ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the pan-Atlantic relationality between Robertson's figuration of the New World in America and the corrective revisions of Clavijero's Storia antica del Messico and Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments. They resist Robertson's universalizing epistemology and its narrative of inevitable European progress and reinscribe the continued agency of native peoples in the face of European expansion in the Atlantic. Robertson's restaging of the conquest creates a global consciousness for Britain, one in which commerce and navigation lead to the progress of knowledge and, concomitantly, empire. Las Casas also uncovers a discursive interplay between the enslavement of Amerindians and that of Africans. Cugoano urgently demands political and legal action toward the immediate abolition of slavery from fellow Christians in Britain and across Europe. The paradigm of empire that Robertson had traced to the Spanish as 'principles and maxims' that all of Europe afterward put into practice was put to the test in the American Revolution, as he himself recognized.
