Trying to understand how civilized people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. "Modern Inquisitions "takes Arendt s insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics...