Frontiers of Possession

This book promises the reader a new understanding of how boundaries between Spain and Portugal came into being, whether in Europe or in the Americas. Tamar Herzog stresses the common cultural heritage of Portuguese and Spanish actors who articulated legal doctrine, evoked local history, and obeyed the law while seeking the interpretations that best served their needs. The basic premise is that borders resulted from “activities by a plethora of agents” who “defined the territories of their communities and states” (p. 1) — in other words, that borders were not established by diplomacy or war.Part 1 focuses on the vast interior of South America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where influential Spanish and Portuguese agents, such as missionaries, military leaders, governors, scientists, and colonists, defended their claims and rights to land. Adopting the metaphor of an archipelago of “islands” in a ”sea” of unoccupied land, Herzog argues that territorial expansion was discontinuous; there was no “line or a front or even an amorphous area” (p. 42). Before colonization began, the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) attempted to delineate territory. During the union of the two crowns (1580–1640), expansion into the vast interiors of South America led to tangled claims about what was rightly Portuguese. The success of the Jesuits further complicated what belonged to each kingdom, especially after their expulsion in the mid-eighteenth century. The lack of accurate maps, overlapping jurisdictions, competing rights, and a sense of urgency all created chaotic claims on territories. In contested cases, the reports of agents on the ground carried great weight. Yet these documents, which tried to establish a sense of order, to understand rights, and to reconstruct histories, hardly helped. Herzog suggests that historians have been far too quick to read the many reports and letters as factual accounts rather than as tendentious documents. Invariably, most were written with an eye to defending a claim and to enlisting the support of those higher up.Agents on the ground, whether Spanish or Portuguese, developed similar narratives to claim, justify, and defend what they saw as their rights. Even though Spanish and Portuguese agents most frequently competed against each other — by asserting their rights to the same territory — they largely built and rested their cases on understandings derived from their shared European background. Fundamental were assumptions that rights could be either granted by formal donation (such as the Treaty of Tordesillas) or acquired through possession, a principle deriving from Roman law. Also debated extensively in Europe and discussed in the Americas were the rights of indigenous peoples to land — what could be considered legitimately occupied and what could be claimed by colonists.The sweeping approach to territorial definition in the Americas in part 1 gives way in part 2 to a finely grained analysis of minor territorial conflicts over land, grazing, and fishing rights along borders between Spain and Portugal. By meticulously reconstructing case studies, Herzog shows that the Spanish and Portuguese crowns did not impose national borders on locals. Instead, conflicts endured for centuries, and despite what treaties mandated, frontier lines materialized on the ground. Foreigners could range across borders and cultivate, collect, herd, and fish so long as their claims to the right to do so remained personal and nonexclusive. This uncovers one key difference: in the Americas, simply the articulation of a personal right could lay the basis for Portugal or Spain to claim the territory.A reservation with the methodology should be noted in closing. Using a microhistory approach for the Old World, Herzog can highlight the strategies of the fronterizos, the fishermen, collectors, ranchers, and farmers in small towns and villages on the border between Spain and Portugal. In the New World, where the canvas is huge, the agents making territorial claims were regional power brokers. This means that Herzog's “plethora of agents” is actually quite different in America than in Iberia. As a result, the strategies of those who lived in the contested zones of the New World, such as indigenous peoples, those of mixed race, the free poor, and runaway slaves, cannot be explored in the same way as they are in the border communities of Portugal and Spain. Herzog has shown that Portuguese and Spanish regional agents shared common understandings of law and historical precedents. She is certainly right that in the competition for territory in the Americas these Spanish and Portuguese agents utilized similar strategies and that, whether employed to the benefit of Spain or Portugal, they dispossessed many who were already there. But how those who lived in the contested communities in the Americas understood their claims, defended them, and won or lost them is lost in the larger story

Annexation · Archaeology · Archipelago · Diplomacy · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Portuguese · Possession (linguistics) · Treaty · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies in Latin America · Historical Studies on Spain · History · Law · Philosophy

• Woven and warring cosmologies

  Open Access•Maïa Pal, Claire Vergerio•European Journal of International…•2025

  Add to list