MDDM related book: Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest.

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=200531020360905

Jose Rabasa. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography
of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 359 pp. Notes, maps, illustrations,
bibliography index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8223-2567-5.

[...] Rabasa expands his thesis to include the argument that the Spanish
colonization of the Americas "rehearsed, three centuries later, the
imperialist categories that Britain and other northern European powers came
to deploy in India, Africa and the Middle East a the end of the eighteenth
century" (p. 16). He argues that although categories such as "colonialism"
and "racism" have been shown by scholars of colonialism to derive their
meaning from eighteenth and nineteenth-century capitalist expansionism,
this does not mean that the sixteenth century did not have a similar
"civilizing" mission. For the Spanish this mission was religious, not
secular. [...]