Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas

by Tamar Herzog

Frontiers of Possession asks how territorial borders were established in Europe and the Americas during the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are largely determined by military conflicts and treaties. Focusing on Spanish and Portuguese claims in the New and Old Worlds, Tamar Herzog reconstructs the different ways land rights were negotiated and enforced, sometimes violently, among people who remembered old possessions or envisioned new ones: farmers and nobles, clergymen and missionaries, settlers and indigenous peoples.

Questioning the habitual narrative that sees the Americas as a logical extension of the Old World, Herzog portrays Spain and Portugal on both sides of the Atlantic as one unified imperial space. She begins in the Americas, where Iberian conquerors had to decide who could settle the land, who could harvest fruit and cut timber, and who had river rights for travel and trade. The presence of indigenous peoples as enemies to vanquish or allies to befriend, along with the vastness of the land, complicated the picture, as did the promise of unlimited wealth. In Europe, meanwhile, the formation and re-formation of boundaries could last centuries, as ancient entitlements clashed with evolving economic conditions and changing political views and juridical doctrines regarding how land could be acquired and maintained.

Herzog demonstrates that the same fundamental questions had to be addressed in Europe and in the Americas. Territorial control was always subject to negotiation, as neighbors and outsiders, in their quotidian interactions, carved out and defended new frontiers of possession.

Genres: History

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2015

About the author

Tamar Herzog is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the History Department at Harvard University, and Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School.

Reviews

[DS25 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stile semplice nel complesso, molto pesante nello specifico. Ho apprezzato di più le parti generaliste, che fanno un breve excursus dei problemi che contraddistinguono le frontiere Europee e nel Nuovo Mondo nelle diatribe espano-portoghesi, con notevole insistenza sul carattere locale e policentrico dei conflitti.

[Andre Aguiar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tamar Herzog analyzes territorial formation in Portugal and Spain, both in Europe and the Americas, not looking solely to treaties or military confronts, but mainly by how a plethora of actors ("farmers, nobles, clergymen, friars, missionaries, settlers, governors, municipal authorities, and military men," p. 1) who through exchange, resistance, violence, negotiation, defined their community and impact territorial formation—though often through unplanned and uncontrolled acts. She stresses that instead of bilateral top-down treaties, the construction of communal spaces was more connected to locals.strategies of territory claim-making. In this way, Herzog's central argument is that borders were not primarily defined by state-driven treaties, military conquests, or the interests of kings but were instead dynamically shaped by a multitude of local actors whose everyday actions, local conflicts, and practical assertions of "possession" shaped imperial territories.

Herzog challenges a historiography that prioritizes legal and state military disputes to understand territorial conflicts. She argues that this top-down approach defines borders as clear lines dictated by monarchs and state agents through treaties (like the Treaty of Alcañices in Iberia and the Treaty of Tordesillas in the Americas), which mistakenly reduces local communities to invisible or ahistorical actors, ignoring how they can be the most impactful and more interested subjects in territorial conflicts. Thus, she shows how the border on both sides of the Atlantic was part of complex, ground-level interactions, local disputes, and bottom-up, simple-folk and Indigenous people's exercise of jurisdiction, language, history, memories, and even violent actions that truly tamped territorial expansion and boundary creation. It is interesting that, at any point in the book, she frames the work as part of borderland historiography.

Her book is organized in two parts, with two chapters each. She proposes an interconnected, transnational methodology, first examining the Americas and then European Iberia, and reframes a common trend that often analyzes the New World as derivative. Rather, she states that "suggesting that medieval Iberia chronologically preceded early modern Spanish and Portuguese America is natural; arguing that Europe continued to be the source of all things and received nothing thereafter is not" (11). By starting her examination in the Americas in Part I of the book, she asks how the colonial experience of border-making informed European territoriality. In Part II, she stresses these similarities, focusing on how everyday struggles, land uses (possession), and the role of outsiders (Indigenous in the Americas, Fronterizos in Iberia) had a deeper impact than formal diplomatic actions.

In part I (chapters 1 and 3), Herzog argues that territorial disputes between Portuguese and Spaniards in the Americas were not easily settled by legal practices or identity-driven alliances. Primary tools for legitimacy—such as papal bulls, treaties, physical occupation—frequently contradicted one another, creating interpretation gaps, deep ambiguity, and high contention between the two Empires, turning territorial expansion into a process where local settlers, soldiers, and vassals constantly protested each other's claims, complicating any possibility of consent through written agreements. In chapter 1, there is also a lot of attention to the Iberian unification between 1580 and 1640, where Portugal was under Spain's monarchical control. Despite Portugal being politically autonomous under Spanish rule, this long relationship blurred territorial claims—Spaniards argued that any expansion of Portugal during that period was made in their favor and by Spaniards—and identity categories of who was "Spanish" or "Portuguese," or, at least, who was better to be loyal to following separation. In this dispute scenario, Indigenous People. Chapter 2 analyzes how Spain and Portugal explicitly linked religious conversion and political vassalage to physical possession, using missionaries, gift-giving, alliance-making (praticas and parliaments), and doctrines of "just war" to convert indigenous presence into legal claims over contested territories. Although indigenous groups actively navigated these encounters to advance their own diplomatic, economic, and territorial interests, Herzog argues that they were ultimately drawn into a chaotic inter-imperial competition that redefined their lands and political autonomy according to European territorial logic.

In Part II (Chapters 3 and 4), Herzog shifts her analysis towards the Iberian Peninsula to examine how European borders were forged across long time horizons. Chapter 3 analyzes multi-century boundary disputes, especially La Contienda, arguing that territorial divisions were not top-down impositions by monarchs, but rather complex, hydra-like conflicts sustained and litigated over generations by local frontier inhabitants (fronterizos) pursuing their own practical interests. Unlike a history focused on state-agent diplomacy, she argues that a "longer history of the border demonstrates that the only persons who fought, struggled, and insisted on maintaining divisions were locals, not kings" (184). Chapter 4 explores how these local communities re-imagined history, geography, and the boundaries between "natural" and conventional landscapes to justify ongoing spatial claims. She sought to demonstrate that Iberian state borders were open-ended processes constructed through continuous local usage, litigation, and community compromise rather than static royal decrees or diplomatic treaties, since royal officials had particular moments to be worried about these borders different from those who lived there and had constant concerns about the land they lived on.

I felt the reading was easy and accessible to follow, but often with some gigantic paragraphs that could have been broken down for better reading flow. Despite showing a few maps, I believe it would be interesting if the book had a more cartographic discussion. This might be because I am particularly interested in the 19th Century, when scientific mapping and cartography increased the importance of borders in border disputes, but mapping was also important in the previous centuries. On this matter, some historians, like Raymond B. Craib, have emphasized that cartography also requires navigating conflicts, collaboration, and negotiation with local actors, who had a significant impact on the processes, so drawing maps was far from being a top-down imposition. Personally, I think a strong point of the book is the first part. Herzog reframes Latin American territorial disputes not merely as reflections of European diplomacy, but as central sites of legal and political innovation where local actors, including indigenous populations, actively shaped global imperial boundaries. It was very interesting to discuss how conversion, missions, and religious participation in the process of incorporating or displacing indigenous peoples were structurally tied to European claims of possession and vassalage in the Americas.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant but so dense. Herzog is a new social historian, interested in the ordinary people of history. She's focused on the united history of Spain and Portugal, so she compares events in their New World colonies to events in the Iberian peninsula. Herzog's thesis is that local populations' plans and strategic goals for land use, and not so much state-level treaties or wars, defined relations between the Portuguese and Spanish empires. This is basically a book about the use of real estate (much of which was stolen from Native Americans). Herzog has done a staggering amount of research in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, but despite the clarity and thematic breadth of her introduction and epilogue, the body chapters are bogged down in detail.

[Stevie · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5…gosh i kept thinking the book was getting bad and then it would get worse 😭 i enjoyed the amount of information presented but gosh i felt like this was not well written. the way the info was presented was so dense and it could have been written w greater structure to be better presented (also hated the use of parenthesis, i do that in informal writing not in an academic book as way to add words or give your opinion…imo). i also felt like there was a lot of repetitive lines, while on one hand i enjoyed emphasizing the point i also hated how i felt like i was going crazy rereading the same point. i recommend only if you’re interested in portuguese and/or spanish expansion into the americas and the conflict they had w each other in europe on establishing borders and boundaries