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The precedent set by the United States helped Spanish Americans justify their claims to republican sovereignty. In response, royalists brazenly cited Vitoria. They said that if the claims of independence leaders were to be taken to their conclusion, then Venezuela should be returned to its true sovereigns, to the “Caribes, Motilones, Guagiros, Quiripiripas, Guaranos, and other indigenous Indian nations” who ruled Venezuela before Spain’s arrival. This wasn’t an easy-to-dismiss criticism, and the best independence leaders could do was say that over time history created new obligations. There was no going back to the past. If Spanish Americans were required to return America to its original peoples, then Spain, republicans said, should give Iberia back to the Phoenicians or Carthaginians, “wherever they may be found.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Madrid eventually decided that the territory west of the Mississippi River was more trouble than it could handle. It was costly to guard such a long border with the United States, too expensive to maintain a river fleet of galliots and bombardiers. British traders, still a powerful presence in the Mississippi Valley, meddled in local politics. French colonists resisted Spanish authority.fn1 The radicalism of the French and Haitian revolutions was spilling into Louisiana. In 1795, in Natchitoches, a local priest had organized a group called the Revenants, which ran rough over the settlement, chanting revolutionary slogans and singing revolutionary songs—apparently in opposition to the Spanish policy of encouraging Anglo settlement. Revenant comes from an old French word that means “the returned,” referring, in myth, to reanimated corpses, an echo of the terrors then unfolding in Haiti. New Orleans likewise was feared to be a hotbed of Black Jacobinism, confirmed by the discovery, also in 1795, of a slave conspiracy to set fire to plantations. And so Spain, in 1802, gave it up, turning New Orleans and greater Louisiana over to France. In compensation, the Spanish monarchy received Etruria, an Italian kingdom of about a million people. Tuscan hills were much preferable to Mississippi mosquitos.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The paradox is notable. Spain was as constant in support of slavery as it was in support of sanctuary. Madrid held a position not unlike Adam Smith’s: Slavery was an evil, a violation of natural law and reason. But as an established historical institution, it would be difficult if not impossible to extirpate. The demands of imperial security reconciled opposites. Starting in the last decades of the 1700s and continuing through 1816, Spanish troops in Northern Mexico captured thousands of “indios enemigos”—mostly Apache and Comanche warriors—and exiled them to Cuba as slaves. At the same time, the Crown repeatedly affirmed the humanity of slaves in terms that echoed Las Casas. Any enslaved person from another polity who entered the Spanish realm was made free, protected from being handed back to his or her master. Asylum seekers would be considered “vassals” of the monarchy and eligible for whatever employment they could find, as affirmed by a 1789 royal edict. When word spread of this order, enslaved people began fleeing the United States, crossing the Mississippi into Spanish Mexico. United States slavers complained that Spanish officials were using “every means to reduce, weaken and ruin the adjoining Country belonging to the Americans,’’ including encouraging “the desertion of slaves.’’

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Marrero also stressed the importance of the Americas to greater Europe’s sense of identity. By this point in the late 1770s, there was no shortage of imperial propagandists arguing that the New World was the source of English and Spanish wealth and power. Marrero agreed. But he went beyond declaring that any single nation wouldn’t have prospered were it not for their American colonies. He said Europe as Europe would cease to exist if it gave up colonial exploitation. “Europe cannot maintain its current power unless it has the whole of America entirely in its dependence,” he wrote. “Since its discovery, the riches provided by that part of the world has sparked a prodigious expansion of Europe’s agriculture, arts, industry, commerce, and navigation.” Marrero went on to say, “The wealth that circulates from these activities adds value to all of Europe’s products and services.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Sewall had become convinced that Mexico would be the site of Christ’s Second Coming. He forcefully countered Mede’s opinion that the New World was damned, instead insisting that America would be the scene of Christ’s great victory. In his schema, Indians were the descendants of Jews (because according to one reading of the Song of Solomon, Jews during end-times would be gathered in a garden of nuts, and Mexicans, according to Sewall, ate a lot of nuts). America, he said, still with Mede on his mind, “was not a place of damnation.” Europe’s Jews would migrate to the Americas and join with their lost brethren, and Mexico’s New Jerusalem, he wrote, will “wonderfully dilate, and invigorate Christianity in the several Quarters of the World; in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, and in America.” Like the imprisoned Father de la Cruz in Peru a few decades earlier, Sewall was declaring that America would be the future seat of the returned savior, and in the process he put forth a generous, sweeping vision of the New World as humanity’s redeemer. “Shout, Sing triumphantly,” Sewall ecstatically wrote, “O America! America! America!” “Christ shall come to this Mexican Valley.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The extraction of the world’s resources—the coin, food, and commodities needed to keep up the growth rate of an expanding world economy—produced the wealth that allowed more and more Europeans and European settlers to enjoy more freedom. Slavery (not the old feudal-servant slavery of Las Casas’s Mediterranean childhood, but a new system in which humans as property provided the labor for large-scale debt-capitalized, export-oriented plantations) was as essential to the emergence of bourgeois order as was the right of commerce and communication and the freedom of the seas.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

I mammas russiske verden er Russland et godt og heltemodig land som ikke har noe annet valg enn å slåss. Det betyr ikke at hun er hjerteløs, bare veldig sannhetsforvirret. Og derfor er det nok også veldig vondt for mamma at sønnen hennes ikke for sitt bare liv vil innse den russiske sannheten.

— Russiske spesialiteter by Ute Neumann, Dmitrij Kapitelman

De investerte sparepengene forduftet som stinkende fiskesuppe. Og så bestemte mamma at de snaut to tusen mark som var igjen, skulle gå til å åpne et магазин. Pappa bestemte det riktignok, han også, men mer som en slags post-avgjørende andrestemme.

— Russiske spesialiteter by Ute Neumann, Dmitrij Kapitelman