BOOK REVIEWS

HERZOG, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession. Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge / London: Harvard University Press, 2015, 384 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-73538-5.

Camila Loureiro Dias¹

¹ Federal University of Pará, Brazil. E-mail: camila.loureiro.dias@gmail.com

In this study about territorial frontiers, Tamar Herzog’s most important aim is to deconstruct traditional borders, especially historiographical ones. Looking at the history of Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas, her conclusion is that rather than being imposed by kings upon the local inhabitants the borders between Spain and Portugal were gradually constructed over many centuries by a multiplicity of groups and individuals who fought for their own interests. The parties involved, the territories that were coveted, and the claims that were made upon them, all changed over the centuries, and the frontiers were constructed at the same time as the properties and the communities themselves. If they took on the appearance of a dispute between the Spanish and the Portuguese, such a situation was, in fact, true in the nineteenth century. However, historians have tended to fossilize this image, projecting it over the centuries and expressing it in terms of present-day political entities, as if these actually preexisted.

Herzog reaches this conclusion by asking how theoretical divisions, such as those laid down in bulls and treaties, could be effectively implemented, how individuals understood, constructed, and defended their rights, and how conceptions regarding the use and the property of the land changed the nature of territorial debates in the long run. In order to expound her conclusions, she presents her arguments in two parts: the first deals with the territorial conflicts in America and the second with conflicts in Iberia. By “artificially” reversing existing narratives and beginning with America, she seeks to show how the one is reflected in the other and to underline her efforts to think about the Old World and the New World as just one single space. So far, we have established two broken boundaries: between the national states and between the narratives about the Old World and the New World; but she goes further and, in painting the picture of the New World with what she describes as a “wide brushstroke” (p. 12), she assembles her material thematically, according to actors and arguments rather than places or chronologies: the result is a single space-time description of the American territorial conflicts.

In a sense, this result is quite an interesting one, given that she identifies in all the American conflicts three conditions that were allowed for by European traditions and which granted contemporaries certain entitlements regarding possession. Bulls or treaties might have framed the debate, but only actions could lead to the acquisition of rights. Sharing a common legal tradition, both Spanish and Portuguese agreed that actions had to be performed with the intention to appropriate; possession had to be taken with no opposition (silence could be interpreted as consent); and these actions had to be carried out by vassals or people authorized to take possession of territories for the king. In the Americas, the question as to who was a vassal of which country involved not only Europeans but also the indigenous populations so that the precepts that regulated the relationship with natives and the mechanisms to transform them into vassals of the royal power were both equally important. At first, the process required a pact with the natives through their conversion to Christianity, highlighting the importance of the missionaries’ role in converting native land into European territory and their consequent involvement in territorial conflicts. By the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the clergy had given way to other actors, consisting mostly of military and administrative personnel, and the conversion of the natives was followed by a treaty that stressed the importance of indigenous political allegiance and acculturation. In both cases, not only the territory, but also the indigenous people, could be possessed and become the property of one power or the other. Challenging the assumption that these treaties signed with the indigenous populations were the result of negotiations, Herzog argues that they were instead a European legal and political construct.

The natives’ right to land was central to sixteenth and seventeenth-century debates regarding the rights of Europeans in the New World. However, according to Herzog, while at this time there was a general agreement among jurists that, unlike private property, the political space was immutable and unchanging, these same jurists gradually began to question these assumptions, using notions about private property to create doctrines about public borders and jurisdictions. Such developments signaled the coming of a new age, in which land would be the property, not of those who had it “first”, but instead of those who used it “better” (p. 124). From the seventeenth century onwards, rather than respecting the indigenous population’s past entitlements, Europeans, both jurists and actors in the field, concluded that those territories that were not used in accordance with their understanding of improvement were consequently open to their penetration. As a result, the indigenous adherence to one country or another may have guaranteed the Spanish or the Portuguese the right to possession of the land, but it did not imply that the natives themselves had effective possession or rights in detriment to European domination. This means that despite incorporating the natives’ right to land in their conflicts with one another, both the Spanish and the Portuguese denied these implications when dealing with the natives themselves.

The second part of the book is dedicated to the conflicts in Iberia. Here, the author pays more attention to contexts, returning to the chronology and examining in detail a number of specific confrontations. She shows that these conflicts were much more complex than we normally imagine and that they developed over a long time, from the tenth century onwards, some of them ending only in the early twentieth century. Over time, the actors constantly changed, as did their identity and their behavior, as well as the objects that they coveted and the claims that they made. Sometimes conflicts placed municipalities belonging to the same royal power in opposition with one another, even spreading to others from different kingdoms. Opponents did not always decide matters by establishing separate territories, and there were, in fact, some situations where the agreement that was reached was the common use of the land. On other occasions, the dispute was related to the receipt of taxes, and involved religious rather than civil institutions. In several of these cases, rather than becoming a state issue, frontiers were constructed by private interests. Therefore, the construction of the border between Spain and Portugal should not be related as the narrative of a state growing in prominence against local wishes, nor as an alliance between a state and local communities that led to the nationalization of the frontier. Depending on the loyalty of individuals, something that could not be gained simply by calling upon their nativeness (the subject of a previous book of hers, Defining Nations, 2003), border construction did not involve nationalist ideologies, but rather commercial and political choices.