Forum Essay: Responses
Borders and Borderlands of Interpretation
CHRISTOPHER EBERT SCHMIDT-NOWARA
Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone.!
THE CUBAN NATIONALIST LEADER JOSe Marti invoked "barricades of ideas" as a
defense against the imperial pretensions of the United States. "Our America,"
imagined by Marti, was Latin America, an America with a common history and
culture that transcended borders while respecting national differences. Jeremy
Adelman and Stephen Aron simultaneously challenge and reinforce that vision of
the Americas. Like Marti, they look beyond political borders at deeper connections
and commonalties that borders often obscure. In contrast, Adelman and Aron cast
their gaze beyond Latin America, including the United States and its origins in the
clashes between rival empires and emerging nation-states on the North American
continent.
The affinity with and distinction from Marti's view of "Our America" raises two
related questions. First, Marti wrote his essay more than one hundred years ago
against the backdrop of numerous Cuban and Latin American essays and historical
studies in a similar vein. His work suggests that English-speaking historians and
intellectuals were not alone in theorizing the history of empire and cultural
connections in the Americas; Herbert Bolton and Frederick Jackson Turner (and
then William Cronon, Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and David J.
Weber) are not the only sources of this historical project, even though the
predominance of English-language social-science monographs in Adelman and
Aron's scholarly apparatus might inadvertently lead one to believe otherwise.
Second, Marti's perspective implies a relationship between historical vision and
political sovereignty. What would Adelman and Aron's model mean for historians
in other American countries? In other words, how would a distinct political and
institutional context alter the transnational model theorized by Adelman and Aron?
In this short response, I do not pretend to answer these questions. Rather, I raise
them to ask how Adelman and Aron's encompassing historical vision might also
reflect on the broad history of interpretation intertwined with the events and
processes it seeks to comprehend. Rivalries among empires, states, and peoples
manifest themselves not only through trade and warfare but also through the
interpretation of those struggles. Along with their counterparts in the United States
! Jose Marti, "Our America" [1891], in Marti, Our America: Writings in Latin America and the Struggle
for Cuban Independence, Elinor Randall, trans., Philip S. Foner, ed. (New York, 1977), 84.
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(and often in dialogue with them), historians and intellectuals from Latin America
have pondered the distinctive trajectories and moments of overlap between the
different European empires and their interactions with subaltern groups. Such was
the case in another territory caught between empires, Cuba in the nineteenth
century. Briefly examining Cuban views of empire and the American past suggests
that a North American history might be built on intellectual foundations inscribed
with their own transnational historicity.
Cuban (and Spanish) intellectuals felt compelled to explain and interpret the
persistence of three seemingly archaic institutions until the end of the nineteenth
century: the slave trade to Cuba (abolished 1867), slavery (abolished 1886), and
Spanish colonial rule (which lasted until the U.S. intervention in 1898). In doing so,
they often resorted to the comparative history of American colonial empires,
seeking both to throw their own situation into relief and to draw useful lessons from
other colonialisms, especially British. Many of them were well informed of
historical and theoretical trends in the English-speaking world.
Cuban intellectuals drew a firm distinction between the rationales and effects of
Spanish and British colonialism: in their eyes, the former was distinguished by its
religious motivations and racial intermixing (although economic motives and
exploitation were not absent), the latter by its almost exclusive concern with
commerce and its foundation in racial segregation. Political institutions were also
distinctive: Spain sought to rule unilaterally over its colonies, while Great Britain
permitted considerable self-rule. 2
Reflecting on these contrasts, many Cubans perceived Spanish colonialism as
superior. While based on forms of unfree labor, Spanish rule and customs
nonetheless permitted the coexistence and intermixture of Africans, Indians, and
Europeans. Foreshadowing Gilberto Freyere's arguments about the Portuguese in
Brazil, the Cuban writer Jose del Perojo argued that the Spaniards' experience with
colonialism and distinct racial and religious groups within Spain itself during the
Middle Ages prefigured the development of Spanish-American societies. 3
For their present situation, however, Cubans loyal to the colonial regime vastly
preferred British models. The British had ended the slave trade and moved to
abolish slavery in a gradual and compensated process. Moreover, British colonial
subjects had an important voice in local budgets and trade policies and elected their
own officials. Cuba, in contrast, was subject to exceptional military rule for most of
the nineteenth century, its economy was highly regulated in favor of Spanish
interests, and the survival and growth of slavery bred permanent social instability.
A variegated image of British colonialism, and especially of the United States,
emerged from this interpretive process. For Cubans in favor of preserving the
colonial bond in the later nineteenth century, the ideal colonial society was Canada
because the metropolis had peacefully ceded virtual sovereignty to the colony. For
2 See Antonio Angulo y Heredia, Estudios sobre los Estados Unidos de America (Madrid, 1865); Jose
Antonio Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los paises
americo-hispanos (Barcelona, 1879); Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Cuba primitiva (Havana, 1883); and
Jose del Perojo, Ensayos de politica colonial (Madrid, 1885). The works of the Cuban-born Spaniard
Rafael Marfa de Labra on slavery and colonialisms in the Americas are also important. See La abolicion
de fa esclavitud en ef orden economico (Madrid, 1873); and Politica y sistemas coloniales (Madrid, 1874).
3 Perojo, Ensayos de politica colonial.
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Christopher Ebert Schmidt-Nowara
those in favor of annexation to the United States, the vigorous economic growth
and decentralized political institutions were attractive (as was the political weight
of Southern slaveowners until the Civil War). For separatists, the most progressive
and inclusive political actors in Cuba, the former British colonies were ambiguous
at best: though democratic, they were nonetheless rent by violent racial strife and
discriminatiun and expressed threatening ambitions in the Caribbean.
The fears of Cuban nationalists like Jose Marti were borne out in 1898 when the
United States invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, annexing the latter
two and preserving the right of intervention in the former. U.S. motives were mixed.
While many Americans supported the intervention to help Cuban forces defeat
Spain, some political and military leaders saw the war between Cuba and Spain as
a good moment to satisfy long-held territorial ambitions. In the subsequent century
of explanation of the intervention, interpretive positions solidified: U.S. historians
emphasized the selflessness of U.S. actions, unaware of the depth and sophistication of the Cuban nationalist movement, while Cuban historians argued that the
United States acted to head off Cuban independence without regarding the
democratic motives of some North American supporters. Ironically, an event that
tightened U.S.-Cuban political, military, and economic bonds also created new
intellectual and historiographical borders between them. As a leading historian
has recently argued, that border has madc the cvcnts of 1898 mutually
incomprehensible. 4
Adelman and Aron offer excellent conceptual tools for thinking across that
historiographical divide by theorizing the linkages between imperial rivalries and
state formation and how those processes are shaped by multiple axes of conflict. My
only reservation is that the intellectual foundations of this project seem to lie too
squarely in the English-speaking world, from Turner and Bolton to the current
western historians. Historians from other parts of the Americas have thought about
this interrelated and contentious history for reasons as diverse as those in the
United States and Canada. In exploring the origins of contemporary political
borders in the borderlands of the past, should historians of North America stop at
the "barricades of ideas" that obscure borderlands of historical interpretation?
4 See Louis A. Perez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); and Perez, "Incurring a Debt of Gratitude: 1898 and the Moral Sources of
United States Hegemony in Cuba," AHR 104 (April 1999): 356-98.
Christopher Ebert Schmidt-Nowara received his PhD in 1995 from the
University of Michigan, where he studied with Rebecca Scott, Geoff Eley, and
Fred Cooper. He teaches Spanish and Latin American history in the Department of History, Fordham University, Lincoln Center. He has also taught in the
History Department of Stanford University. In June 1999, the University of
Pittsburgh Press published his first book, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba,
and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. His articles concerning aspects of Antillean
slavery, Spanish colonialism, and post-emancipation politics appeared in the
Hispanic American Historical Review and Illes i imperis in 1998. He is also one
of the authors of Mas se perdi6 en Cuba: Espana, ]898 y el fin de siglo (Madrid,
1998).
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1999