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Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830 . Edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) 344 pp. $55.00

2019; The MIT Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jinh_r_01384

1530-9169

Molly A. Warsh,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

This collection maps a rich world of Anglo-Iberian exchange and stands as a notable marker of how far the field has come since Cañizares-Esguerra’s and Gould’s 2007 essays in the American Historical Review forum on “Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World.”1 In a strident introduction, Cañizares-Esguerra is straightforward about what he sees as the present-day political importance of this work. After acknowledging the tremendous complexity of the early modern Atlantic world, he notes that the book “studies only the entangled history of the Iberian and British Atlantics because it ultimately seeks to bring into focus the centrality of the Iberian-Latino past to the very constitution of the history of this nation.” A historiography (presumably of North America, though Cañizares-Esguerra does not specify) “that brings Latinos into the narrative as ‘minorities’ whose voices need to be heard, is itself complicit in their marginalization. Amerindians, Blacks, and Latinos ought not to be considered minorities to be incorporated into a larger narrative canvas. This book seeks to demonstrate that without ‘Latinos’ there is no canvas” (4). This assertion is puzzling given the presence of the continent’s numerous and diverse indigenous peoples long before the arrival of anyone who might be deemed “Latino,” but it seems safe to assume that Cañizares-Esguerra is making a point about the post-1492 Americas.This presentist political tone does not characterize the rest of the volume. Entangled Empires offers a rich overview of the field, drawing from the work of emerging scholars as well as established Atlantic world historians to trace, in the words of contributor April Hatfield in the chapter “Reluctant Prisoners,” a “political economy of interconnection” (198). The contributions range widely in terms of focus and time period. In Part I, “Severed Histories,” Mark Sheaves, Michael Guasco, and Benjamin Breen explore how the entwined Anglo-Iberian Atlantic world came to be understood and remembered as two distinct spheres of activity rather than one. They recover numerous arenas of mutual influence and exchange, ranging from European mercantile networks (Sheaves), the politics of slave trading in Africa (Guasco), and pharmaceutical trades and epistemologies of knowledge within the Lusophone imperial sphere (Breen).In Part II, “Brokers and Translators,” Christopher Heaney shows how printed materials facilitated the exchange and evolution of entwined imperial fantasies. Holly Snyder, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, and Cameron Strang show how marginalized populations (Iberian conversos, Irish, or European-descended cultural brokers with mixed-race families) navigated shifting political and cultural borders on the ground from Europe to the Americas. The two essays included in Part III, “Possession, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy,” explore shared intellectual genealogies and their impact on European and indigenous relations, from critical Iberian-inflected discourses of dominium and sovereignty in the early years of English settlement in Virginia and New England (Cañizares-Esguerra) to the influence of British perceptions of Spanish Indian policy in South Carolina between the mid-seventeenth century and the outbreak of the Yamasee War in 1715 (Bradley Dixon). Part IV, “Trade and War,” looks at the compromises and unforeseen consequences that continued to characterize Anglo-Iberian relations throughout the military and diplomatic wranglings of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, from the Caribbean (Hatfield and Ernesto Bassi) to the Philippines (Kristie Patricia Flannery).The volume’s only drawback is that a great deal of work has already been done in the last decade on the intertwined nature of the early modern Anglo-Iberian empires; evidence of this shared history no longer comes as a surprise. Furthermore, the ironic effect of the volume’s emphasis on Anglo-Iberian entanglement alone is to reify the binary that the volume seeks to deconstruct. In his afterward, Gould acknowledges as much, pointing out that the collection’s exclusive emphasis on one particular sphere of Atlantic competition inadvertently suggests that no equally rich adjacent (and indeed, entangled) worlds existed beyond the Anglo-Iberian.This tension, however, does not detract from this welcome addition to scholarship about an enormously complex arena of exchange and mutual influence. If “entanglement” is now widely accepted as a way of thinking about the early modern Atlantic world, the volume’s final chapter about the British occupation of Manila during the Seven Years’ War—the only chapter that looks beyond the Atlantic basin in a sustained way—underscores the utility of moving beyond the Atlantic to consider the global repercussions of the era’s many exchanges and encounters.