Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest is a 2003

2003 in literature

The year 2003 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Peter Ackroyd - The Clerkenwell Tales*Atsuko Asano - No...

 non-fiction book by ethnohistorian

Ethnohistory

Ethnohistory is the study of ethnographic cultures and indigenous customs by examining historical records. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may not exist today....

 Matthew Restall

Matthew Restall

Matthew Restall is an ethnohistorian and Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women's Studies, Director of Latin American Studies, and Director of LiLACS at the Pennsylvania State University...

 which exposes seven myths about the Spanish colonization of the Americas

Spanish colonization of the Americas

Colonial expansion under the Spanish Empire was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores and developed by the Monarchy of Spain through its administrators and missionaries. The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Christian faith through indigenous conversions...

 that have come to be widely believed to be true. Working within the tradition of New Philology

New Philology

New Philology is a school within ethnohistory that seeks to describe the history of colonized people largely by using the colonized peoples' own written sources to understand their perspective of their own history...

, Restall questions several notions which he claims are widely held myths about how the Spanish achieved military and cultural hegemony in Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

. The book has been published in Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 and Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 translations.

• Chapter 4 deals with what Restall calls "the Myth of Completion" — the belief that all of the Americas was under Spanish control within a few years after the initial contact. Restall claims that contrary to this belief pockets of indigenous peoples living without having been conquered subsisted for several centuries after the conquest - and arguably to this day. For example Tayasal
  Tayasal
  Tayasal is a pre-Columbian Maya archaeological site that dates to the Postclassic period. The site is located in the southern Maya lowlands on a small island in Lake Petén Itzá, now part of the Department of Petén in northern Guatemala...
  
  , the last independent city of the Maya, did not fall under Spanish sway until 1697. In other areas of Latin America, Spanish control was never complete and rebellions were continuous. He shows that the colonization of the Americas did not happen as one fell swoop, but rather as a historical process starting centuries before the magic years of 1492 and 1521 and ending several centuries after.

• Chapter 5 deals with what Restall calls "The Myth of (Mis)Communication" — the beliefs that the Spaniards and natives had perfect communication and that each group understood the other's words and intentions unhindered, or alternatively that many of the crucial events of the conquest were a result of the two groups misunderstanding each others' intentions. Restall claims how communication between the groups were in fact very difficult at first, and that the rendering of passages of speech made by one group to the other in post-conquest sources cannot be understood as having been recorded "verbatim" even though it is understood and interpreted that way. But he also shows that the natives cannot be said to have crucially misunderstood or misinterpreted the Spaniards' intentions, but rather that they had a good understanding of how the Spanish worked at a very early stage in the conquest.

• Chapter 6 deals with what Restall calls "The Myth of Native Desolation" — the belief that the indigenous peoples of the Americas resigned to their fate, included themselves in the new European order and ceased to exist as ethnicities. He also argues that many of the indigenous peoples never felt "conquered" but rather that they had formed a partnership with a new power to both of their advantage - this for example was the case for most of the allied forces that helped Cortés defeat the Aztecs.

• Chapter 7 deals with what Restall calls "The Myth of Superiority" — the belief that the success of the Spanish conquest was due to either the supposed technological superiority of the Spaniards or a kind of inherent cultural superiority — and that Spanish victory was therefore inevitable. Restall claims that such technological advantages as handguns, cannons, steel armor, horses and dogs weren't of great consequence in the actual fighting since they were all in short supply, and that the Aztecs were not daunted by this new technology for long. He also refutes the notion that the Indians' lack of alphabetic writing constituted a major drawback. Nor were the Indians childlike, naive or cowardly in comparison with the Spanish such as many early Spanish sources have painted them. Restall argues that the factors behind the success of the conquistadors were mostly the devastating effect of European diseases for which the Indians had no resistance, the disunity between indigenous groups some of which allied with the Spaniards early, the technological advantage of the steel sword, native battle practices that were not upheld by the Spaniards — such as killing non-combatants and civilians, and most importantly the fact that the Indians were fighting on their own ground with their families and fields to care for, which made them quicker to compromise.

Editions

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest was first published 2003 in cloth (hardcover) edition by OUP, with a paperback edition released the following year. A Spanish-language edition (under the title Los siete mitos de la conquista española) was published by Paidós, with imprint

Imprint

In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...

s issued in Spain (Barcelona, November 2004) and Mexico (2005).