| Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 344 pages Reviewed by: Matthew Powers, University of Texas at Austin Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s book, Puritan Conquistadors, pursues several related goals. The author seeks to understand the mindset of Europeans regarding colonization in the New World. He also examines the similarities between English and Iberian ideologies of colonization, and the implications of this interconnection for our understanding of Atlantic history. Cañizares-Esguerra’s claims that “striking resemblances between Spanish and Puritan discourses of colonization as ‘exorcism’ and as spiritual gardening point to a common Atlantic history, one rooted in a centuries-old shared Christian tradition of battling holy wars against demonic enemies and transforming satanic landscapes into occupied holy lands.” To establish this point, Cañizares- Esguerra looks at textual and visual sources to reconstruct a world view that is “violent, alien, and offensive to our modern sense of what is physically possible.” This work focuses on what the New World and the act of colonization meant to the participants, which leads to an analysis that demonstrates the similarities in the English and Spanish ideology of colonization. This book makes important contributions to British history in a number of ways. Specifically, it demonstrates that historians have overstated the extent of England’s isolation from the continent, especially in the intellectual sphere. Professor Cañizares-Esguerra gives compelling evidence for the importance of Spanish precedents in British colonization ideology. He makes an even more compelling case for the continued importance of England’s medieval Christian heritage. Since Spain and England share a related medieval religious tradition, approaching issues from this perspective enables us to see more similarities in their belief systems than a standard Protestant/Catholic dichotomy allows. Any attempt to understand England’s ideology of colonization would be incomplete without taking Cañizares-Esguerra’s claims into account. Puritan Conquistadors’ claims are intended to extend beyond just the issues of the ideologies of colonization; the similarities that this book explores demonstrate the dangers of studying Latin American and Iberian history in isolation from European and Atlantic history. This results in an anachronistic view of history, and Professor Cañizares-Esguerra believes the consequences of this division exist in the present day. Cañizares-Esguerra has clearly shown that, at least in the seventeenth century, such a division proves unwarranted and misleading. |
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