Contrasting Approaches in History: Ideas vs. Material Lives

How can an interdisciplinary approach to the study of our past help our understanding of history? How transformative was the Spanish Empire’s global influence and how did they accomplish it?

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the author of several books including How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided, and Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food.

Felipe and Greg discuss the hunger for simple, moral narratives in history, a stark contrast to the reality of multifaceted characters and events that shaped our world. They scrutinize the legacy of Cortez and the Spanish conquest, challenging notions that have influenced our moral judgments of history. Felipe also takes on some myths surrounding the technological prowess of the Spanish Empire.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

What did engineers contribute to the political functioning of an empire?

24:02: What did engineers contribute to the political functioning of the empire? And I think that was crucial as well. Because if you've got an empire, especially if you've got a pre-industrial empire like that of Spain, and you're trying to manage this vast enterprise from a very small country with a very small population, a very restricted domestic resource base, a poor, small country, in order to do that, you need indigenous collaborators. You mentioned the Black Legend, of Spanish cruelty and oppression. No matter how cruel or oppressive you are, you can't run an empire of that sort with pre-industrial technology unless you can reconcile sufficient indigenous people to it.

What can we learn about hatred from history?

41:22: One of the lessons I've learned from history is that hatred is an intractable emotion that has extraordinary enduring powers, and people tend to change their friends a lot. The history of international relations is basically the history of shifting alliances. People always change their friends, but they keep the same enemies. I think, for all the good intentions of the Spaniards, they never quite created the sort of Pax Hispanica, which might fully deserve the name. Of course, Pax Romana didn't deserve the name either.

History isn't a science

51:08: For me, history isn't a science. It's an art; it's a humanistic discipline. I make no apology for that revel in it. That's what makes it fascinating, because the problems of science are fundamentally solvable; if they're genuinely problems of science, they're fundamentally solvable. When scientists take on subjects beyond their province, like, you know, "What's the origin of the cosmos?" or "Does God exist?" all those sorts of questions. Now, science—that's rather foolish and ambitious on the part of a scientist; if a question is genuinely scientific, then it's in principle answerable. If a problem is scientific, it's, in principle, solvable. Whereas a problem in the humanities is, in principle, insoluble because you can never have a completely objective assessment of the evidence.

The nature of truth in historical narratives

07:27: A very important truth about history is that we don't know what the truth is. We know only the truth of what the sources say, so we know what particular people who've left us sources wanted us to think. And to some extent, I suppose we can corroborate that against archaeological evidence or dispassionate statistics if they happen to be available. But essentially, the problem of being a historian and telling the truth is that the evidence is not present to our senses, so we cannot test it in the same way that we can test the truth of assertions that are made by things that are happening in our own time.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• R. G. Collingwood
• Leopold von Ranke
• History of the Conquest of Mexico
• Pax Romana
• Pax Americana
• Pax Hispanica
• Reconquista

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Notre Dame
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History
• 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided
• Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature
• Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
• A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change — and the Limits of Evolution
• The Oxford History of the World
• Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America
• The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction
• The Americas: A Hemispheric History
• Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan
• Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food
• Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration
• Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It
• The World: A History, Volume 2
• Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed
• Approaches to Global History: To See the World Whole
• Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492
• Columbus
• So You Think You're Human: A Brief History of Humankind