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.

[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