The subject of this November 2017 History Debate is the " globalization of history ", understood as the making of world history by European historians, who have constructed the past of all parts of the globe using codes, categories and divisions specific to the West. In his recently published book, La Machine à remonter le temps. Quand l'Europe s'est mis à écrire l'histoire du monde, Serge Gruzinski traces the genealogy of this hegemony from a strong and original idea : " it was in the 16th century, and more precisely in the America of the Iberians, that what would become the springboard of European historical consciousness emerged ". This hypothesis, which gives the book its structure, allows us to formulate some essential questions. How were Spanish chroniclers and missionaries able to write the history of peoples and empires whose existence they were totally unaware of before 1492 ? Can the codices painted by Indian painters before or after the Conquest be considered as historical narratives? How did European-style history writing capture and colonize indigenous memories ?
To answer these questions, Serge Gruzinski begins by examining the reasons that prompted administrators and missionaries to write the history of colonized and evangelized American peoples. Focusing in particular on the work of Franciscan Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía (the "poor little " in Nahuatl), Serge Gruzinski analyzes the models, sources and difficulties encountered by historical writing that starts from scratch. The models are those provided by the biblical narrative and ecclesiastical history ; the sources, the painted codexes and the living words that explain them ; the difficulties, those posed by the reconciliation of Christian chronology and the indigenous calendar, or by the uncertainty as to the origin of the Indians, who must nevertheless be situated in the universal history of Salvation.
The painted codices are the essential and only source for tracing the history of the Indians before and after the Conquest. But what is their status ? Are they expressions of indigenous idolatry, as the Spaniards, who destroyed them en masse, believe, or places of memory for the Indians, who use them as proof of their rights against the colonial power ? Are they an Indian way of writing history ? The answer is not simple. Comparing Montolinía's narrative with the images in the Texcoco codices might suggest a parallelism between two ways of describing the past - in this case the process of " civilization " in the Mexico Valley. But to conclude in this way would be to overlook two essential facts. On the one hand, from the 1540s onwards, Indian painters and their commissioners, who were often Indian themselves, rapidly incorporated the codes and conventions imposed by the Spaniards (for example, by erasing all references to gods, sacrifices and places of pre-Christian worship). On the other hand, as Serge Gruzinski has shown in his previous books, in particular La Colonisation de l'imaginaire and La Guerre des images, the mental categories of the Indians are irreducible to those of their colonizers and evangelizers.
Hence the tension between the recognition of this irreducibility and the need to designate it using notions and representations specific to the Western tradition and shared by the missionaries of the 16th century and the historian of the 21st century. These include the distinctions between sacred and profane, reality and the supernatural, the linear dating of events and the category of causality. Serge Gruzinski lucidly confronts the difficulty of asserting the radical difference between Indian peoples' ways of being in time, while at the same time accounting for them using Western concepts. He is caught between the recognition of anthropological invariants, which enable comparisons between cultures and an understanding of otherness, and the identification of radical differences, which are the very foundation of crossbreeding and acculturation.
His genealogy of " the globalization of history ", relocated to the second half of the 16th century, focuses on writings that embrace the totality of transatlantic spaces and the links between Europe, Africa and America - as Las Casas does in his Historia de las Indias and his Apologética Historia Sumaria - and on those that place a local history within a perspective of globality : this is what the mestizo contributors to the Relaciones geográficas questionnaire of the administration of Philip II do, paradoxically rehabilitating the pre-Hispanic past of their nations by situating it in the present of the Spanish empire, thus implicitly denounced. This rewriting, which reinterprets idolatry, described as a monotheism that ignored itself, paves the way for the hegemonic imposition of the European way of history, which is, at once, the colonization of indigenous memories, separated from their past, and the official history of a world subjected to the authority of the very Christian king or kings.