2 - Indian societies and the Spanish conquest

Summary

Western historiography, for a long time dominated by a Eurocentric view of historical development, has devoted considerable attention to the exploits of the conquistadores, but has only recently begun to examine the ‘vision of the vanquished’. Still useful, however, in spite of being more than a century old, are the works of William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 3 vols. (New York, 1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru, 2 vols. (London, 1847). The same is true of other classic works by Georg Friederici, Der Charakter der Entdeckung und Eroberung Amerikas durch die Völker der alten Welt, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1925–36) and by Robert Ricard, La Conquête spirituelle du Mexique: Essai sur I’apostolat et les méthodes missionnaires des ordres mendiants en Nouvelle-Espagne de 1523–24 à 1572 (Paris, 1933). For a full discussion of work published on the conquest, see essay II: 1. An important revisionist work might be mentioned here: Ruggiero Romano, Les Mécanismes de la conquête coloniale: Les conquistadores (Paris, 1972). See also Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America (New York, 1984), a bold semiotic interpretation of the conquest in Mesoamerica, and S. L. Cline’s interesting reevaluation of a key source, ‘Revisionist Conquest history: Sahagún’s Revised Book XII’ in The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Mexico, edited by J. Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson and Eloise Quiñones Keber (Albany, N.Y., 1988), 93–106.

In recent decades ethnohistorical research has made remarkable progress both on Mesoamerica and the Andes. The work of Angel M. Garibay, Miguel León-Portilla, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Pedro Carrasco and others on the one hand, and of John V. Murra, María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Tom Zuidema and others on the other hand has transformed our knowledge of American societies before and after the conquest: we now have completely new perspectives on the Indian reaction to the European invasion.