Peering Beyond the Imperial Gaze: Using Digital Tools to Construct a Spatial History of Conquest

Abstract

Ethnohistorians and other scholars have long noted how European colonial texts often concealed the presence and participation of indigenous peoples in New World conquests. This scholarship has examined how European sources (both texts and maps) have denied indigenous history, omitted indigenous presence, elided indigenous agency, and ignored indigenous spaces all while exaggerating their own power and importance. These works provide examples of colonial authors performing these erasures, often as a means to dispossess. What they lack, however, is a systematic means of identifying, locating, and measuring these silences in space and time. This article proposes a spatial history methodology which can make visible, as well as measurable and quantifiable the ways in which indigenous people and spaces have been erased by colonial narratives. It presents two methods for doing this. First, narrative analysis and geovisualization are used to deconstruct the imperial histories found in colonial European sources. Second it combines text with maps to tell a new (spatial) narrative of conquest. This new narrative reconstructs indigenous activity through a variety of digital maps, including ‘mood maps’, indigenous activity maps, and maps of indigenous aid. The resulting spatial narrative shows the Spanish conquest of Peru was never inevitable and was dependent on the constant aid of immense numbers of indigenous people.

Quantifying Interdisciplinary History: The Record of (Nearly) Fifty Years

“…Content of this sort has recently started to appear in the journal, most notably in Atkinson and Gregory's article in volume XLVIII. 17 Much of the data analysis in the history of the JIH has had its intellectual origins in the social sciences, but the success of the journal derives in good measure from its success at showcasing interdisciplinary approaches to music, religion, or the visual arts alongside important historical questions. Relatively few of the older humanistic interdisciplinary articles made use of large-scale data or quantitative strategies.…”