Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2077216

1527-1900

Sean F. McEnroe,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Native Claims presents the work of a dozen colonial historians whose subjects ring the planet from Africa to Oceania to the Americas in a period spanning from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. What unites these projects is their narrow focus on legal conflicts among colonizing and colonized peoples during the early phases of contact, settlement, and state formation. The essays make extensive use of petitions, treaties, court records, and contextualizing documents of all kinds to capture the legal and rhetorical strategies of Europeans and non- Europeans, and to reconstruct their shared and divergent beliefs about diplomacy, property, and sovereignty. Topically, the chapters fall into several geographical categories: Jovita Baber and Rolena Adorno address Spanish America; Andrew Fitzmaurice, Craig Yirush, and Saliha Belmessous cover British (and in the latter case, also French) North America; Lauren Benton examines Portuguese sites in West Africa and Moluccas; Kristen Mann looks at British Lagos; and Mark Hickford, Ann Curthoys, Jessie Mitchell, and Christopher Hilliard analyze British Australia and New Zealand.Since the 1980s, many historians have revisited the early colonial period with fresh eyes, challenging previously widespread assumptions about the asymmetry of power between Europeans and non- Europeans in the first era of global interactions. Along the way, many tidy analytical boundaries based on race, nationality, and linguistic identity have dissolved; meanwhile, new studies on ambiguous and contested cultural spaces have proliferated. In this wave of scholarship, the roles of missionaries, merchants, transla tors, indigenous allies, litigants, petitioners, and so- called subalterns of all stripes figure prominently. Often legal documents have been the key to recovering the historical experiences of nonelites and colonized populations. Native Claims builds on this tradition and complements several other edited volumes with overlapping concerns: Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy’s Negotiated Empires (2002); Andrew Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara’s Imperial Subjects (2009); Jane G. Landers and Barry M. Robinson’s Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives (2006); and Matthew Restall’s Beyond Black and Red (2005). Readers in hemispheric American studies will also note that Native Claims addresses questions of intercultural diplomacy raised in the past by writers such as Richard White, Karen Kupperman, Daniel Usner, Juliana Barr, and contributing authors Rolena Adorno and Lauren Benton.The definitions of property and state have evolved in countless ways over the past five centuries all over the world. Thus, even though Native Claims (as the title implies) is about recovering an understanding of non- European legal actors, it is also just as much about reconstructing the colonizers’ notions of jurisprudence and statecraft. One of the book’s strengths is that it allows the reader to glimpse patterns in the practices of a given colonizer across multiple environments. It describes the legal culture shaped by the Spanish in Peru and Mexico, the Portuguese in West Africa and Southeast Asia, and the British in West Africa, North America, and Oceania. The emphasis is on disputes over sovereignty and property. Consequently, neither other types of civil and criminal litigation nor issues of indigenous citizenship and political participation are examined as extensively.Native Claims brings together the research of two groups of scholars, one from the Americas and the other from Australia and New Zealand. The book emphasizes these parts of the world, and as a result draws an implicit contrast not just between the two regions but also between two very different moments in colonial history. The chapters on British, French, and Spanish America (as well as Benton’s chapter on the larger Iberian world) describe an age from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in which the technological and organizational powers of Europeans and non- Europeans were closer to parity. Under these conditions, Europeans often sought to understand and operate within indigenous systems of diplomacy, law, and commerce. In contrast, the chapters on nineteenth- century Lagos, Australia, and New Zealand address an epoch in which European military and technological power overwhelmed that of non- European peoples, and in which the modes of legal contestation were decidedly European. These broad distinctions are fascinating, as are the occasional exceptions. One limitation of the book’s design is that it lacks coeval comparisons to regions outside the British sphere in the later period of asymmetrical negotiations.Many edited volumes are the work of junior scholars in emerging fields. Often the archival research is valuable but the quality of writing uneven. Native Claims is a different sort of book. The contributors are leading scholars in their respective fields who are now engaged in elaborating or extending paths of inquiry begun in their previous works. Their standards of writing are high, and their specific historical cases are nicely contex- tualized for nonspecialist readers. This makes for a volume that is both an important scholarly contribution and an accessible collection of writing. Native Claims will surely provoke discussion among a wide variety of historians, and it will merit a place on the syllabi of courses in Atlantic history, world history, colonial studies, ethnohistory, and frontier studies.