Ryan Crewe

Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Denver

From Tenochtitlan to Nagasaki: Into the antipodes of a myth of conquest

Abstract:

In recent decades, scholars have exposed how the mythification of the Spanish-Mexica War of Conquest (1519-1521) concealed the sordid acts of an invasion, provided an ideological basis for the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and gave early modern Europeans a parable of colonial power. Yet for the generations immediately following the Conquest, this myth was also a plan of action, a lens upon the world that profoundly shaped Spanish (and in some cases, Portuguese) relations with non-Europeans across the globe. This paper traces the transpacific migration of the culture of the Mexican Conquest to Asia in the sixteenth century. In the Philippines, Maluku, Cambodia, China, and Japan, would-be conquistadors with personal ties to the Mexican Conquest sought to follow the Cortesian script, and they set their expectations according to the myth’s monumental scale. With the partial exception of the Philippines, these projects foundered spectacularly on Asian shores. Local rulers—some of whom had heard the gist of the Mexican Conquest story—engaged in counter-Conquests and “counter-Meetings,” setting in place new myths about Spanish power that were the very opposite of Cortesian.

Ryan Crewe is an historian of colonial Latin American and early modern global history. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2009, and is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the author of The Mexican Mission: Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in New Spain, 1521-1600 (Cambridge), which was published in 2019. His next project examines the involvement of the Mexican viceroyalty in the Moluccan Spice Wars in Indonesia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.