An Old New World

for the History of Historiography

Mark Thurner

Abstract
The history and theory of historiography remains curiously captive to its own seductive auto-
biography, which has been written largely from the perspective of modern northwestern
‘Europe’. History’s story and theory of itself, however, has managed to neatly elide the early
modern Indo-Iberian invention of a global and colonial history that began in the sixteenth
century and which preceded the invention of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’. In this paper I suggest
that the old history of ‘New World’ historiography may contribute to the urgent task of re-
writing History’s history and theory.
Keywords : Historiography, Indias, Peru, Latin America, Theory of History, Global History,
 

Historicism.

La tarea verdadera consiste ante todo en examinar los orígenes,

los perjuicios y los procesos de las verdades recibidas. En una
palabra, hacer cuestión expresa de la historia de la historia.
Edmundo O’Gorman, Crisis y porvenir de la ciencia histórica

I n his keynote address delivered to the Inaugural Congress of the International Network
for Theory of History (Ghent, July 2013), François Hartog urged us “to finally detach
ourselves from a history which has lost its credibility : that which Europe launched
 

and imposed, which appears with a capital H ; which saw itself as the locomotive of
 

the modern world and cast itself as its ultimate tribunal”. A necessary and positive
“second step”, Hartog continued, “would be to consider new ways in which the ven-
erable word ‘history’ could be brought back into service”. 1 In this piece I will propose
 

that the “venerable word” of “history” may indeed be “brought back into service”
but only if and when “History with a capital H” is rewritten in such a way that “Eu-
rope” no longer holds the copyright on its name.
To my ears, what was most notable about Hartog’s address and the INTH con-
gress as a whole was its abiding Eurocentrism, that is, the ease with which argu-
ments about history (capital H or small h) were sustained with references almost
exclusively European or, at a pinch, ‘Western’. I do not doubt that this state of affairs

1  F. Hartog, The Future of a Very Old Name, Keynote address, INTH Inaugural Congress (Ghent, July
2013). I wish to thank the author for sharing his still unpublished text. Hartog writes : “History constitutes
 

what could be called a ‘crossroads’ name, indeed the arch concept around which belief has crystallized over
the last two centuries. With a capital ‘H’ it served as explanatory key whilst being exempt from explain-
ing itself. With a small ‘h’ it encouraged the search for several explanations : the establishing of laws ; the
   

identification of great underlying movements ; the recognition of the more or less significant part of con-
 

tingency in human affairs”. Historians, he continues, are traditionally concerned with the small ‘h’. Today,
this small ‘h’ is being displaced by the arch concept of ‘memory’, thus the need to bring back ‘the venerable
name of history’. Hartog’s argument is based almost exclusively on French references.

Storia della Storiografia, 67 · 1/2015

30 mark thurner
is in fact a faithful reflection of the composition of the historical field in the West.
Most history writing today is in one way or another about ‘the West’, including that
which otherwise appears to be about the East or the Rest. 2 Why be surprised to find
 

that the international history and theory of history is likewise about the West ? But  

the reasons and the questions run deeper. History is primarily Western not only be-
cause the East/Rest historian’s need to read and listen to historians of the West is
not reciprocal (a fact that remained painfully obvious to me at the INTH congress),
nor because all history everywhere is the colonial captive of European historicism,
as Dipesh Chakrabarty argued, 3 but because the disciplines of history and of the phi-
 

losophy of history are underwritten by a Western narrative and idea of history’s own
historical formation. In a word, history is the guilty prisoner of its own ‘European’
story, and as such is unable to see that, beyond its cell, the story it tells itself and the
theory of history that the story sustains are rather unconvincing. 4  

In vulgar or scholarly form, the outline of history’s shadow is clear enough : she  

springs from oracular, ancient Greek origins, passes through Rome and her medieval
and renaissance European dispersions, only to find her true home and end in mod-
ern northwestern Europe, where she reaches maximum expression in the national
historical and philosophical traditions of Germany, France, and Britain. 5 From there,  

perhaps, the story of history or of the idea of history reaches across the Atlantic to
Germanic or Anglo America and, only much later if at all, does she trickle down and
out to the rest of the developing world. Outside of this historicist history of history
there is little of importance to the history and theory of history : all else is a ‘cabinet
 

of curiosities’ to be plundered and displayed in the West’s Global Museum of Histo-

riography. Perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps Europe is the home and museum
of theory and history, after all. As Chakrabarty wittily exclaimed at the fitting close
to his Provincializing Europe : “European thought is a gift to us all”. 6
   

But what if the modern global historical imagination dawned in the Indies (or the
Indo-Iberian world) before the West as Europe could be imagined ? What if histori-  

cism was, avante la lettre, a Creole invention before it became recognized as a pri-
marily German contribution to the history of thought ? What if postcolonial history
 

2  For a recent survey of the small world of professional historical writing in the US, UK, and Canada, see
L. Clossey and N. Guyat, “It’s a Small World After All : The Wider World in Historian’s Peripheral Vision”,
 

Perspectives on History, 51, 5 (2013) : 24-27.

 

3  D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton : Princ-
   

eton University Press, 2000).

4  The critique of Eurocentrism in the history of historiography informs the ‘cumulative narrative’ of the
new 5-volume Oxford History of Historical Writing (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011-2012), under the
 

general editorship of Daniel Woolf. Several chapters in Volumes 3-5 address colonial and postcolonial Latin
American historiography in illuminating fashion. Nevertheless, the Oxford History continues to treat Latin
American historical writing, particularly in the modern or postcolonial period covered in Volume 4, as an
‘offspring of Europe’. A less comprehensive attempt to present a ‘global history of modern historiography’ is
G. G. Iggers and Q. E. Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography (New York : N.Y. Pearson Longman,
 

2008). This interesting volume divides the world in the canonical ‘West’ versus ‘East’ fashion (the latter subdi-
vided in the Middle East, India, and East and Southeast Asia), completely ignoring Latin America and Africa.
5  For a full historicist account of a ‘Western’ history of history embodied by canonical figures or stars,
see D. Kelley’s erudite trilogy, Faces of History : Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven : Yale
   

University Press, 1998), Fortunes of History : Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven : Yale
   

University Press, 2003) and Frontiers of History : Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century (New Haven : Yale
   

University Press, 2006). 6  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 255.

 an old new world for the history of historiography 31
and critique was born not in twentieth-century India or the Indian diaspora but in
nineteenth-century Peru and Mexico ? Although the scholarship on the history of his-
 

toriography in the Ibero-American world is slim and uneven, recent work suggests
that such – admittedly provocative – questions as these are very serious ones with
obvious implications for the history of history. 7  

Dipping into recent work in the field, and building primarily and without hesita-
tion upon my research on the history of Peruvian historiography, 8 in this piece I  

briefly entertain these questions, suggesting that ‘Latin American’ historical writ-
ing and its indispensable early modern, Indo-Iberian predecessor might be seen as
an old frontier or new world in and for the history of historiography. Given space
limitations and the state of research I will not attempt to fully demonstrate that con-
tention here. I merely suggest that if the questions raised here resonate as true, that
resonance resides in the possibility that at particular moments the language of ‘pe-
ripheral’ or, as I prefer, ‘traveling’ histories made critical contributions to the global
making, or mirror-making play, of modern historical discourse at large. Such play
would in theory reside not only at the ‘center’ but also on history’s cutting colo-
nial and, later, postcolonial edges. Whether or not those cutting edges are read and
registered in History/history’s self-fashioned center and story of itself, however, is
another matter. As the history of the history of historiography reveals, a decentered
reading of connected histories has not been typical of the field.

I. History at the Edges of the World ?  

Decades before the quadripartite dispensation, that is, before the invention and
adoption of the name of ‘America’ in certain learned quarters of the early modern
world’s bipartite temporal order (the Old and the New), 9 and centuries before the 

transatlantic coming of ‘Latin America,’ the specter of an ancient name hovered over
the modern dawn of the global historical imagination. This marvelous name was not
‘Europe’ nor ‘the West’ but ‘India’.

7  The seriousness of these questions represents a sea change in scholarly attitudes. Not so long ago the
history of ‘Latin American’ historical writing was widely seen – perhaps first and foremost by progressive
Latin American and Latin Americanist historians – to be marginal if not embarrassing, and so unworthy of
serious consideration in its own right. In this vein, the ‘Chronicles of the Indies’ were frequently dismissed
as the Eurocentric accounts of the conquerors, while nineteenth-century historiography was a matter of
‘aping Europe’. For more recent critical revalorizations of colonial and postcolonial historiography, respec-
tively, see J. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World : Histories, Epistemologies, and Iden-
 

tities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2001) and the pioneering
 

essay of G. Colmenares, Las convenciones contra la cultura : Ensayos sobre la historiografía hispanoamericana del
 

siglo XIX (Bogotá : Tercer Mundo Editores, 1987). Also see M. Thurner, “Yet Another History of History”,
 

Latin American Research Review, 41, 3 (2006) : 164-174.

 

8  It is of course common for historians of Europe or the United States to make universal claims based
on little more than their own national historiographies. Hartog does it in his keynote address. My conten-
tion is that, as a name of and for modern history and the theory and history of modern history, ‘Peru’ is as
useful as ‘France’ or ‘Germany’. Indeed, for global historical reasons, ‘Peru’ may be more useful. On this
last point, see discussion below.
9  One must insist upon the ‘certain circles’ caveat, since among Spaniards the name of ‘Indias’ was never
displaced by the name of ‘America’. ‘Indias’ remained the official and historiographical name for the mon-
archy’s ‘kingdoms and provinces’ abroad, and indeed it lives on today not only in the Archivo General de In-
dias and in academic journals such as the Revista de Indias, but also in popular Spanish-language parlance.
32 mark thurner
I want to suggest here that the global history of this name opened up new hori-
zons and worlds for the history of historiography, but that we as historians of history
have failed to capitalize on the opening. For this reason, here I will briefly sketch
something of that name’s early colonial resonance in the vast corpus of history writ-
ing often referred to as the ‘crónicas de indias’. Let me begin by citing the brilliant
Jesuit historian José de Acosta, who in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590)
explained that :  

Among us [Spaniards] the name ‘Indias’ is general since, in our tongue, when we say ‘Indias’
we refer to far away and rich lands that are very different from ours. Thus we Spaniards call
Peru and Mexico, China, Malaysia, and Brazil ‘Indias’ ; and if letters are sent from any part of
 

these, even though said lands and dominions are very distant and diverse one from the other,
we say that they are letters from the Indies. One can also not deny that the name ‘Indias’ was
taken from Oriental India, because among the ancients that other India was celebrated as a
very remote and rich land so far away that it was taken to be the end of the earth. And so,
those who reside at the ends of the earth are called ‘Indians’. 10  

Acosta’s words register a new world-historical map but one with old names in which
the ancient gloss for “the rich land at the end of the earth” 11 (India) was now repeat-
 

ing, dispersed, truly everywhere for the Spaniards had, under Charles V and Philip
II, ‘pushed’ the limits of universal empire beyond the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ to all the
‘ends of the world’.
That modern pushing of the name of ‘India’ to every end of the earth coincided,
of course, with the universal appearance of that “marvelous possession” and exotic
subaltern figure : the “Indian”. Contrary to common and uncommon belief then, the
 

demonym of ‘Indians’ and the toponym of ‘Indias’ were not the consequence of the
supposedly mindless and prejudicial repetition of a founding misnomer coined by an
errant pilot who wrongly assumed he had landed on the edge of ‘India’. That mis-
informed reading corresponds instead to more recent frames of reference and their
distinct modes of ‘historical understanding’. 12 It is we who are the authors of that
 

mindless repetition, not Columbus.

The global dispersion of the appellative ‘India’ and ‘Indian’ as ‘Indias’ and ‘Indios’
marked not an error, prejudice, or mere ‘Orientalism’ (although those things did
come to pass) but instead a repeating colonial horizon of desire for ‘the riches of the
body and the soul’. By the early eighteenth century (and surely before) the geograph-
ical referent for the generic meaning of the word ‘India’ was no longer the Asian sub-
continent but the Occidental and Oriental ‘Indias’. The earliest entry for ‘India’ in the
Diccionario de Autoridades (1734) reads thus :  

INDIA. s. f. Abundancia y copia de riquezas y preciosidades. Dixose por semejanza a los Re-
inos de las Indias, donde se hallan minas de oro y plata. Latín. Divitiarum copia. QUEV. M.
B. Dar valor al viento, es mejor caudal en el Príncipe que minas, quanto es mejor y más cerca

10  J. de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Madrid, 2003 [Seville, 1590]), 92-93. My translation.
11  Acosta, Historia natural, 91.
12  ‘Historical understanding’ and ‘historical truth’ refer to contemporary adherences to particular frames
of reference. For further discussion of O’Gorman’s concept of ‘historical understanding’, see M. Thurner,
“‘The Founding Abyss of Colonial History’, or ‘The Origin and Principle of the Name of Peru’”, History
and Theory, 48 (2009) : 44-62.
 
 an old new world for the history of historiography 33
ser Indias que buscarlas. Y Mus. 6. Rom. 25. Thesoros vertió en los campos, Indias derramó
en los Pueblos, el que del honor de España tuvo a cargo el desempeño. 13  

The consequences for the historical imagination of this serial dissemination of the
classical name and concept of ‘India’ and that of its global inhabitants, or ‘Indians’,
are today largely lost to view. It was not always so. We need only recall the appeal
of Raynal’s hefty bestseller of 1770, that wildly popular and, for some historians of
world history at least, revolutionary compilation, later translated and abridged as A
History of the Two Indies. What is not generally recognized, however, is that Raynal’s
beastly history is steeped in the anti-Hispanic rhetoric of the infamous Black Legend
cultivated by Spain’s imperial rivals, and that Raynal contributed to the crafting of a
European historical discourse built upon that legend. 14 More importantly, Raynal’s
 

history was rather less the vanguard of world historiography than it was the shiny
tip of a deep, two centuries-old iceberg of global history and travel writing on and in
“the Indies” that it sought to defame as “fables”. 15 Most of that previous history was
 

written in Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Quechua and Nahua, and some of it in Dutch,
French, Italian and English.
The scholarship and meta-commentary on that mountainous “Chronicles of the
Indies” tradition is now growing like an active volcano. Nevertheless, and with the
usual notable exceptions, beyond small circles of scholars this ever-growing corpus
is not being read as the cutting edge of global historical writing in the early modern
world. Despite scholarly gains, we are far from a persuasive, new narrative that may
grant this work its critical place in the history and theory of historical discourse.
Quixotic arguments are nevertheless being lobbed, most vociferously perhaps from
certain quarters of Luso-Hispanic cultural studies 16 but also, and more rigorously,
 

13  Diccionario de Autoridades, Tomo IV (Madrid, 1734).

14  In France, for example, the trope of the ‘Indies’ was registered in creative ways. In 1877, Jules Verne
published a novel entitled Les Indes Noires (literally ‘The Black Indies’ but translated into English as The
Child of the Cavern, or Strange Doings Underground) which applies the dark or ‘Black Legend’ myth, a la Ray-
nal, of the colonial extraction of the riches of the Oriental and Occidental Indies to the adventure novel,
here set in the exploitative and malevolent depths of the coal mines of Scotland. In the context of the
scramble for Africa, however, in 1890 the same coin was put to use in colonial discourse about France’s
role in ‘the civilizing mission’ in Africa. Notably, Eugène-Melchior de Vogué’s ‘Les Indes Noires’, which
appeared in the long-lived French journal Revue des Deux Mondes, was faithfully translated in the Boletín de
la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima in 1891 as ‘Las Indias Negras’. As the reception of the Lima translation in Peru
makes clear, derivative French discourse on ‘The Black Indies’ ironically played a tactical part in Peruvian
debates about what should be done with the South American Republic’s ‘savage’ Amazonian interior. See
M. Thurner, “After Spanish Rule : Writing Another After”, After Spanish Rule : Postcolonial Predicaments of the
   

Americas, eds. M. Thurner and A. Guerrero (Durham : Duke University Press, 2003), 42-44.
 

15  To attempt to list here the major works that make up this sunken ‘Indian’ iceberg would surely ship-
wreck this essay. For a useful review of attempts to classify the variety of chronicles, see C. Pupeney Hart,
“La Crónica de Indias : Intentos de Tipología”, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 19 (1992) : 117-126. For a critique
   

of Raynal and other armchair ‘commercial philosophers’ of history, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write
the History of the New World, and “Spanish American Colonial Historiography : Issues, Traditions, and De-
 

bates”, The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Vol. 3, 1400-1800, eds. J. Rabasa, M. Sato, E. Tortarolo and D.
Woolf (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2012), 661-679.
 

16  Most of the cultural studies meta-commentary reads the ‘Indian’ chronicles of the Hispanic world as
derivative of classical, medieval, and renaissance ‘European’ models, and as promoting Eurocentrism. In
contrast, it often celebrates ‘indigenous histories’ that, in most every case, should be read instead as hy-
brid or connected histories that deploy multiple discursive strategies. For samples of such cultural studies
work, see J. Rabasa, Inventing America : Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman :
   
34 mark thurner
from scholars trained in the disciplines of anthropology, art history and history.
These arguments are part of a wider move to shift, or perhaps set adrift, the cutting
edge of global modernity and modern historical thought, away from enlightened,
eighteenth-century northwestern Europe and back toward the sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century colonial “ends of the world”, that is, toward those regions that were
universally glossed, in most of the European languages of empire, as “the Indies”.
This new work suggests that to read the ‘Indian’ corpus of traveling histories and
metaphors as instruments of Eurocentrism, or simply as the derivative and unimagi-
native aping of ‘European’ history (or, in seeming but false contrast, to juxtapose
“indigenous history” to “European history”) is to flatten the earth that the word
‘Indias’ itself made round. Instead, it is now thinkable that historical writing on the
Indies operated a (temporary ?) displacement of the old referents of ‘the West’ and
 

‘the East’ while at the same time pushing Mediterranean historical traditions toward
new, global horizons. The key point here is that this ‘Indian’ decentering of the ref-
erents of history and civilization was carried out long before Europe was enthroned
as the master subject of a world history defined as ‘Western’. In any case, the tat-
tered narrative of ‘European expansion’ or ‘Westernization’ once again appears in-
adequate to the task of coming to terms with the ‘Indian’ corpus. I say ‘once again’
because this inadequacy or indeed impossibility was also registered in the writings of
many of the early modern ‘Indian’ historians, and the legacy of those writings lived
on, and lives on, in subsequent historiography.
Chief among these early modern historians was the illegitimate mestizo son of
an Inca ‘princess’ and Spanish conquistador who left Peru for Spain in 1560. Gomes
Suarez de Figueroa (1539-1616), 17 who in 1563 adopted the aristocratic and literary
 

title of “Inca Garcilaso de la Vega”, is widely celebrated for having authored a two-
part historical commentary on Inca oral tradition and Spanish historiography, com-
monly referred to as Los comentarios reales de los Incas (The Royal Commentaries of
the Incas). Considered a ‘literary’ monument of the Spanish ‘Golden Age’, this text
has produced its own body of meta-commentary. 18 I have argued elsewhere that
 

the Inca’s key contribution to history was to turn the fabulous ‘Indian’ barbarian
into a properly ‘Peruvian’ historical subject with a past and future that far exceeded

University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance : Literacy, Territoriality
 

and Colonization (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2003) and Narración y reflexión : Las crónicas de
   

Indias y la teoría historiográfica, ed. K. Kohut (México : DF, 2007).

 

17  Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was baptized Gomez Suares de Figueroa after his great grandfather. He was
the son of the Spanish captain Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas and the niece of the Inca Guayna
Capac, baptized Isabel Suares Chimpu Ocllo. Since Crown policy prohibited interracial marriage, Sebastian
later married the Spanish woman Luisa Martel and arranged Chimpu Ocllo to be joined with the Spanish
commoner Juan del Pedroche. Gomez Suares de Figueroa did not fare well at the Spanish court, however
(his father was accused of aiding the wrong side in the civil war in Peru), and so he retired to his uncle’s
estate near Cordoba to write his histories and take up a clerical life. Some scholars have suggested that
Gomez Suarez favored his father’s surname – which he could not legally adopt because he was illegitimate
– in part for its literary resonance : Garcilaso de la Vega (1503-1536) was a celebrated Spanish Golden Age
 

poet-soldier.
18  The garcilacista critical scholarship is simply too vast to list here. Indispensable ‘revisionist’ readings of
Los Comentarios reales de los Incas include J. A. Mazzotti, Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso : Resonancias andinas
 

(Lima : Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996) and M. Zamora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in
 

the Comentarios reales de los Incas (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1988).
 
 an old new world for the history of historiography 35
Rome’s. 19 In effect, his erudite commentary invented ‘Peru’ for posterity, now as a
 

proper and sovereign historical subject with a deep and numinous genealogy of its
own making. In so doing, Inca Garcilaso founded a mestizo history that was at once
cosmopolitan and colonial, or cosmocolonial. This new manner of history was glob-
al and proper, ancient and modern, Spanish and Quechua, and it spoke both from the
new metropolis (Spain) and the old ‘new lands’ of an Indian ‘Rome’ (Peru).
The gloss for the new historical subject named ‘Peru’ was in certain ways a haunt-
ing echo of ‘India’. Like ‘India’ her allure was immense, her riches deep, her domain
unimaginably vast. As Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre (1903-1980) noted, “her name
resonated universally as a fascinating announcement of riches and well-being”. 20 In  

sixteenth-century Iberia, the very utterance of ‘Peru’ evoked dizzying images of El

Dorado (the gilded man and city). The proverbial ‘poseer el Perú’ (‘to have Peru’)
described men of extraordinary material or spiritual wealth. It anticipated the more
remembered Spanish proverb ‘hacer la América’ (‘do the American thing’), which
means ‘strike it rich’. More exhilarating, however, was the phrase ‘¡Vale un Perú !’  

(‘That’s worth a Peru !’), an exclamation that may still be heard in Spain, Peru and
 

neighboring South American countries.

It is possible that the exclamation ‘¡Vale un Perú !’ was coined to evoke an image
 

of an astounding event : Francisco Pizarro’s fabulous ‘gift of Peru’ to the Holy Ro-
 

man Emperor Charles V, King of Spain and now ‘Emperor of the Indies’. Notably,
Pizarro’s gift of ‘Peru’ to the appointed Emperor of Christendom was, according to
the chroniclers, made possible by an earlier, even more fabulous gift. This earlier gift
was the unprecedented ‘King’s ransom’ or ‘palace full of gold’ reportedly rendered
to the Conquistadors or adelantados Pizarro and Diego Almagro circa 1533 by the cap-
tive Inca Atahualpa. In the second part of Los comentarios reales, Inca Garcilaso goes to
great pains to establish the true worth of Atahualpa’s ransom. His reasoned estimate
comes out slightly lower than that of the Peruvian Jesuit historian Blas Valera, who
had estimated its worth at 4.8 million ducats. Notably, Inca Garcilaso compares Ata-
hualpa’s ransom to the European King’s ransoms tallied by the famous French jurist
and historian Jean Bodin. The Inca duly concludes that Atahualpa’s ransom was the
greatest ransom the world had ever seen.
For the fastidious mestizo historian the Inca’s gold and silver were the principle ma-
terial source of Spain’s newfound greatness, for it was well established that prior to
the conquest of Peru “Spain had little money”. Writing seventy years after the event,
Inca Garcilaso wryly noted that for many of his Spanish readers Atahualpa’s unprec-
edented ransom now seemed like a paltry sum since “10 or 12 million ducats worth
of gold and silver now sail up the Guadalquivir each year, sent by my land to all of
Spain, and [from there] to all of the Old World”. 21 As the gold and silver continued to
 

flow in ever great quantities into Spain and Europe, Peru’s mineral wealth “revealed

19  The ‘modern’ practice of writing histories that purposefully surpassed ‘ancient’ Greco-Roman prec-
edents (and Old Testament typology) was widespread in New World history writing. See D. A. Lupher,
Romans in a New World : Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor : University of
   

Michigan Press, 2003) and S. MacCormack, On the Wings of Time : Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton :
   

Princeton University Press, 2006).

20  J. Basadre, Meditaciones sobre el destino histórico del Perú (Lima : Huascarán, 1947), 104-105.
 

21  Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Segunda Parte de los Comentarios Reales de los Incas o Historia General del Peru
(Cordoba, 1617), Libro I, Capitulo XXXVIII, folio 31.
36 mark thurner
herself to be a cruel stepmother [madrastra] to her own sons and a passionate mother
to foreigners”. 22 That ‘Peru’ should evoke riches, ransom and loss, however, is so
 

not only because Pizarro’s marvelous ‘gift’ to the emperor promised an unparalleled
flow of ships laden with gold and silver. In retrospect, more significant was the in-
vented ‘historical truth’ to which the spiritual wealth or memory of future Peruvians
may be traced : namely, that Pizarro’s gift of Peru came to signify the transfer (legiti-
 

mate or illegitimate) of imperium or kingly sovereignty from the Peruvian Monarchy

of the Incas to the composite and universal Spanish Monarchy of the Hapsburgs.
This fictive and retrospective ‘translation’ or ‘transfer’ of ‘imperium’ traslatio imperii
(which in effect ‘translated’ incompatible concepts of dominion) was the hermeneuti-
cal necessity of the early chroniclers, who told the story of encounter within existing
frames of historical reference as the ‘conquest’ and surrender of the heathen ‘lords of
the land’ to the Christian Emperor and the Spanish monarchy. This early necessity of
writing ‘conquest’ history, which drew upon Old Testament and classical Mediter-
ranean tropes, would serve as a ‘secondary’ source basis for the subsequent elabora-
tion and proliferation of royal genealogical histories in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, many of which promoted the narrative of ‘spiritual conquest’
in which the preternatural messengers of God had intervened, thereby granting the
Church its central position in the postconquest colonial order. 23 The Incas had been
 

portrayed in the early accounts as the natural ‘lords of the land’ of otherwise barbar-
ian and idolatrous subjects. In Inca Garcilaso’s providential dynastic history of ‘spiri-
tual conquest’, Peru’s Incas of the ‘Capac’ lineage are wise sovereigns who serve his
grand narrative and critical purpose as Neo-Platonist ‘mirrors of princes’ and utopian
“Incas, Kings of Peru that were”. This purpose was largely realized in the political
realm, since Inca Garcilaso’s profiles of the Incas were frequently cited as models for
‘how to govern’ colonial Peru and the Indies at large, although other, competing
histories were also cited in support of contrary policies. In the realm and republic of
historical discourse, the Incas would be inscribed and historicized as a numinous and
unsuspected chapter in the Book of Kings. The Book of Kings was a gloss for a venerable
tradition of history writing of Old Testament (Hebrew) and classical Mediterranean
origins that was modernized and refined in early modern Hispanic historiography. 24  

At the same time, the consequences of this Indian inscription in the Book of Kings of
a New World empire greater than Rome could be deeply disturbing for the received
discourse of universal history.
Notably, Inca Garcilaso’s two-part, “royal commentaries” on preconquest and con-
quest history had at its heart and start (or ‘origin and principle’) the ambivalent and
universal figure of the Indian barbarian, albeit one who’s proper name was “Beru”.
This figure was squarely implicated in the abysmal event that would generate the
name of Peru, which I have discussed in detail elsewhere. 25 To make a long story
 

22  Garcilaso, Segunda Parte, Libro I, Capitulo XXXVIII, folio 31.

23  See J. C. Estenssoro Fuchs, “Construyendo la memoria : la figura del inca y el reino del Perú, de la con-
 

quista a Tupac Amaru II”, Los incas, reyes del Perú, eds. Thomas Cummins et al. (Lima : Banco de Credito,
 

2005), 94-173.
24  A. de Solís, Historia de la Conquista de México (Madrid : A. Goncˇalez de Reyes, 1704).
 

25  M. Thurner, History’s Peru : The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography (Gainesville : Univer-
   

sity Press of Florida, 2011), ch. 1.

 an old new world for the history of historiography 37
short, the name of ‘Peru’ was the événementiel product of a predictable linguistic error
of discovery that was nevertheless resonant and historically true. It was the anxious
utterance by “Beru” of his own proper name and of the word ‘Pelu’ (which means
‘river in general’ in a native Peruvian language of the coast) pronounced at the mouth
of a river (that is, in the mouth of any of the many rivers that flow into the sea in the
northern coastal provinces) and heard by the ‘desiring’ ears of wayward Spanish ex-
plorers. This strange but revealing event, based on earlier oral accounts and narrated
for posterity by Inca Garcilaso, was followed by the enthusiastic reception of the
name back in Spain, and finally the exegetical proof, offered by Inca Garcilaso in his
history, that the name made sense in historical and linguistic terms. It was this tertiary
event of learned ‘commentary’ that founded Peruvian history/historiography. The
conjoining of “Beru” and “Pelu” as “Peru” satisfied history’s narrative requirement
that its subject possess a proper name with a future among a community of readers.
It did so by virtue not only of a deft mestizo exegesis but by taking literary recourse
to the ancient poetic tradition of christening upon discovery, here informed by the
ancient trope by which rivers (and kings) could “write their names on the land”. In-
deed, this was also the “origin and principle” of the names of “India” and “Iberia”. 26  

The strange and numinous new subject of history named “Peru” was one of the
first and most enduring fruits of the global “Indian” historical imagination. As in the
ancient imperial age of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic ‘universal historians’
who participated in the invention of the enduring subject of history named ‘India’,
the known universe had suddenly expanded. However, this time the expansion was
truly global, particularly when seen from the predicament or subject position of ‘the
ends of the world’. As in the lands that became modern Europe, the histories of cos-
mocolonial Peru or Mexico reached back to their own interrogated and invented
‘antiquity’. This ‘Indian antiquity’ that would find its posterity in national and natural
history was unlike modern Europe’s in one key sense, however. It was an intimate
and proximate antiquity that had suddenly elapsed but not disappeared at the mo-
ment of crisis normally called ‘conquest’. It was an antiquity with survivors who
lived and wrote among the moderns. An antiquity whose history was told not only
in monumental ruins and texts (codices) but in the living words and ‘customs’ of
historical eyewitnesses. Inca Garcilaso’s foundational account of the twelve Inca sov-
ereigns of the Capac dynasty was a Renaissance Indian doubling of Suetonius’ Lives
of the Twelve Caesars with strong parallels to the providential history of the House
of Constantine, written from Spain for the posterity of “Peru”. But Inca Garcilaso’s
ghosts were not Petrarch’s bookish phantoms. He talked to the dying Incas in the
flesh, suckled fables at their knees, and otherwise harvested their living oral tradi-
tions, and then he wrote them in Spanish for the posterity of Peru, from the other
side of the world. 27 In this sense, Inca Garcilaso was an ‘Indian’ or ‘Peruvian’ Hero-
 

26  For further discussion of the events and traditions of naming, see Thurner, History’s Peru, ch. 1-3. For
a Spanish language edition of the same, M. Thurner, El nombre del abismo : meditaciones sobre la historia de la
 

historia (Lima : IEP Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2012).

 

27  Inca Garcilaso was fully aware of his new geohistorical predicament. On the one hand, the author
presents himself as a hearing subject from ‘the end of the world’, that is, as a listening ‘Indian Inca’ (Inca
Yndio) who had ‘suckled fables’ at the knee of Inca royalty as a youth. On the other hand, this same author
is a ‘Spanish Inca’ (the resonant meaning of the pen name Inca Garcilaso de la Vega) writing subject. This
older writing subject now dialogues, in an erudite Spanish language that nevertheless registers Quechua
38 mark thurner
dotus, only this Herodotus was fully modern in a global sense heretofore impossible.
Another contrast lies in these respective historian’s treatment of ‘barbarians’. As Har-
tog shows, for Herodotus the Scythians are an inverted mirror of Greek identity but
also a mythopoetic means to an inaugural discourse of heterotopia that we now call
‘history’. Inca Garcilaso turned his ‘Indian’ barbarians into ‘Peruvians’ and thereby
inaugurated ‘Peruvian history’. Like Herodotus but on a more limited plane, Inca
Garcilaso came to be seen as the ‘father of history’ and ‘the father of lies’ or ‘fables’,
giving rise to endless polemics and revisions. 28 In either case, his impact on all subse-
 

quent Peruvian and South American historiography was profound.

It was the fabulous parlaying of this intimate Indian antiquity into the gambits of
global historical knowledge that gave rise to the early modern science of anthropol-
ogy and its universal history of ‘natural man’. 29 But in their efforts to inventory and
 

narrate this intimate and bloodied antiquity, historians of the Indies created sover-
eign political subjects and collectivities with proper genealogies, thereby carving out
spaces of historical interpretation and historicist critique. At about the same time that
Jean Bodin famously doubted its veracity, colonial Mexican and Peruvian royal ge-
nealogies undermined the ‘Four World Monarchies’ scheme, which had charted the
western drift of the Old World’s ‘universal history’. 30 Later, these same deep Indian
 

or American genealogies of sovereignty were deployed to challenge the modern Eu-

ropean dogma that would soon displace the ‘Four Monarchies’ scheme with another
fearsome foursome, and which in modified form still frames most history writing
around the world today (e. g., ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary). America,
it would later be argued, never had a ‘medieval’ period since it passed directly, via
conquest, from ‘antiquity’ to colonial ‘modernity’, and from there to the postcolonial
‘contemporary age’ of revolution and democracy. 31  

II. ‘Indian’ Genealogies of National History ?  

Modern Latin American historiography was not Europe’s offspring. 32 In the old New  

World that was once called the ‘Indias occidentales’ then also ‘America’ and now
‘Latin America’, there was and is no need to import national history or historicism
from Europe.
This is so in part because historians in Europe and America drank from the same
ancient Mediterranean well, in part because ‘Indian’ genealogies provided ‘ancient’

cadences, with his young aural self and thus with the Quechua ‘fables’ or oral histories that constitute the
primary sources of the text. In short, the subject position of this new dispensation of history was that of a
listening and writing ‘knowing subject’ who stood on either antipode of the globe and on both sides of the
ancient/modern divide.
28  On Herodotus, see F. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus : The Representation of the Other in the Writing of
 

History (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988).

 

29  See A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man : The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology
 

(Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987).

 

30  On the Four World Monarchies scheme and Bodin, see A. Grafton, What was History ? The Art of His-
 

tory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Kelley, Faces of History.
 

31  See Sebastián Lorente : Escritos fundacionales de historia peruana, ed. M. Thurner (Lima : Fondo Editorial
   

de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2005).

32  The ‘Europe’s Offspring’ phrase is from The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Vol. 4, 1800-1945, eds. S.
Macintyre, J. Maiguashca and A. Pók (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2012).
 
 an old new world for the history of historiography 39
origins independent of the Old World, and in part because at particular moments the
horizon of modernity lie not in Europe but across the seas. Strictly speaking, national
history in the Americas was written before modern ‘Europe’ raised its head north of
the Pyrenees. Once this new ‘Europe’ was in place, American history was often writ-
ten against it, or at least against those misinformed generalizations manufactured by
the northwestern European historians who contributed to the modern invention of
a “Europe” that, as Hartog notes, “saw itself as the locomotive of the modern world
and cast itself as its ultimate tribunal”. 33  

The rise of a new “Europe” led by the Dutch, British and French commercial em-
pires heralded a veritable intellectual onslaught on ‘the Spaniard’ and ‘the Turk’ and
their old tributary empires and ecumenical faiths. Viewed from the Indo-Hispanic
world, the new, northwestern European Enlightenment could signify not only an in-
spiration to critique and reform but also an uncouth aggression that recalled the Ref-
ormation’s iconoclastic craze to de-authorize and ‘Orientalize’ Spain and its worldly
Catholicism. The eventual result of that northern aggression is well known : Hegel’s  

“Europe” and “History” itself would, in its master/slave, dialectical march westward
toward full consciousness of itself, bypass the “priest-ridden” lands to the south of the
Pyrenees and the Italian Alps. No longer all-powerful on the seas and in northern Eu-
rope, Spain and her empire would be pronounced backward and morbid by virtue of
the African and Asian “influences” that had “enervated her progress”. A debilitating
amnesia set in, one that would be foundational for the erection of a modern narrative
of history as the march of “the West”.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s rereading of the old ‘polemic of the New World’ –
magisterially reviewed earlier by Antonello Gerbi – has underlined the vigorous
eighteenth-century counterattack against the new Europe, mounted by historical
thinkers based both in New Spain (Mexico) and Spain. 34 Cañizares-Esguerra’s argues
 

that novohispano and hispano historians of the New World developed an ethnohistori-
cal, empirical and relativist historical science that ironically anticipated the historicist
tenets that we now associate with Herder’s critique of Kantian ‘universal history’ or
with the professional, Rankean attack on armchair ‘philosophical history’. This rig-
orous, New World historiography was sustained by what Cañizares-Esguerra calls
“Creole patriotic epistemology”, 35 although it evidently was not limited to Creoles.
 

This approach to the writing of ‘Indian’ or New World history privileged native codi-
ces, the oral accounts of native nobles, ethnographic observations, and archaeologi-
cal reconnaissance. This critique was made possible in part by the recovery and re-
deployment in critical historical discourse of both the universal history of ‘Indias’ as
an opening chapter of the modern age, and of the genealogies of sovereignty worked
out by earlier historians of Peruvian and Mexican ‘antiquity’. Cañizares-Esguerra of-
fers many numinous eighteenth-century examples of Creole and Spanish polymaths
writing histories of ‘antiquity’ for ‘America’ and against ‘Europe’, and he focuses
in particular on the Jesuits among them, many of whom were forced into exile in
Italy or Britain, suggesting that these intellectuals were ‘postcolonial critics’ avante

33  See footnote 1.

34  Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, and A. Gerbi, La disputa del Nuevo Mun-
do : Historia de una polémica, 1750-1900 (Mexico : Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955).
   

35  Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, 206.
40 mark thurner
la lettre. 36 Here I will focus my discussion on two remarkable Peruvian examples of
 

secular historians who remained in America and engaged in similar polemics : Pedro  

de Peralta Barnuevo and José Hipólito Unanue.

If Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was the Herodotus of the New World, Pedro de Per-
alta Barnuevo (1673-1743) was surely its Vico. 37 It is highly doubtful that Peralta read
 

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), whose work apparently did not circulate beyond small
circles until the nineteenth century. Instead, as contemporaries working in cloistered
university settings in distant corners of the far-flung Spanish empire (in 1734 Vico was
appointed royal historiographer by the King of Naples and the Two Sicilies, who
later rose to become Charles III, King of Spain and Emperor of the Indies, while Per-
alta was named “Cosmographer and Engineer of the Realm” at the Viceregal Court
of Peru) they developed like methods and came to similar theoretical or poetic in-
sights, in part because both made enlightened readings of the same classical sources,
although the Neapolitan’s library and patronage was apparently richer than that of
his Limean counterpart, and perhaps as a result he was able to produce more and
higher quality work. 38  

If Vico blazed the trail of the ‘new science’ of history or ‘philosophical historicism’
back to Old World antiquity, Peralta pioneered another poetic trail as the first and
perhaps only American subject to write a history of Spain, and in particular of Spain’s
antiquity, from the colonies or “kingdoms and provinces”. He also wrote an epic
history in verse of his native land, Peru, entitled Lima fundada (1732) which is in es-
sence an erudite updating and poetic transposition of Inca Garcilaso’s Los comentarios
reales. 39 Peralta’s Historia de España vindicada (1730) is ostensibly an “apology” or de-
 

fense, aimed to deflect the attacks on Spain and her empire launched by European,
and in particular French, historians. Those historians had charged that poor Spain
lacked venerable antiquity, and as a mongrel empire consisting of Asian, African and
Indian elements would soon disappear from history. Peralta countered with a deep
genealogy that traced in detail and with abundant footnotes “the name and political
ship of Spain” back to Noah (something that Hapsburg imperial historians had done
in the sixteenth century albeit with rather less rigor). Peralta concluded that Spain
was the most ancient and greatest empire the world had ever seen, for she was the
only empire in world history to “unite two worlds”. It was also a bold enterprise, a
traslatio studii (transfer of the seat of knowledge) that addressed ancient Spain from

36  J. Cañizares-Esguerra, “Postcolonialism avante la lettre ? Travelers and Clerics in Eighteenth-Century

 

Colonial Spanish America”, After Spanish Rule : Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, eds. M. Thurner and
 

A. Guerrero (Durham : Duke University Press, 2003), 223-247.

 

37  Lest I be misunderstood, let me clarify that in summoning these recognized names or icons of the
Western canon I do not mean to suggest that these Peruvian historians be understood as derivative figures.
The Italo-Mexican collector and historian Lorenzo Boturini, for example, was sharply criticized by Europe-
ans for being derivative of Vico. But this criticism missed the parallel nature of his work. My deployment
of ‘Vico’ here is a recognition of the power of names to shape historical and scientific discourse. For cogent
discussions of the history of these powers, see M. Foucault, The Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human
 

Sciences (New York : Random House, 1970) and J. Rancière, The Names of History : On the Poetics of Knowledge
   

(Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

 

38  On Peralta’s working conditions, see Jerry Williams’ erudite preface to P. de Peralta Barnuevo, Histo-
ria de España vindicada (Newark : Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2003), xi-lii.
 

39  Lima fundada was, like Los comentarios reales, written to be read or performed aloud in the plazas and
salons of Peru and Spain.
 an old new world for the history of historiography 41
a Peru that was now Spain’s light and future, for Spain was to ancient Rome what
Peru was to Spain. Once an outer province of Rome, Spain subsequently outstripped
her achievements when she “united two worlds”. In turn, Peru had exceeded Spain
by “making of two empires, one”. 40 That is, Spain had united the Old World with
 

the New, but now a Peru led by Lima had united the Inca Empire with the Spanish
Empire, producing the next step in the history of world empires.
Peralta’s Lima was the “Political Phoenix” of its own modern mestizo empire, the
city a new “seat” of historical knowledge. That “seat” of glory and enlightenment
now aspired to a poetic or prophetical history that ‘imitated’ but also clearly ex-
ceeded Virgil’s Aeneid. Pizarro, the founder of Lima, is sung by Peralta as the Aeneid
of the New World, only he is clearly greater than Aeneid, and so Peralta too must
be more than Virgil. In part this is so because the “Rome” that Pizarro conquers was
greater than anything seen in the Old World, and in part because Peralta is now able
to ‘imitate’ Virgil as his intellectual successor.
But Peralta did more than praise and surpass. By sophisticated poetic means and
philosophical arguments, Peralta frees “History” from “the Prince” so that Peruvian
history could become the product of its own making and Lima the place from which
that history is sung. Peralta’s project is to recover the lost rhetorical arts of the an-
cient historians and poets and to place them at the service of Lima. He would make
‘historics’ prophetic or “poetic” again, and thereby turn the sovereign figure of “the
Prince” (in this case the Spanish Prince of the global “Spanish nation” which included
the Indies and so Peru) into the sovereign figure of “History”. Further, the locus of
enunciation of “History” is now Lima. Thus freed from “the Prince”, the poetic or
true “copy” of the Prince named “History” would become available to the Peruvian
imagination as the sovereign “head” or agent of its own future, as the maker of its
own lineage or “inheritance”.
Peralta’s dynastic poetics of history, wherein “History” is the “Prince” of the world
and therefore the true guide and ‘inheritance’ of any and all princes, has been de-
scribed as retrograde in the past but I suggest that in its own way it may have an-
ticipated later developments in German historical discourse described by Reinhart
Koselleck as world-historical. A half century before German discourse would rework
the unpromising word Geschichte into a collective singular noun and arch concept of
modernity that collapsed the inquiry and writing of history with the worldly succes-
sion of events and the past, and infused that concept with the empowering notions of
prognosis and acceleration, 41 Peralta was turning the Latinate term ‘historia’ (inqui-
 

ry and writing of history) into an all-encompassing concept of modern prognosis and

progress manifested in the Phoenix-like career of Lima, the enlightened head “of two
empires made one”. He did so by making “History” the Prince’s sovereign double
and true guide. As the “animated reason” of “the Prince”, “History” was “truer than
life”. Since “the Prince” was the “head” of the nation and since he embodied and sur-
passed his own royal lineage, as his animated reason “History” stood in a sovereign
and futural position vis-à-vis the past of the Empire, the distant King, and the imag-
ined Prince or “head” it tutored, and this was precisely the position of Lima and Peru
vis-à-vis Spain and the Spanish monarchy.

40  Last two quotes from P. de Peralta Barnuevo, Historia de España Vindicada (Lima : Francisco Sobrino,
 

1730). 41  R. Koselleck, Geschichte, Historie (Stuttgart : Klett, 1975).

 
42 mark thurner
Peralta’s poetics of history were imbued with a characteristically ambivalent form
of colonial (and postcolonial) critique in which, as the imagined Prince’s tutor and
double, “History” was not merely a ‘mirror of princes’ but instead the true sender
and addressee of “the answer” to the Prince’s ponderous “question” of “how to rule”.
In short, as the truer-than-life “example of all examples” that the imagined Prince
should follow, “History” ruled the world. “History” thereby made itself available
to Peruvian political and aesthetic projects, including those revolutionary ones that
would later decapitate the imperial body politic in the name of a “destiny” and “na-
tion” that “History” itself had made imaginable. Stated another way, this decapita-
tion in the realm of politics could only proceed efficaciously whence the “head” of
“the nation” could be imagined to be not “the Prince” but his textual “copy” and
excess, “History” itself.
The actual political beheading of the Spanish and Peruvian empires was still be-
yond the horizon, the “headless history” of the Republic more than a century off.
But a half century after Peralta had freed “History” from “the Prince”, the Peruvian
historicist critique of Eurocentrism developed by Unanue and others brought His-
tory’s headless horizon into view. In 1791 the editor of Lima’s El Mercurio Peruano an-
nounced that the primary task of his enlightened journal was to eradicate historical
ignorance about Peru in America and Europe since, he lamented, “the Peruvian em-
pire” now occupied “only a diminutive place in the portrait of the Universe painted
by Historians”. 42 Part of the problem was that the Bourbon administration had dis-
 

membered “the Peruvian empire” by creating new Viceroyalties to the north and
south of Lima ; but the burning issue involved a wave of skeptical European attacks
 

on the historical validity of the early Indian chronicles, among them Inca Garcilaso’s
Los comentarios reales.
These attacks had gone so far as to deny the Peruvian or indigenous identity of
the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, the cornerstone of Inca Garcilaso’s
genealogy of Peruvian sovereignty and his narrative of the rapid rise of Inca civiliza-
tion. In short, the new critiques threatened Peruvian (and by implication, Spanish)
dynastic sovereignty in its very origin. The Peruvian “Book of Kings” now tottered
on its Inca foundation. To the rescue of Manco Capac and Peruvian sovereignty
came many Peruvian historians, but the most brilliant defense was elaborated by
Unanue. Taking Montesquieu’s experimental method to other shores and another
conclusion, Unanue observed that the particular “genius” of the South American
mind was the product of its heightened neural sensitivity to the diverse “influences”
on the body exercised by the Andean clime, where an unparalleled range of vertical
or altitudinal gradients mediated the effects of the blazing and debilitating equatorial
sun. 43 As a consequence of these variable environmental influences, the “American
 

imagination” of Peru was more sensitive and rapid-firing than the European mind,
which in turn he characterized, in accordance with the cool and damp European
climes of the north, as slow and dull. Based on his controlled experiments and ob-
servations, Unanue argued that Manco Capac must have been Peruvian, for only
a talented native could have launched Peru on such a rapid climb to the heights of

42  J. Calero y Moreira, El Mercurio Peruano (2 January 1791).

43  J. H. Unanue, Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima y sus influencias en los seres organizados, en especial el
hombre (Madrid : Sancha, 1815 [1805]).
 
 an old new world for the history of historiography 43
Inca civilization, which had outstripped millennial Rome in a mere century or two. 44  

Moreover, Manco Capac’s founding “laws” had been sagaciously adopted and updat-
ed by the remarkably historicist sensibility of the enlightened Spaniards, who based
the “Laws of the Indies” in part on Islamic and Roman law, and in part on insights
culled from the early chronicles, in particular Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s, and also
from the “relaciones” and “informaciones” or reports gathered by Spanish scholars
and Crown functionaries. 45  

Reviewing in great detail Peru’s geographical diversity and cultural heritage,

Unanue argued that there was nothing in the world that Peru lacked. Peru embraced
all of the world’s climes within her territory. Likewise, her human diversity defied
and obviously far exceeded contemporary European classification schemes, which
had wrongly attempted to fix civilizational potential based on the predominance of
one racial type and one clime. Peru was not only a natural and human ‘microcosm’.
In Unanue’s mind, given its geographical situation and civilization, Peru was prob-
ably more universal than any land in the world. In contrast, the inability to grasp the
native “genius” of this Peruvian universality revealed the European mind’s provin-
cialism and slowness to react “to the vicissitudes of history”.
For Unanue and many of his Creole peers across the Americas, “Europe” denom-
inated an upstart eighteenth-century province located in the dull and dim north-
western climes of one small and formerly barbarous “quarter” of the Old World. In
contrast, the “other three-quarters of the globe” embraced the ancient and modern
civilizations and diverse and benevolent climes of the Mediterranean world, Ameri-
ca, Asia, and Africa. These old and venerable homes of world history had, in his view,
been ungratefully dismissed by a rigid and provincial European imagination.

III. Postcolonial avant la lettre

Unanue’s late colonial critique of the new Europe of “the Enlightenment”, launched
from Peru in the name of “the other three-quarters of the globe”, anticipated ‘head-
less’ or postcolonial-republican histories written in the nineteenth-century Americas.
In his introduction to an elaborately illustrated two-volume coffee-table book en-
titled Peruvian Antiquities, the first director of independent Peru’s national museum,
Mariano de Rivero y Ustariz, pronounced that “Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome
are not the only empires worthy to serve as nourishment for a generous [historical]
imagination”. 46 That generous historical imagination was soon cultivated by a new
 

generation of republican historians, chief among them Sebastian Lorente (1813-1884)

the Spanish-born occupant of Peru’s first chair in “History of Peruvian Civilization”
at its oldest university, San Marcos (founded in 1551). Lorente’s postcolonial philo-
sophical history of the Peruvian “soul” provided the imagined political community
of Peru with a positive and persuasive historicist narrative of its own modernity and
contemporaneity as a sovereign historical subject positioned on the cutting edge of

44  J. H. Unanue, “Idea General de los Monumentos del Antiguo Perú e Introducción a su Estudio”, El
Mercurio Peruano, 22 (17 March 1791).
45  Juan de Solórzano Pereira’s historicist treatment of laws and customs in Política Indiana (1647) antici-
pated many of the theses of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) by more than a century.
46  M. Rivero and J. von Tschudi, Antigüedades Peruanas, vol. 2 (Viena : Imprinta Imperial de la Corte y
 

del Estado, 1851), iii.

44 mark thurner
“contemporary” world history. In contrast to the standard negative or ‘not yet’ plots
of most historical narratives of Peru today, Lorente maintained that Peru was ready
for the popular sovereignty of the contemporary age of democratic revolutions. This
was so not only because she was blessed with a primitive “communal” and “national
spirit” that had guided her progressively through ‘turbulent’ epochs, but because
“those who would propose solid bases for social doctrines [...] must depart from the
phenomena of the soul”. 47 That is to say, Lorente’s histories would confirm, both on
 

historical and philosophical grounds, that Peru was inherently fit to fully partake and
even lead in the worldwide “contemporary age”.
Working for the most part within contemporary, transatlantic historicist concepts,
Lorente’s philosophical history of the “soul” is notably immune to Dipesh Chakrabar-
ty’s heavy-handed critique in Provincializing Europe, which claims that historicism was
a European invention imposed on the colonized. “Historicism”, Chakrabarty writes,
“came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of
saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else”. 48 This generalization does not hold for Peru nor
 

indeed does it apply to most of the Americas. Instead, and as Lorente’s histories make
clear, historicist concepts such as ‘soul’ and even ‘progress’ could underwrite a dis-
course of colonial and postcolonial political modernity that anticipated or ran parallel
to, rather than behind, ‘Europe’.
As Juan Maiguashca has noted, nineteenth-century South American histories traf-
ficked “between Centre and Periphery” in ways that not only “imitated” but also
“created” both new narratives and philosophical reflections on history. In certain
ways akin to the philosophical history of the contemporary Argentine historian Vi-
cente Fidel López, Lorente’s approach to history transcended the old face-off, made
iconic in the 1840s polemic on historical method between Andrés Bello and José Last-
arria, between ad narrandum (narrative) and ad probandum (philosophical) approaches
to history. 49 Drawing creatively on Vico, Kant, Herder, Michelet and Guizot, among
 

others, Lorente developed a critical philosophical history of Peru that anticipated and
deeply influenced historical writing in twentieth-century Peru.
Lorente’s histories raised questions about the universality of the recognized
“epochs” of world history developed by European historians. The principal divisions
of “Universal History” reviewed in Lorente’s textbook on the subject corresponded
to the accepted four major ‘epochs’ of the Old World : ancient, medieval, modern and
 

contemporary. Ancient history in the received discourse, Lorente noted, “extends

from the origin of peoples to the dissolution of Roman society” and it has “three divi-
sions” : Oriental, Greek and Roman. “Medieval history” (historia media or historia de
 

la Edad Media) concerns itself with the progression of events from the end of ancient
history to the discovery of America. “Modern history” runs from “this transcendental
discovery to the French revolution”. Finally, “contemporary history” extends “from
that great revolution down to our day”. Universal History’s faithful and truthful rela-

47  S. Lorente, Curso elemental de filosofía para los colegios del Perú (Ayacucho : Impr. de D. T. Arriaran, Aya-
 

cucho : Impr. administrada por Braulio Cárdenas, 1854), 26.

 

48  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8.

49  See J. Maiguashca, “Historians in Spanish South America : Cross-References between Centre and Pe-
 

riphery”, The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 463-487. Also see Colmenares, Convenciones contra la cul-
tura.
 an old new world for the history of historiography 45
tion of the brilliant career of civilization thus arises in the Orient and runs through
Rome to Spain, for she was “the vanguard of Europe” that made that “transcenden-
tal discovery” that ushered in “the Modern Age”. Centuries later, Paris announced
the arrival of “the contemporary age” of “the end of colonialism” and the “death of
the King”. 50 But there is another catch : the Sun of “ancient civilization” also rose in
   

Peru. So the Eastern origin narrative was incomplete in one key sense : it no longer  

was about civilization everywhere. The possible, distant Oriental origin of the first
“Indians” in “America” (migration via the Bering Land bridge) was another question,
unrelated to the more recent history of civilization, which was a subsequent develop-
ment that evolved independently in the Americas. And there was another problem
with the narrative of “universal history”. Peru had passed directly from the “ancient”
age to the “modern” age : there was no “medieval” period in the New World. 51
   

Lorente’s career of history differs notably from Hegel’s as outlined in his Philoso-
phy of History, where “Germania” or northwestern protestant Europe is the “new
world” of liberty and the destiny of the “world-spirit”, and where America is a mere
extension or working out of the post-reformation European dialectic between north-
ern “Germanic” or Protestant states and southern “Romanic” or Catholic states. Lor-
ente’s vision of the contemporary age’s future was more global and multipolar, and
it included Asia and Africa. He noted that in India under British rule, “Calcutta and
other great centers of culture boasted handsome educational and social establish-
ments”. He looked approvingly at the Indian Mutiny of 1857, whose result in his view
was to check the worst abuses of the Company (“the despotism of Company rule
made things intolerable”). The mutiny had failed, however, because of religious divi-
sions and the monarchist clamoring of those who mistakenly wished to restore an
‘aging Mogul’ to the throne. Although Lorente had little patience for constitutional
monarchy, he noted that the Queen’s rule in India promised economic reforms and
justice. In India as elsewhere in Asia and Africa the coming of the people’s republic
and its contemporary age was simply a question of the right opportunity and not of
“development” and indeed was “guaranteed” by the ancient history of civilization
among the peoples of those regions. 52  

Lorente’s genealogy of Peruvian history identified the colonial with the modern
and the independent or postcolonial with the contemporary. As such, we may dis-
cern in the (strictly speaking) post-modern or ex-colonial (since for Lorente and many
others the colonial period was identified with “the modern age”) contemporary age
of independent Peru the outlines of an early postcolonial historical thought with
clear colonial precedents in the likes of Unanue. As Chakrabarty has rightly noted,
‘postcolonial history’ should not be understood as anti-imperialist in the nationalist,
revanchist and parochial sense ; it should also not be identified with ‘resistance’ to
 

colonialism or capitalism and it is also not nativist or, as it is called in Latin America,
indigenista. Instead, postcolonial history registers the ambiguities of its own subaltern
predicament as a history made possible by the history of colonialism. In Lorente’s
historical thought we see that the republican revolution in Peru was postcolonial or

50  See M. Thurner, “After Colonialism and the King : Notes on the Peruvian Birth of ‘Contemporary His-
 

tory’”, Postcolonial Studies, 9, 4 (2006) : 393-420.

 

51  S. Lorente, Historia Antigua del Perú (Paris and Lima : Masías, 1860) and Historia de la civilización peruana
 

(Lima : Gil, 1879).

 
52  S. Lorente, Compendio de Historia Contemporánea (Lima : Gil, 1876).
 
46 mark thurner
“ex-colonial”, that is, it came after an ambivalent but generally positive colonial his-
tory of modernity that had been written over the inerasable name of an ancient, pre-
colonial native civilization, itself underwritten by the “soil” and “clime” of a sublime
“nature” of the same name.
Lorente’s genealogical discourse fully registered in its own way what we might call
the postcolonial historical predicament of the Peruvian Republic. In the historicist
imaginary elaborated by Lorente and which would live a long if invisible life in twen-
tieth-century Peruvian historiography, the death of the king was not so much the
birth of the nation ; instead, it signified the liberation of the “new nationality” seeded
 

by Spanish colonialism in the rich soil of the ancient (pre-colonial) native land. That
modern colonial nationality under Spain was imbued with the enduring “communal
spirit” of the indigenous villages and the “high culture” of the Incas. Kings ruling
from abroad did not determine the course of Peru’s history ; indeed, even the native
 

Inca kings did not determine its course. In Peru the nation’s history was headless.
Deeper than dynasties, the origins and permanence of “Peruvian civilization” were
to be found in the villages that formed the “base of the state”. Beyond the “modern
age” of colonial Peru rose the “contemporary age” of revolutions. Peru had boldly
entered this new age and it was from the promise of this age that Lorente boldly
wrote his politically committed histories. The cause of the “contemporary age” con-
stituted for Lorente the politics and poetics of history and as a result he dedicated his
life’s work to elucidating the significance of “Peruvian civilization” for the Peruvian
people’s liberty, “for if not all is done by the people, we may surely say that all is done
for the people”.
Philosophical narratives like those of Rivero and Lorente were challenged from
within and without. Many American and European critics questioned whether the
new republics of Spanish America were ready for independence and they counted
the days awaiting their demise. Were these “countries” nations or only “nations in
name” ? Many argued that “the republic” was alien to Peruvian or Mexican history
 

if not to modern history at large, and that errant and ungovernable postcolonies
should return to the European breast of imperial monarchy and to the long arms
of the Vatican or, failing that, follow the American example of the transplanted and
naturalized Portuguese monarchy that now ruled from the Empire of Brazil. Be-
cause any “return” to monarchy raised the colonial specter of European rule in the
Americas, in Peru and Mexico the “national question” of the historical suitability or
viability of republican independence was always a ‘postcolonial question’. In part for
this reason, and as Elías Palti’s brilliant little history of “the national question” among
historians has suggested, that question was raised here by historical thinkers two de-
cades before it was first articulated in Europe by Lord Acton, 53 and nearly half a cen-
 

tury before Ernest Renan famously asked his now canonical question in response to
the calamities of the Franco-Prussian war and the rising tide of European racial “eth-
nography”. 54 Renan’s ostensibly novel contention that all European nations were ra-
 

53  E. J. Palti, La nación como problema : Los historiadores y la ‘cuestión nacional’ (Buenos Aires : Fondo de
   

Cultura Económica, 2003).

54  E. Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation ?” (What is a Nation ?), lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, 11 March
   

1882, see the English annotated translation by Martin Thom in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhab-
ha (London : Routledge, 1990), 8-22.
 
 an old new world for the history of historiography 47
cial mongrels had long been a commonplace in the Americas and his argument that
nation was a “spiritual principle” was also anticipated here by more than a century.
Apparently, the first historians to raise ‘the national question’ in the postcolonial
Americas were Creole ‘conservatives’ who looked to colonial histories or ‘Indian’
chronicles for inspiration and who argued that the nation was a ‘spiritual’ union
forged by Catholicism and subject to ‘providence’ and ‘divine sovereignty’. Barto-
lomé Herrera of Peru and Lucas Alamán of Mexico were perhaps the most influential
historicist critics of the republican and liberal theorists of popular sovereignty and
nationhood in the Spanish Americas. This polemical unclothing of ‘the nation’ in the
1840s anticipated the polemics that within a century would expose many of the tenets
of national historicism as it had been practiced heretofore.

IV. Historicism ’ s Hand Revealed ?  

The ‘crisis of historicism’ was not just a European phenomenon. Critical reflections
on the theory of history and the practice of historicism were written in Peru and
Mexico during the European ‘interwar period’ and beyond, into the middle decades
of the twentieth century. In Europe and in particular Germany, these years wit-
nessed a growing ‘crisis of historicism’ and ‘European science’ and also its revisionist
defense (Dilthey, Heidegger, Meinecke, Husserl, Ortega y Gasset and many others
were implicated). 55 Among the critical American reflections that responded to local
 

crises, perhaps the most acute were authored by Edmundo O’Gorman of Mexico
and Jorge Basadre of Peru. Both men were widely read in European philosophy and
history, had close family connections to Europe (Ireland and Germany, respectively)
and dedicated themselves to the study of the historical worlds they inhabited, strug-
gled with and loved : “America”, “Mexico” and “Peru”.
 

As Guillermo Zermeño argues, 56 O’Gorman’s trenchant critiques of profession-

 

al Mexican historiography – in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century,
Mexican historiography began to register in particular ways prestigious French posi-
tivist and German historicist persuasions or Fragestellung (approaches) – opened up
a wide polemical horizon that infused Mexican modernity with a lively and precari-
ous sense of its own historical and political being. O’Gorman’s philosophical reflec-
tions on the ‘invention of America’ and the “trauma of Mexican history” raised the
colonial and national questions in ways that demanded a critical rethinking of the
theory and methods of history. For O’Gorman, the new “historical science” was
akin to an aggressive “Prussian dog” (a reference to Ranke) that hounded “histori-
cal truth” into hiding. For O’Gorman, truth was not “an eternal and passive pos-
session” but “a demanding lover that, in effect, requires of us a continuous effort
of adherence so that she will remain ours ; it requires not only an initial acknowl-
 

edgment (conocimiento) but repeated re-acknowledgment (re-conocimiento)”. 57 As  

the re-acknowledgement of historical truths, the history of history (or historiolo-

55  On the European crisis, see C. R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca : Cor-
 

nell University Press, 1995).

56  G. Zermeño Padilla, La cultura moderna de la Historia. Una aproximación teórica e historiográfica (México :  

El Colegio de México, 2002).

57  E. O’Gorman, La idea del descubrimiento : Historia de esa interpretación y crítica de sus fundamentos (Mexi-
 

co : Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, 1951), 379-380.

 
48 mark thurner
gy) was both indispensable to the pursuit of truth and a threat to the truth claims
of historiography. The history of history was now History/history’s worst enemy.
Jorge Basadre was not the trenchant critic of historicism that O’Gorman was. In-
deed, he strongly defended historicism as “relativist humanism” but in the process
ironically pushed historicist thought to its aporetic limits, in the end revealing its
founding, collective artifice to be the proper name of the collective historical subject
within which the knowing subject (the historian) may discover the truth of his own
historicity. The proper name governs any historical field of belonging, inquiry and
narration, and in Basadre’s case that name was, of course, none other than “Peru”
itself. Although Basadre recycles dialectical and developmentalist themes and lan-
guage found in European historicism (his lexicon is particularly indebted to concepts
drawn from Dilthey and Croce), his narrative framing of the historical subject named
Peru is not evolutionary or “developmentalist” but is instead an affirmative, second-
order “wager” for a future that is itself the consequence of affirmative wagers made
in the past by “Peruvian” predecessors. Moreover, those precedent “wagers” propel
Peru toward a future whose “historical reason” must be distinct from that of modern
Europe, since that reason is the product or posterity of Peru’s own historical mode of
becoming what “Peru” itself proposed it should become. 58 For Basadre, to be histori-
 

cal is to make wagers on those historical wagers that were made on us before we lived.
O’Gorman’s critical “historiology” – inspired in the thought of Heidegger and Orte-
ga y Gasset and developed in dialogue with his compañero de ruta, the Spanish philoso-
pher in Mexican exile, José Gaos – shared key notions and concepts with the “finalist”
historicism of Basadre, who was more closely influenced by the thought of Benedet-
to Croce. One of these shared notions was a philosophical and historical appreciation
of the generative power of language, and in particular of the invention of resonant
proper names, in the making of worlds. For O’Gorman and Basadre, such historical
names could verily sustain political worlds when “adhered” to or “loved” by histori-
cal communities of practicing speakers and believers. Both Basadre and O’Gorman
questioned the notion that history could have any origin or meaning before or out-
side of the proper name that proposes or “presupposes it” and to which the historian
must cling, since history is lived, imagined and written under its spell. O’Gorman
and Basadre thus confronted the ‘crisis of historicism’ from the historical worlds un-
der whose names they lived and wrote history : “America”, “Mexico” and “Peru”.
 

Significantly, this ‘nominalist’ but crisis-ridden appreciation of the meaning, science

and art of history is not the same as the national historicist notion, still common in
Europe, and perhaps most notably advanced by Wilhelm von Humboldt, that man
becomes caught in his own “national” web of language and that the only way out of
that web is to get trapped in another national web of language, from either of which,
nevertheless, an objective “History” may be grasped. 59 Such a notion corresponds
 

58  Basadre’s philosophy of history is displayed in the following texts : Perú : Problema y posibilidad. Ensayo
   

de una síntesis de la evolución histórica del Perú (Lima : Librería Rosay, 1931), Meditaciones sobre el destino hi-
 

stórico del Perú (Lima : Ediciones Huascarán, 1947), La promesa de la vida peruana y otros ensayos (Lima : Mejía
   

Baca, 1958), “A propósito de los puntos de vista de este libro : Reflexiones sobre la Historiografía”, Historia
 

de la Republica del Peru, 1822-1933 (Lima : Editorial Universitaria, 1968), xxxv-xlvi.

 

59  For a discussion of Wilhelm Humboldt’s influential concept of language/nation as applied to Mexican
historiography, see Zermeño Padilla, La cultura moderna de la historia.
 an old new world for the history of historiography 49
to modern European concepts of nation as linguistically bound communities with
(Christian) access to universal truth. As Benedict Anderson and other scholars have
demonstrated, that notion does not apply to Spanish America or indeed to the colo-
nial and postcolonial world at large, which is to say, most of the world. 60 Indeed the  

language = nation equation may have been a racialist fantasy in Europe as well, later
made real and enduring by a punishing process of schooling and warfare, against
which Renan famously protested. In any case, it is evident that the nation = language
= history equation reflects a particularly provincial, nineteenth-century European
view. In the ‘Indies’ and the Americas that equation was otherwise. Here, inflected
European and, in some cases, missionary-promoted native languages, became ad-
ministrative vernaculars and lingua franca, and the language map rarely obeyed the
drawing of modern political borders. Perhaps this insight and condition could serve
well as a guide for a global history of History/history that could “bring back into
service the venerable name of history”. 61 As Rancière noted, all history needs to do
 

is “reconcile itself with its own name”. 62 But what is its name ? I hope to have shown
   

here that at the very least History/history and the history of historiography need not
always be the ‘Indian’ captive of the name of ‘Europe’.
University of London

60  B. Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London : Verso,
   

2006). 61  Hartog, The Future of a Very Old Name.

62  Rancière, The Names of History, 103.