Negotiated Empires

Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2837372
AutoresThomas E Sherida (University of Arizona, autor correspondente)
Ano2005
Volume85
Fascículo1
Páginas125-127
Data de publicação2005-02-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoREVIEW
Resenha deNegotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820, Amy Turner Bushnell, 2013
PeriódicoHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-85-1-125
OpenAlexW2007915933
IdiomaEN

In the past decade, there has been a modest boom in comparative studies of Latin American frontiers, with edited volumes by David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch (Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History, 1994) and Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, 1998). In one sense, Negotiated Empires expands those comparisons by including chapters on Dutch, French, and British colonies in the Americas as well. In another sense, however, the volume directs attention away from frontiers by emphasizing relations between colonial peripheries and European cores. As a result, Native Americans move to the background as negotiations between Euroamericans and Europeans reclaim the foreground. With the exception of David Weber’s superb “Bourbons and Bárbaros: Center and Periphery in the Reshaping of Spanish Indian Policy,” the authors do not focus on Native American strategies in the global chess game of European colonialism.Negotiated Empires developed out of a conference at Michigan State University in 1997 organized by Amy Turner Bushnell, an avowed Spanish borderlander, and Jack Greene, a historian of the British Empire in North America. “The volume’s premise is that the concepts of center and periphery may be usefully applied to the historical understanding of colonial centers and their peripheries in the early modern Americas,” they write in their introduction (p. 3). They trace the brief history of core-periphery models, including Wallerstein’s influential world systems theory. In contrast to Wallerstein and his followers, however, all the contributors to Negotiated Empires emphasize the creativity and resiliency of the colonies and the limitations of imperial authority. More emphasis on Native American geopolitics would have sharpened and deepened their critiques of European hegemony embedded in world systems theory.The first five essays, by Amy Bushnell, John TePaske, Ida Altman, John J. Johnson and Susan Socolow, and David Weber, examine core-periphery dynamics in the Spanish Americas. A. J. R. Russell-Wood and Mary Karasch follow with two chapters on Portuguese Brazil. Wim Klooster explores Dutch colonialism, while Leslie Choquette and Philip Boucher examine France’s imperial endeavors. The volume concludes with chapters by Elizabeth Mancke, Jack P. Greene, and H. V. Bowen on British America. One dominant thread emerges: from Newfoundland to Buenos Aires, Euroamericans gave as good as they got in their negotiations with European cores over political authority, commerce, and personal mores.All the chapters are strong, but a few stand out in suggesting further directions for comparative research. Bushnell’s chapter provides a tart dissection of how the “invisible hand of the job market” has shaped the historiography of the Americas (p. 15). She also employs Weber’s definition of the frontier as “a zone of interaction between cultures.” Consequently, she, like Weber, pays more attention to Native American agency than other contributors. Greater attention to the differences between frontiers and peripheries throughout the volume would have provided a counterpoint to the generally Eurocentric emphasis of most chapters.TePaske’s chapter argues that the Spanish Empire was essentially a medieval construct shaped by the Reconquista. Unlike Britain, there was “no interval for development of more modern bourgeois values and institutions” (p. 33). Weber demonstrates how Enlightenment ideas and ideals transformed Spanish Indian policy in the late colonial period, but the rigidity of the Spanish Empire contrasts sharply with Dutch and English imperialism, which gave freer reign to private commercial ventures.Elizabeth Mancke, in one of the more stimulating chapters, argues that Britain balanced two visions of empire—oceanic vs. territorial—which in turn “reflected long-standing divides in the organization and institutionalization of the early modern British Empire” (p. 235). As interested in overseas commerce as in territorial colonization, the British government pursued three distinct patterns of negotiation: (1) with its colonial peripheries, where authority was “constructed on the colonial margins rather than transplanted from Europe” (p. 236); (2) with other imperial powers to define the world beyond Europe; and (3) with rival transoceanic commercial interest groups. Greater flexibility in the core allowed greater economic and political dynamism in the peripheries.Both Mancke and Green make good use of the literature on state formation to show how the British Empire moved from negotiation to centralization and force as its military and economic power increased. That trajectory backfired in North America, provoking the American Revolution. It would have been illuminating if a concluding chapter could have compared and contrasted the development and projection of state power in Spanish, Portuguese, and French America as well.There is an academic truism that every scholar should edit one and only on volume in his or her career. It is a consummately difficult task to do well. If you try to impose a unifying theoretical structure, contributors often rebel. If you don’t impose any structure, contributors meander down their own conceptual paths. Because all contributors did employ variations of the core-periphery model, Negotiated Empires has more coherence than most edited s volumes. A strong comparative concluding chapter would have made it even more compelling, but the range of the volume and the strength of the individual chapters provide a stimulating overview of European colonialism in the Americas

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Comparative history · Empire · Latin Americans · Political science · Premise · Sociology · State (computer science · Anthropology · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Society in Latin America

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