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The Inquisition: Only a Part of a World Invasion The Spanish Empire would fail ultimately, but the precedent of the possibility of world domination had been established with all its complexities of domestic and international trade, and the Dutch and English quickly seized upon the possibility. One could look at this differently too. One could say that the Spanish Empire did not fail but merely mutated under the control of the British, Dutch and Americans. There is no reason to preserve the partisan and nationalist histories of former times. Nationalism no longer has much meaning in a world where rights are denied across borders and power lies in transnational corporations. The divisions that historians try to maintain between Protestant, Catholic, scientific, English, Dutch or Corporate forms of knowledge/power are rather arbitrary. Historians argue about whether North or South American slavery was more brutal or genocidal. They argue about whether it was economic, cultural or religious motivations that predominated. No doubt there are differences. For instance, Stannard observes that the "Spaniards mammoth destruction of whole societies was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself". Whereas in "British America, extermination [of the Indians] was the primary goal and was so precisely because it made economic sense". [1] This is an important difference between the North and South American atrocities. But these differences shouldn't be exaggerated. While there is less racial tension in South America than in the US, there is greater and deeper economic discrimination and exploitation, which continues to this day. Despite these differences and similarities between atrocities in North and South America, it can still be said generally that the invasion of America killed millions and caused untold suffering both in the North and the South, and this death and suffering was due to Christianity in many forms, to scientific exploration and 'discovery', to economy, national interests and many other factors. Splitting hairs about whose suffering was greater is disrespectful to the dead and those that still suffer. The Inquisition was one of the many factors in the Invasion of America and the rise of global, colonial imperialism. The purpose of the Inquisition appears to have been to consolidate belief and knowledge and thereby to increase the consolidation of both political and economic power. The Inquisition forged an apocalyptic consciousness that placed abstract doctrine above any question of persons or humanity and this enormously facilitated the seizure of both local and global power. The engine of this consolidation is the cultural element of Christianity, and not merely the class interest of the Spanish Court and bureaucracy. The latter certainly are important, as the upper classes and ruling families of the Dutch, French and English are also important. The Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, sought to "save the world" by destroying any oppositional mentality or peoples who would not conform. Class is important, as Peter Laslett and others have pointed out, but equally important are the belief systems which help generate sustain and promulgate the class system. Henry Kamen, in his book on the Spanish Inquisition, tries to reduce the Spanish Inquisition to merely the question of class: "the class content of ideology cannot be too strongly emphasized as the main factor in the creation of the closed society of traditional Spain", he concludes.[2] But this is to detach the Inquisition too much from the cultural element. It is also to look at the Inquisition as a separate entity from the global history of European Imperialism at the time, which was not merely, or even primarily, an economic phenomena. The Protestant states were equally, and very likely more involved in the business of social consolidation and repression through a regime of knowledge and power than were the Catholic. Luther's anti-Semitism was a Protestant form of Catholic racism. It was equally lethal, perhaps more so. The witch hunts may have been worse in Germany, and the slave trade more harsh under the English, but all these manifestations of European exploitation and Manifest Destiny share the same cultural drive to power and dominion. The number of those killed by the Inquisition is debated: Cecil Roth cites the figures of an ex-Secretary of the Holy Office, Llorente, who claimed on the basis of Church records now lost that the Spanish Inquisition alone burned 31,912 people at the stake, and reconciled, that is, forced reconciliation to the will of the church, usually by torture, on 291,450 people. Roth concludes these numbers might be a little high, and quotes a Catholic historian who claimed that 28,540 were burned at the stake and 303,847 were tortured into submission.[3] But accurate records seem to have disappeared and this makes any estimate questionable. But these numbers are arbitrary in any case, because they separate those killed by the Inquisition from those killed in colonial wars and peasant uprisings, witch burnings and Imperialist massacres all of which have a relation the ideology of Christian-European supremacy. The Inquisition was part of an overall struggle to expand a system of power and knowledge across the globe, and this was not merely a Spanish phenomena but a European one. Historians make a similar mistake of neglecting the larger picture when they discuss the genius and glory of the English 'agricultural revolution', which neglects to count all those forced into starvation or famine in England itself or on the slave ships and in the English colonies. The agricultural revolution had many long term effects, many of them beneficial, but the cost is rarely counted. The environmental degradation of large areas of the globe is still largely neglected as a consequence of the search for scientific and agricultural glory and wealth. |