The Conquest of Mexico: Westernization of Indian Societies from the 16th to the 18th Century

Really outstanding books of history almost inevitably have certain basic common features; in particular, long and patient work on immense amount of often obscure original sources. Therefore favourable reviews often tend to have similar features, in particular praise for the author's immense, or at least uncommon, learning and labour. I dare say that, from the reader's point of view, negative reviews may be more fun, since a book can be bad in infinite ways but good in only one of a few. In this case, I will have to be boring: since this outstanding revisitation of colonial Mexican history is impressively learned, with a strong grasp of basic sources across at least three centuries (and if you think that's easy, just try it); insightful, leaving a clear impression of native spirituality and world-view and of its difference with the Christian and European world of the invaders; and novel. That is the main point. Gruzinski comes to his material with a question nobody before him had asked: how did the natives, heirs of a complex if barbarous civilization and of a very large variety of cultures, react to the presence among them of what was at first, and for considerable time, an alien culture with largely different assumptions and a wholly different world-view? He traces the interaction of Spanish Catholicism and political power with the various local cultures (never failing to make clear that Mexico was not a single culture, but an empire dominating or overshadowing a large number of different tribes) across three centuries, showing that as late as the eighteenth centuries there were broad unassimilated areas - which however tended to fade - and suggesting a subterranean continuity, bubbling up in the unsettled world of pulquerias and colonial slums, between the failures of assimilation in colonial times and the strong anti-clerical currents of post-independence Mexico, which are still a factor in the country today.Gruzinski's writing is straightforward though not very plain - big words are not avoided and some sentences may take time for the ordinary reader to grasp. But he avoids the bane of the French intellectual - airy generalizations and general pretentiousness: he always has his eye to the object, and is most often accurate, fair, and careful. Some of his views may, I suppose, be challenged: for instance, he treats the enormously widespread problem of alcoholism in the seventeenth century as a by-product of failed assimilation, yet Bernal Diaz del Castillo (one of Cortez's own soldiers, who wrote a memoir at the end of his life) tells us that massive and vicious drunkenness, including details too revolting to mention here, was a feature of pre-Conquest society as he encountered it. Gruzinski, being a pioneer, may have got some things wrong, as pioneers do. But he has given us a completely new and very valuable way to look at an old issue, and done so in a very well-organized, capable and professional way.