DAVID DAY ON ESSENTIAL BOOKS ABOUT HISTORICAL CONQUEST
Wall Street Journal
August 16, 2008
1. History of the Conquest of Mexico By William Prescott 1843
History can be understood in many ways, but one of the most compelling
is to track the movement of peoples and their later attempts to put
their stamp on newly conquered lands. Spain’s conquest of Mexico
in the 16th century is a dramatic example. A rousing narrative of
that conquest was written in the early 1840s by the partially blind
American historian William Prescott, who combined admiration for
the Spanish conqueror Cortes with a relatively sensitive portrayal
of the vanquished Aztecs. "It is but justice to the Conquerors
of Mexico," Prescott writes, "to say that the very brilliancy and
importance of their exploits have given a melancholy celebrity to
their misdeeds." This hugely influential book was based on research
in Spanish archives and was published as Americans were completing
a sweep across land that they had claimed as their own.
2. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World,
1492-1640 By Patricia Seed Cambridge, 1995
The assertion of control over newly conquered lands is usually marked
by an act that has symbolic meaning, at least for the conquerors. In
her landmark history, Patricia Seed describes the competing ways
in which European powers asserted their right to territory in the
Americas, with each country refusing to recognize the claims of the
others. Her book is peppered with fascinating vignettes of Portuguese
and Dutch who thought that mastering the navigation of distant seas
entitled explorers to seize the lands that their ships chanced upon. In
contrast, the British emphasized enclosing and farming as a means of
establishing their dominion, while the French preferred to enact a
ceremony that mimicked the forms of a coronation back home. As for
the Spanish, "it was the words that counted," Seed writes. "A highly
formalized and stylized speech known as the Requirement had to be made
when encountering indigenous peoples for the first time. The text of
the speech was not a request for consent, but a declaration of war."
3. Sacred Landscape By Meron Benvenisti University of California, 2000
Military superiority is not enough to ensure that an act of conquest
will prevail. The newly acquired land must be made to seem the
natural possession of the new rulers. In "Sacred Landscape," Meron
Benvenisti — who served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem from 1971
to 1978 — recounts how, in the 1940s, he traveled across British
Palestine with his father, a Jewish mapmaker, on a mission to
"draw a Hebrew map of the land" that could act as "a renewed title
deed." Partly based on this personal experience, "Sacred Landscape"
is an anguished reflection on the terrible costs of two peoples’
asserting an inalienable right to the same land.
4. The Isles By Norman Davies Macmillan, 1999
Although the British are usually regarded as having been conquerors
across the world, the islands that they inhabit have themselves been
the scene of conquests over the centuries, by Romans, Celts, Vikings,
Saxons and others. In "The Isles," the British historian Norman Davies
— who has written extensively about Poland, another much-contested
country — applies his skills to describing his homeland. The result is
a rewarding tour from prehistory to the present day. Davies explores
the successive invasions of what we call the British Isles and the
struggles between the peoples who had come to conquer and then remained
to call different parts their own.
5. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe By Raphael Lemkin Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, 1944
Any legitimacy that Hitler might have been able to claim for his
European conquests unraveled as soon as he revealed that he was intent
on doing more than redress the harsh peace of 1919. As readers of
"Mein Kampf" had already learned, his ambitions were continental in
scope and merciless in method. The monumental "Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe," written as World War II entered its final phase, is Polish
lawyer Raphael Lemkin’s description of how the Nazis executed with
cold precision their brutal plans for conquered peoples. In the
process of sounding the alarm, Lemkin coined what has become the
vexed term "genocide." It is clear from Lemkin’s other scholarly
work, on the Turkish genocide of the Armenians during World War I,
that he intended the term to have a wider application than just to
the Nazis; it was meant to cover all those laws and actions that are
used by conquerors to remove distinct populations from the landscape,
whether through direct killing, expulsion, compulsory assimilation
or other means. The book remains tragically relevant.
Mr. Day’s latest book, "Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others,"
was published in June by Oxford University Press.