EDMUND SPENSER: HISTORY AND LABOR ON THE IRISH LANDSCAPE

A View begins with Eudoxus’s opening question, which frames the whole dialogue as a project of “reducinge that salvage nacion to better gouerment and Cyvilitye” in order to access Ireland’s “so goodlie and Comodious a soyle.”Footnote ²² The dialogue’s wide-ranging considerations of Irish lineage, customs, legal and political systems, and religion never fully escape the fundamental pull of the relationship between the “salvage nacion” and its “soyle.”Footnote ²³ A View exhibits ambiguous generic and formal properties as a humanist dialogue that debates current crises while also integrating tendentious antiquarian material.Footnote ²⁴ Much of this historical reconstruction seeks to understand the origins of what Spenser imagines to be a threatening collaboration between the Irish and the landscapes that seem to favor their survival. How could colonial warfare result in the settled production of agrarian commodities, when the Irish have survived for generations without performing anything that Spenser recognizes as productive labor?

Irenius explains that it is imperative to pacify the Irish and settle the land because it is teeming with wasted potential. While Vargas Machuca presents his castigos as self-funded enterprises in keeping with the model of the “armed entrepreneur” of earlier conquistadors, Spenser favors a scheme of plantation that had to be paid for by the English state.Footnote ²⁵ By 1596, the Nine Years’ War was becoming increasingly expensive, but New English advocates for the war effort argued that the expense would be worth it once victory ensured a generous return on investment.Footnote ²⁶ To give a sense of what might be gained, Irenius offers a tantalizing description of Ulster’s copious advantages:

Monetary revenues and a large working population that could also be mobilized as soldiers top a catalogue that includes rivers, fisheries, woodlands, ports, and, most importantly, the fertile soil and temperate weather that fed the population and provided the agrarian basis for the Crown’s revenues. This description of Ulster serves as a fantasy image of Ireland as an ideal resource landscape in which people and ecosystems work together to produce value that can be abstracted and alienated in monetary form—“Thirthye Thowsande markes of olde money,” to be precise. The whole island may offer such wealth, if not for Spenser’s equally potent fantasy of its opposite: that of the idleness of cattle-herding rebels and the wasted landscape of mountainous pastures and woodlands.

Throughout A View, Spenser’s vision of Ireland’s wealth opposes images of its ruin and waste. Lashed by harsh winters and peopled by nomadic cattle herders, Ireland resists colonization even as it offers the “sweteste Soile”Footnote ²⁸ and ample supplies of potential laborers and rent-paying tenants. Spenser at once invents an ecology of nearly hopeless hostility to peaceful settlement and conjures tantalizing scenes of fecund lands, industrious subjects, and their organization on agrarian estates and in market towns.Footnote ²⁹ In a typically contradictory description, an otherwise threatening “mountaine and woddye” region prompts Irenius to opine optimistically that English landlords and tenants would settle the land because “the mountaine pasturage doe recompence the badnes of the Soile, so as I doubte not but it will finde inhabitantes and vndertakers enoughe.”Footnote ³⁰ This constant juxtaposition of wealth and waste motivates Irenius’s scheme to destroy the way of life that he thinks deserves the most blame for loss of Ireland’s potential wealth: the booley.

The booley, or the system of transhumance defined by the seasonal movement of dairy cattle, symbolizes for Spenser the social and ecological escape route from the English plantation, allowing the Irish to subsist on the land without working it in a way that would yield profit for English landlords.Footnote ³¹ He describes it as “one vse amongest them to kepe theire Cattell and to live themselves the moste parte of the yeare in Bollyes pasturinge vppon the mountaine and waste wilde places and removinge still to freshe lande as they haue depastured the former The which appearethe plaine to be the manner of the Scithians.”Footnote ³² Notwithstanding the evidence, both historical and as admitted within the pages of A View and other Elizabethan writings on Ireland, that tillage is practiced throughout the island, Irenius fixates on the idea that the primary enabling factor of Irish resistance is the conjunction of pastureland, cattle, and the lack of labor that the booley represents.Footnote ³³ In fact, Spenser seems to conflate the booley (in which seasonal transhumance involved moving to fixed plots of pasturage based on time of year) with caoraigheacht—or, in Spenser’s anglicization, crete, which is like the practice that Irenius describes of movement from one area to the next after one has been depastured, and “appears to denote the combined stock of a number of followers under one leader, often in a mobile military context.”Footnote ³⁴ This more specific term sounds closer to the practice for which Spenser uses the broad term booley. The linguistic imprecision here could be an instance of Spenser’s generally “shallow acquaintance” with Irish.Footnote ³⁵ But it perhaps has a more pointed relevance, for using booley instead of crete elides the regular, seasonal dimension of transhumance conveyed by the Irish term buiale,Footnote ³⁶ allowing Spenser to portray a supposedly essential mode of Irish subsistence as inherently wasteful and militaristic. By describing the so-called booley as a “manner of the Scithians” from whom the Irish have supposedly descended, Spenser folds racialized modes of thought about lineage and descent into his linguistically dubious assessment of the booley.Footnote ³⁷ Here, a sense of linguistic otherness merges with the construction of the Irish relationship to place as an anachronistic survival of the Scythians, as Spenser activates classical frames of reference for the distinction between civilized and barbarous people.Footnote ³⁸ Likewise, in his anglicization of crete and extension of the term booley to signify a more irregularly mobile practice of transhumance than actually existed, Irenius combines the English erasure of Irish language with the construction of the Irish landscape as in need of Englishing, so to speak, along the lines of arable, manorial production.Footnote ³⁹

This portrayal of Irish resistance as entirely based around cattle herds has deep historical implications for Irenius’s reconstruction of the decline of English rule in Ireland after the initial conquest of Henry II. In this account of the initial Anglo-Norman conquest, Henry sought to impose his rule in Ireland by installing his noble followers as landlords of manorial estates, after which many of the Irish “fledd from his power into desertes and mountaynes,” where “they lived onelye vppon white meates [i.e., dairy products].”Footnote ⁴⁰ There is a telling historical resonance here between sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of cimarron communities and Irenius’s account of effective Irish resistance to the Anglo-Norman conquest, insofar as each represents the use of apparently uncultivatable and inaccessible mountain terrain and livestock as an effective assemblage of political ecological resistance.Footnote ⁴¹

For Irenius, the booley represents a way to survive in the Irish ecosystem of upland pasture without creating legible landscapes, accountable commodities, or alienable rents. Irenius does not care, as Eudoxus points out, that this way of life might be “behoofull in the Countrye of Irelande wheare theare are greate mountaines and waste desertes full of grasse that the same shoulde be eaten downe and norishe manye thowsandes of Cattell.”Footnote ⁴² While Eudoxus might be momentarily prepared to grant, in Eugene Costello’s words, “the agency of subaltern rural dwellers” as thoughtful participants in ecosystem management, Irenius is quick to attribute their actions to a reflexively practiced inheritance of a “Scithian manner” and to focus on the political dangers of the booley.Footnote ⁴³

The great liability of this way of life, according to Irenius, is that it allows people to escape life as vassals in “the wide Countrie,” where there were, after Henry II’s conquest, “Inglishmen whoe possessed all the land” and who only allowed the Irish to settle there “as they thoughte fitt for labour, and industriouslye disposed”; these supposedly industrious Irish were received by English landlords “as theire vassals,” who would thereafter work as settled agrarian tenants on the newly anglicized great estates.Footnote ⁴⁴ The booley, in Irenius’s eyes, created an alternative to manorial vassalage in the time of Henry II, just as it would provide an alternative to the plantation in Spenser’s own time. In A View, this relationship between people and landscape continues to enable the Irish to escape resettlement as tenants on English plantations. “Mountaines,” “desertes,” and the “white meates” of dairy cattle ally with alleged Irish rebels to create a resource landscape that evades the maps, surveys, and censuses that are central to Irenius’s vision of a pacified Ireland.

For Spenser, while Munster may have “the sweteste Soile of Ireland,” such potential agrarian wealth remains unavailable on account of not only the peripatetic lifestyle of the cattle herder but also the martial lifestyle of the Irish. Spenser imagines that their bodily attunement to mobility and violence in a harsh landscape militates against settled labor on the soil.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hardy and violent, but not given to plowing or enclosing land for the production of agrarian commodities, Ireland “is a nacion ever Acquainted with wars…and in theire owne kinde of milytare discipline trayned vp even from their youthes.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Trained as children in the ways of war, common soldiers, or gallowglass, are “greate endurers of Colde Labour honger and all hardnesse verye active and stronge of hande very swifte of foote verye vigilaunte and circumspecte in theire enterprises verye presente in perills veryre great scorners of death.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Despite this litany of physical and psychological fortitude, Irenius elsewhere paints them as feckless idlers pretending to noble status: “all the Irishe allmoste boste themselues to be gentlemen…and therevppon scorneth eftsones to worke or vse anie hande labour, which he saiethe is the liffe of a pesante or Churle, but thence forthe…envringe himselfe to his weapon and to his gentelmanlye trade of stealing.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The alleged falsity of their gentlemanly status is key to Irenius’s desire to turn them into peasant laborers, as class hierarchies of gentry and peasant here interact with racialized distinctions between English and Irish. Spenser renders embodied practices of labor and violence as manifestations of heritable markers of otherness that at the same time define the political ecology of Irish resistance. This fundamentally militaristic existence, as Irenius imagines it, necessarily involves a particular way of inhabiting and shaping the landscape. Spenser essentializes Irish militarism and aversion to labor as racialized signifiers of a threatening relationship to place that must be disrupted. Body and environment interact, in Irenius’s vision, to form a martial way of life that, like the booley, renders the Irish unassimilable into the English-dominated, manorial hierarchy of agrarian labor until they are defeated by the combined military and ecological interventions of the English garrisons.

VARGAS MACHUCA: COLONIAL WAR AS LABOR AND INVESTMENT

Notwithstanding his brief considerations of ancient warfare, Vargas Machuca mostly focuses on the here-and-now practice of colonial war in the Americas, in contrast to Spenser’s antiquarian reconstructions of Irish lifeways. In the absence of anything like the long history of conflict that marks English-Irish relations since the twelfth century, Vargas Machuca bases his account of Native American subsistence practices and ways of fighting upon his own authority as a firsthand witness. As a result, his descriptions of the landscape in and around New Granada in the Milicia y descripción are more detailed than Spenser’s surveys of Irish woods, arables, pastures, and mountains. Vargas Machuca devotes much space to the topography, flora, and fauna of the Indies, while Spenser’s perspective seems more attuned to the abstract measurement of acreage, tenants, and rents. Yet Vargas Machuca also eventually turns his attention to the quantitative administration of so-called pacified territory, exemplifying the environmental dimension of state power in Spain’s early modern construction of both racialized identities and “bureaucratized beings” in its imperial project.Footnote ⁴⁹ Vargas Machuca’s quantifying gaze complements his rich catalogue of plants, animals, and terrains in a way that at once advertises his close familiarity with the land as a perpetrator of castigos against Indigenous and maroon communities and constructs the landscape of New Granada as a profitable site of exploitation.

As in Spenser’s contradictory construction of a simultaneously bountiful and threatening Ireland, Vargas Machuca likewise pairs the spurious objectivity of the colonizing surveyor with an account of Indigenous prowess as survivors in these landscapes. He dwells on his adversaries’ use of flora and fauna, topography, and riparian formations to gain advantages against the Spanish. As Jairus Victor Grove observes of the Milicia y descripción, “Indigenous knowledge of the environment recurs as a threat throughout the manual,” and so Vargas Machuca counters this by deploying his own “regimes of knowledge about the weather, peoples, plants, and nonhuman animals” in “the very development of war practices.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Grove reads the Milicia y descripción as an early exemplar of a modern mode of defeating anticolonial resistance that seeks to use an otherwise sustaining ecosystem against its Indigenous inhabitants. Spenser and Vargas Machuca each develop this strategy as they speculate about breaking Irish and Native American rebellion, just as it informs their respective visions of so-called peace, in which fruitful lands and productive labor are united in a new, extractive assemblage. This is one of the “coincidences,” to use Patricia Palmer’s phrase, that emerge in the comparison of English and Spanish approaches to colonization, in which vastly different imperial contexts yield patterns of thought that can be illuminating in their similarities.Footnote ⁵¹ Even as Vargas Machuca fashions himself as a toiling caudillo quite unlike the seemingly detached interlocutors of Spenser’s dialogue, these texts share in the construction of a racialized relationship to place that must be violently and laboriously transformed to establish a new colonial political ecology.

But this coincidence does not exclude significant differences in the way Spenser and Vargas Machuca imagine ecological warfare. Where Spenser is willing to consider the outright destruction of Irish subsistence practices by deliberately creating the conditions for famine, as we will see, Vargas Machuca envisions the colonizers’ imitation of Indigenous subsistence practices as a means to defeat them. Vargas Machuca constructs a kind of ecological version of the “intimate enmity” Kris Lane describes as a signal feature of the Milicia y descripción, in which a purported enemy becomes at the same time an example to be followed for fighting in the colonial conflict zone.Footnote ⁵²

Vargas Machuca cannot help but acknowledge the effectiveness of Indigenous tactics for surviving in this varied terrain. They can move through the difficult topography with ease at all times of day and night: “The quality of the Indians is like nocturnal birds, who go all night without any rest when carrying arms…not hindered by the roughness and brush of the land, the long path, the torrential rain, the mighty river, thirst and hunger, nor sleep and work, they break everything, they pass through everything.”Footnote ⁵³ Unlike the colonizing militia that puts itself at risk by being “greedy in searching for food,” the Amerindians deal with hunger on campaign by eating “what they call cimarronas,” such as snakes, lizards, worms, or parrots.Footnote ⁵⁴ Vargas Machuca’s description of this facility of movement, endurance, and discipline conjures the threat of imposing, tireless enemies and offers a model for defeating them by imitating this imagined collaboration between people and landscape. By learning from such ecologies of resistance, the milicia Indiana (Indian militia) can disrupt the relationships that enable it. This dynamic of imitation recalls Cord Whitaker’s formulation of the “rhetorical mirage” of race, in which the same kinds of material relations can be evaluated in diametrically opposed ways according to racialized hierarchies.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Vargas Machuca’s “rhetorical mirage” of race-making in terms of bodily attunement to a particular ecosystem, what is at one level an essentialized marker of somatic difference between Native Americans and the Spanish militia, becomes something to be imitated by the caudillo, as long as doing so helps to establish a new hierarchy of labor exploitation.

Vargas Machuca takes pains to detail how profitable such a new hierarchy could be. He offers a vision of an ideal resource landscape much like Spenser’s survey of Ulster. We learn of the agrarian bounty of the region, including imported crops like wheat, grapes, and sugarcane as well as Indigenous crops of maize and cassava; on top of all this there is the promise of gold, silver, and other minerals.Footnote ⁵⁶ For Vargas Machuca, describing the practices of the irregular militia leads him to recognize how, as Barrera-Osorio describes the Spanish empire in general, “nature became a contingent reality, adaptable to human plans and needs, and a collection of commodities and curiosities ready for exploitation and collection.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In the concluding sections of the Milicia y descripción that catalogue the useful and nutritious plants, the hydrography and geography of the entire region, and its fish and animals, Vargas Machuca’s exhaustive, paratactic style aspires to a totalizing vision of an exploitable ecosystem, while his survey of rivers and ports evokes the mercantile networks that carried silver and gold back to Spain, the mining of which spurred the commercialization of colonial economies across the Americas.Footnote ⁵⁸

The seemingly contradictory accounts of desolate, dangerous lands that are also bounteously fruitful can be found throughout colonial missives like Spenser’s and Vargas Machuca’s.Footnote ⁵⁹ This rhetorical strategy can be seen as a perversely exploitative manifestation of ecological awareness. It registers the knowledge that the colonizer is not separate from the environment and is everywhere vulnerable to the potentially dangerous effects of subsisting within its ecological relationships. Yet this phase of ecological recognition functions only to set up the exploitative denouement: by opening oneself to the risk of the colonized ecosystem, one can transform it from threatening wilderness to a source of wealth.

Such extractive ambitions, even in their most confident projections of colonial bounty, never manage to dispel the shadow of resistance to colonization and the persistence of alternative lifeways. While Spenser and Vargas Machuca might construct an absolute contrast between the agrarian ecologies of colonial settlers and the wastelands of Indigenous wanderers, they also record a more complex mixture of subsistence practices that reveal the continuation of Indigenous forms of life beyond the colonizers’ field of vision. Vargas Machuca, for example, asserts of all Amerindians that “for the most part they are lazy, but not in matters of war,”Footnote ⁶⁰ and yet at the same time notes that those in hot climates grow their own food, even describing methods of planting maize in the heads of sardines.Footnote ⁶¹

For Vargas Machuca, Indigenous resistance offers both a threat and an example to be followed by the colonial militia in its own kind of martial toil. As he puts it in one of the foundational premises of his tract, “There are so many inventions of war that the natives of those parts use…that they have taught us some of what we do and that are necessary to countermine them.”Footnote ⁶² Such an outlook, according to Solodkow, marks “the martial modernity of Vargas Machuca, his warrior originality, [which] is based on a kind of mimetic pragmatism.”Footnote ⁶³ In a sense, this is the starkest difference between A View and Milicia y descripción, since Spenser never advocates anything like the English forces organizing themselves in an Irish booley but instead wants to use English soldiers to harass the booley out of existence, as we will see. But there is a commonality in the way each writer imagines a collaboration between a recalcitrant populace and an ecosystem that provides whatever it needs. Vargas Machuca, like Spenser when he invents his version of the booley, imagines the interdependence of Indigenous lifeways and the colonized landscape as a kind of insurgent assemblage. But in Vargas Machuca’s vision, the militia commander and his soldiers must first insinuate themselves into this assemblage through imitation before they can disrupt it.

Doing so exposes the would-be conquistador, in Vargas Machuca’s account, to the risks of wounds, diseases, and poisons as he traverses unfamiliar ecosystems. Yet such an environment could also provide the means for the militia’s victory if its leader’s qualities could match those of his adversary. Vargas Machuca offers a distinctively embodied account of the caudillo’s travails that mirrors the bodily capacities of Indigenous people to subsist within their landscapes. The commander of the anti-Indian militia must be able “to walk on foot night and day, through the ravine, hills, and mountains in winter and summer,” planning and packing adequate provisions to survive in seemingly depopulated areas, lest “many people die from hunger along the way.”Footnote ⁶⁴ For both the caudillo and alleged rebel, Vargas Machuca’s descriptions of embodied activity are inseparable from descriptions of landscapes and ecosystems as they are traversed and transformed at the ground level.

A significant portion of book 3 is devoted to clearing roads, constructing bridges, fashioning watercraft to cross rivers, and building fortified camps.Footnote ⁶⁵ Making war, for Vargas Machuca, means making infrastructure as a first step of ecological transformation. The exemplary symbol of this use of the landscape’s provisions to wage punitive raids against its inhabitants is his recipe for gunpowder that includes charcoal made from foraged plants.Footnote ⁶⁶ The implements of armed castigos are taken from the land itself and refined by the work of the soldier into a weapon. (English forces in Ireland, by contrast, could not make gunpowder there and imported all of it from England.)Footnote ⁶⁷ The labor of the soldado intervenes in the colonized ecosystem, Vargas Machuca imagines, which will enable the transformation of an Indigenous political ecology that prevents the capture of Native labor and land by colonizing settlers.

Vargas Machuca moves from the concrete interactions of the militia’s embodied toil and the subsistence and guerilla strategies of Indigenous resistance to broader imperial networks of extraction and accumulation. Wealth (la riqueza), as Vargas Machuca elaborates, drives the project of Spanish domination across vast areas of space: “For it the soldier labors and all the other lower and higher estates; for it so many lives are risked and for it are they sustained through so many various paths; for it the sea and the equinoctial line are crossed.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Vargas Machuca here makes explicit the relationship between the vast riches flowing to the Crown through its colonial expansion and the wealth of the properly rewarded soldier who furthers that expansion. The individual risks undertaken by these caudillos are a kind of investment that, in Murdo MacLeod’s terms, allowed early colonizers, often from the minor Spanish nobility, “to think of merits and services as capital and to use them openly to ‘buy’ a better position from the king or the viceroy.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In a text marked by a literary style of practical bluntness that offers little self-examination, Vargas Machuca pauses here to consider the motivations and means of this enterprise. He situates the toil of the caudillo within a global process of accumulation in order to turn his martial and ecological expertise into a kind of tradeable good by advocating for a portion of the wealth he and those like him supposedly helped create.

Vargas Machuca asserts that “the riches” won by the “the labor” of Spain’s people and “the swords” of the milicia Indiana are “the beginning of everything.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In his insistence on this point, he not only makes an analytical claim about the global machine of wealth extraction that motivates the caudillo’s attacks but also extends the longstanding literary genre of the relaciones de méritos y servicios and its emphasis on tangible rewards for service to the Crown. These relaciones are “‘autobiographical’ reports, documenting services rendered to State and King, which the individual must present to the authorities in order to apply for vacant offices and privileges.”Footnote ⁷¹ Insofar as the Milicia y decripciòn is at once a manual and an attempt to win a post in the colonies from the court in Madrid, his analysis of the militia’s “labor” as the source of colonial wealth serves as a strident reminder of what a Spanish king owes his hardworking subjects.Footnote ⁷² This work was not undertaken at the explicit direction of the sovereign, but was, rather, a speculative endeavor, the value of which Vargas Machuca was now hoping to realize in the form of some remunerative post.

The punitive raids he carried out, therefore, ought to be seen, he suggests, as a financial investment, since the caudillo fronts the costs for paying soldiers and securing provisions and supplies without royal support.Footnote ⁷³ These campaigns are also an investment of labor, since the militia leader “works first at making the fort, opening the road and the forest [montaña], building the bridge and the raft in the river to be able to pass.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Given such financial and physical investment, the wise king, Vargas Machuca implies, “will honor his caudillos and settlers with honorable awards to those who are so deserving.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As he later warns, “Those prizes that consist in honor, it is good they be given to encourage the militia…for not being rewarded drives many to idleness, forgetting the foundation of arms.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The literary effort of Vargas Machuca, following Robert Folger’s analysis of relaciones as a distinct genre, responds to the “economy of mercedes” within the colonial bureaucracy, which enacts the fundamental principle that “it was the King’s duty to administer a just distribution of favores [mercedes] in the colonies.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Without this promise of reward, Vargas Machuca argues, idleness will replace the soldier’s toil. But in presenting itself as a manual for would-be caudillos, the Milicia y descripción goes beyond the economic premise of the relaciones to detail the underlying ecological knowledge and devastation that makes these colonial rewards available for distribution in the first place. Vargas Machuca argues that the abstract ideals of the colonial bureaucracy, such as the justly distributed mercedes (favors) of the Crown, are material rewards, earned by bodily labor that transforms ecosystems and enables the exploitation of Indigenous labor.

For Spenser and Vargas Machuca, the landscapes of Ireland and New Granada enable rebellious communities to survive without settled agrarian labor. This construction of idleness activates an imaginary of colonial warfare as a kind of labor that can transform and enlist Indigenous ecologies within transatlantic extractive economies. Such a literary projection of ecological transformation takes shape against the resistance of so-called rebels, as their modes of subsistence provoke the response of “planting,” in its early modern English sense, as both settling people in a colony and in the agrarian sense of sowing seeds for future harvest—an investment with expectation of a return.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the next sections, we will see how Spenser and Vargas Machuca imagine that investments of labor and money will pay off in the transformed resource landscapes of Ireland and New Granada.

EDMUND SPENSER: MAKING THE LAND PAY

Spenser’s strategy for breaking the resistance that the booley supposedly enables depends not upon military force alone, but the maintenance of English-dominated agrarian estates, mercantile networks, and market towns. For Spenser, the method of turning Ireland into an English plantation depends, as Irenius infamously asserts, upon “the sworde.”Footnote ⁷⁹ But the sword, as it turns out, depends upon the plow, because Irenius plans to fund permanent English military garrisons through the revenues of Irish lands escheated by rebellious lords. Eudoxus questions Irenius on the details of this policy: “tell vs I praye youe how ye woulde haue the same Landes rated that bothe a rente maie rise theareout vnto the Quene and allsoe the soldiours paye.”Footnote ⁸⁰ As Eudoxus’s question implies, the success of colonial war depends upon the capture of value from Irish land, transforming it from an ecosystem that may support the independent sustenance of potential rebels into a measured, managed, and predictable source of revenue for the Tudor state and its military apparatus.

Irenius’s detailed response exemplifies how the literary construction of a colonial resource landscape can move from the untraceable movements of rebels through trackless terrain to the generation of the comfortingly predictable numbers that mark the “exceedingly mathematical rhetoric” of the latter part of A View.Footnote ⁸¹ Setting aside the specific quantities of plowlands and revenues Irenius lists just for Ulster, Eudoxus usefully summarizes the scheme thus: “So then belike ye meane xvC soldiours in garrison for Vlster to be paide principallie out of the rente of those lands which shall theare excheate vnto her maiestie.”Footnote ⁸² The lands escheated to the Crown will pay soldiers in permanent garrisons. Irenius plans to position them so they can quickly strike whenever Irish herders appear in a nearby booley. Irenius’s scheme thereby intervenes in Irish ecology on two levels: it at first depends upon the reorganization of escheated estates into profitable agrarian concerns for the Tudor state, and then the garrisons these estates support will interrupt the ecological links between Irish herders and the landscape.

The garrisons would be arranged strategically to enable the opportunistic harassment of the booley. They would also be supplied with a half-year’s supply of food ahead of time.Footnote ⁸³ Such efficient provisioning of the English garrisons was at best a dream, for it was one of the biggest challenges for the Elizabethan government during the Nine Years’ War. As a result, “a more common device for feeding the army from the land was for the field army, or for garrisons out on incursions, to plunder cattle from the Irish.”Footnote ⁸⁴ If Irenius’s plan is to harass cattle to the point of eliminating them as a viable source of sustenance for the Irish, then that is why he insists on long-term victualing of the garrisons. It is the only way the English garrisons will be able to withdraw from the Irish cattle herding ecosystem far enough to perpetrate its destruction without harming themselves. This strategy crystalizes the interaction of colonial war, labor, and “provisioning” as a question of resource use.Footnote ⁸⁵ The cattle could enable the provisioning of English field troops, but not while they simultaneously supported Irish rebels.

In a state of self-subsisting isolation from the land, the soldiers of the garrisons will “issu[e] forthe at suche Convenient times as they shall haue intelligence or espiall vppon the enemye…that in shorte space his Crete which is his moste sustenaunce shalbe wasted with prayinge or killed with drivinge or starued for wante of pasture in the woodes and he him self broughte so lowe that he shall have no harte nor habilitye to endure his wretchednes.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This passage moves from the garrisons’ surveillance of the landscape to the pursuit of the booley from pastures into woodlands in which the “Crete” will starve, thereby breaking any Irish resistance due to lack of provisions. This completes the multiple phases of ecological warfare brought together by Spenser’s interweaving of investment in military garrisons, victualed in advance and financed by rents from escheated lands, with the deliberate destruction of the socioecological assemblage of the booley that supposedly enabled Irish resistance during the time of Henry II’s conquest and in the 1590s.

Spenser matches the destruction of the booley with a scheme of infrastructural construction and demographic manipulation that intends to create a new political ecology of enclosure and surveyed populations. As Irenius asserts, “to haue the lande thus enclosed and well fenced…is bothe a principall barre and empeachement vnto theves…and allsoe a gavle againste all Rebles And outlawes.”Footnote ⁸⁷ A demographic counterpart to this infrastructural program is the resettlement of any formerly rebellious Irish “dispersed wide from theire Acquaintances and scattered farr abroad thoroughe all the Countrye.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Once dispersed, they must be induced to agrarian labor, “because it is moste ennemye to warr and moste hatethe vnquietnes,” and this new occupation is to be made heritable by enforcing the statute whereby “all the sons of husbandmen shalbe trained vp in theire fathers Trade.”Footnote ⁸⁹

This exemplifies the relationship between labor, ecological transformation, and the race-making implications of Spenser’s proposed disruption of Irish modes of affiliation and kinship. As Urvashi Chakravarty tracks the interplay of darkness and lightness in the construction of “savage” and “civilized” people and landscapes in A View, the fashioning of a “faire habitacion” involves not only the creation of a landscape safe for English settlers imagined as white but also the destruction of alternative kinship structures and their replacement by “sanguinal succession as a vector for the extraction and continuation of productive and predictable ‘labour and husbandrie,’ which will steward the land and secure local economies to colonial benefit.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The creation of a new social hierarchy based on agrarian labor exemplifies the contradictory construction of somatic difference as at once immutable and subject to change for the purposes of integrating the laboring bodies of colonized people into extractive political ecologies, as Patricia Akhimie observes of the “marvelous husbandry” of English writing about the New World.Footnote ⁹¹ In terms of the “strategic essentialisms” of race-thinking, to return to Heng’s formulation, Spenser is willing to posit an innate Irish aversion to labor and then abandon that premise in order to assert the changeability of Irish relationships to the land and to each other. In Spenser’s View, once the Irish are separated from networks of affinity that resist attempts to turn Ireland into an orderly resource landscape, they will be isolated from their “salvage nacion” in a way that allows their previously essentialized, recalcitrant relationship to agrarian labor to be transformed into the basis of a heritable laboring status that founds an English-dominated, manorial resource landscape.

An essential component of this new regime are market towns situated next to English military fortresses, where Irenius would have “inhabitantes of all sortes as merchantes Artificers and husbandmen placed…so would it in shortte space turne those partes to great Comoditye and bringe er longe to her maiestie muche proffitte.”Footnote ⁹² In this narrative, Spenser envisions the Irish landscape as changing from an unmeasured source of nonmarketable sustenance for rebellious cattle herders into a measured system of agrarian estates, connected by roads to market towns as sites for the spread of so-called civility. “For theare is nothinge dothe soner Cause Civilitye in anye Countrye then manye market Townes by reasone that people repairinge often thither for theire nedes will dailye see and learne Civill manners of the better sorte.”Footnote ⁹³ Here, the infrastructural transformation of the Irish landscape complements the ecological destruction of the booley. Each of these environmental interventions participate in the racializing logic of the spread of “Civill manners” through mercantile networks under English control over and against any alternative modes of social affiliation and subsistence within Ireland’s ecosystems.

VARGAS MACHUCA: FROM CASTIGOS TO RESOURCE LANDSCAPES

The logic of investment in ecological transformation leading to new forms of social relations likewise defines Vargas Machuca’s conception of the caudillo’s relationship to the colonized landscape. He emphasizes the need to give the colonized Native Americans a material interest in the new society he imagines in the Milicia y descripción, in part through the establishment of market days for them in newly established settlements. Amidst his detailed constructions of the landscape—its poisons and cures, mountains and plains, rivers and swamps—and the global network of wealth extraction to which he hopes to join it, Vargas Machuca narrates the intermediate steps that will enable the militia to transition from backwoods toilers to beneficiaries of the encomienda system. As Vargas Machuca asserts at the beginning of the fourth book of Milicia y descripción on urban settlement, “under peacetime, the Indian gives vassalage and obedience and…gives tribute to the prince…and with him and with industry they live and sustain populated places.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In his vision of pacificación, ceremonies that “will send them to their homes and villages happy” also enable Amerindians to work to support Spanish settlers (los cristianos) “with provisions from the land…in the interval that they try to produce their own food and settle themselves.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Exploiting agrarian labor is foundational in Vargas Machuca’s vision of colonization, but its indispensable counterpart is urbanization and the development of a market for craft production: “Agriculture is the foundation of the multiplication and conservation of the cities,” but “more people sustain themselves by art and industry than from the income of the land.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Although they start from starkly different types of military forces, Spenser and Vargas Machuca imagine a similar process of colonization, as the militarized disruption of Indigenous place-relations gives way to land surveys, the measurement of populations, and the circulation of commodities within a newly urbanized landscape.

One of the primary duties of an officer in a newly pacified area, Vargas Machuca asserts, is to make “a description and account of the Indians…of rivers, fishing and hunting, of metals, mines, and notable things.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In this way, written surveys should be compiled in an official document to be delivered to the governor or audiencia.Footnote ⁹⁸ The writing of colonial ecologies performs the land’s subjugation even as it registers ecological relations between Indigenous people and their landscapes, if only to better grasp how they can be exploited. The caudillo should make sure that the land is healthy and agriculturally fertile, “which will be seen in the natives, if they are robust and well-proportioned, and in that it is populated, and in that there be many elders, from which health is inferred.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Vargas Machuca reads the landscape through the bodies of its inhabitants, once again enlisting Native American peoples into his rhetorical construction of New Granada as a resource landscape by examining their bodily capacities and characteristics alongside knowledge about foodways and crops, livestock, and climate.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Vargas Machuca imagined the Native Americans as a people who had once merged with the landscape, who could move undetected through and subsist upon a land that stymied the would-be conquistador’s every step. Now, Vargas Machuca joins Indigenous peoples and the land together in his vision of a productive socioecological assemblage under the inquisitive, documenting gaze of the colonist. Quantifying and distributing riches cements the transformation of the threatening montañas into a resource landscape: “and having seen the number [of Indians], he will consider the farms [granjerías] of the land, if there are pearls, gold, or precious stones, or if it has a single industry…and with this consideration he will share the land and settle the Indians, more or less, conforming to the uses of each province.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This procedure of the quantitative measurement of people, the land, and its products marks the culmination of the colonizer’s fantasy of ecological warfare, in which the initial violence and toil of the militia against both people and landscape creates a predictable relationship between work, settlement, and the profitable extraction of resources.

The narrative conclusion of this process is a romance of the market, in which the initial investment of money and manpower in the establishment of market centers will attract Indigenous people, such that “all the land will go to each market, because from there they carry hats, beads, salt, meat, gold, and from among these same native Indians [some] will be hired later, each one bartering the fruits of his land, and like this they walk away happy and have more with which to pay their tribute.”Footnote ¹⁰² This vision, in which Vargas Machuca’s evident desire to see the violent castigos against allegedly secretive and idle Indians pay off in the open, daylit trade of the marketplace, further promises the momentum of a self-perpetuating machine, as new commodities further enmesh Indigenous communities in networks of exchange, including those of labor power. How, specifically, this translates into increased wealth for the encomendero and his sovereign is left vaguely implicit. What matters instead for Vargas Machuca’s narrative is that knowledge about the colonized ecosystem supplant the previously unaccountable, mobile subsistence of Indigenous peoples. In ways similar to Spenser, the rebel is defined by an apparent aversion to labor and an embodied habituation to moving across threatening environments, which the work of colonial warfare interrupts by creating conditions in which settled, agrarian labor or craftwork are the only ways to survive. Enforcing such a labor regime depends upon not only the threat of military reprisal but also the transformation of the landscape itself—from a means of mobility and subsistence for so-called rebels into a site of resource extraction and accumulation.