Ida Federica Pugliese (European University Institute, Florence)
From antagonism to a common fate: Abbé Raynal and William Robertson
The first part of my paper focuses on the reception of Raynal in the Scottish Enlightenment, taking into account the particular case of the historian William Robertson. Though they had never met, Raynal and Robertson shared more than being contemporaneous. They were writing during the same period on the same topic – colonization. Robertson, who was writing the History of America when Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indies was published, seemed to be worried that Raynal could blot his book out of the book market. Within this context, I will discuss Robertson’s use of networks of informants to obtain information from the colonies as well as Spanish sources unavailable in Scotland. His purpose of writing a history that could be the closest to the truth led him to improve on the methodology of historical research, operating on two stages: firstly, he created a system of contacts to whom he sent questionnaires about the Indians and the colonial life; secondly, he developed a textual structure through which he could discuss and contextualize the sources. In the case of the networks, I will explain the two types of networks that were established: the colonial network, whose informants Robertson sent questionnaires to; and the Spanish network formed by diplomats and members of the Spanish Ilustración, to whom he asked for documents that were conserved in Spanish inaccessible archives. As for the textual structure, his method of dividing the book in two parts, the second devoted to the discussion of the sources will be illustrated. The very emphasis that Robertson put on the sources denotes the criterion with which he would judge other historical works, up to the point that even Voltaire was criticized for the lack of quotations in his undoubtedly remarkable works. Raynal analogously employed networks of correspondents and collaborators and sent questionnaires out; however, his neglectful misquotations and partial position towards the Spanish sources mark the difference with the Scottish historian.
In the last part of the paper, I will consider to what extent Raynal and Robertson eventually shared a common fate: their works were pooled together by critics who deemed their perspectives completely incorrect. They were accused, for instance by the Jesuit Nuix, of giving a distorted image of Spain and of the Spanish colonies. But, while Raynal had actually represented a negative image of Spain, Robertson’s own interpretation of the Spanish empire was modulated on various levels, based upon which he hardly ever agreed with the so-called Leyenda Negra. Robertson’s work, besides all his efforts, was eventually misinterpreted most likely because it was automatically associated to Raynal’s one. The reception of the two works in Spain was then analogous: for Spanish critics, no matter the real contents of the books, the issue consisted in a colonial history that had to be written by national (and official) historians and not shaped by foreigners. Just in opposition to them, Juan Bautista Muñoz will be appointed as the official cronista so as to write an authentic Historia general de Indias.
