of Spain and its rule over the New World, as absolutist, predatory, fanatical and intolerant goes back to the Black Legend. We show that this caricature has survived and serves as a convenient straw man on which very influential explanations for superior Anglo-Saxon institutional - and hence economic – performance are pinned. This device was most effectively used in the work of nobel laureate Douglass North. It (and New Institutional Economics generally) decisively shaped economic theory, political economy, sociology and political sciences in the last 20 years and still provides the conceptual and ideological umbrella for the contemporary recipes of policy making and supra-governmental interventions worldwide. We show that its success was crucially dependent on voluntary disengagement of cultural and intellectual historians from historical social sciences.

            The third and most promising recent development is global history. Yet, by focusing predominantly on the divergence within Eurasia global historians are prone to deny any agency of the New World in early modern history. We conclude with a research agenda that can bring the New World back into the global narrative.