History of the Conquest of Mexico by William Hickling Prescott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I began this book with great expectations—cracking open its pages in the airport, on my way to Mexico City for my first ever trip to Latin America. The book seemed extremely promising: the classic work on a subject that fascinates me, written by a man who is considered to be both an excellent prose stylist and one of the founders of scientific history. Rarely does a book seem more perfectly suited to my tastes.
By the end, however, I found myself drained and unmotivated—dragging myself through the final pages. And now, I am in the strange situation of being unable to recommend this book to nearly anyone, despite seeing why it was considered a classic for so long.
I should begin by giving Prescott his due. Severely visually impaired, he could not travel to any of the places he was famous for writing about—never once stepping foot in Mexico, Peru, or Spain. Instead, he had to rely on secretaries, on copies of manuscripts sent to him, and most of all on his prodigious memory, which allowed him to gain fuller access to the primary sources than any scholar before him. And judged by the academic standards of his time, he was an extremely thorough and careful researcher. This book is extensively footnoted, and includes bibliographic essays at the end of many chapters. He did his homework.
He was also an accomplished writer. Believing that history was a genre of literature as much as a record of facts, he labored to make his narrative colorful and attractive. True, his style can seem overly verbose for modern tastes. But the book is still very readable. Indeed, the experience is often more comparable to reading a good swashbuckling novel than a serious work of history. More impressive still—considering his trouble seeing and his never having traveled there—his descriptions of the landscapes are quite lovely examples of nature writing. As both a historian and a writer, then, there is much to commend.
As James Lockhart points out in the introduction, however, there is a tension between these two sides of Prescott. While he is meticulous and skeptical in his footnotes, he is willing to take poetic license with his narrative. Facts, after all, are not always conducive to drama; and the records of history often leave unsatisfying lacunae. But Prescott was intent on writing a story that would stand on its own merits, and shows a willingness to fill in gaps or twist facts to suit his purposes. His urge to tell a good story, in other words, often overpowered his judgement.
Yet for the modern reader, this is not the most serious issue with this book. The glaring and obvious problem is Prescott’s candid sympathy for the conquering Spaniards, combined with his open disdain for those they conquered. Referring to the Aztecs as “barbarians” and “savages,” he dismisses their entire civilization as “half-civilized,” comparing their culture to “Asiatic despotism.” Now, to be fair to Prescott, these sorts of prejudices were nearly universal in his cultural milieu. But I have been alarmed to see other users on Goodreads swallow these prejudices uncritically—which I think requires some correction.
In Prescott’s hands, you see, the conquering Spaniards are romanticized to the point of unrecognizability—becoming an intrepid band of knights errant, motivated by genuine religious conviction, on a civilizing mission to free the oppressed and ignorant denizens of the New World from their tyrannical oppressors. The Aztecs are reduced to bloodthirsty savages, superstitious to the point of insanity, whose barbaric religion must be eradicated for the good of the world. This is no exaggeration. I am using his language and his phraseology here.
Now, I am certainly not going to sit here and write a defense of human sacrifice. But it is worth noting that the Spanish conquest led to a calamitous demographic collapse—one of the great mortality events of recorded history. So any notion that they somehow saved lives is absurd. It is also worth pointing out that the Spanish subjugated everyone they could, peaceful or otherwise. Further, any historian of the period will tell you that the Spanish conquistadores were motivated by one thing above all else: riches. This was obvious and openly admitted. Indeed, their actions don’t make sense in any other light.
If this book is worth reading, then, it is because it is itself a piece of history—a stirring work of literature, a contribution to the academic discipline of history, and an example of the dominant prejudices of the time. But in both its understanding of the period, and in the attitudes it reflects, this book is more than dated. It is obsolete.
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