Conclusion: Black Legend, White Legend, Red Legend

The impression thus given that the societies of colonial Latin America were especially violent is, of course, meaningless (all past human societies were violent, as the volumes of The Cambridge World History of Violence attest).

First, the Protestant world of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries developed a judgement of Spanish conquest and colonialism as excessively violent; the colonialism exercised by other European nations was thereby rendered benign by comparison. Imperial rivalries fuelled this hypocritical distortion of the colonial track record, boosting it as late as the decades following the Spanish-American War, when a Spanish apologist for his nation's lost empire dubbed that distorted reputation ‘the Black Legend'.^[680] Historians have spent the century since debating and debunking Black and White legends (the White being the fiction that Protestant colonists were more benign and enlightened than Catholic ones), in parallel to similar debates regarding comparative slave systems in the Americas. But despite overwhelming evidence that nowhere in the Americas did Europeans maintain benign systems to exploit indigenous and African-descended peoples, and that variations in how subject peoples were treated were regional (not national or imperial), myths like the Black Legend persist.

Second, Spaniards themselves had earlier developed what we might call the Red Legend - the notion that some, if not all, indigenous peoples in the Americas were inherently barbarous and savage, prone to certain cultural depravities.

The three legends per se - Black, White and Red - do not help us to better understand violence in the early Americas. The partisanship and prejudice that underpin them cannot be easily reconciled with our claims to objec­tivity; as the late Tzvetan T odorov put it, ‘what if we do not want to have to choose between a civilization of sacrifice and a civilization of massacre?'^[681] But they do help us to see how violence has tended to be justified or condemned in relative terms, which leads us to our third point: within Spanish culture generally, and specifically within its political and legal culture, there was a relativist understanding of violence. Violence was a valid and acceptable mechanism for exercising authority, communicating political and religious orthodoxy, restoring honour, punishing transgressors and righting wrongs. But there were contexts to when, and rules to how, it could be committed. Violence was never just violence; it had to be just violence. And if an act of violence violated those rules, and was unjust, then violence against its perpetrators could be legitimate - in a way, restorative. Silverblatt, in discussing Hannah Arendt on Western civilisation and Michael Taussig on the early Americas, remarked that ‘Violence and civilization: they are insepar­able. They need each other, they feed on each other - a realization that can stop your heart.'^[682] In colonial Latin America, violence was not antithetical to, or incompatible with, what European colonists considered civilised life; on the contrary, in various ways it was classified and exercised as legitimate and legitimising, as the performance of civilisation itself.