The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Early Modern and Colonial Histories of Globalization: An Interview with Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole (Part II)

Foreword by John Gleb

This is the second half of a two-part article. To read the first part, click here.

Ivonne del Valle (University of California-Berkeley), Anna More (Universidade de Brasília), and Rachel Sarah O’Toole (University of California-Irvine) are prominent scholars of colonial Latin America. Earlier this year, they sat down with Fernando Gomez Herrero (University of Manchester) to discuss a project they had worked on together, a book entitled Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019). The book is an edited collection which was published as the 44th volume in the University of Minnesota’s Hispanic Issues series.

In the first half of their conversation with Gomez Herrero, del Valle, More, and O’Toole discussed the origins of their project and identified its principal intellectual goals. The following interview reproduces the second half of the conversation, which saw the three authors dive much deeper into the contents of their book. Their comments identify the most important themes to emerge from Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, describe some of its constituent essays, and reflect on perspectives the book overlooked—and where colonial Latin American history is headed next.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: Which specific aspects, favorite themes or unmissable issues would you like to highlight in relation to this collective volume? Is there a magic thread, a line of peas to follow? The acknowledgements make mention of María Elena Martínez [1966–2014, an historian of colonial Mexico].

Ivonne del Valle: From my perspective, I’d like to believe that María Elena Martínez (a colleague and friend from Instituto Tepoztlán [an annual conference on the transnational history of the Americas]) looms large. I hope that the combination of rigor, and imagination she shared with us, is clear in the work as a whole. Beyond this, there are other threads I’d like to foreground. One of them is the engagement with theory, and the postcolonial inflection of the volume. Another one is the attempt to look at globalization and its universalizing aims from the perspective of the local. That is, [the] Iberian metropolis might have initiated certain processes, yet they did not have control over them. An important contribution in most of the articles is that of the dialectics between ideas and projects on the one hand, and the material realities that sustained them, or not, on the other. The gap between them was important for us.

By the same token, rather than trying to “tame” the complex dynamics of early modern/colonial globalization, we accepted the intricacies, and tried to make sense of them.

By the same token, rather than trying to “tame” the complex dynamics of early modern/colonial globalization, we accepted the intricacies, and tried to make sense of them. I think that because of that we’re offering a prism that coherently reflects how these initial and profound global contacts could provoke awe and genuine interest and curiosity in those involved, but that it was primarily a process based on exploitation that caused overwhelming chaos, in spite of the serious attempts (those of some religious orders, or art, for example) to give it a more humane face. [Hispanic Issues series editors Raúl] Marrero-Fente and [Nicholas] Spadaccini in the “Afterword” refer to art as that which turns history into myth and symbol. The myth of salvation is a powerful one in colonial art.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: The welcomed challenge of this project has been how to articulate the political, cultural, social, and intellectual agency of Indigenous and African Diaspora people within empire’s superstructure. We had models to follow. For me, these included historians who have shown how Indigenous communities employed imperial legal institutions to their own benefit (de la Puente Luna 2018, Premo 2017, Stern 1982, Yannakakis 2008) as well as scholars who chart Indigenous authorship within the so-called Spanish lettered city (Adorno 1986, Rappaport and Cummins 2011). In the volume, you can find Guillermo Wilde, Ivonne, and Charlene Villaseñor Black expanding on how Guaraní and Nahua people employed Spanish missionary texts, colonial institutions, and artistic forms to defend, negotiate, and create their own intellectual projects. Rather than explain Guaraní and Nahua authors within a resistance paradigm, our hope is to showcase how indigenous communities shaped literacy and Christianity from their own realities.

The interdisciplinarity that is built into the volume and, I think, emerges subtly, in the keen attention that each scholar attends to the text. We were often easily lost in our initial conversations as the differences of language, discipline, nationality, generation, and other identifiers seemed overwhelming. Nonetheless, when we met in the Museo de Franz Mayer in Mexico City that houses a fantastic collection of decorative and visual art from the colonial period, our common meeting point was a mutual fascination with how each other was transforming evidence from distinct objects, documents, or data. Art historians Charlene Villaseñor-Black and Elisabetta Corsi point to the materiality, provenance, and skill necessary to create a shimmering mother-of-pearl inlay image or a porcelain statue. Literary scholars including John (Jody) Blanco call our attention to the exchange of translation evident in tracing a European medieval romance. Deftly, Bernd Hausberger’s paper referred to quantitative data while Bruno Feitler called on the testimonial echoes among Inquisition cases across vast geographical distances. We made a point, in the editing, to have the authors explain their methodological approaches to their texts, or how they extracted their evidence, in part to underline a shared scholarly agenda. For Anna and Ivonne, I think this question was boring! But, for other scholars, especially the historians, the result, I think, invited us to think even more creatively about texts that constitute, and explode, the boundaries of our early modern narratives. 

An elaborate ornamental object, golden in color, featuring a tall base, a small figurine, and a large starburst topped by a cross.
An artefact on display at the Museo de Franz Mayer in Mexico City. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Anna More: I would agree that with Ivonne and Rachel. All of the chapters, in one way or another, provide a detailed discovery of an object and a problem in which documents from locales reflect globalizing processes: long-distance connections, universalizing norms and at times violent mandates. In this sense, Maria Elena Martínez’s chapter is exemplary as she took her vast knowledge of processes of racialization in New Spain and pushed them out to further geographies. This was one of the last pieces of writing of María Elena’s to be published and as such it is at once so important and so hard to see it in print. But overall, it shows the carefulness in interpretation necessary to avoid sweeping generalizations and find surprising narratives in the past.

In this sense, for me, there is also a very important line that runs through various chapters: practices that are products of globalization but whose meaning is enigmatic. In a sense, this is more of a norm than an exception. That is, globalizing processes that are centralizing or subordinating can be very clear. Reactions or proactive connections outside or beyond these processes tend to be very opaque to us. I think this is particularly the case with literature and art and for this reason, I would highlight the chapters that have already been linked in Rachel’s comments: Charlene Villaseñor Black’s essay on mother of pearl inlay; Jody Blanco’s chapter on the permutations of the story of Buddha, through Spanish theater and eventually to the Philippines; Elisabetta Corsi’s chapter on the blending of Chinese and Christian art under the Jesuits. Perhaps this is an important element that could be brought to bear on the present: the extent to which globalization creates processes that are meaningful and opaque to those of us who are accessing them from the outside. The message is that creativity is a source of political resilience. When I think of this, I immediately find parallels in such leaders as the late Marielle Franco, here in Brazil, whose unapologetic creativity seems to have been the source of her violent repression by state-condoned militias.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: In relation to your favorite themes, issues, etc., what needs work? What remains unsatisfactory, if anything? How? Why? What’s next?

Ivonne del Valle: In the “Afterword,” the editors mentioned that the volume was missing a more robust engagement with Asia and the Philippines. I think we all agree with this, but then again, there is only so much one can do in a volume. We hope that one of the articles (Blanco’s) gives readers a glimpse of the important—and changing—role of Asia vis-à-vis Europe and its American colonies. The growing importance of the role of China in Latin American countries makes this earlier connection all the more important, especially because now, China’s connection with ports, mining, and all kinds of industries in Latin America, is direct and doesn’t need Spain, Portugal or any other European country’s mediation.

Equally important, if not more so, is the lack of a truly non-Western point of view (we acknowledge this in the Introduction). Indigenous and African perspectives are missing, and we hope that future works will tackle this issue. Fortunately, there are now indigenous intellectuals (such as Yásnaya Aguilar and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui) who have a robust production in which they share a contemporary indigenous perspective about colonialism and globalization. In an insufficient way, but trying to mitigate this gap, we started the Introduction with the words and images of Guaman Poma, who in the early 17th century was an Andean subject well aware of the consequences of globalization. Nevertheless, full-fledged indigenous and African perspectives about globalization are missing.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: Like Ivonne, I remember our many conversations regarding the glaring gaps in the volume. The lesson for me is how a project needs to begin with the people, the questions, and the frameworks that are central to the intellectual endeavor. As many of us know, outcomes often reflect the process. If we intended to include Indigenous intellectuals, African Diaspora political actors, queer people, or articulate a gender analysis or an intersectional approach, then we needed to have begun with these commitments. Instead, we began with a clear intention to unhinge an overly Anglo-centric approach to the Iberian early modern world. The result is a compelling argument against Eurocentric approaches to empire and an generative interdisciplinary intervention. But, to move beyond adding additional voices or diversifying perspectives, we need to start with the actors or the narrative that is Indigenous, Asian, queer, disabled, or feminine-coded.

If we conceptualize the early modern Iberian Empire from an African Diaspora perspective then our story of global trade, religious networks, and racial hierarchies would find distinct centers including Cartagena and Luanda, but also remap what constituted freedom on which seas

If we conceptualize the early modern Iberian Empire from an African Diaspora perspective then our story of global trade, religious networks, and racial hierarchies would find distinct centers including Cartagena and Luanda, but also remap what constituted freedom on which seas.[1] In a sixteenth-century Atlantic, Black vecinos and vecinas articulate as free Christians and royal subjects who created the empire through their “lived experiences of blackness.”[2] Those men and women labeled as fugitives, but who called themselves sovereign in Panama, the Pacific coast, northern Brazil, and throughout the Caribbean simultaneously sharpened and warped imperial boundaries by trading with whomever was profitable. Active within institutional Catholicism, Black diviners and spiritual leaders continued and created horizontal hierarchies, polycentric pantheons, and fluid gender expressions that defy tracking into singular institutional affiliations.[3] The goal would be additional edited volumes, textbooks, monographs, films, artwork, and documentaries that continue to correct a narrative that assumes whiteness with indigenous victimization corresponds to empire.

Anna More: I completely agree with Ivonne and Rachel and, as they state, we did discuss this gap when we were putting together the scholars that compose the volume. I think that another issue for me is the relatively small space we give to the geography of the Portuguese empire, especially to Brazil. Even so, my chapter does include Africa in a very minimal way; Bruno Feitler does as well and includes Brazil and Goa. But we barely touch on the complex interaction between Spain and Portugal nor have we included the complex interactions on the West African littoral or really grappled with the medieval roots of both African and European interactions there. We could also take note of indigenous enslavement in Brazil and its interactions with the transatlantic slave trade which have multiple consequences. Finally, we could even think about non-Iberian Europeans throughout these empires. From a Portuguese perspective, these were omnipresent in Asia, Africa and Brazil.

As we have said, it is an impossible task to include everything. But I think that being honest about what is missing points to where the field can and should go.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: Give us a summary of your three articles. If I may, in relation to Ivonne’s, since she takes into account my own book on Vasco de Quiroga [a 16th-century Mexican bishop and colonial official]. What is the general thesis? Why does Quiroga matter? You call him “New Moses” and you cite Freud.

Vasco de Quiroga--a balding, grey-haired, solemn-faced man in clerical robes--rests his left hand on an open book atop a cluttered table in this full-length portrait. A skull, an inkwell with quills, more books, and a clerical hat also stand on the table; Quiroga is holding yet another book in his right hand, using his index finger as a bookmark. A coat of arms is visible in the upper right-hand corner.
A portrait of Vasco de Quiroga. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Ivonne del Valle: In my case, and since I agree with what you said about Vasco de Quiroga’s reasoning for creating hospitals, that it was directed by an economic logic, I wanted to think about this vis-à-vis two questions. First, the undeniable and prolonged “legacy” (to give it a name) of his actions. As we know, he is still a ubiquitous name and figure in Michoacán. That is, he’s somehow regarded as the “founder” of a particular indigenous state. That’s why I introduced the idea of Moses. Yet, in spite of the fact that he attempted to help indigenous communities with his hospitals, and with the Ordenanzas governing them (his new tablets, as I call them), as you remark in your own work about him, his monastic paradigm is grounded in the distribution of labor, and schedules, the division between rural and urban work, time to pray and time to eat, and time to work, etc. With work being the most important factor. Second, the fact that the protection he offered would end up (at least in theory) transforming those entering his institutions from being P’urhépechas in danger of being slaved, to being simply poor working people, is all the more telling given the 20th-century Mexican state’s plans for indigenous people—not that far from those of Quiroga: an indigenous population comprised of  more or less contented, poor peasants and artisans, living separated from the wealth they help create, but don’t enjoy. The fact that Hannah Arendt’s ideas about people without a country, and the hospitality the world can afford them, are although a lot more developed not as that different from those of Quiroga, should give us another reason to pause.

Another point I wanted to make, one from which we academics are not exempted, is the ironic twist by which in deeply unequal situations, what the same entity (the colonial state in this case) does with one hand (the conquerors producing terror and havoc), it tries to fix with the other one (Vasco de Quiroga’s hospitals, for example).

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: As I explore in my chapter, “Household Challenges: The Laws of Slaveholding and the Practices of Freedom in Colonial Peru,” I invite historians of Latin America, the Atlantic world, and slavery to understand the transition from slavery to freedom as an incomplete commercial transaction. While scholars of slavery in Latin America have explored legal struggles for freedom or armed rebellion and revolution towards freedom, I suggest that manumission, or individual self-purchase was “contained within personal relationships” (164). As a result, early modern freedom was tangled into ties of economic and gendered exchanges, often within households, as men and women of the African Diaspora in colonial Peru wrestled domestic arrangements into public arenas to gain freedom.

This "casta" painting is divided into sixteen smaller panels, each labeled to identify the particular racialized sub-group represented by the figures portrayed therein.
An 18th-century painting illustrating various castas–racialized, hierarchical categories of social organization used in colonial Latin America–on display at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in Tepotzotlán, Mexico. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Anna More: My chapter in this volume is a very preliminary take on the subject of my book in progress. My book charts the way that the transatlantic slave trade impacted economic theory and practice from roughly the late sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth centuries as seen through documents from Africa, the Iberian peninsula and the Americas. I think that the node for me in that chapter is the astounding inclusion in a seventeenth-century published work of a debate on the slave trade that was internal to the Jesuit order. Whereas the author of the treatise, Alonso de Sandoval, has often been seen as critical of the transatlantic slave trade, I interpret his inclusion of a superior’s justification of the slave trade in his work as a way of giving priority to the official Jesuit stance, which fell on the side of a pragmatic pro-slave trade (in fact, as the superior says, the Jesuits themselves were involved in the trade and were prolific slave owners). That is, it was actually calculated to shut down debate on the issue in a kind of “final word” manner.

The bigger issue for me in the chapter is the question of how globalization can cut both ways and potentially lead to alliances or critical perspectives from comparative or networked perspectives.

The bigger issue for me in the chapter is the question of how globalization can cut both ways and potentially lead to alliances or critical perspectives from comparative or networked perspectives. The Jesuit order was perhaps the most global of the missionary orders and certainly the most structurally global. There was potential, in this sense, that the order serve as a point of critique as their members were stationed at all points along the transatlantic slave trade. That the order shut down its internal critique can perhaps tell us something about the interests, financial and ideological, needed to sustain global institutions and the compromises that result from pragmatism.

This means that we need to think about critique as situated more locally, perhaps, and certainly understand the way that the archive becomes truncated as those that are voicing critique and dissent are actively suppressed. While I did not include this in the chapter, as I have moved forward on the topic I have found other examples of stronger Jesuit dissent. Beyond Sandoval, there were other Jesuits who were more strident and disturbed by the slave trade and the order’s involvement. But the order was fairly ruthless in snuffing out this dissent. While Sandoval’s compromise perhaps was what allowed him to publish, two Bahian Jesuits from the late sixteenth century (Miguel García and Gonçalo Leite) were forced to return home and fall out of the record.

For me these examples do not lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to effect dissent from global institutions. Rather, I believe that it points to where the creative political work needs to happen, especially now that social media has potential for activist connections that reinforce local forms of critique. And of course, we can look for early modern versions of this, albeit probably on a very different scale (such as fugitive communities; heterodox practices etc). Rachel’s answer gives marvelous examples of these.

A seventeenth-century map centered on the Atlantic Ocean. The Americas (excluding North America's west coast), Africa, Europe, and the western half of Asia are also depicted. Small illustrations of ships appear on the map's oceans, while its continents are decorated with rivers, natural features, and human figures.
A map of the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent continents by Portuguese cartographer Pascoal Roiz, 1633. Source: Library of Congress.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: This handsome volume is something like a network, a hub, a web, a node. In fact, the collection Hispanic Issues does not publish single-authored works. There are three editors, ten voices in total, multiple localities, one prominent country (the U. S.) and several others–Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, a bunch of institutions, two of you are based in California, one in Brazil . . . . What can you say about this scholarly type of international enterprise? Virtues? Vices?

Ivonne del Valle: I do like this question because it gives me an opportunity to thank the editors of Hispanic Issues. Among the volumes they publish, there are several which have been key for my own development. In that way, it is a real pleasure to now have our own edited collection becoming part of an important corpus of articles that for some time now have seriously tried to understand and throw light on the colonial and Iberian experience.

We hope that some of the voices we have included help attenuate one of the vices that are more prevalent in international enterprises. That of giving priority to U. S. themes and names, interests. The virtues lie in not pretending to have the last word and/or the final word, but to allow for perspectives to interact with each other and to show the different bibliographic and institutional context in which works can be produced.

Anna More: As Ivonne states, we are very pleased and honored to be a part of the Hispanic Issues series. In terms of the diversity of our collaboration, I think that we have outlined in our previous answers how deliberate that was. It is important to underscore that again because it points to why it doesn’t happen more often. To bring scholars together, you need a place, funds, networks, and a lingua franca. It is not that this is not happening at all. In fact, we have mentioned the importance of the Tepoztlán Institute in which all three of us, and some of our contributors, participate. But in terms of publication, there are additional challenges, such as paying for translators (and here we benefited from grants from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine) and finding a way to parlay the collection into more lasting dialogues. Just as an example of the difficulty of the latter, we have yet to organize a book launch in part because of the dispersed geography and realities of our contributors during these pandemic years. And finally, of course, we should point out the obvious: this publication is in English and not the home languages of our contributors. It is most likely that the collection will circulate in North America and Europe and not in Latin America.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: Coming out of this work, where are you at this moment in terms of pedagogy and scholarship? Where are you going? How does any of this Early Modern / colonial Iberian world register in your specific localities?

Ivonne del Valle: Personally, even though I’m increasingly interested in the 20th and 21st centuries, I continue working on the Early modern/colonial period.  Obviously, I think the years I’ve worked on earlier materials have helped me to be better prepared to approach later works.

As for my specific locality, and given that I already mentioned something about California and students in California, allow me to say something about Mexico (where I’m currently located) to say that Pablo González Casanova’s work on internal colonialism remains an important provocation, and that in spite of some institutions’ attempts at silencing this and its related problems (racism, for example)—I think on the proliferation of the concept of Viceroyalty and not colony in Mexico, for example—there’s a growing awareness among the younger generations of the colonial continuities that keep informing modern nation states.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: My chapter foregrounds my second book project, “Contracting Freedom in Colonial Peru” that challenges historians and scholars of the African Diaspora to define freedom as a negotiation within patronage, rather than a legal declaration of citizenship, or manumission. By weaving together fragments of life stories, “Contracting Freedom” illuminates how enslaved women and men in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo contested enslavers’ legal control and constructed freedom by investing in their children, their kin, and their communities. In many ways, I carefully track how enslaved and free people exercised incredible legal consciousness such as documented by Herman Bennett, Michelle McKinley, and Rebecca Scott. My goal, however, is to demonstrate that enslaved and freed people did not necessarily equate freedom with securing a legal document of manumission or petitioning slaveholders for the right to purchase themselves. Moreover, enslaved and free people were highly versed in the inadequacies of legal processes, the violence of provincial courts run by enslavers, and the sheer refusal of the colonial archive.

A light-skinned man in blue military uniform, identified as "el colonel de milicias de Lurigancho,"is the central subject of this watercolor painting by Pancho Fierro. The colonel rides a white horse and is accompanied by three dark-skinned attendants in green uniforms, all of whom are on foot. One attendant leads the horse; another holds a large shade umbrella over the colonel's head; and a third fans the colonel.
Afro-Peruvian servants feature in this 19th-century watercolor painting by Peruvian artist Pancho Fierro. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

I chart my growing suspicion and perhaps outright disrespect of the Iberian empire and its institutions with my urge to travel intellectually beyond the realms of the early modern (as Ivonne reflects). Thanks to the events sponsored by and rare conversations with colleagues, graduate students, and undergraduate students at the University of California, Irvine, I have been heavily influenced by prison abolitionists, Black Lives Matter activists, and radical scholars who question the benefits of the liberal university. Without implicating those who inspire me including Aisha Finch (now at Emory University), Sara Johnson, and Robin Derby, I have been asking, why would I continue to follow the imperial narratives of Iberian globalization or concern myself with positivist requirements of proof?

Anna More: As I stated above, my current project is heavily focused on 16th- and 17th-century Africa and employs documents and writings in Portuguese, for the most part. I also am working slowly on a rather more whimsical project that links Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the late seventeenth-century Mexican poet and nun, to the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and the politics of Nzinga Mbande in Angola during the same time. Both projects have benefited from our insistence on globalization, in the sense that it has given me language to defend what I am doing in ways that go beyond North American disciplinary structures. For instance, African materials have only just begun to be interpreted from literary studies; and even in history, there is a certain balkanized tradition (that as a scholar coming from the outside and with a different disciplinary base, I can happily ignore). That said, one of the most rewarding aspects of my current work is learning from the incredible scholarship that has been done by historians of early modern Africa (pre-colonial, in the African Studies language). I feel that one of my tasks as a scholar is to be sure that I have read deeply enough that I can speak to various scholarly publics, even if I am doing something slightly outside of their disciplinary traditions.

In terms of a home for this scholarship, I confess that it is getting harder to shoehorn it into the Latin American umbrella. I presented at the African Studies Association conference this year and that was a terrific experience. I have also presented at the American Historical Association as well, and it is possible to contemplate presenting at the MLA as it begins to push some of the disciplinary traditions that have kept us focused on the Americas and documents in Spanish. The Renaissance Studies Association is another possible arena, as it has become deliberate in its attempt to move beyond a European focus. And of course, I continue to attend the Tepoztlán Institute almost yearly. Although the last does not have an Early Modern focus, there are a number of us who work in the colonial period and attend regularly.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is finding venues and networks in Brazil. I am talking with a colleague from Rio about starting a working group on Early Modern Studies because there are no spaces for Early Modern discussions here outside of history departments. And Brazilian academia tends to be very disciplinary so it is harder to find bridges between literary and historical studies. There is a lot of institutional investment in “methodology” as a means to distinguish and defend disciplines, even for funding and other resources. So, opening to different methodologies, or mixing, say literary reading with historical discussions is actively discouraged and even treated with suspicion or accused of undermining the discipline. This was a surprise to me when I arrived, but it just shows how funding and institutions can determine so much and, of course, create scholarly isolation or marginalization. And then there is the uniquely Brazilian problem in literary studies that one of the most important scholars of literary history, Antonio Candido, excluded the colonial period from Brazilian literary history! For all these reasons, I have found it easier to engage in more transhistorical theoretical discussions in Brazil, to use my teaching and dialogues with colleagues to ground my politics, and to continue to bring my research to more North American conferences and spaces. Meanwhile, I do hope eventually to carve out a space for dialogue in Brazil by linking scholars who are doing similar work.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: Anything else you might want to add?

Ivonne del Valle: Thanks!

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: Thank you, Fernando, for the welcomed chance to write and to think with Ivonne and Anna again! I credit both of them with the much more formal way that I approach collaborative projects as well as my own renewed fascination with how texts work.

Anna More: Fernando, it is gratifying to know that our volume has provoked such interesting questions. I have found it very illuminating to think through these issues with some distance. We hope that the volume and continued discussion will lead to new and fascinating avenues in our field, indeed that our “field” be transformed and enriched by new theoretical dialogues and comparative connections.

[1] Tamara Walker, “‘They Proved to Be Very Good Sailors’: Slavery and Freedom in the South Sea,” The Americas 78:3 (2021).

[2] Chloe Ireton, “‘They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians’: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97:4 (2017), 608; David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2016, 146.

[3] Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 192.

Fernando Gomez Herrero (Spain, US; PhD (Duke University), MA (Duke U, Wake Forest U, U of Salamanca), B.A. (U of Salamanca). He has taught at Duke, Stanford, Pittsburgh, Hofstra U, Oberlin College, etc. Relocated in the U.K, he has taught at the University of Birmingham and the University of Manchester in the last four years. His book Good Places and Non-Places in Colonial Mexico: The Figure of Vasco de Quiroga (University Press of America, 2001). He is working on a volume tentatively titled The Hispanic Misnomer in the Anglo Zone: Public Conversations (2001-2022). Latest publications include: “The Latest American Appropriation of Western Universalism: A Critique of G. John Ikenberry’s ‘Liberal International Order,’” included in Rethinking Sovereignty and Territoriality in the 21st Century (http://journal.thenewpolis.com/archives/1.1/index.html ; Inaugural Issue, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 2022), Decoloniality and the Disintegration of Western Cognitive Empire: 90 pages.site:  https://www.fernandogherrero.com. He has recently collaborated with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia covering international news, particularly U.S. and U.K. (https://www.lavanguardia.com/autores/fernando-gomez.html , in Spanish).

IHS Workshop: “Wherever the Flag Flies”: Conquest, Sovereignty, and Vital Records in Early Colonial Algeria

This is a chapter from “In the Beginning I Had a Name: Symbolic Violence, the Name, and Algeria’s Colonization,” a book about the colonization of Algerian names in the nineteenth century. Overall, Algerians saw their names transformed as France remade Algeria in its own image, exerting a monopoly of symbolic violence in pair with their monopoly of physical violence. Names stood at the heart of this project, the preeminent sign among signs through which rulers have long announced their powers and claimed territory and people as their own. This chapter examines how personal names, written into French registers of births and deaths known as the état civil, expanded powers in the first decade after the landing of troops, a time when jurisdictions remained volatile and undecided. In this context, “wherever the flag flies,” a comment Napoleon Bonaparte made about the état civil in 1801, harnessed the registers to the conquest, extending French claims upon certain classes of people and excluding others. (Muslim Algerians made their way into the early registers only in their deaths.) The chapter covers precolonial vital registration practices in France and Ottoman-era Algeria, and it examines how their relationship to sovereignty changed during wars of the French Revolution.

Dr. Benjamin Claude Brower specializes in the history of colonial-era North Africa and modern France. His research centers on the problem of violence in history, secularism and Islam, and language and colonialism. He is currently completing a history of names in colonial-era Algeria which in colonial-era Algeria which examines the conversion of Algerian personal names to French standards as part of an investigation into symbolic power and the legacies of colonial violence. He is a Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies in 2022-2023.

Respondent:

Dr. Julie Hardwick
John E. Green Regents Professor of History;
UT Austin Distinguished Teaching Professor;
UT Systems Regents Distinguished Teaching Professor; and
Founding Director of the Institute of Historical Studies, 2007-13
The University of Texas at Austin

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions. 

Putin’s Effort to Make Conquest Acceptable Again

September 30, 2022 marked the abrupt end to a long era of world history. In a dark, threatening, and bombastic speech to his cowering, hand-picked apparatchiks, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his country was annexing almost one-fifth of Ukrainian territory – the eastern provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Russian soldiers staged referenda at gun-point in these invaded territories, forcing residents to cast ballots for a Russian Anschluss. No one believes the people of Eastern Ukraine want this outcome, but that does not matter for Putin. He claims Russia must take this territory from a sovereign state to protect his country’s culture and manhood.

Putin’s words and actions echo a distant past. The political scientist Tanisha Fazal has observed that between the French Revolution and the Second World War, large countries frequently conquered small ones – about once every three years, on average. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were eras of imperial consolidation across the globe, when powerful, industrial states took control of people and resources in near and distant territories. As Paul Kennedy and others have written, imperialism was the currency of great power politics. Military technology favored large, well-organized armies. Resource extraction and factory production concentrated power in a few states. And the expanding regimes asserted a civilizing mission to dominate others – a claim widely accepted at the time, at least among those educated at major universities.

A modern, multistory apartment complex displays visible signs of significant damage. The building is coated in soot and its windows appear to have had their glass shattered. The building also has a gaping hole several stories in height, through which a grey sky is visible. Rubble is strewn around the base of the hole.
A ruined apartment building in Borodianka, Ukraine, on April 6, 2022. Russian armed forces bombarded the town during their assault on Kiev in March. Source: Pexels.

The Second World War, triggered by the brutal, breakneck expansion of two empires in particular, Germany and Japan, weakened most of the conquerors. Years of economic deprivation and genocidal violence left little for holding distant territories. This was an imperial civil war that devasted the imperialists who made it. In its wake, formerly conquered peoples in Europe, Asia, and Africa gained new leverage to push for self-rule; their former conquerors had proven they were neither omnipotent nor civilized. Nationalist claims to territorial sovereignty for ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups replaced defenses of empire as the lingua franca of international relations. Adom Getachew calls this the “worldmaking” of an emergent anti-colonial era.

The United Nations, founded in 1945, embodied this geopolitical shift most clearly. From its first meetings, it existed to empower newly independent states, giving them voice, legitimacy, and often assistance in their efforts to secure their independence. The United Nations had severe limitations in its ability to curb abuses by states at home and abroad, but it re-mapped a former world of empires as a global community of sovereign territories. Above all, the international organization existed to reject conquest.

In this mission, the United Nations succeeded brilliantly. Although wars between and within states continued – and in some regions they multiplied in their frequency and damage – large countries felt constrained against conquering neighbors and former colonies. Fazal explains that after the Second World War new states were “born” at a rapid pace, and very few “died” over the next seven decades. Big powers continued to manipulate, bully, and coerce small states, but they paid consistent deference to their right to exist. The former empires relied on “indirect” forms of influence; they no longer argued they had a right to rule other peoples.

This development was significant because it placed constraints on how power could be used in foreign and military policy. A world organized against conquest deterred countries, including the United States, from acting in that way. A consensus arose that a norm of non-conquest benefited everyone – small states and big, powerful societies. Both superpowers promoted this norm, despite their other forms of aggression during the Cold War. Fearful of a war in disputed territories escalating into nuclear conflict, leaders in Washington and Moscow came to the conclusion that they had to avoid aggressive conquest. They fought many “limited wars,” as they called them – from Korea and Hungary, to Vietnam and Angola – but they almost always avoided annexation of sovereign territories. They used the cover of sovereign local leaders to show they did not seek another world war.

Historian Arne Westad has shown that these Cold War interventions were not necessarily less harmful than wars of conquest, but they were different. Each superpower had to make an effort to build an independent government in the site of intervention, and the intervening forces had to legitimize different local practices and cultures from their own. Each superpower also had to make promises about leaving, at least militarily. “Limited wars” were supposed to be limited in time; they could not be permanent, as acts of conquest claimed to be. These constraints on war promoted basic state sovereignty around the globe, making independent countries the expectation on all continents. Their numbers grew consistently from decade-to-decade, until now.

A large banner tinted to resemble a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag hangs from the façade of an apartment building in Berlin, Germany, overlooking the "Checkpoint Charlie" museum and giftshop. The banner's text (displayed in both English and Ukrainian) reads: "By defending the liberty of Ukraine we defend the liberty and unity of the countries of Europe. Vladimir Putin: abandon your geopolitical ambitions and set the whole of Ukraine free."
“By defending the liberty and unity of Ukraine we defend the liberty and unity of the countries of Europe”: a banner protesting Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “geopolitical ambitions” hangs above Berlin’s “Checkpoint Charlie,” which formed part of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, on August 6, 2019. Source: Maksym Kozlenko/Wikimedia Commons.

Putin’s effort to conquer territory in Ukraine is a bold and intentional effort to reverse seventy years of history. The Russian president calls this history “Western colonialism,” when it is really the opposite. The ruler of a former empire (the Soviet Union) that has been disintegrating since 1991 into independent states, he fears that Russian power will continue to diminish unless he conquers nearby territories. Annexing Ukraine to Russia, as he intends, promises to make his regime a central actor again in the middle of Europe. He will use conquest to increase his country’s reach, as his nineteenth century predecessors did before.

Putin is unlikely to succeed because of courageous Ukrainian resistance, strong world opposition, and the excesses of his ambitions. Conquest is very hard under any circumstances, and it rarely pays when the population resists so strongly. What is discouraging, however, is that Putin is likely not alone in pursuing conquest today. The language of military control and racial superiority is echoed by many other authoritarians, including Donald Trump, and it has enthusiastic support from citizens fearful of losing influence to more diverse cultures at home and abroad. If this is the end of the seven-decade era against conquest, we must work to insure it does not become a renewed era of empire and intolerance.

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the History Department and the LBJ School. He is the author and editor of eleven books, most recently, Civil War By Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. He is the co-host of the podcast “This is Democracy.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The image of Vladimir Putin used in this article’s banner image was obtained from Wikimedia Commons and originally published on the official website of the Russian presidency. Not Even Past has modified the photo’s background.

Early Modern and Colonial Histories of Globalization: An Interview with Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole (Part I)

Foreword by John Gleb

This is the first half of a two-part article. To read the second part, click here.

Ivonne del Valle (University of California-Berkeley), Anna More (Universidade de Brasília), and Rachel Sarah O’Toole (University of California-Irvine) are prominent scholars of colonial Latin America. Earlier this year, they sat down with Fernando Gomez Herrero (University of Manchester) to discuss a project they had worked on together, a book entitled Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019). The book is an edited collection which was published as the 44th volume in the University of Minnesota’s Hispanic Issues series.

In the following interview—part one of two—del Valle, More, and O’Toole discuss the origins of their project and identify its principal intellectual goals in conversation with Gomez Herrero.

The interview sheds light on the process by which scholars from different disciplines come to produce new scholarship and the challenges and clear benefits of collaborative work. As they explain, “Rather than arrive at a singular vision of early modern Iberian globalization or fold each case study into an unified narrative, the collaborative process required that we had to take each other seriously as peers.”

Equally interesting, the interviews wrestle with the complicated imperial context of globalization. As its title suggests, the book seeks to show the “Iberian roots of globalization,” while at the same time, the authors seek to give globalization its “proper dimension” by “displacing the Iberian metropolis, to focus on the important role of other locations in the process of creating global networks.”

The relationship between globalization and imperial power seems eerily familiar today. Del Valle, More, and O’Toole recognize this. In the interview below, they frequently draw connections between past and present, noting the ways in which the lived experiences of millions of people continue to be shaped by the political and cultural projects highlighted in their book. The authors argue persuasively that the centuries-old subject matter of colonial Latin American history is in fact imbued with deep contemporary relevance, especially for teachers and their students.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: Let us revisit and rethink the work done. This is about the genesis of the collaboration about this specific work [e. g., Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization]. How did you put together this edited volume that comprises eleven articles, or chapters, the three of you included, plus an afterword of two others? Something is already mentioned in the Acknowledgements.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: In 2010-2011, Anna and Ivonne convened junior and senior literary scholars, historians, and art historians as the University of California multi-campus “Early Modern Globalization: Iberian Empires/Colonies/Nations” group to discuss their current works-in-progress. Inspired by the interdisciplinary collaboration, Rachel joined the long-standing duo (Anna and Ivonne have been close friends since graduate school). Together, we applied for a Mellon-LASA [Latin American Studies Association] Grant Seminar Grant with the goal to expand our participants beyond the United States and publish our collaborative research. The result was an intense week where we convened at the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City to discuss both our precis on early modern Iberian globalization and pre-circulated papers with scholars from Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Mexico, and the United States.

During the workshop, how participants defined globalization, empire, and what or who constituted “Iberian” revealed our disciplinary boundaries, including where and when we had been formally educated, and what we thought was at stake in scholarly work. At the same time, the group immediately began to discuss a generative tension between institutional boundaries versus subaltern narratives or how there was a need for macro, structural accounts but also local particularities, period aesthetics, and individual people. As editors working with Hispanic Issues, then, the challenge was exercising patience with the texts and the narratives of our contributors, including ourselves, that could be described as baroque, jazz history (Elsa Barkley Brown 1992), or hybridity (Dean and Leibsohn 2010). Rather than arrive at a singular vision of early modern Iberian globalization or fold each case study into an unified narrative, the collaborative process required that we had to take each other seriously as peers. The process included multiple debates of terms, sharing scholarship, and repeated revisions that respected rather than flattened the particularity of text, time, and place.

Rather than arrive at a singular vision of early modern Iberian globalization or fold each case study into an unified narrative, the collaborative process required that we had to take each other seriously as peers. The process included multiple debates of terms, sharing scholarship, and repeated revisions that respected rather than flattened the particularity of text, time, and place

Ivonne del Valle: The conversations at the workshop in Mexico City (not always smooth, but the disagreements were also enriching) made us think about the field (colonial/early modern), from different disciplines, and perspectives. What is crucial for an art historian, for a historian, or for a literary critic, is not always the same, nor are the questions we ask from the documents we read, and from the field. The concepts we tend to value, the topics, all of these differences are valuable but as we learn, can also be bridged, sometimes. In general, people from different disciplines usually don’t have the opportunity to engage in this type of conversations about our field, and the approaches we value, about ways to collaborate. Another aspect that must be mentioned is the participation of the three of us at Instituto Tepoztlán (an international collective of academics at all stages in our careers—from graduate students to professors—that meets at a yearly conference in Mexico). We all have benefited immensely from the open debates and discussions their organization foments. And are indebted to them.

In these encounters we realized that one of the topics that kept coming back had to do with the question of globalization as it pertained to our period. When and how did it start? We were in agreement that the roots of the form of contemporary globalization could be found in the early modern period. We decided to answer it in a collective way with some of the people we had previously been engaged in this process initiated in 2010.

Putting the volume together was not an easy task to the extent that we wrote the Introduction as a team, and that meant a lot of back and forth, revisions, discussions. Each one of us also read all the papers, and we have different editorial practices. You can imagine that part. Nevertheless, at the end I think it was all worth it, the authors were patient with us, and understood the nature of the collaboration. Equally important is that we had three people (in addition to each author) agreeing that the articles were ready to pass to the review process of the press. Now I don’t remember clearly but I think that our own demands made the process easier with the press afterward.

Anna More: One thing that I would like to add to all that has been said is that from the beginning of our collaboration, we very consciously sought out interdisciplinary dialogue. Not only was that a main goal of our initial UC Humanities working group on colonial Latin America that initiated our collaboration, but we were deliberate in seeking contributors from different disciplines for the seminar in Mexico City that became the volume. For the second seminar, we also sought out participants from across the Americas. Not only was this a stipulation of the LASA Mellon Grant we received, but we also felt that there are few academic spaces where true inter-American dialogue takes place. This has to do with the different realities of funding that clearly affect Latin American participation in LASA, for example. Through the LASA Mellon Grant we were able to bring scholars together from across the hemisphere and even from Europe. To find these scholars we had to activate our networks from over the years. That is where being a collaboration of three scholars with roots and contacts in different places was invaluable.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: So, is this about the narrative of “globalization” and reasserting the “Iberian roots” in it? In other words, Spain and Portugal go “earlier” or “deeper” or “first” . . . . So what? And then what? I suppose I want your engagement with the introduction written jointly and also ideally with the “afterword” written by [Raúl] Marrero-Fente and [Nicholas] Spadaccini, editors of Hispanic Issues.

We are, indeed, asserting the Iberian roots of globalization, while at the same time we’re interested in giving it its proper dimension by displacing Iberian metropolis, to focus on the important role of other locations in the process of creating global networks

Ivonne del Valle : We are, indeed, asserting the Iberian roots of globalization, while at the same time we’re interested in giving it its proper dimension by displacing Iberian metropolis, to focus on the important role of other locations in the process of creating global networks. This exercise had two aims. First, to remind us all (once more, in a repetition that is as trite as it is necessary) that several of us do our work in an Anglo-centered environment, and that oftentimes even for knowledgeable academics nothing happens, or happened, until it occurs in an English-speaking location. Second, to also remind us that being the first doesn’t always translate into a sense of pride. Perhaps the contrary is the truth, as it is in this case, in which globalization brought about (as we insist in the Introduction) the production of enormous inequalities that were not there before. But this does not mean that the Iberian empires, or its organic intellectuals, were not deeply and astutely (though perversely perhaps) immersed in answering questions that were relevant not only to Spain and Portugal, but to international law, commerce, etc.

As for so what, I think that for those of us working in the U. S. it is clear that the changing origin of our students makes the period and the problems related to colonialism, immediate and contemporary. At least it is for them. One would think, for example, that sitting in a class where one has to read 16th, 17th, or 18th century materials in the original Spanish (as it happens in departments of literature) would not be desirable for young people. Nevertheless, the opposite is true. Students are engaged in the discussions and understand the stakes. Once, after a series of sessions on [Felipe] Guaman Poma [an Indigenous author from 17th-century Peru] and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega [another seventeenth-century Peruvian writer], one of my students suggested that perhaps in the future I’d realize how among those taking my class was the person who had become the 21st century Inca Garcilaso, who in the U. S. would compare this country to a Latin America, in order to uphold the latter. If colonialism and imperialism did not exist anymore, perhaps these types of courses and books would not be as relevant, yet imperialism continues to exist and to shape our experiences and it’s therefore important to understand it. As Marrero-Fente and Spadaccini remark in the “Afterword,” there’s a nexus among colonialism, imperialism and globalization. And I don’t think this has ever stopped being the case.

A 19th-century engraving of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega by Carlos Penoso. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Anna More: I think that one important point to make is that like any ongoing and totalizing process, globalization is a term that can be interpreted through diverse structures and from vastly different perspectives. So, we were deliberate in our use of the term “roots” rather than “origins.” Origin suggests a singular genealogy, looking for the source of a current state. “Roots” is obviously more rhizomatic and multiple. This is not to say that there weren’t events or institutions that accelerated and centralized processes. This is where the “Iberian Empires” part of the equation becomes relevant. While we all acknowledge that Iberian monarchies were dispersed, they were also coordinated under legal frameworks, religious institutions and norms, and cultural and linguistic processes of homogenization. And these norms were not just suggested as a natural part of an equivalence or exchange, but indeed expected and mandated by institutions backed by force. Of course, that does not mean that there weren’t creative forms of appropriation of languages of power, modes of living under new social identities or genuine conversations to Christianity. And it is also true that Iberian institutions were competitive, focused on diverse and at times contradictory goals, or simply reactive to on the ground distinctions in the vast geographies of Iberian expansion.

Our challenge was to somehow reflect all of this messiness as well as the attempts to order it, both by Iberians and by non-Iberians. Even in a long volume it would be impossible to cover all the variations. But we wanted to combine geographical reach with disciplinary lenses to give a sense of the results of different approaches to diverse materials and questions.

We hoped that this exercise gives a sense of the interplay between the macro processes of, say, bullion flows that traveled to China or the Inquisition in its attempt to police religious practice in far flung regions, and the microhistories of the lives of those who were living in these regions and under these circumstances. I suppose that this has to do with a sensibility that we believe that all our contributors shared to exposing the mechanics of this sort of globalization in the interplay between the macro and the micro levels.

Finally, we were not necessarily interested in weighing in on theoretical versions of globalization or on lamenting or celebrating it.

Finally, we were not necessarily interested in weighing in on theoretical versions of globalization or on lamenting or celebrating it. I believe that if we had a certain affinity, it would be more in line with a world systems approach, however that would not account sufficiently for forms of meaning and resistance formed through culture and social relations. And while I think that we can all agree that the violent imposition of empire was disastrous for most of those living under colonial rule, that fact needs to be complemented by the ways that a shared trauma or circumstance created new political modes. These modes go beyond a search for “resistance,” a term that ultimately reifies structures of power, and into realms that might not even be fully legible for us as historians. In other words, our collective challenge is to remain open to meanings that were generated in the vastly different regions that Iberians attempted to incorporate into their monarchies.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: Still, for me, one problem that remains is the deep attachment that we continue to maintain to the organizing possibilities of empire. I include myself! The challenge, however, is how we include or narrate the empire. I wonder if we could stop positioning the empire, or the state, or Spain as the main actor in our historical narratives. Even reviewing recent publications for this interview, I was struck by how many continue to employ the same framework of Iberian triumphal expansion. For historians, partly, the focus on Spain, or the Crown has to do with our dependence on archives produced by state institutions that, in turn, shape our narratives. It is no wonder, then, that in their “Afterword,” Marrero-Fente and Spadaccini emphasize the European institutions of our volume including Jesuit networks, global trade, imperial laws, and racial discourses that presumably provide the required “sweeping conclusions” (333) for contemporary academic audiences. Yet, I would suggest that clerical orders, merchant guilds, policy makers, and colonial authorities produce what Western scholars expect as teleological narratives that are located and captured in the archives created by the empire for the empire. As a result, the story of the state has become the story we are most accustomed to hearing.

I, for one, cringe at my own narrative when I hear myself in lecture or when I write a sentence that begins with “Spain” as the central historical actor. After all, as Ivonne so eloquently and wryly observes, pride is not the emotion we associate with being the first. Why? Because the articulation of Spain, empire, or Europeans as the main actor is historiographically paired with the erasure, belittlement, and denigration of Africans and Indigenous people. As much as we worked to highlight the intellectual and religious contribution of Indigenous Andean people in our “Introduction,” the emphasis was on their labor, while Marrero-Fente and Spadaccini refer to enslaved captives as commodities (332) in the “Afterword.” Both examples call my attention to how we need to address the narrative or how we tell a story of empire, including the Iberian empire, without continually dismissing the political, cultural, social, and intellectual actions of Indigenous, African, and Asian people.

Left to right

Fernando Gomez Herrero; Anna More; Ivonne del Valle; Rachel Sarah O’Toole

One answer is to simply, and radically, begin another empire at the center such as the Kingdom of Kongo as have John Thornton and Cécile Fromont. As Herman Bennett has reminded us so clearly and so eloquently, we need to see Africans and African-Iberians as theologians, merchants, courtiers, sovereigns, and intellectuals who disagreed, competed, conquered, and historicized from their own empires.[1] Another is to meticulously insert enslaved African and African-descent people as the central actors in the global institutions of the Spanish empire as disrupting global currency chains or providing the standard for early modern Christian piety.[2] Or, we could insist on the decentralization of empire and confront universalist assumptions by refusing, or at least, questioning the logic of connectivity. As Zoltán Biedermann points out, “there is a potentially pernicious politics to global and connected history writing, especially when it emphasizes trade or culture over war and exploitation.”[3] In our volume, we worked these tactics as Anna explains by including activities in Goa [a Portuguese colony in India] and Manila in our definition of an “Iberian” sphere or demonstrating how enslaved litigants shaped the rules of imperial documentation. In seeking a disavowal of the empire’s organizing function, perhaps an additional tactic is to investigate those who turned away from the sirens of empire that we are so readily able to document.

Fernando Gomez Herrero: Perhaps another way of saying the previous question is, how do we put together the various labels of “Iberian,” “globalization,” Hispanic and Latin America, imperial and colonial? Why bother? How does this “history” fare, say, in California and Brasília or elsewhere for that matter?

Ivonne del Valle: In the case of California, given the fact that Latinos comprise almost 40% of the total population, and that the University of California is supposed to be a public institution, I think it’s clear that we have a responsibility to educate our students about the countries they come from (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, etc.), and also about the legacy of political projects than continue to affect them in the 21st century. Learning about history, theory, literature, and learning about them in a rigorous way doesn’t have to be an abstract, luxurious exercise removed from daily life. It isn’t for us, and it isn’t for many of our students for whom the “ivory tower” metaphor simply doesn’t make any sense.

Given the highly unequal nature of Latin American societies, I’m sure that the topic of colonialism in its 16th-18th century avatar or in its more contemporary forms, remains entirely relevant. It is at least in the case of Mexico. Not all inequalities are related to colonialism, of course, but some of the most salient are: racism against Indigenous and African people, with all this entails: From the institutional treatment of these communities (lack of hospitals, schools, running water, all basic services, etc.) to the continuous despoiling of their lands, their water, forests, etc. The fact that in recent demonstrations in Chile, for example, and in Santiago and not in a “remote” rural area, waving an [Indigenous] Mapuche flag was the chosen symbol, is very telling. The same can be said about the recent destruction of statues and monuments of Spanish conquistadors all over Latin America, the U.S. included. Latin America continues to have an immense debt to indigenous and African populations.

Chilean demonstrators wave a Mapuche flag during a protest against the Trans-Pacific Economic Cooperation Agreement (TPP11), 28 October 2019. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It is also important to understand the role of processes that unevenly connect a small town in a Latin American country to places such as California. Why do people in a farming community in Mexico, or Guatemala end up going to California? Perhaps because the economic treaties and the demands of international trade, put an end to the possibility of living there in a way that might seem opaque, but which consequences are very real: all of a sudden a big agroindustry working for the U.S. market takes up all their land and water (with the help of their local and national governments), and these communities all of a sudden are left to fend for themselves. This is a clear effect of globalization (and imperialism, and internal colonialism). The U. S. is a chosen place to migrate to, not only because it’s closer than say, Amsterdam, but also because it is also the place to where all good things go: the best crops, the best produce, etc. The image of incredible wealth is not gratuitous. And people who can no longer work their own land, have to go elsewhere in order to sustain themselves and the communities they left behind.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole: Picking up on Ivonne’s attention to our shared student body at the University of California, I think the point is to revisit what we mean by “marginal” or “minority” within an imperial or colonial framework.  In southern California, my students and I are incredibly conscious that we are learning, living, and working on unceded lands of the Gabrieleños and Juaneño-Acjachemen Nation, stolen from Mexican ranchers in the nineteenth century, usurped from Japanese farmers in the twentieth century, and currently operating under the logics of redlined, sundown towns to Black Californians. So, a narrative that a Spanish or Iberian empire would “reach” or “embrace” or “define” a geography and its populations that stretched from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea simply does not make sense to the diasporic, multilingual, and brilliant BIPOC students who talk to me on the daily.

So, a narrative that a Spanish or Iberian empire would “reach” or “embrace” or “define” a geography and its populations that stretched from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea simply does not make sense to the diasporic, multilingual, and brilliant BIPOC students who talk to me on the daily.

As a result, I have been challenged by what dissent means within the Iberian empires. Hardly a Gramscian hegemony and certainly not confined to a Marxian teleology, my students are suspicious of concepts, actors, and logics that are defined as dominant. As Ivonne suggests with her example of Guaman Poma, students ask me why wouldn’t a dissenting text, hybrid art, and or an enslaved person define legal freedom, natural rights, and ecclesiastical aesthetics? So, in answer to Fernando’s question of “why bother,” we need revised frameworks of empire, globalization, and colonialism that center the majority of experiences but also grapple with dissent in a non-binary manner. Bringing Amerindians, Blacks, and Latinos “into the narrative as ‘minorities,’ whose voices need to be heard, is itself complicit in their marginalization” as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra so eloquently explains, is not the end game.[4] Instead, the goal is to shift the narrative, change the frame, or move entirely to a new sphere. In his edited volume “Entangled Empires,” Cañizares-Esguerra asserts that without Latinos, or without the Spanish Americas, the previously hermetically-sealed Anglo Atlantic world simply could not exist. Indeed, what Cañizares-Esguerra suggests is not just a corrective to Eurocentrism, but a change in who is at the center of our narratives and how we tell the story. Along with Cañizares-Esguerra, our goal, then, is to challenge a clean, homogenizing, and Eurocentric narrative of empire. Instead, I suggest a generative story recognizable to many of our students: that of dissent, disorder, or the queer, without which the empire simply could not function.

A self-portrait by Felipe Guaman Poma. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Anna More: This is an interesting question for me as it forces me to articulate from “where” I am researching. Mid-way through our process from seminar to publication I moved from the University of California to Brasília, where I now teach at a large public university. The move has entailed many challenges but even more gains. Clearly, academia is a globalized institution, which obviously is not to say it is homogenous. Of course, universities in Latin America are constantly battling for funding and this affects many research possibilities. But then, there are creative ways to address those limitations. I cannot count on the library at my university, but the Brazilian government pays centrally for good journal access. I have friends who send me pdfs that I can’t get and I also buy books on kindle if I’m desperate.

Yet my reality is still privileged, both in terms of Latin American universities, which do not all have even the funding that Brazil provides, and in terms of my networks and ability to travel. And if these challenges exist for university professors, they are clearly worse for my students. There are all sorts of gatekeeping functions, from ability to read research published in English to more basic obstacles like computers and bandwidth. And yet, my students are reading [sixteenth-century social reformer Bartolomé de] Las Casas and Guaman Poma and Sor Juana [Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century polymath from colonial Mexico] and having strong reactions of curiosity, identification and illumination about deep structures of race and gender, for instance.

It’s important to realize that in Brazil, democracy is young and my students are the first generation to fully grow up under the 1988 constitution. We are also living through an extremely destructive presidency and, of course, the global pandemic. The university feels like an oasis, but it is under attack and holding out against vindictive funding cuts. At the same time, all of this is retribution for the gains made under the previous administration. Over the last twenty years, our student body became more diverse, more engaged with questions of race, class, and sexuality, and thus more curious about their deep history in Brazil and Hispanic America. I suppose that what is most surprising to them is that processes from 500 years ago are so recognizable today. What is striking is that for them, it’s the university that is the portal onto the world, especially for students studying Spain and Spanish America. For many, this is an alternative to U. S.-centric globalization that surrounds them on a daily basis.

So, in terms of the “so what” question, I think that there is one answer as researchers in dialogue with global academia in which it is important to bridge colonial Iberian studies and theoretical and historical debates that often have presentist or anglophone blindspots. There is another answer if we are thinking about students who are themselves trying to understand processes of globalization, including the politics of democratization and social justice. I think that what our answers all show is that the second is as important if not more important a “so what” as the first.

[1] Herman Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossion in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

[2] Larissa Brewer-García, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 198; Molly Warsh, “Assessing Worth across the Iberian Empires: Pearls and the Role of Human Capital in the Creation of Value, c. 1500-1700,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19:2 (Spring 2019), 63, 65.

[3] Zoltán Biedermann, (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), ix.

[4] Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Introduction,” Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, editor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 4.

Fernando Gomez Herrero (Spain, US; PhD (Duke University), MA (Duke U, Wake Forest U, U of Salamanca), B.A. (U of Salamanca). He has taught at Duke, Stanford, Pittsburgh, Hofstra U, Oberlin College, etc. Relocated in the U.K, he has taught at the University of Birmingham and the University of Manchester in the last four years. His book Good Places and Non-Places in Colonial Mexico: The Figure of Vasco de Quiroga (University Press of America, 2001). He is working on a volume tentatively titled The Hispanic Misnomer in the Anglo Zone: Public Conversations (2001-2022). Latest publications include: “The Latest American Appropriation of Western Universalism: A Critique of G. John Ikenberry’s “Liberal International Order,” included in Rethinking Sovereignty and Territoriality in the 21st Century (http://journal.thenewpolis.com/archives/1.1/index.html ; Inaugural Issue, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 2022), Decoloniality and the Disintegration of Western Cognitive Empire: 90 pages.site:  https://www.fernandogherrero.com. He has recently collaborated with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia covering international news, particularly U.S. and U.K. (https://www.lavanguardia.com/autores/fernando-gomez.html , in Spanish).

“Yellow Peril” and Naval Power: Richmond P. Hobson and the Racist Imagination of American National Security

By John Gleb

Commentators and scholars have long represented the United States as the supreme guarantor of a well-tempered international order. Today, however, agents of American international relations find themselves confronting uncertainty both at home and abroad. Nevertheless, as they navigate the uncharted waters of contemporary global politics, representatives of the United States and its international interlocutors can still look to their shared past for insight. There are lessons, some positive, some deeply negative, to be learned in the long, complex, and decidedly messy history of the United States in the world.

Produced in collaboration with the Clements Center for National Security, Not Even Past‘s “Uncharted Waters” series is bringing that history to life in detailed case studies, highlighting moments when Americans have grappled with the uncertainties of power. Our aim is to document unease and confusion, hidden dangers and unexpected opportunities. In so doing, we will provide readers with a fresh and provocative perspective on the history of American foreign relations.

Among the many threats to American national security that experts perceived in February 1909, one in particular stood out to Democratic congressman Richmond P. Hobson of Alabama. Hobson, a former naval officer and celebrated Spanish-American War veteran, maintained an unusually high public profile for a member of the House of Representatives; his reputation as a war hero had allowed him to become a kind of celebrity commentator on world affairs. Now, midway through a long floor speech, he invited his congressional colleagues to consider what he called “the problem of all the ages, the problem that now challenges the good and thoughtful men throughout the world.” The problem had a name: “race antagonism.”[1]

A print commemorating Richmond P. Hobson, a naval hero of the Spanish-American War. A portrait of the young, mustachioed Hobson in naval uniform appears as an inset flanked by billowing American flags and crested by a laurel-wreathed, shield-bearing eagle. In the background is an image of the collier Merrimac, which Hobson commanded during the American naval blockade of Santiago de Cuba, under attack by Spanish artillery.
A print commemorating Hobson’s most famous wartime exploit: a bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to sink the collier Merrimac as a blockship at the entrance to the harbor of Santiago de Cuba, then a major Spanish naval base. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By this, Hobson did not mean what we would call racism—in fact, the Alabama Democrat was himself an unapologetic racist, fully convinced that his own oft-repeated generalizations about white, Black, and “yellow” people were grounded in scientific truths. What alarmed him was the prospect of political instability arising from the tension between geographically adjacent but supposedly incompatible racial communities. Hobson thought he had seen this kind of tension building up for years, and in his opinion, it was growing especially acute in the Pacific. There, he believed, “race antagonism” between “Europeans” and “Asiatics” was threatening to hurl an unprepared United States into a war against Japan.[2]

It goes without saying that this conviction was little more than a racist delusion. Antagonism between Japan and the United States really existed in 1909, but it was not “race antagonism,” the supposedly inevitable byproduct of fixed, irreconcilable racial identities. And of course, while bigots like Hobson may have relied on race to explain human behavior on a grand scale, race itself does not actually determine how people behave.

Nevertheless, the distorted imaginings of Hobson’s racist mind demand careful scrutiny. Not only did they condition his responses to political events both at home and abroad; in doing so, they also performed important intellectual work, reinforcing and eventually transforming the underpinnings of his outlook on foreign affairs. Ultimately, concepts like “race antagonism” mattered both in spite and because of the way they warped the world around them. Through an examination of Hobson’s career and writings, we can place them at the center of a dark but highly significant chapter in the history of national security.

“A Danger and a Responsibility”

To understand how and why Hobson developed his obsession with “race antagonism” in the Pacific, it is first necessary to examine the broader worldview out of which that obsession emerged. At its heart stood a vision of global rivalry between two modes of social order: militarism, which organized societies for the express purpose of waging wars; and industrialism, which harnessed their productive capacities to provide for the well-being of individual citizens. Initially, Hobson saw militarism embodied most clearly in the autocracies of old Europe. The United States, by contrast, supposedly stood at the vanguard of an emerging industrial civilization. The distinction was moral as much as it was political. In a manner that seems eerily familiar today, Hobson cast industrial development as a force for good, claiming that it would break down entrenched social hierarchies, spur the growth of free enterprise, and spread peace and prosperity the world over. Militarism he characterized as the enemy of progress, oppressive, bloodthirsty, and fundamentally barbaric.[3]

Ultimately, Hobson expected industrialism to displace and supplant militarism world-wide. “Nations of prey will have no part to play in the new order of things,” he predicted; “like beasts of prey they are doomed to extinction.”[4] But for the moment, the “nations of prey” appeared to hold one significant advantage over their rivals: in the course of fighting each other, they had developed immensely powerful armed forces. Hobson thought that the existence of these forces placed the United States in an uncomfortable quandary. To contain militarism and ensure its destruction, Americans would have to develop a countervailing military power rooted in their own industrial society. But how could they do so without succumbing to militarism themselves?

By way of an answer, Hobson proposed that naval power, unlike its land-based counterpart, could be built up without stirring any militaristic impulses. The logic behind this surprising proposition was easy enough to follow: because warships could not project force inland, and because they did not require vast reserves of manpower in order to operate, navies supposedly presented no threat civil liberties at home, nor did they enable wars of conquest abroad. On this basis, Hobson spoke out forcefully in favor of expansive naval armament against the militarist threat. “Naval power,” he claimed, “does not involve military organization in the people, and is the natural, logical, form of power for industrialism[,] for free institutions[,] and for peace nations.”[5]

A cartoon depicting an enormous fleet of American battleships escorting a larger-than-life female figure in armor, who carries both a sword and an olive branch. "Peace," reads the cartoon's caption. The lead battleship has its prow decorated with an image of Theodore Roosevelt.
This 1905 cartoon from the popular magazine Puck also portrayed naval power as a force for peace. Note the image of Theodore Roosevelt attached to the prow of the leading battleship. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Hobson’s views were idiosyncratic, but his calls for naval expansion were in harmony with mainstream trends. The early twentieth century was the golden age of “navalism,” a political movement which promoted and celebrated the construction of huge, impressive battlefleets. Many prominent Americans were navalists, including President Theodore Roosevelt and the enormously influential military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. However, the navalist movement also faced significant organized opposition from pacifists, anti-imperialists, and fiscal conservatives. As a result, although the American navy grew steadily in size and power over the course of Hobson’s political career, it did not do so fast enough to satisfy his increasingly urgent demands.

Hobson responded to navalism’s critics by trying to undercut their base of public support. In speech after speech, article after article, he urged his countrymen to support the assertion of American naval power abroad. But in doing so, he found himself running up against a potentially fatal weakness he thought was inherent in industrial development. The weakness in question was a byproduct of industrialism’s tolerance of individual liberty. On the whole, this seemed like a good thing—but it also made it harder for industrial societies to recognize or respond collectively to national security threats. For this reason, Hobson felt obliged to package his support for naval expansion as a civic obligation to which every American was liable. “American citizens should not blind themselves to the fact that [the] blessing of individual liberty involves a danger and a responsibility,” he warned. The least anyone could do in exchange for liberty’s “glorious privileges” was “to take a lively, active, effective interest in all questions of good government, including the nation’s foreign policies.”[6]

Exciting this “lively, effective interest” became Hobson’s overriding political objective. With missionary zeal, he went again and again before the public, calling attention to supposed militarist plots that seemed to demand a naval response from the United States. “Race antagonism” he regarded as a byproduct of one of those plots. Its source, he claimed, was Japan.

The “Yellow Peril” as a National Security Threat

Hobson’s interest in Japanese militarism began as an interest in China, one of the focal points of American foreign policy ambitions during the early 1900s. At the time, policymakers in Washington coveted China as a vast potential market for American goods and services. Hobson, who assumed that American-led economic development in Asia would further the cause of industrialism, firmly supported his government’s oft-repeated calls for an “Open Door” to the Chinese market. His greatest fear was that some rival power would slam the door shut and subject China to militaristic influences.

Initially, those influences seemed most likely to come from Europe and especially from Russia. Then came the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), which ended in a decisive Russian defeat and made Japan the preeminent military power in eastern Asia. Hobson shed no tears for the Russians, and found himself in fact deeply impressed by Japan’s meteoric rise. Nevertheless, he shuddered at the prospect of Japanese soft power gaining a foothold on the mainland. “The world has been saved from the domination of China in the interest of [European] absolutism,” he wrote, “but it now faces the possibility of a less visible but deeper and more complete domination of China by Asiatic fanaticism.”[7]

“Asiatic fanaticism” was a concept heavily freighted with racist baggage. Indeed, Hobson explicitly characterized the hypothetical Japanese threat to industrialism as a pan-Asian racial threat, a “yellow peril” that would take deliberate aim at white supremacy world-wide. “[C]reating and using race hatred for her purposes,” he warned, “Japan could, unquestionably, bring about the military organization of China”—and the result would be nothing short of apocalyptic. Superimposing racist tropes onto his preexisting anxieties about militarism, Hobson predicted that, “[s]hould the yellow race rise in arms with its preponderance of numbers, and its astonishing aptitude for modern war, Asia would swamp Europe, and there would follow a titanic war between the eastern and western hemispheres that would drench the world in blood and hurl mankind backward to savagery.” [8]

Seven larger-than-life allegorical figures cower in fear of an eighth figure, who is even larger and partly obscured by the horizon line. The cowering figures are personifications of various European great powers, including Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. the giant in the distance is Japan, who is dressed in a soldier's uniform and carrying a bayonet. Russia is bandaged and clearly injured.
Another cartoon from Puck, this one depicting the so-called “yellow peril” that animated Hobson’s response to the Russo-Japanese War. Personifications of Europe’s great powers cower in fear of a racialized Japanese giant; the bandaged figure is Russia, already beaten on the battlefield. Such threatening imagery was a standard component of anti-Japanese depictions from this period and must be seen in this context. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Hobson’s nightmare was a figment of his racist imagination. But it seemed real enough to him, and he began planning a military response. Specifically, Hobson proposed that the United States use its naval power to interdict Japanese access to China if and when the “yellow peril” began to materialize. Not coincidentally, the plan provided its author with a compelling argument in favor naval expansion. “[W]ith a strong navy,” Hobson argued, “we can without war or friction cause Japan to refrain from organizing the Chinese or disregarding the principle of the Open Door; we could insure [sic.] the commercial and industrial organizing of China for the good of all mankind; if we had a strong navy, we would keep the peace in Europe and Asia alike; we could eventually keep the peace of the world.”[9]

But before Hobson had a chance to put his plan into action, a series of unfortunate events occurred that would transform his preoccupation with the “yellow peril” into a dangerous obsession. The chain of causation began not in China but in San Francisco, California, which had long been a hotbed of anti-Asian racism in the United States. In October 1906, the San Francisco school board attempted to segregate students of Japanese ancestry from their white peers. The school board’s action elicited a formal protest from the Japanese government, unnerving President Roosevelt, who opted to avoid a diplomatic incident by compelling the board to rescind the segregation order. When political leaders from California objected to the federal government’s intervention in what they considered a local affair, the president and his principal advisors warned them privately that allowing the crisis to escalate out of control would risk provoking a military response from Japan. Shocked, one of the Californians promptly leaked the warning to the Washington Post, dramatically escalating a simmering war scare that was starting to alarm officials on both sides of the Pacific.[10]

Even before the scare began, Hobson believed Japan was preparing for a fight. “The Japanese have taken up the cry of Asia for the Asiatics and are now drilling the Chinese in warlike methods,” he had told the Washington Post in August 1906, and by the beginning of 1907, he apparently believed that Japan was “waiting only for a reasonable pretext” to declare war on the United States. Knowing this, on the evening after the Roosevelt administration’s leaked warning appeared in print, a reporter from the New York Times approached Hobson for a comment. The reporter was not disappointed.[11]

“[N]ow I shall say what I really believe,” Hobson announced. Then, smiling and straightening his shoulders, he cut loose: “Japan is spoiling for a fight with this Nation. She is only waiting until she can negotiate loans from Europe. As soon as this has been accomplished you will see that this Government [e. g., the Roosevelt administration] will have to either eat humble pie or fight.” Hobson then turned his attention to the segregation crisis, which he cited as proof of Japan’s malign intentions. His statement to the Times implied that the Japanese protests against anti-Asian racism were deliberately provocative, insofar as they insisted that the federal government desegregate San Francisco’s school system or “suffer the consequences.”[12]

From this point of view, it looked like the president had done the right thing by denying the Japanese the pretext they seemed to be seeking. “Roosevelt was too wise for them,” Hobson told the Times reporter. “He did not want the war he feared would come.” But Hobson also made it clear that appeasement was not an adequate long-term policy. The real solution to the Japanese problem, he suggested, was to achieve control of the Pacific Ocean by accelerating the expansion of American naval power. “Meantime, we must be prepared to eat crow,” he concluded bleakly, “for if a war were to come to-day, we could not send a fleet into the Pacific that could cope with [the Japanese] navy.”[13]

“The Only Way to Get Exclusion”: The Domestic Political Significance of Naval Power

The school segregation crisis powerfully reinforced Hobson’s racially-inflected enthusiasm for naval armament. More importantly, though, it also forced him to reconsider the relationship between world power and domestic politics. Race shaped the way he thought about both, and his obsessive fear of Japan forced them together in his mind.

Hobson recognized that the San Francisco school board’s hostility to students of Japanese ancestry was grounded in the domestic politics of immigration policy on the West Coast, where anti-Asian xenophobes were clamoring for Japanese exclusion. Hobson had not always been a supporter of exclusion legislation. In fact, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, he had supported loosening restrictions on Chinese immigration in order to help facilitate the spread of industrialism across the Pacific. But in light of his growing preoccupation with “race antagonism,” Hobson eventually reversed his position. “Wherever two races so far different as to be different in color have come together, one has been subservient to the other, or else endless war has followed,” he wrote in 1908. “The instinct of self-preservation, to escape the fatal consequences of miscegenation, has always engendered race hatred . . . . Following this instinct,” Hobson concluded with approval, “America has excluded Chinese and is now preparing to exclude Japanese.”[14]

A poster reading as follows: "Asiatics Must Not Be Naturalized -- NO JAPS IN OUR SCHOOLS -- CITIZENS' MASS MEETING Will be held in DREAMLAND PAVILLION POST AND STEINER STREETS Monday Eve., Dec. 10 1906 AT 8 O'CLOCK Under the auspices of the Japanese & Korean Exclusion League, A. TVEITMOE, Presiding Officer The Meeting will be Addressed by MAYOR EUGENE E. SCHMITZ HON. FRANK MCGOWAN, Attorney, WALTER MACARTHUR, Editor Coast Seaman's Journal, W. R. HAGGERTY, President San Francisco Labor Council, P. H. MCCARTHY, Pres. State & Local Bldg. Trades Councils, AND OTHER PROMINENT CITIZENS RAIN OR SHINE Be Sure to Attend and Register Your Protest by Your Presence"
A poster advertising an anti-Japanese rally held at the height of the school segregation crisis. Note that the rally was organized “under the auspices of the Japanese & Korean Exclusion League.” San Francisco mayor Eugene Schmitz was an outspoken anti-Asian racist. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It was at this point that the supposed threat of Japanese militarism reentered the picture. For by turning racial injustice into a foreign policy issue, Japan had made it impossible for the United States to enact discriminatory laws without provoking a world crisis. To Hobson, this seemed to leave both countries teetering on the brink of an abyss which only American naval supremacy could bridge. “[T]he possession of a powerful navy is the only way to prevent war following upon the heels of exclusion,” he noted fretfully in a draft of one of his many articles on international affairs. Tellingly, an earlier version of this sentence had ended by asserting that “the possession of a powerful navy is the only way to get exclusion.”[15]

This was an extraordinary claim in and of itself. But its broader implications were equally profound. Naval power, Hobson had come to believe, was more than just an instrument of foreign policy. As one of the bulwarks of national sovereignty, it also played a vital enabling role in the domestic political process. In its absence, Americans would be unable to regulate their internal affairs as they saw fit. This was the lesson Hobson ultimately drew from the school segregation crisis. Alluding obliquely to the tension between industrialism from militarism, he characterized the United States as “a Western democratic republic, built largely upon the right and principal of local self-government,” which had been challenged in the exercise of this right by Japan’s “oriental, absolute monarchy.” Hence the segregation crisis, in which Japanese absolutism had challenged the federal government’s foundational commitment to state and local rights. “Clearly, submission on the part of America can not go on indefinitely,” Hobson concluded. “The challenge of Japan places us in the very presence of war.”[16]

Hobson’s views on school segregation cannot be separated from his identity as a white Democrat from the Deep South. Characteristically, in championing the political rights of racist bigots, he completely ignored the human rights those bigots wanted to violate. Therein lay an enormous contradiction Hobson completely failed to grasp; as a discrete political issue, racism simply doesn’t seem to have mattered to him. What did matter, however, were the twin dangers of “race antagonism” and Japanese military power. Insofar as Hobson could now present those dangers as threats to both national interests abroad and domestic political freedoms, he had found a powerful new means by which to popularize naval expansion.

The Globalization of the American Mind

During the school segregation crisis of 1906–07, local and global politics had collided in a spectacular and illustrative way. Hobson recognized this, and in subsequent years, he exploited it to his advantage. Claims about alleged Japanese assaults on local self-government began to turn up in his speeches and articles. The claims were usually didactic, designed to engage and educate skeptical or distracted audiences. Hobson wanted to prove to the uninitiated that the Japanese threat was real, imminent, and palpably manifest in the lives of American communities.

An especially striking example of this technique marked the climax of the long speech Hobson delivered to Congress in February 1909. The speech’s nominal subject was a bill appropriating money for the diplomatic service. But unsurprisingly, the House soon found itself listening to a lecture on Hobson’s favorite subject, Japanese-American relations. For over fifty minutes, Hobson walked his colleagues through the various points of friction between the two countries. Inevitably, “race antagonism” reared its ugly head; so, too, did the school segregation crisis. Then, Hobson invited the House to consider what he characterized as a second violation of San Francisco’s civic autonomy. The previous year, a Japanese consul had persuaded the municipal government to give five Japanese citizens special permission to sell alcohol locally, despite the fact that a xenophobic city ordinance forbade officials from issuing liquor licenses to foreigners. Hobson made note of the incident for the House’s benefit, claiming—absurdly and erroneously—that the American ambassador to Japan had personally endorsed the Japanese consul’s legally dubious request in order to avoid a diplomatic rupture.[17]

At this point, Hobson prepared to move on to a new topic. But before he could do so, his remarks about the licensing incident caused an uproar on the House floor. Several members of Congress, who were apparently unfamiliar with the local politics of San Francisco, reacted as though their colleague from Alabama had just exposed a major domestic political scandal, interrupting his speech one by one to demand clarification. This annoyed Hobson tremendously, and when a stubborn California congressman tried to pick a fight with him, he lost his temper. “Oh, I am not here to quibble,” he snapped. “The gentleman misses the point entirely.”[18]

Boldly reasserting control of the House, Hobson proceeded to make the point his colleagues had missed.  The result was a moment of rhetorical drama that transformed an argument about local politics into a teachable moment on the subject of American national security. The details of the licensing incident receded into the background as Hobson clarified the stakes: at issue, he explained, was not San Francisco’s liquor law but the “inalienable right” of “local self-government”—“the right,” Hobson thundered, “for which Anglo-Saxons have fought for thousands of years [applause], the right for which our forefathers fought.” It was also the right Hobson thought American officials were surrendering under Japanese pressure. But his aim was not to criticize their actions; “On the contrary,” Hobson clarified, “I say it is right for them to do as they have done and are doing, in dropping the Japanese question in legislatures and in city councils. My investigations have shown that there is no way to settle these questions while we are defenseless in the Pacific.”[19]

From here, a pivot back to Hobson’s main theme was easy, and in one fell swoop, the congressman from Alabama laid bare the inner workings of his worldview. “If our people are going to be so neglectful,” he roared, “so self-centered in their own interests, that they will not take an account of their country’s growing danger; will not even open their eyes when daily occurrences show the crying necessity to provide for the power that is needed to have a rational and peaceful settlement of grave difficulties, then it is right for them to put on sackcloth and ashes and submit to the humiliation that is necessary to avoid war.”[20] It was a stinging indictment, and of course, its underlying message was obvious. According to Hobson, so long as the enemies of navalism kept the United States vulnerable abroad, American rights and American honor would remain insecure at home.

The Imagination of National Security

“[I]n the era of globalization in the early twentieth century,” the historian Hajimu Masuda wrote over a decade ago, “global events quickly reached the other side of the earth and influenced local people’s way of thinking, which in turn swayed local politics and, by extension, influenced national and international politics.” Masuda was describing what happened on both sides of the Pacific during and after school segregation crisis. Facilitated by the advent of mass media and high-speed telegraphic communication systems, “considerable antagonism arose. Racism flared up. Newspapers and magazines carried rumors of war. And novels began to imagine possible wars between Japan and the United States.”[21]

Surveying this volatile landscape a hundred years earlier, Hobson had seen evidence of “race antagonism,” a supposedly inexorable, biological force. Masuda saw something different. Instead of blaming the breakdown in Japanese-American relations on deep-seated animus, he cited it as an example of social construction, a process which had allowed spontaneous, uncoordinated expressions of public opinion to change the course of international relations. Persistent popular rumors of war had intersected with localized racial anxieties to generate new rumors in a kind of vicious cycle.[22]

Hobson himself had played an important role in this process. From his bully pulpit in Congress, he insisted that war with Japan was imminent over and over again. His views were controversial, mocked as often as they were praised. But without question, they helped popularize the notion that Japan and the United States were mortal enemies doomed to engage in a fight for control of the Pacific.

A cartoon by in which Hobson appears as a diminutive figure in an enormous military cap, beating a drum and bellowing "War! War! War!" through a bugle. Uncle Sam, seated in a chair, looks on with concern. A small bear--the signature creation of cartoonist Clifford Berryman--appears dismayed and covers its ears at left.
A cartoon mocking Hobson and the war rumors he spread throughout his career. (The creature at left is a teddy bear, a visual signature of cartoonist Clifford Berryman.) Source: Library of Congress.

Equally significant, however, was the way in which Hobson demonized Japan. His speeches and articles did more than just exaggerate and sensationalize the abstract threat of war. They invited Americans to reimagine the world around them, to see a terrible alien evil lurking behind “daily occurrences” in American domestic politics. For Hobson, globalization was more than just a process facilitated passively by technological change. It was a deliberate act of interpretation, a state of mind.

Hobson clearly anticipated the emergence of what foreign affairs scholar Dexter Fergie has dubbed the “national security imagination,” a way of looking at the world that made an assertive, militarized defense of American democracy “thinkable” during the crisis years of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.[23] Tragically, one of the forces responsible for catalyzing Hobson’s own national security imagination, and the primary tool with which he sought to awaken it in others, was racism. That’s something we’d do well to remember today. As we turn, once again, to confront a geopolitical rival in the Pacific against a backdrop of rising anti-Asian violence at home, the story of Hobson’s hateful career ought to stand as a powerful warning to all of us. Its protagonist was a demagogue who used racism to hammer home an inflammatory message of inevitable conflict. We should be wary of anyone else who attempts to do the same.

John Gleb is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin and a graduate student fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. John’s research traces the emergence of national security as a concept by documenting attempts to mobilize public opinion on behalf of foreign and defense policy during the early twentieth century.

[1] Congressional Record 43 (1909), 2659.

[2] ibid.

[3] Remarks about militarism and industrialism show up in many of Hobson’s speeches and articles, but for a comprehensive overview, see the undated manuscript entitled “America’s Mighty Mission,” in Box 28, Folder 3 of the Richmond P. Hobson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (henceforth: Hobson Papers).

[4] ibid., 16–17.

[5] ibid., 40–42.

[6] ibid., esp. 20–22.

[7] Hobson laid out his views on China, Russia, and Japan in an unpublished manuscript entitled “American Naval Policy in Light of the Russo-Japanese War” (Hobson Papers, Box 28, Folder 3). Part of the manuscript appears to be missing, but what survives conveys a great deal of substance, and a long section on Japan remains intact. Hobson did not date the manuscript, but since its analysis of the Japanese threat makes no mention the San Francisco school segregation crisis (described later in this essay), it seems safe to assume that he wrote it before 1907.

[8] ibid.,47–48.

[9] ibid., 56–59.

[10] For a detailed account of the school segregation crisis and its international ramifications, see Charles E. Neu, An Uncertain Friendship: Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, 1906–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014 [orig. 1967]), esp. 20–88. A more recent article on the war scare itself is Masuda Hajimu, “Rumors of War: Immigration Disputes and the Social Construction of American-Japanese Relations, 1905–1913,” in Diplomatic History 33/1 (2009): 1–37. For the leak, see “Seek to Avert War: President, Root, and Taft Point Out Crisis over Japan,” Washington Post, 1 February 1907, 1.

[11] “Perkins Expects a Conflict,” New York Times, 2 February 1907, 2. For Hobson’s August 1906 comment, see “Captain Hobson Sees Peace in Great Navy,” Washington Post, 8 August 1906, 4.

[12] “Perkins Expects a Conflict,” 2.

[13] ibid.

[14] For these remarks, see pp. 35–36 of the unpublished draft of Hobson’s article “Disarmament,” dated September 1908, in the Hobson Papers, Box 28, Folder 2. Part of this draft was published the following month under the same title in the American Journal of International Law 2/4 (1908), 743–57. However, the published version omits the draft’s lengthy discussion of exclusion and the Japanese military threat in the Pacific.

Hobson criticized Chinese exclusion in his manuscript on “American Naval Policy in Light of the Russo-Japanese War.” He did so, however, on explicitly racist grounds: assuming that hard work was naturally “congenial to the Chinese,” he argued that white Americans should let “the chinaman” free them from any obligation to perform “cramping and injurious forms of labor.” “In the great industrial life of the world now opening up,” he wrote, “there will be chinamen enough to keep all the white men engaged in supervision, directing, controlling, and organizing, forms of work adapted to the white man.” Hobson, “American Naval Policy” manuscript, 44.

[15] Hobson, “Disarmament” draft, 36.

[16] ibid., 37–38.

[17] For the full text of Hobson’s speech, see Congressional Record 43 (1909), 2655–62. Hobson’s remarks on “race antagonism,” the school segregation crisis, and the liquor licensing incident all appear on p. 2659.

[18] ibid., 2659–60.

[19] ibid., 2660.

[20] ibid.

[21] Masuda, “Rumors of War,” 4.

[22] This is the main argument presented in ibid.

[23] On the “national security imagination,” see Dexter Fergie, “Geopolitics Turned Inward: The Princeton Military Studies Group and the National Security Imagination,” Diplomatic History 43/4 (2019): 644–70.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

This is Democracy: Gorbachev

Today, Jeremi and Zachary discuss the significance and legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev and his political career with professor, author, and political scientist Dr. William Taubman.

Zachary reads his poem, “What Mikhail Thought of.”

Guest

William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at Amherst College. He is one of the foremost experts on Russia in the United States, and the author of numerous prize-winning books, including: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era , which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Gorbachev: His Life and Times, published in 2017.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Morgan Honaker.

About This is Democracy

The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. This podcast will draw on historical knowledge to inspire a contemporary democratic renaissance. The past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment — and each show will offer a serious way to do that! This podcast will bring together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Our goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. Dr. Jeremi Suri, a renowned scholar of democracy, will host the podcast and moderate discussions.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

This is Democracy: Leadership

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by American historian Mark Updegrove. They discuss Mark’s recent book, Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency and President John F. Kennedy’s popularity and lasting legacy.

Zachary reads his poem, “Never Again the Same.”

Guest

Mark K. Updegrove is an American author, historian, journalist, and Presidential Historian for ABC News. He is the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation in Austin, Texas. Previously, he served as the director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum for eight years.

He is the author of five books including his latest, The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, published in 2017. His latest book, Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency, was published by Dutton in April 2022. He is also the executive producer of the CNN original series “LBJ: Triumph and Tragedy.”

This episode of This is Democracy was edited, mixed, and mastered by Morgan Honaker.

About This is Democracy

The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. This podcast will draw on historical knowledge to inspire a contemporary democratic renaissance. The past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment — and each show will offer a serious way to do that! This podcast will bring together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Our goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. Dr. Jeremi Suri, a renowned scholar of democracy, will host the podcast and moderate discussions.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Introducing “Uncharted Waters,” a New Article Series from Not Even Past and the Clements Center for National Security

Commentators and scholars have long represented the United States as the supreme guarantor of a well-tempered international order. Today, however, the picture looks far murkier. Agents of American international relations find themselves confronting uncertainty both at home and abroad. New and unpredictable threats to national security, public health, and the global environment loom large on the horizon. Existing institutions and strategic paradigms are struggling to meet the moment. And with domestic political consensus in jeopardy, American policymakers may find it hard to act consistently and with confidence on the world stage.

As they navigate the uncharted waters of global politics, representatives of the United States and its international interlocutors can look to their shared past for insight. There are lessons, some positive, some deeply negative, to be learned in the long, complicated, and often messy history of the United States in the world. Narratives tracing the rise and contours of what has been called American hyperpower form an important part of that history. Equally important, however, are stories about fog-shrouded horizons and unexpected opportunities, stories in which unease, confusion, and leaps into the dark played a decisive role in shaping the outcomes of global events.

In our latest series, “Uncharted Waters,” Not Even Past will bring those stories to life through detailed historical case studies, highlighting moments when American foreign policy agents grappled with the uncertainties of power. Material for the series will come from the cutting-edge research projects like the ones supported by our co-sponsor, the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Through “Uncharted Waters,” Not Even Past and the Clements Center will show you tantalizing glimpses of global uncertainty past, present, and future.

The Clements Center's logo. The logo's text reads: "The University of Texas at Austin Clements Center for National Security. History. Strategy. Statecraft."
Image courtesy of the Clements Center for National Security.

Articles featured in “Uncharted Waters” will be descriptive, not prescriptive. Instead of advocating for or against specific contemporary policies, they will illuminate a rich past, filled with uncertainty and anxiety, which saw Americans position and reposition themselves across a series of fast-changing global landscapes. Calling attention to the complexity of these international and transnational histories will not solve the problems confronting the United States today. But it will, we hope, provide insight into the current moment. After all, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Series Overview

“Yellow Peril” and Naval Power: Richmond P. Hobson and the Racist Imagination of American National Security — by John Gleb

What role has racism played in the history of U. S. national security? In the first installment of “Uncharted Waters,” series creator and NEP Associate Editor John Gleb finds an answer in the hateful career of Richmond P. Hobson, a virulent anti-Asian racist who became a prominent advocate of American naval expansion during the early 1900s. Gleb’s article explains how two closely-related aspects of Hobson’s worldview—his faith in the benevolence of American power and his ugly, racist fear of the so-called “Yellow Peril”—combined to determine how he thought about national security. As Gleb puts it, Hobson’s racist fantasies mattered “both in spite and because of the way they warped the world around him”: “Not only did they condition his responses to political events both at home and abroad; in doing so, they also performed important intellectual work, reinforcing and eventually transforming the underpinnings of his outlook on foreign affairs.”

Click here to read the article

Crises as Catalysts: The Case for Optimism in Future U. S.-Russia Arms Control Negotiations — by Jon Buchleiter

Has the war in Ukraine doomed arms control? Maybe not, posits Clements Center graduate student fellow Jon Buchleiter in the second instalment of “Uncharted Waters.” Buchleiter presents a fresh take on contemporary U. S.-Russia tensions by calling attention to the surprising long-term side effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which wound up encouraging leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain to dial down their Cold War arms race. Originally published to mark the 60th anniversary of the Missile Crisis, Buchleiter’s article demonstrates that episodes of international instability can—under the right circumstances—catalyze rather than derail arms control negotiations. More specifically, the article suggests that “a thoughtful understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis, its context, and its aftermath can inform U. S. responses to the ongoing upheaval in Ukraine and prepare for a postwar period that may present an opportunity for détente.”

Click here to read the article

Buchleiter’s conclusions present an interesting contrast to the ones Jeremi Suri drew in a recent Not Even Past feature. It’s also one of several noteworthy responses to the war in Ukraine published by UT-Austin graduate students and faculty.

Confronting Dictatorship: Jimmy Carter and Human Rights Diplomacy in Argentina — by Gabrielle Esparza

In its pursuit of order and its search for reliable allies, U. S. foreign policy has often been slow to challenge—and has sometimes actively supported—dictatorship and repression abroad. But with the right kind of support from above, American diplomats can also advance the cause of human rights, special guest author Gabrielle Esparza reminds us in the third instalment of “Uncharted Waters.” Through a careful exploration of U. S.-Argentine relations at the end of the 1970s, Esparza’s article evaluates the transformative presidency of Jimmy Carter, who famously upended Washington’s long-standing alliance with authoritarian anticommunism in Latin America. Esparza explains how this bold political realignment facilitated an equally important shift in the State Department’s institutional culture. “By championing human rights diplomacy,” she concludes, “Carter not only dramatically redefined the U. S. Cold War relationship with Argentina but also expanded the political imaginations of and the range of action available to agents of U. S. foreign policy.”

Click here to read the article

From Camp David to Baghdad: Scrambling For and Against Peace in the Middle East, Fall 1978 — by Benjamin V. Allison

Benjamin V. Allison helped “Uncharted Waters” kick off Spring 2023 by diving deep into the archives. His article—the fourth in our series—analyzes the volatile and multi-layered history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Highlighting the fragility of the uneasy peace process undergirding the landmark Camp David Accords of 1978, Allison tells a classic Cold War story with an enduring lesson, one the U. S. “has failed to learn time and again”–“a story of how relatively weak states can create significant problems for powerful countries.”

Click here to read the article

Keep an eye out for the next instalment of Uncharted Waters!

About the Clements Center

The William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin draws on the best insights of diplomatic and military history to train the next generation of national security leaders. Established in 2013 with the support of distinguished policymakers and scholars, the Clements Center is a nonpartisan research and policy center uniquely positioned in the Office of the President.

The Clements Center honors former Texas Governor Bill Clements and his leadership on national security during his service as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1973-77. Clements managed the Pentagon and helped guide American national security policy during a critical time. He brought a deep appreciation for history to every aspect of his leadership, policies, and decision-making.

The Clements Center carries forward Bill Clements’ legacy by:

Celebrating 200 Episodes of This Is Democracy: A Conversation about Conversations with Jeremi and Zachary Suri

By John Gleb

Jeremi Suri is worried about the way Americans talk about politics. “There’s something missing,” he tells me. “We have voices and words being thrown around, but it’s not democracy.” Suri and I are discussing This Is Democracy, the immensely popular podcast he produces in collaboration with Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS). The occasion is a landmark event in the podcast’s history: This Is Democracy has just recorded its 200th episode.

Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s also the author of a new book, entitled Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. In short, he’s an expert on the subject at hand, and many of the guests who appear on his podcast have similarly impressive pedigrees. Nevertheless, Suri insists that showcasing expertise isn’t his sole objective. Ideas matter to him, but so does the process by which they’re communicated. “Democracy,” he says, “is conversation.”

For the last four years, Suri has tried to provide a catalyst for the democratic process by using his podcast to model the art of conversation. Each episode features a guest expert and spotlights an issue of clear political significance. Past audiences have tuned in to hear former UN ambassador Samantha Power on human rights, career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch on the war in Ukraine, and (most recently) the renowned economic historian Adam Tooze on inflation. But really, he just wants to get guests talking. The conversations he sets in motion are spontaneous by design. Although Suri does background research before heading to the recording studio, he never uses a script, and he always tries to nudge guests away from prepared remarks. With this latter goal in mind, he also deploys a secret weapon: his 17-year-old son Zachary, who hosts This Is Democracy alongside his father.

Jeremi and Zachary Suri recording an episode of This Is Democracy with one of their guests
Jeremi Suri (left) and his son Zachary (center) record an episode of This Is Democracy with historian Charles Edel (right), 11 March 2019. Source: Jeremi Suri.

Zachary’s role on the podcast is one of its signature features. At the beginning of each episode, the younger Suri recites an original poem relevant to the topic under discussion. The poem expresses Zachary’s own political views, but it’s also designed to elicit unforced reactions from guests. It’s the first thing they hear, and it sets the tone for the conversation that follows—a conversation in which the teenaged co-host gets to take part as an equal.

Zachary shares some of the frustration young Americans feel when they get shut out of conversations that matter. One of his poems, written for a podcast episode entitled “Give Young People the Vote,” addresses itself to an older generation which, with “haggard face . . . held high, like a crest or a shield, . . . wander[s] the halls in . . . sleep. We have watched your somnambulations,” the poem warns. “We have watched you walk headfirst into a wall.” But while he’s willing to provoke guests, Zachary doesn’t try to start fights. Like his father, he wants to talk. “A lot of young people view politics as us speaking truth to power,” he says. “What I learned was how to actually listen and then ask a really relevant question.”

For Suri, his son’s coequal status exemplifies the spirit of This Is Democracy. “It’s not only that we bring on a range of guests. We don’t have a hierarchy,” he declares with pride. “Everyone is treated as a contributor whose comments are serious and fact-based and valuable for our common discovery.” It’s a format that perfectly reproduces the way Suri sees democracy itself: an endless, boundless conversation carried on outside the constricting halls of established institutions, always changing and never beholden to external authority. In podcast form, the result is (as Suri puts it) something that usually sounds “more like a salon than an expert seminar.”

It’s no coincidence that Suri has alluded to the drawing rooms of nineteenth-century Europe. We’d just been talking about Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political theorist whose magnum opus, Democracy in America, remains a standard reference work even though it was written nearly two centuries ago. Like Suri, Tocqueville understood the dynamic, liberating power of conversation—a power he recognized in the United States because he sensed its absence in his aristocratic homeland. It strikes me that Suri, too, has framed his understanding of democracy around a conviction that contemporary political discourse lacks something important. So what exactly do he and his son think we’re missing?

As we talk, they articulate several different answers—sometimes at odds with each other. At one point, Suri says that he thinks Americans are becoming too pessimistic. Zachary interjects. A certain amount of pessimism is warranted, he suggests. “Our democracy is actually a lot more broken than we thought it was when we started the podcast.” “And it’s fixable,” Suri immediately insists. Zachary laughs. “I don’t know about that,” he says with a wry smile. “Maybe it’s fixable, but I’m not always sure we’re going to fix it.”

On one point, however, both father and son concur: too many barriers separate specialist knowledge from the citizens it ought to serve. It’s a conviction that cuts in two directions. Suri recognizes that experts err when they talk down to curiosity. His podcast, he tells me, is meant for “people who want to understand their world, but who feel frustrated. They don’t want to be told what they should know, but they do want to be given the tools they need to understand the world themselves.” That doesn’t mean expertise ought to be shunned. In fact, it’s essential in a world flooded with misinformation and disinformation. “We want the people who are looking for conversation in the wrong places to come to us,” Suri explains, “and have that conversation with real experts.”

Jeremi and Zachary Suri in their recording studio with former UN ambassador Samantha Power
Suri and Zachary pose for a photo with podcast guest Samantha Power, former US ambassador to the United Nations, 2 October 2019. Source: Jeremi Suri.

It’s this emphasis on imparting knowledge through conversation that has made Suri and his son somewhat wary of the label “free speech,” which describes something that democracy embraces but from which it doesn’t always benefit. On This Is Democracy, the speech is, of course, always free. But as Suri points out, “not everything deserves to be amplified.” Zachary agrees. A conversation worthy of their podcast, he asserts, “has to be a conversation that is meaningful.” It should also encourage more and better speech—the speech itself ought to be liberating, not merely free. Suri lays great emphasis on this point. “Offensive rhetoric closes off conversation,” he tells me firmly. “Ideological talking points close off conversation.”

Instead of generating noisy, offensive speech, Suri and his son want to help people understand and appreciate a broad range of informed viewpoints. For Zachary, “democracy is all these different modes of action or activism that should be changing the way we think about our world.” It encompasses everyone’s concerns—including the concerns of young Americans like him. Zachary doesn’t pretend to speak for his entire generation. “Obviously there is no single youth perspective, and I’m getting a distorted sense of what that perspective might be,” he admits. “But that’s not really the point. The point is not the perspective but asking the question”—namely, what do young people think? Suri agrees. To ask the question at all, he tells me, “destabilizes the perspective that things can only be thought about in one way.”

As they tout their commitment to pluralism, both Suri and Zachary acknowledge that they’re less than fully satisfied with what they’ve managed to achieve so far. In future, they want to host an even more diverse pool of guests and find ways to engage new listeners—especially young listeners, whom they hope will be drawn to the podcast format. But for Team Suri, working through these problems is an essential part of the democratic process. And as hosts of a podcast that now stands in the top 2% worldwide in terms of listening audience, they have a lot to be proud of already, even as they anticipate more hard work to come. “The 200th episode marks the fact that we’ve started a conversation,” Suri says of This Is Democracy. “But like democracy, it’s constantly evolving.”

Jeremi and Zachary Suri celebrating the recording of This Is Democracy's 200th episode with members of the LAITS production team
Suri and Zachary celebrate the recording of This Is Democracy‘s 200th episode with members of the LAITS production team. Source: Jeremi Suri.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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