![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Writing The History of the Sevarambians in the 1670s, the Huguenot Denis Veiras borrowed many ideas from Garcilaso de la Vega, also known as El Inca, whose Royal Commentaries of the Incas was published in 1609. Both works describe the history of an empire and justify it on the ground that it brought peace and unity. While Garcilaso’s book purported to be a history, his selection of facts reflected his goal of improving the treatment of the Incas by the Spanish. Veiras’s story also claimed to be a history, but it was transparently a fiction, even to the point of lifting many elements from Garcilaso’s book. What both works equally emphasized was that empires could aim at, and could be justified by, the benefits they provided their subjects. Both tell stories of benevolent and paternalistic rulers who founded nearly ideal societies in the countries they conquered. These were models of empire for peace and unity rather than merely promoting toleration of differences or concord among differing parties. Veiras’s utopia thus offers an instructive case study of the effects of cross-cultural borrowings of literary and political ideas.
Notes
1. Veiras, History of the Sevarambians; hereafter cited in the text as V; Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas; hereafter cited in the text as G. Veiras is sometimes spelled as Vairrasse.
2. Baczko, Utopian Lights, 22–23, 28, 37.
3. Masroori and Laursen, “The Persian Moment,” 69–71.
4. Laursen and Masroori, eds., The History of the Sevarambians, xii.
5. See, for example, Friederich, Australia in Western Imaginative Prose, 15–16.
6. Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage, 118.
7. Ibid., 115, 117.
8. Throughout this article we refer to Laursen and Masroori’s edition of History of the Sevarambians, which is a modern edition of the 1734 text. There are no significant differences from the earlier English and French editions that affect our argument here.
9. On the difference between the two versions, see Laursen and Masroori’s edition of the History of the Sevarambians, ix–xii.
10. For more on his biography, see Veiras, Eine Historie der Neu-gefundenen and L’histoire des Sévarambes.
11. Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage, 162.
12. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 370.
13. Machiavelli, The Prince, 11.
14. Ibid., 23.
15. Masroori, “Toleration in Denis Veiras’s Theocracy,” 124.
16. Laursen, “Denis Veiras’s Utopia,” 259.
17. Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language, 37–38.
18. Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage, 116.
19. Masroori, “Denis Veiras’s Theocracy,” 127.
20. Ibid., 124.
21. Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage, 114.
22. The classic distinction in the literature may be found in Turchetti, Concordia o tolleranza?
23. For an overview of theories of empire in this period, see Pagden, Lords of All the World.
24. Cicero, On Duties, 14–15.
25. St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God, 882.
26. Ibid., 882–83.
27. Ibid.
28. Dante, On World-Government, 23, 14–15.
29. Ramsay The Imperial Peace, passim.
30. Las Casas, History of the Indies, 66.
31. Castro, Another Face of Empire, 8.
32. Fiengo-Varn, “Reconciling the Divided Self,” 123.
33. Vitoria, Political Writings, 250, 251, 259, 303, 284, 285.
34. Ibid., 282, 283.
35. Ibid., 290.
36. Fiengo-Varn, “Reconciling the Divided Self,” 126.
37. Ibid., 122.
38. Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage, 119.