Quotation: “Even Spanish culture seems moribund: as the Chicago exhibition showed, its artist were unappreciated, its vision of the past contested. To the outside world, Spain’s glorious imperial past was a dark and obscurantist story, ‘the black legend’.” (Vincent, 80)

Argument: Vincent is arguing that the decline of the Spanish empire gave the rest of the world to question Spain’s history and it’s empire. The world associates Spain with barbarism and terror for their treatment of the native Indians of the New World. Their history was no longer respected and agonized. Spain is now seen as a country with dark past and terror. The world focused more on the Spanish treatment of the native rather than the early development of democracy in Spain. …show more content…
During this lecture, Professor Abercrombie talked about how the very first idea of self-governance came from the Islamic rule in Spain. The dhimma was a foundation for the later Spanish rulers’ governance of such a diverse group of people. The quote contradicts what we learned during lecture and shows us that the rest of the world does not have a good understanding of Spain’s history and its role in modern government. The quote also relates to Irene Silverblatt’s Modern Inquisitions- Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. In the chapter Silverblatt states that, “The Spanish experience-fashioned out of colonial efforts and European state-making-colored all the West’s state-building projects. European state-making, then, was bound in various ways to imperial expansion; this link is hidden if we date colonialism to the nineteenth century and not to the sixteenth century.”(2) Silverblatt is arguing that Spanish inquisition was the starting point of colonialism and it will seem otherwise if we think colonialism began in the nineteen-century and not sixteenth-century. She argues that Spain had the first organized state level bureaucracy and it impacted how the rest of the European kingdom expanded under colonialism. All of Spain’s history is not dark as it also developed the idea of state level bureaucracy while the rest of the Europe was embodied by