Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra responds to Chapter 1—World of Empires (Precontact-1740) and Chapter 2—America and the Transatlantic Enlightenment (1740-1800) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
A Condition of the Imagination
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has published a brief primer of intellectual history that claims novelty, but upon closer reading is deeply traditional. Chapters one and two explore the colonial history of ideas among white northern European on the east coast of North America, particularly in Massachusetts and Virginia. Ratner-Rosenhagen is not only deeply traditional in her geographical choices, but also in her narrative choices, plumbing exclusively the tropes of scholarship on Renaissance humanism and new Enlightenment sociability (print culture, Republic of Letters, public sphere, newspapers, coffee shops). Her Algonquian Native Americans confront Puritans and struggle to gain literacy. Her humanists are largely British, German, Dutch, and Puritan divines. Her Enlightened deists, lovers of Nature as law giver, are members of a North Atlantic Republic of Letters. Her networks of print and paper are white.
Ratner-Rosenhagen begins with an appealing model of ideas “crossing” empires-nations, temporal boundaries, and ethnicities, communities, and locales, yet implicit throughout her book is that in this world of ideas only North Atlantic whites were doing all the thinking, printing, and writing. There is no vibrant republic of Black Letters. There are no African Lodges, Churches, and Atheneums.[1] Natives appear as victims and so too do Blacks. No intellectuals. No Hispanics need apply.
America is a condition of the imagination. It could and should be considered differently. What if we were to take Florida and Santa Fe, not Massachusetts and Virginia, as the source of our colonial American origin story? Friars, not Puritans? Timucua and Pueblo, not Algonquian? Ratner-Rosenhagen’s intellectual history of colonial America would look rather different had she chosen to privilege these two “Hispanic” spaces.[2]
The Documents are There
As I write, I have nearly 1,000 pages of primary documents, transcribed, translated, and published by George Hammons and Agapito Rey in 1953 in front of me. They are a collection of documents on Juan de Oñate’s 1598-1606 expedition to New Mexico. Hammond and Rey picked and chose a few, out of many thousands of contracts, audits, petitions, and litigation in which hundreds of indigenous peoples participated as witnesses, translators, writers, captives, and sexual partners. One could argue that at least one half of Oñate’s privateering army composed of some 150 carpenters, cowboys, miners, scribes, cobblers were half Indians from Zacatecas, Mexico City, Queretaro, Durango and Sombrerete.
There are countless documents penned by eight Franciscan friars. There are also countless suzerainty treaties signed by dozens of Pueblo, Zuni, and Apache communities, accepting iron tools, new crops, new animals, and protection from raids by communities in Great Plains in exchange for providing Oñate with logistical support, for Oñate’s privateering party had no intention of settling New Mexico. Oñate was looking for ways to get into the North Sea and South Sea, to establish ports and trade with China. There are dozens of detailed empirical descriptions of nature, including buffaloes, crops, salt mines, and all variety of resources. There is evidence in the two-volume collection that the Pueblo, Zuni, and Apache quickly embraced paperwork and participated actively in the public sphere of the empire, through petitioning and testimonies in audits and trials. So too did the Timucua in Florida.
Hammons and Rey’s collection include detailed humanist debates among friars and privateering militias of mestizo commoners on whether they had the right to declare “just war” against Acoma, citing neo scholastics from Salamanca (along with Aquinas and Augustine) at every turn. One of the members of the expedition, Gaspar Perez de Villagra, wrote an epic, archival-based account in versified form, of the expedition, The History of the Nueva Mexico, printed in Alcala de Henares in 1610, to defend himself and Oñate of anti-tyranny charges from the bottom up. Villagra drew on classical and well established genre of New World sixteenth century epics imitating Greek and Roman texts to address a bottom-up paperwork revolt by participants in the expedition, including dozens of indigenous servants, militia rivals, and friars.
These are records of a vibrant republican debate that involved natives, Blacks, mestizos, and Europeans over the limits of elites to circumvent contracts, treaties, and the law. The first radical republican debates in today’s territories of the US did not happen in eighteen-century Boston, but in the manuscript-driven-public sphere of sixteenth-century New Mexico, with abundant indigenous participation.[3] All Ratner-Rosenhagen needed to do to find this world was to open a book printed in 1953 by the University of New Mexico in English. No need even to visit archives in Santa Fe, Mexico, or Spain. Here is a colonial intellectual history of what would become the United States as crucial, as vibrant, as foundational as any New England sermon or Virginian tract or Boston republican public sphere of print culture.
The Epistemological Wall
America is a conceit of the imagination. It has the power to silence and marginalize people from the past—and therefore people in the present. Ratner-Rosenhagen does this twice: her choice of whose ideas to study and her choice of a North Atlantic teleological white America with colonial roots both in a Puritan city in the hill and in Boston’s republican public sphere. However, if we switch our focus to two other places of what is today the United States, New Mexico and Florida, the landscape changes radically. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s categories of print culture and public sphere render invisible entire chapters of the intellectual history of the US polity. So too do her English-British categories of race and empire.
New Mexico witnessed an empire that unlike the British experienced massive participation of indigenous commoners and elites who engaged immediately with new systems of paperwork as witnesses, writers, litigants, scribes, and translators. In Florida thousands of African slaves and free Blacks engaged both as litigants in freedom suits and as petitioners for services rendered to the crown in Black Caribbean armies.[4] In Florida, the Timicua engaged in a paper public sphere in Franciscan missions.[5]
The Spanish Empire used very different categories of citizenship and vassalage; slavery was endemic, but it was not racial.[6] Native Americans and Africans were enslaved but also incorporated as citizens and vassals. Spain’s imperial model was Rome’s: barbarians and slaves could and should become Romans. A considerable number of the conquistadors in Oñate’s expedition came from the Mexican Bajio and were indigenous themselves.[7] Half Indian. Hundreds of Nahua and Otomi and “Chichimec” servants and slaves accompanied them as porters.
Oñate endured a republican trial in the city of San Juan Bautista, the first capital of New Mexico, before it moved to Santa Fe, conducted in a paper public sphere in which the republican discourse of anti-tyranny articulated the whole. The Franciscan friars Oñate brought with him as part of the company contract he protractedly negotiated with two viceroys and the crown (not unlike any of the contracts of the Virginia and Plymouth companies for both Anglican and Puritans) leveled accusations against him not of tyrannical abuse against participants in his privateering-commoner army, or against Acoma captives. The friars accused him of promiscuity and polygamy, of having established too many indigenous families as he moved along New Mexico, Arizona, the Plains, and California in a desperate effort to establish ports to communicate with China. The half-Indians that were the “Spanish” members of Oñate’s party begot thousands of mestizos we today call Hispanics.
This history of African slaves and Native American communities engaging in writing and public sphere in New Mexico and Florida gives the lie to all the literature on the Enlightenment that sustains the liberal myth of the US modernity as the heir of white British Empire, the local cradle of science, Humanism, the Enlightenment, the public sphere, print culture, consumer revolution, republicanism, and a white empire. We need a more generous history of this continent—and of this country, in particular—that fully brings in Hispanics, Native Americans (free and slave) and Blacks (free and slaves) as the co-creators of the public sphere, paper culture, and republicanism, not simply as a foil for the West, namely as the “other,” the passive victims of European malignity. In this way, liberal and progressive historians such as Ratner-Rosenhagen unwittingly have built the historiographical bricks upon which Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again wall has long been built.
We urgently need a different version of the history of ideas in this country. Progressive liberalism and decoloniality are largely responsible for a historiography that has systematically excluded non-northern Atlantic European whites from the intellectual histories of the colonial US. Together these meta-narratives have surrendered as a white monopoly the origin story of print culture, writing, and the republican public sphere by moving the intellectual foundations of the nation to both Boston and Jamestown. These are the very intellectual tools that make MAGA possible. Conservative right and progressive left—both groups—are intellectual twins. To rethink the ideas that made America in the colonial and Enlightenment eras is to undo this edifice at its very ideational foundations.
About the Author
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the author and editor of four books relevant to The Ideas That Made America. These are How to Write the History of the New World (2001), Puritan Conquistadors (2006), Entangled Empires (2018), and (with Adrian Masters) The Radical Spanish Empire (2026). Separately or together, the four offer a radically different interpretation of the intellectual history of the colonial US.
Notes
[1] For a history of a Anglo American Black public sphere in lodges, churches, and atheneums in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, see Jim Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and nation in the early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). For more local perspectives in the northeast, see Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), ch. 6.
[2] For an intellectual history of the Puritans as intellectual derivatives of Hispanic texts and print culture, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). There is absolutely no justification for Ratner-Rosenhagen not to be aware that the Puritans drew central ideas of their sociologies (and contracts) from the Hispanic and Mexican print culture. For contracts, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “The ‘Iberian’ Justifications of Territorial Possession by Pilgrims and Puritans in the Colonization of America,” in Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 161-177.
[3] For an account of a dynamic radical political, republican paper-driven public sphere in the sixteenth-century Spanish Indies, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, The Radical Spanish Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2026).
[4] Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Chloe Ireton. Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
[5] Bradley J. Dixon, Republic of Indians: Empires of Indigenous Law in the Early American South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
[6] For this as crucial difference in self-imperial definitions already in mid-17th-century Jamaica, see April Lee Hatfield, Boundaries of Belonging: English Jamaica and the Spanish Caribbean, 1655–1715 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).
[7] The literature on Indian Conquistadors is vast. See for example the various essays in Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, eds. Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).