Volume 25, Number 9 · June 1, 1978
Strangers and Brothers
By J.H. Elliott
Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism
by Ronald Sanders
Little, Brown, 443 pp., $15.00
The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440-1770
by C.R. Boxer
Johns Hopkins, 139 pp., $9.50 (To be published July 13.)
The search for the origins of modern racism—the word but not the reality is a twentieth-century invention—has a way of leading back sooner or later to the sixteenth century. Understandably so, since this was the first great age of European overseas empire, and imperialism and racism have come to seem inextricably conjoined. Where better, then, to look than to Spain and Portugal, as the pioneer colonial powers of the modern world? Professor Charles Boxer, in his brief but invigorating volume on The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, remarks that 'attitudes and convictions formed as the Iberian mariners, missionaries, merchants, and men-at-arms spread around the globe lasted for centuries, and are still with us in varying degrees.' The twentieth-century Westerner who examines the words and works of those Iberian pioneers glimpses, as in a murky mirror, the forms and lineaments of a too familiar world.
Review, 3296 words
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