Frontiers of Possession

Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas

Bibliographic Data

ID7767928
AuthorsTimo Mcgregor (New York University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume63
Issue2
Pages437-438
Publication date2016-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnohistory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1801 • E-ISSN: 1527-5477
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00141801-3455555
OpenAlexW2319000096
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Frontiers of Possession is a bottom-up social and legal history of Spanish-Portuguese territorial disputes. Arguing that traditional nation- and state-centric accounts have obscured the complexity and dynamism of early modern border formation, Herzog focuses more on recovering the forgotten contingencies of the process than on explaining the resulting national boundaries. In both Europe and the Americas, disputed border regions and their communities were constantly reshaped and redefined, not by treaties or battles but by the everyday activities of their inhabitants as they contested the right to exploit their own patches of land. Messy, unpredictable, and often violent, the process of defining and defending private or communal usage rights hinged on effective claims making and drew normative force from political, social, and economic values as well as legal doctrine. The result was a “highly dynamic, open-ended process that involved individuals and groups that did not necessarily represent a state but that nevertheless ended up constructing and defining one” (248).The first half of the book explores Spanish-Portuguese territorial disputes in South America in broad, thematic brushstrokes. Iberian colonization was punctuated by papal bulls and treaties, but in practice these only raised further questions about interpretation and enforcement. Locals accordingly preferred to invoke the flexible Roman doctrine of possession as the basis of their land claims. Because a wide variety of actions could demonstrate possession and because failure to protest such actions was construed as consent, constant vigilance was required and minor incidents could provoke a “tedious interplay of action and reaction” that dragged laymen into complex political and juridical disputes (44). Relations with Native Americans were also crucial, as religious (and therefore civic) conversion, alliance, and warfare were considered legitimate means to acquire title to native territory. The result was fierce competition among religious orders, settlers, governors, and military leaders to assimilate and control native populations, who became the “true terra nullius” (132).Turning to the European border, part 2 focuses on a series of small-scale municipal disputes over communal land and jurisdictional boundaries. As in South America, these case studies reveal a chaotic “multilogue” of claims making driven by a complex array of local actors (137). The resulting tangles of claims and counterclaims defied straightforward classification, with patterns of cooperation as well as conflict appearing across national, familial, and social lines. Local compromises could create spaces of shared jurisdiction or “promiscuous villages,” where jurisdiction was divided on a house-by-house or even room-by-room basis (234). Such arrangements were remarkably common and persistent, Herzog argues, despite being branded as anomalies by nineteenth-century rationalizers. The frontier was not a static, unchanging space, but the driving forces of change were shifts in social and political economic thought rather than state intervention. Conflicts evolved along with new ideas about land usage and historical custom, but local interests and divisions continued to trump state concerns.Drawing on an impressive number of European and South American archives, detailed in a hundred pages of notes, Frontiers of Possession is an imposing piece of genuinely transnational research. Its arguments are equally ambitious in scope and speak to scholars in a wide range of fields. Herzog’s approach suggests that more attention to the dynamics of community formation and cross-imperial collaboration could help move Atlantic history beyond its persistent national divisions. Borderlands historians will be interested in Herzog’s arguments about the role of law in structuring understandings of space, while others will wish to elaborate on the active roles and experiences of indigenous people caught up in complex matrices of possession. Like the treaties it describes—and as all good scholarship should—Frontiers of Possession provokes as many interesting questions as it answers

Doctrine · Normative · Political science · Politics · Portuguese · Possession (linguistics) · Sociology · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · Historical Education and Society · Law · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

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