Creole Pioneers
The new American states of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries are of unusual interest because it seems almost impossible to
explain them in terms of two factors which, probably because they are
readily derivable from the mid-century nationalisms of Europe, have
dominated much provincial European thinking about the rise of
nationalism.
In the first place, whether we think of Brazil, the USA, or the former
colonies of Spain, language was not an element that differentiated them
from their respective imperial metropoles. All, including the USA, were
creole states, formed and led by people who shared a common language
and common descent with those against whom they fought. Indeed, it
is fair to say that language was never even an issue in these early struggles
for national liberation.
In the second place, there are serious reasons to doubt the applicability
in much of the Western hemisphere of Nairn's otherwise
persuasive thesis that:
The arrival of nationalism in a distinctively modern sense was tied to
the political baptism of the lower classes . . . Although sometimes
1. Creole (Criollo) - person of (at least theoretically) pure European descent but
born in the Americas (and, by later extension, anywhere outside Europe).
47
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
hostile to democracy, nationalist movements have been invariably
populist in outlook and sought to induct lower classes into political
life. In its most typical version, this assumed the shape of a restless
middle-class and intellectual leadership trying to sit up and channel
popular class energies into support for the new states.2
At least in South and Central America, European-style 'middle
classes' were still insignificant at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nor was there much in the way of an intelligentsia. For 'in those quiet
colonial days little reading interrupted the stately and snobbish rhythm
of men's lives.' As we have seen, the first Spanish-American novel was
published only in 1816, well after the wars for independence had
broken out. The evidence clearly suggests that leadership was held by
substantial landowners, allied with a somewhat smaller number of
merchants, and various types of professional (lawyers, military men,
local and provincial functionaries).
Far from seeking to 'induct the lower classes into political life,' one
key factor initially spurring the drive for independence from Madrid,
in such important cases as Venezuela, Mexico and Peru, was .the fear of
'lower-class' political mobilizations: to wit, Indian or Negro-slave
uprisings.5
(This fear only increased when Hegel's 'secretary of the
World-Spirit' conquered Spain in 1808, thereby depriving the Creoles
of peninsular military backup in case of emergency.) In Peru,
memories of the great jacquerie led by Tupac Amaru (1740—1781)
were still fresh. In 1791, Toussaint L'Ouverture led an insurrection of
black slaves that produced in 1804 the second independent republic in
the Western hemisphere — and terrified the great slave-owning
2. The Break-up of Britain, p. 41.
3. Gerhard Masur, Simon Bolivar, p. 17.
4. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 14-17 and passim. These proportions
arose from the fact that the more important commercial and administrative
functions were largely monopolized by Spain-born Spaniards, while land-owning was
fully open to Creoles.
5. In this respect there are clear analogies with Boer nationalism a century later.
6. It is perhaps notable that Tupac Amaru did not entirely repudiate allegiance to
the Spanish king. He and his followers (largely Indians, but also some whites and
mestizos) rose in fury against the regime in Lima. Masur, Bolivar, p. 24.
48
CREOLE PIONEERS
planters of Venezuela.7
When, in 1789, Madrid issued a new, more
humane, slave law specifying in detail the rights and duties of masters
and slaves, 'the Creoles rejected state intervention on the grounds that
slaves were prone to vice and independence [!], and were essential to
the economy. In Venezuela - indeed all over the Spanish Caribbean -
8 i
planters resisted the law and procured its suspension in 1794.' The
Liberator Bolivar himself once opined that a Negro revolt was 'a
thousand times worse than a Spanish invasion.' Nor should we forget
that many leaders of the independence movement in the Thirteen
Colonies were slave-owning agrarian magnates. Thomas Jefferson
himself was among the Virginian planters who in the 1770s were
enraged by the loyalist governor's proclamation freeing those slaves
who broke with their seditious masters.10
It is instructive that one
reason why Madrid made a successful come-back in Venezuela from
1814-1816 and held remote Quito until 1820 was that she won the
support of slaves in the former, and of Indians in the latter, in the11
struggle against insurgent Creoles. Moreover, the long duration of
the continental struggle against Spain, by then a second-rate European
power and one itself recently conquered, suggests a certain 'social
thinness' to these Latin American independence movements.
Yet they were national independence movements. Bolivar came to
1 2 * • *
change his mind about slaves, and his fellow-liberator San Martin
decreed in 1821 that 'in the future the aborigines shall not be called
7. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 201.
8. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 192.
9. Ibid., p. 224.
10. Edward S. Morgan, 'The Heart of Jefferson,' The New York Review of Books,
August 17, 1978, p. 2.
11. Masur, Bolivar, p. 207; Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 237.
12. Not without some twists and turns. He freed his own slaves shortly after
Venezuela's declaration of independence in 1810. When he fled to Haiti in 1816, he
obtained military assistance from President Alexandre Petion in return for a promise to
end slavery in all territories liberated. The promise was redeemed in Caracas in 1818 but
it should be remembered that Madrid's successes in Venezuela between 1814 and
1816 were in part due to her emancipation of loyal slaves. When Bolivar became
president of Gran Colombia (Venezuela, New Granada and Ecuador) in 1821, he asked
for and obtained from Congress a law freeing the sons of slaves. He 'had not asked
Congress to wipe out slavery because he did not want to incur the resentment of the big
landowners.' Masur, Bolivar, pp. 125, 206-207, 329, and 388.
49
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Indians or natives; they are children and citizens of Peru and they shall be
13
known as Peruvians.' (We might add: in spite of the fact that as yet
print-capitalism had not reached these illiterates.)
Here then is the riddle: why was it precisely Creole communities that
developed so early conceptions of their nation-ness — well before most of
Europe? Why did such colonial provinces, usually containing large,
oppressed, non-Spanish-speaking populations, produce Creoles who
consciously redefined these populations as fellow-nationals? And
Spain,14
to whom they were, in so many ways, attached, as an enemy
alien? Why did the Spanish-American Empire, which had existed
calmly for almost three centuries, quite suddenly fragment into eighteen
separate states?
The two factors most commonly adduced in explanation are the
tightening of Madrid's control and the spread of the liberalizing ideas
of the Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It is
undoubtedly true that the policies pursued by the capable 'enlightened
despot' Carlos III (r. 1759—1788) increasingly frustrated, angered,
and alarmed the upper Creole classes. In what has sometimes
sardonically been called the second conquest of the Americas, Madrid
imposed new taxes, made their collection more efficient, enforced
metropolitan commercial monopolies, restricted intra-hemispheric
trade to its own advantage, centralized administrative hierarchies,15
and promoted a heavy immigration of peninsulares. Mexico, for
example, in the early eighteenth century provided the Crown with
an annual revenue of about 3,000,000 pesos. By the century's end,
however, the sum had almost quintupled to 14,000,000, of which
only 4,000,000 were used to defray the costs of local administration.
Parallel to this, the level of peninsular migration by the decade
13. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 276. Emphasis added.
14. An anachronism. In the eighteenth century the usual term was still Las Espanas
[the Spains], not Espaiia [Spain]. Seton Watson, Nations and States, p. 53.
15. This new metropolitan aggressiveness was partly the product of Enlightenment
doctrines, partly of chronic fiscal problems, and partly, after 1779, of war with England.
Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 4-17.
16. Ibid., p. 301. Four millions went to subsidize administration of other parts of
Spanish America, while six millions were pure profit.
50
CREOLE PIONEERS
1780-1790 was five times as high as it had been between 1710-
1730.17
There is also no doubt that improving trans-Atlantic communications,
and the fact that the various Americas shared languages and
cultures with their respective metropoles, meant a relatively rapid and
easy transmission of the new economic and political doctrines being
produced in Western Europe. The success of the Thirteen Colonies'
revolt at the end of the 1770s, and the onset of the French Revolution
at the end of the 1780s, did not fail to exert a powerful influence.
Nothing confirms this 'cultural revolution' more than the pervasive
republicanism of the newly independent communities. Nowhere was
any serious attempt made to recreate the dynastic principle in the
Americas, except in Brazil; even there, it would probably not have
been possible without the immigration in 1808 of the Portuguese
dynast himself, in flight from Napoleon. (He stayed there for 13 years,
and, on returning home, had his son crowned locally as Pedro I of
Brazil.)19
Yet the aggressiveness of Madrid and the spirit of liberalism, while
central to any understanding of the impulse of resistance in the Spanish
Americas, do not in themselves explain why entities like Chile,
Venezuela, and Mexico turned out to be emotionally plausible and
17. Ibid., p. 17.
18. The Constitution of the First Venezuelan Republic (1811) was in many places
borrowed verbatim from that of the United States. Masur, Bolivar, p. 131.
19. A superb, intricate analysis of the structural reasons for Brazilian exceptionalism
can be found in Jose Murilo de Carvalho, 'Political Elites and State Building:
The Case of Nineteenth-Century Brazil', Comparative Studies in Society and History,
24:3 (1982), pp. 378-99. Two of the more important factors were: (1) Educational
differences. While 'twenty-three universities were scattered in what eventually would
become thirteen different countries' in the Spanish Americas, 'Portugal refused
systematically to allow the organization of any institution of higher learning in her
colonies, not considering as such the theological seminaries.' Higher education was
only to be had in Coimbra University, and thither, in the motherland, went the Creole
elite's children, the great majority studying in the faculty of law. (2) Different career
possibilities for Creoles. De Carvalho notes 'the much greater exclusion of Americanborn
Spaniards from the higher posts in the Spanish side [sic].' See also Stuart B,
Schwartz, 'The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil,' chapter 2 in Nicholas
Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800,
who notes in passing (p. 38) that 'no printing press operated in Brazil during the first
three centuries of the colonial era.'
51
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
2 0 *
politically viable, nor why San Martin should decree that certain
aborigines be identified by the neological 'Peruvians.' Nor, ultimately,
do they account for the real sacrifices made. For while it is certain that
the upper Creole classes, conceived as historical social formations, did nicely
out of independence over the long haul, many actual members of those
classes living between 1808 and 1828 were financially ruined. (To take
only one example: during Madrid's counter-offensive of 1814—16
'more than two-thirds of Venezuela's landowning families suffered
21
heavy confiscations.' ) And just as many willingly gave up their lives
for the cause. This willingness to sacrifice on the part of comfortable
classes is food for thought.
What then? The beginnings of an answer lie in the striking fact that
'each of the new South American republics had been an adminis-22
trative unit from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.' In this
respect they foreshadowed the new states of Africa and parts of Asia in
the mid twentieth century, and form a sharp contrast to the new
European states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The original shaping of the American administrative units was to
some extent arbitrary and fortuitous, marking the spatial limits of
particular military conquests. But, over time, they developed a firmer
reality under the influence of geographic, political and economic
factors. The very vastness of the Spanish American empire, the
enormous variety of its soils and climates, and, above all, the immense
difficulty of communications in a pre-industrial age, tended to give
these units a self-contained character. (In the colonial era the sea
journey from Buenos Aires to Acapulco took four months, and the
return trip even longer; the overland trek from Buenos Aires to23
Santiago normally lasted two months, and that to Cartagena nine. )
In addition, Madrid's commercial policies had the effect of turning
administrative units into separate economic zones. 'All competition
20. Much the same could be said of London's stance vis-a-vis the Thirteen
Colonies, and of the ideology of the 1776 Revolution.
21. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 208; cf. Masur, Bolivar, pp. 98-99
and 231.
22. Masur, Bolivar, p. 678.
23. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 25-26.
52
CREOLE PIONEERS
with the mother country was forbidden the Americans, and even the
individual parts of the continent could not trade with each other.
American goods en route from one side of America to the other had
to travel circuitously through Spanish ports, and Spanish navigation
24
had a monopoly on trade with the colonies.' These experiences help
to explain why 'one of the basic principles of the American revolution'
was that of 'uti possidetis by which each nation was to preserve
the territorial status quo of 1810, the year when the movement25
for independence had been inaugurated.' Their influence also
doubtless contributed to the break-up of Bolivar's short-lived Gran
Colombia and of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata into
their older constituents (which today are known as VenezuelaColombia-Ecuador
and Argentina-Uruguay-Paraguay-Bolivia). Nonetheless,
in themselves, market-zones, 'natural'-geographic or politicoadministrative,
do not create attachments. Who will willingly die for
Comecon or the EEC?
To see how administrative units could, over time, come to be conceived
as fatherlands, not merely in the Americas but in other parts of
the world, one has to look at the ways in which administrative
organizations create meaning. The anthropologist Victor Turner has
written illuminatingly about the journey', between times, statuses and
26
places, as a meaning-creating experience. All such journeys require
interpretation (for example, the journey from birth to death has given
rise to various religious conceptions.) For our purposes here, the modal
journey is the pilgrimage. It is not simply that in the minds of Christians,
Muslims or Hindus the cities of Rome, Mecca, or Benares were the
centres of sacred geographies, but that their centrality was experienced
24. Masur, Bolivar, p. 19. Naturally these measures were only partially enforceable,
and a good deal of smuggling always went on.
25. Ibid., p. 546.
26. See his The Forest of Symbols, Aspects of Ndemhu Ritual, especially the chapter
'Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.' For a later, more
complex elaboration, see his Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, Symbolic Action in Human
Society, chapter 5 ('Pilgrimages as Social Processes') and 6 ('Passages, Margins, and
Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas').
53
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
and 'realized' (in the stagecraft sense) by the constant flow of
pilgrims moving towards them from remote and otherwise unrelated
localities. Indeed, in some sense the outer limits of the old religious
communities of the imagination were determined by which pil-
27
grimages people made. As noted earlier, the strange physical
juxtaposition of Malays, Persians, Indians, Berbers and Turks in
Mecca is something incomprehensible without an idea of their
community in some form. The Berber encountering the Malay
before the Kaaba must, as it were, ask himself: 'Why is this man
doing what I am doing, uttering the same words that I am uttering,
even though we can not talk to one another?' There is only one
answer, once one has learnt it: 'Because we . . . are Muslims.' There
was, to be sure, always a double aspect to the choreography of the
great religious pilgrimages: a vast horde of illiterate vernacularspeakers
provided the dense, physical reality of the ceremonial
passage; while a small segment of literate bilingual adepts drawn
from each vernacular community performed the unifying rites,
interpreting to their respective followings the meaning of their28
collective motion. In a pre-print age, the reality of the imagined
religious community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless
travels. Nothing more impresses one about Western Christendom in
its heyday than the uncoerced flow of faithful seekers from all over
Europe, through the celebrated 'regional centres' of monastic
learning, to Rome. These great Latin-speaking institutions drew
together what today we would perhaps regard as Irishmen, Danes,
Portuguese, Germans, and so forth, in communities whose sacred
meaning was every day deciphered from their members' otherwise
inexplicable juxtaposition in the refectory.
Though the religious pilgrimages are probably the most touching and
27. See Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 64.
28. There are obvious analogies here with the respective roles of bilingual
intelligentsias and largely illiterate workers and peasants in the genesis of certain
nationalist movements - prior to the coming of radio. Invented only in 1895,
radio made it possible to bypass print and summon into being an aural
representation of the imagined community where the printed page scarcely
penetrated. Its role in the Vietnamese and Indonesian revolutions, and generally
in mid-twentieth-century nationalisms, has been much underestimated and under-
studied.
54
CREOLE PIONEERS
grandiose journeys of the imagination, they had, and have, more modest
29
and limited secular counterparts. For our present purposes, the most
important were the differing passages created by the rise of absolutizing
monarchies, and, eventually, Europe-centred world-imperial states.
The inner thrust of absolutism was to create a unified apparatus of
power, controlled directly by, and loyal to, the ruler over against a
decentralized, particularistic feudal nobility. Unification meant internal
interchangeability of men and documents. Human interchangeability
was fostered by the recruitment — naturally to varying extents — of
homines novi, who, just for that reason, had no independent power of• 30
their own, and so could serve as emanations of their masters' wills.
Absolutist functionaries thus undertook journeys which were basically
different from those of feudal nobles.31
The difference can be represented
schematically as follows: In the modal feudal journey, the heir of
Noble A, on his father's death, moves up one step to take that father's
place. This ascension requires a round-trip, to the centre for investiture,
and then back home to the ancestral demesne. For the new functionary,
however, things are more complex. Talent, not death, charts his course.
He sees before him a summit rather than a centre. He travels up its
corniches in a series of looping arcs which, he hopes, will become
smaller and tighter as he nears the top. Sent out to township A at rank V,
he may return to the capital at rank W; proceed to province B at rank X;
continue to vice-royalty C at rank Y; and end his pilgrimage in the
capital at rank Z. On this journey there is no assured resting-place; every
pause is provisional. The last thing the functionary wants is to return
home; for he has no home with any intrinsic value. And this: on his
upward-spiralling road he encounters as eager fellow-pilgrims his
functionary colleagues, from places and families he has scarcely heard
29. The 'secular pilgrimage' should not be taken merely as a fanciful trope. Conrad
was being ironical, but also precise, when he described as 'pilgrims' the spectral agents of
Leopold II in the heart of darkness.
30. Especially where: (a) monogamy was religiously and legally enforced; (b)
primogeniture was the rule; (c) non-dynastic titles were both inheritable and conceptually
and legally distinct from office-rank: i.e. where provincial aristocracies had
significant independent power - England, as opposed to Siam.
31. See Bloch, Feudal Society, II, pp. 422ff.
5 5
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
of and surely hopes never to have to see. But in experiencing them as
travelling-companions, a consciousness of connectedness ('Why are we
. . . here . . . together?) emerges, above all when all share a single
language-of-state. Then, if official A from province B administers
province C, while official D from province C administers province
B — a situation that absolutism begins to make likely - that experience of
interchangeability requires its own explanation: the ideology of absolutism,
which the new men themselves, as much as the sovereign,
elaborate.
Documentary interchangeability, which reinforced human interchangeability,
was fostered by the development of a standardized
language-of-state. As the stately succession of Anglo-Saxon, Latin,
Norman, and Early English in London from the eleventh through
the fourteenth centuries demonstrates, any written language could, in
principle, serve this function - provided it was given monopoly rights.
(One could, however, argue that where vernaculars, rather than Latin,
happened to hold the monopoly, a further centralizing function was
achieved, by restricting the drift of one sovereign's officials to his rivals'
machines: so to speak ensuring that Madrid's pilgrim-functionaries were
not interchangeable with those of Paris.)
In principle, the extra-European expansion of the great kingdoms of
early modern Europe should have simply extended the above model in
the development of grand, transcontinental bureaucracies. But, in fact,
this did not happen. The instrumental rationality of the absolutist
apparatus - above all its tendency to recruit and promote on the basis
of talent rather than of birth - operated only fitfully beyond the eastern
32
shores of the Atlantic.
The pattern is plain in the Americas. For example, of the 170
viceroys in Spanish America prior to 1813, only 4 were Creoles. These
figures are all the more startling if we note that in 1800 less than 5% of
the 3,200,000 Creole 'whites' in the Western Empire (imposed on
about 13,700,000 indigenes) were Spain-born Spaniards. On the eve of
32. Obviously this rationality should not be exaggerated. The case of the United
Kingdom, where Catholics were barred from office until 1829, is not unique. Can
one doubt that this long exclusion played an important role in fostering Irish
nationalism?
56
CREOLE PIONEERS
the revolution in Mexico, there was only one creole bishop, although
33
Creoles in the viceroyalty outnumbered peninsulares by 70 to 1. And,
needless to say, it was nearly unheard-of for a creole to rise to a position
of official importance in Spain.34
Moreover, the pilgrimages of creole
functionaries were not merely vertically barred. If peninsular officials
could travel the road from Zaragoza to Cartagena, Madrid, Lima, and
again Madrid, the 'Mexican' or 'Chilean' creole typically served only in
the territories of colonial Mexico or Chile: his lateral movement was as
cramped as his vertical ascent. In this way, the apex of his looping
climb, the highest administrative centre to which he could be assigned,
was the capital of the imperial administrative unit in which he found35
himself. Yet on this cramped pilgrimage he found travellingcompanions,
who came to sense that their fellowship was based not
only on that pilgrimage's particular stretch, but on the shared fatality of
trans-Atlantic birth. Even if he was born within one week of his father's
33. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 18-19, 298. Of the roughly
15,000 peninsulares, half were soldiers.
34. In the first decade of the nineteenth century there seem to have been
about 400 South Americans resident in Spain at any one time. These included the
'Argentinian' San Martin, who was taken to Spain as a small boy, and spent the
next 27 years there, entering the Royal Academy for noble youth, and playing a
distinguished part in the armed struggle against Napoleon before returning to his
homeland on hearing of its declaration of independence; and Bolivar, who for a
time boarded in Madrid with Manuel Mello, 'American' lover of Queen Marie
Louise. Masur describes him as belonging (c. 1805) to 'a group of young South
Americans' who, like him, 'were rich, idle and in disfavour with the Court. The
hatred and sense of inferiority felt by many Creoles for the mother country was in
them developing into revolutionary impulses.' Bolivar, pp. 41-47, and 469-70 (San
Martin).
35. Over time, military pilgrimages became as important as civilian. 'Spain had
neither the money nor the manpower to maintain large garrisons of regular troops in
America, and she relied chiefly on colonial militias, which from the mid-eighteenth
century were expanded and reorganized.' (Ibid., p. 10). These militias were quite
local, not interchangeable parts of a continental security apparatus. They played an
increasingly critical role from the 1760s on, as British incursions multiplied. Bolivar's
father had been a prominent militia commander, defending Venezuelan ports against
the intruders. Bolivar himself served in his father's old unit as a teenager. (Masur,
Bolivar, pp. 30 and 38). In this respect he was typical of many of the first-generation
nationalist leaders of Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile. See Robert L. Gilmore,
Caudillism and Militarism in Venezuela, 1810-1910, chapter 6 ['The Militia'] and 7
['The Military'].
57
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
migration, the accident of birth in the Americas consigned him to
subordination - even though in terms of language, religion, ancestry,
or manners he was largely indistinguishable from the Spain-born
Spaniard. There was nothing to be done about it: he was irremediably
a Creole. Yet how irrational his exclusion must have seemed! Nonetheless,
hidden inside the irrationality was this logic: born in the
Americas, he could not be a true Spaniard; ergo, born in Spain, the
36
peninsular could not be a true American.
What made the exclusion appear rational in the metropole?
Doubtless the confluence of a time-honoured Machiavellism with
the growth of conceptions of biological and ecological contamination
that accompanied the planetary spread of Europeans and European
power from the sixteenth century onwards. From the sovereign's angle
of vision, the American Creoles, with their ever-growing numbers and
increasing local rootedness with each succeeding generation, presented
a historically unique political problem. For the first time the metropoles
had to deal with - for that era — vast numbers of 'fellow-Europeans'
(over three million in the Spanish Americas by 1800) far outside
Europe. If the indigenes were conquerable by arms and disease, and
controllable by the mysteries of Christianity and a completely alien
culture (as well as, for those days, an advanced political organization),
the same was not true of the Creoles, who had virtually the same
relationship to arms, disease, Christianity and European culture as the
metropolitans. In other words, in principle, they had readily at hand the
political, cultural and military means for successfully asserting themselves.
They constituted simultaneously a colonial community and an
upper class. They were to be economically subjected and exploited, but
they were also essential to the stability of the empire. One can see, in
this light, a certain parallelism between the position of the Creole
36. Notice the transformations that independence brought the Americans: firstgeneration
immigrants now became 'lowest' rather than 'highest', i.e. the ones most
contaminated by a fatal place of birth. Similar inversions occur in response to racism.
'Black blood' — taint of the tar-brush — came, under imperialism, to be seen as hopelessly
contaminating for any 'white.' Today, in the United States at least, the 'mulatto' has
entered the museum. The tiniest trace of 'black blood' makes one beautifully Black.
Contrast Fermm's optimistic programme for miscegenation, and his absence of concern
for the colour of the expected progeny.
58
CREOLE PIONEERS
magnates and of feudal barons, crucial to the sovereign's power, but
also a menace to it. Thus the peninsulares dispatched as viceroys and
bishops served the same functions as did the homines novi of the pro to-
37 •
absolutist bureaucracies. Even if the viceroy was a grandee in his
Andalusian home, here, 5,000 miles away, juxtaposed to the Creoles, he
was effectively a homo novus fully dependent on his metropolitan master.
The tense balance between peninsular official and Creole magnate was
in this way an expression of the old policy of divide et impera in a new
setting.
In addition, the growth of creole communities, mainly in the
Americas, but also in parts of Asia and Africa, led inevitably to the
appearance of Eurasians, Eurafricans, as well as Euramericans, not as
occasional curiosities but as visible social groups. Their emergence
permitted a style of thinking to flourish which foreshadows modern
racism. Portugal, earliest of Europe's planetary conquerors, provides
an apt illustration of this point. In the last decade of the fifteenth
century Dom Manuel I could still 'solve' his 'Jewish question' by
mass, forcible conversion - possibly the last European ruler to find this38
solution both satisfactory and 'natural'. Less than a century later,
however, one finds Alexandre Valignano, the great reorganizer of the
Jesuit mission in Asia between 1574 and 1606, vehemently opposing
the admission of Indians and Eurindians to the priesthood in these39terms:
All these dusky races are very stupid and vicious, and of the basest
spirits... As for the mestizos and casti§os, we should receive either very
few or none at all; especially with regard to the mestizos, since the
more native blood they have, the more they resemble the Indians and
the less they are esteemed by the Portuguese.
(Yet Valignano actively encouraged the admission of Japanese, Koreans,
Chinese, and 'Indochinese' to the priestly function - perhaps
37. Given Madrid's deep concern that the management of the colonies be in
trustworthy hands, 'it was axiomatic that the high posts be filled exclusively with nativeborn
Spaniards'. Masur, Bolivar, p. 10.
38. Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415—1825, p. 266.
39. Ibid., p. 252.
59
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
because in those zones mestizos had yet to appear in any numbers?)
Similarly, the Portuguese Franciscans in Goa violently opposed admission
of Creoles to the order, alleging that 'even if born of pure
white parents [they] have been suckled by Indian ayahs in their infancy
and thus had their blood contaminated for life.'40
Boxer shows that
'racial' bars and exclusions increased markedly during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries by comparison with earlier practice. To this
malignant tendency the revival of large-scale slavery (for the first time
in Europe since antiquity), which was pioneered by Portugal after
1510, made its own massive contribution. Already in the 1550s, 10%
of Lisbon's population were slaves; by 1800 there were close to a
million slaves among the 2,500,000 or so inhabitants of Portugal's
Brazil.41
Indirectly, the Enlightenment also influenced the crystallization of a
fatal distinction between metropolitans and Creoles. In the course of his
twenty-two years in power (1755-1777), the enlightened autocrat
Pombal not only expelled the Jesuits from Portuguese domains, but
made it a criminal offence to call 'coloured' subjects by offensive names,
such as 'nigger' or 'mestizo' [sic]. But he justified this decree by citing
ancient Roman conceptions of imperial citizenship, not the doctrines of
the philosophes.42
More typically, the writings of Rousseau and Herder,
which argued that climate and 'ecology' had a constitutive impact on
culture and character, exerted wide influence.43
It was only too easy
from there to make the convenient, vulgar deduction that Creoles, born
in a savage hemisphere, were by nature different from, and inferior to,
the metropolitans — and thus unfit for higher office.
40. Ibid., p. 253.
41. Rona Fields, The Portuguese Revolution and the Armed Forces Movement, p. 15.
42. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 257-58.
43. Kemilainen, Nationalism, pp. 72—73.
44. I have emphasized here the racialist distinctions drawn between peninsulares
and Creoles because the main topic under review is the rise of Creole nationalism. This
should not be understood as minimizing the parallel growth of Creole racism towards
mestizos, Negroes, and Indians; nor the willingness of an unthreatened metropole to
protect (up to a certain point) these unfortunates.
60
CREOLE PIONEERS
Our attention thus far has been focussed on the worlds of functionaries
in the Americas - strategically important, but still small worlds. Moreover,
they were worlds which, with their conflicts between peninsulares
and Creoles, predated the appearance of American national consciousnesses
at the end of the eighteenth century. Cramped viceregal
pilgrimages had no decisive consequences until their territorial stretch
could be imagined as nations, in other words until the arrival of print-
capitalism.
Print itself spread early to New Spain, but for two centuries it
remained under the tight control of crown and church. Till the end
of the seventeenth century, presses existed only in Mexico City and
Lima, and their output was almost exclusively ecclesiastical. In
Protestant North America printing scarcely existed at all in that
century. In the course of the eighteenth, however, a virtual
revolution took place. Between 1691 and 1820, no less than
2,120 'newspapers' were published, of which 461 lasted more than
' 45
ten years.
The figure of Benjamin Franklin is indelibly associated with
Creole nationalism in the northern Americas. But the importance
of his trade may be less apparent. Once again, Febvre and Martin
are enlightening. They remind us that 'printing did not really
develop in [North] America during the eighteenth century until
printers discovered a new source of income — the newspaper.'46
Printers starting new presses always included a newspaper in their
productions, to which they were usually the main, even the sole,
contributor. Thus the printer-journalist was initially an essentially
North American phenomenon. Since the main problem facing the
printer-journalist was reaching readers, there developed an alliance
with the post-master so intimate that often each became the other.
Hence, the printer's office emerged as the key to North American
communications and community intellectual life. In Spanish
America, albeit more slowly and intermittently, similar processes
45. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 208-11.
46. Ibid., p. 211.
61
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
produced, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the first
local presses.47
What were the characteristics of the first American newspapers,
North or South? They began essentially as appendages of the market.
Early gazettes contained — aside from news about the metropole —
commercial news (when ships would arrive and depart, what prices
were current for what commodities in what ports), as well as colonial
political appointments, marriages of the wealthy, and so forth. In other
words, what brought together, on the same page, this marriage with
that ship, this price with that bishop, was the very structure of the
colonial administration and market-system itself. In this way, the
newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created
an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellowreaders,
to whom these ships, brides, bishops and prices belonged.
In time, of course, it was only to be expected that political elements
would enter in.
One fertile trait of such newspapers was always their provinciality. A
colonial Creole might read a Madrid newspaper if he got the chance (but
it would say nothing about his world), but many a peninsular official,
living down the same street, would, if he could help it, not read the
Caracas production. An asymmetry infinitely replicable in other colonial
situations. Another such trait was plurality. The Spanish-American
journals that developed towards the end of the eighteenth century were
written in full awareness of provincials in worlds parallel to their own.
The newspaper-readers of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Bogota,
even if they did not read each other's newspapers, were nonetheless
quite conscious of their existence. Hence a well-known doubleness in
early Spanish-American nationalism, its alternating grand stretch and
particularistic localism. The fact that early Mexican nationalists wrote of
themselves as nosotros los Americanos and of their country as nuestra
America, has been interpreted as revealing the vanity of the local Creoles
who, because Mexico was far the most valuable of Spain's American
48
possessions, saw themselves as the centre of the New World. But, in
47. Franco, An Introduction, p. 28.
48. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 33.
62
CREOLE PIONEERS
fact, people all over Spanish America thought of themselves as 'Americans,'
since this term denoted precisely the shared fatality of extraSpanish
birth.
At the same time, we have seen that the very conception of the
newspaper implies the refraction of even 'world events' into a
specific imagined world of vernacular readers; and also how important
to that imagined community is an idea of steady, solid
simultaneity through time. Such a simultaneity the immense stretch
of the Spanish American Empire, and the isolation of its component
parts, made difficult to imagine.50
Mexican Creoles might learn
months later of developments in Buenos Aires, but it would be
through Mexican newspapers, not those of the Rio de la Plata; and
the events would appear as 'similar to' rather than 'part of events in
Mexico.
In this sense, the 'failure' of the Spanish-American experience to
generate a permanent Spanish-America-wide nationalism reflects both
the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the
late eighteenth century and the 'local' backwardness of Spanish
capitalism and technology in relation to the administrative stretch
of the empire. (The world-historical era in which each nationalism is
born probably has a significant impact on its scope. Is Indian nationalism
not inseparable from colonial administrative-market unification,
after the Mutiny, by the most formidable and advanced of the imperial
powers?)
The Protestant, English-speaking Creoles to the north were much
more favourably situated for realizing the idea of 'America' and
indeed eventually succeeded in appropriating the everyday title of
'Americans'. The original Thirteen Colonies comprised an area
49. 'A peon came to complain that the Spanish overseer of his estancia had beaten
him. San Martin was indignant, but it was a nationalist rather than socialist indignation.
"What do you think? After three years of revolution, a maturrango [vulg., Peninsular
Spaniard] dares to raise his hand against an American!"' Ibid., p. 87.
50. A spell-binding evocation of the remoteness and isolation of the SpanishAmerican
populations is Marquez's picture of the fabulous Macondo in One Hundred
Years of Solitude.
63
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
smaller than Venezuela, and one third the size of Argentina.51
Bunched geographically together, their market-centres in Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia were readily accessible to one another,
and their populations were relatively tightly linked by print as well as
commerce. The 'United States' could gradually multiply in numbers
over the next 183 years, as old and new populations moved westwards
out of the old east coast core. Yet even in the case of the USA there
are elements of comparative 'failure' or shrinkage - non-absorption of
English-speaking Canada, Texas's decade of independent sovereignty
(1835—46). Had a sizeable English-speaking community existed in
California in the eighteenth century, is it not likely that an independent
state would have arisen there to play Argentina to the
Thirteen Colonies' Peru? Even in the USA, the affective bonds of
nationalism were elastic enough, combined with the rapid expansion
of the western frontier and the contradictions generated between the
economies of North and South, to precipitate a war of secession
almost a century after the Declaration of Independence; and this war today
sharply reminds us of those that tore Venezuela and Ecuador off from
Gran Colombia, and Uruguay and Paraguay from the United Pro-
CO
vinces of the Rio de la Plata.
By way of provisional conclusion, it may be appropriate to reemphasize
the limited and specific thrust of the argument so far. It is
intended less to explain the socio-economic bases of antimetropolitan
resistance in the Western hemisphere between say,
1760 and 1830, than why the resistance was conceived in plural,
'national' forms — rather than in others. The economic interests at
stake are well-known and obviously of fundamental importance.
51. The total area of the Thirteen Colonies was 322,497 square miles. That of
Venezuela was 352,143; of Argentina, 1,072,067; and of Spanish South America,
3,417,625 square miles.
52. Paraguay forms a case of exceptional interest. Thanks to the relatively
benevolent dictatorship established there by the Jesuits early in the seventeenth century,
the indigenes were better treated than elsewhere in Spanish America, and Guarani
achieved the status of print-language. The Crown's expulsion of the Jesuits from
Spanish America in 1767 brought the territory into the Rio de la Plata, but very late in
the day, and for little more than a generation. See Seton-Watson, Nations and States, pp.
200-201.
64
CREOLE PIONEERS
Liberalism ancl the Enlightenment clearly had a powerful impact,
above all in providing an arsenal of ideological criticisms of imperial
and anciens regimes. What I am proposing is that neither economic
interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in
themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community to be defended
from these regimes' depredations; to put it another way, none
provided the framework of a new consciousness — the scarcely-seen
periphery of its vision - as opposed to centre-field objects of its
admiration or disgust.53
In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim
Creole functionaries and provincial Creole printmen played the
decisive historic role.
53. It is instructive that the Declaration of Independence in 1776 speaks only of
'the people', while the word 'nation' makes its debut only in the Constitution of 1789,
Kemilainen, Nationalism, p. 105.
65