max1461:
My undergrad modern history class introduced me to a lot of really fascinating primary sources, many of which individually changed my perspective on the world in big ways. I don’t remember all the sources we read, but the three that I’ve thought about most often since then (and which I really recommend people read) are:
In Defense of the Indians by Bartolomé de las Casas
Galeote Pereira’s report on Ming China
The diary of Antera Duke
One of the the really important take-aways from this class, and something that actually I think each of these sources illustrates, is just how new racism as we know it today is. Obviously the people of the past were plenty ethnocentric, plenty parochial and often dealt with other societies with contempt. But the ideas that undergird racism today, ideas about the inherent biological superiority of some races to others, and the dichotomy of cultures into “civilized” (Western) and “uncivilized”, really only emerge in a significant way in the 17th and 18th centuries.
You see this in each of these sources. In In Defense of the Indians, you see this debate where the cultural institutions of early modern Europe were deciding what they thought about these newly-encountered people of the Americas. Far from showing up and immediately going “these people are primitive savages”, which is what most narratives would have you believe, the 16th century Spanish didn’t know what to think of the people of this new world. And their most immediate ideological concern was that these people were not Christian. In the famous Valladolid debate, Las Casas argued not just for the humanity and the civilized nature of the Indians, but also for their legal rights. His opponents, of course, did believe that the Indians were like animals, not really human. But what strikes me is that they had to defend this view! We’re used to engaging with European perspectives on colonialism from, say, the 19th century, where the utter superiority of Europeans was taken absolutely for granted.
What’s striking to me about about Las Casas is that unlike later Europeans to sympathize with colonized people, whose writings often still drip with a kind of paternalistic sense of superiority, Las Casas finds it reasonable to say “the Indians are plenty civilized already” in straightforward terms, and expects that his interlocutors’ ideology is capable of accommodating this, even if they disagree. It’s an interesting perspective.
Then you have Pereira’s report on Ming China. Pereira was a Portuguese sailor captured by Ming officials in an anti-smuggling campaign, who then spent several years in China and wrote a travelogue about his experiences. One of the notable things again here is that there are, as far as I can recall, basically no racial undertones. Pereira is quite impressed with the Ming government, he finds Chinese society astonishingly orderly compared to his European home. He of course does not like that the Chinese are not Christian. But by and large he simply engages with Ming China as a society equal to his own. And why wouldn’t he? In terms of wealth and political power, 16th century China was a society equal to his own, and in fact probably one surpassing it.
The last one of these is the diary of Antera Duke. Antera Duke was an 18th century Efik slave trader from Old Calabar (in what is now Nigeria). He acted as a middle-man, acquiring slaves from farther inland (sometimes even catching them himself) and selling them to Europeans. His diary, written in Nigerian pidgin, mostly acts as a record of his sales. But what’s really interesting to me is the way he talks about his interactions with the Europeans he sells to. It’s clear that Duke views himself as their equal, and assumes that they deal with him as an equal too. At this point in time much of West Africa is controlled by extremely wealthy states that make their money selling slaves into the Atlantic salve trade. In Europe and the Americas white supremacy is a reality, but for a guy like Antera Duke it couldn’t be farther from the experience we see in his diary.
Of course, Duke’s apparent perception here seems in some sense out of time. The period in which he’s writing is near the end of the age in which these slave trading states are successful and prosperous. And there’s something fascinating about how we, as modern readers, know that his European contemporaries did not see him as an equal; by the 18th century, ideas about white racial superiority were well developed. But Africa was still 100 years from being colonized, and these ideas had not spread everywhere.
It’s an interesting perspective to observe.
Of course it’s not like we should be sympathetic to Duke here: he was a rich guy who made his money buying and selling other human beings. But not the sort of rich guy who made his money buying and selling other human beings that we usually hear from in the historical record!
