Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of possession. Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MS 2015, pp. 383.
This wonderful book studies disputes over borders in the American and the Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) spaces between the late XVth and the XXth century. However, the book does not aim to compare American and European cases, but to modify our understanding of both by bringing them together. Therefore disputes are convincingly analyzed through a number of extended case studies which, especially in the European case, stretched over a long span of time, had a complex structure and a huge number of actors.
Chapter 1studies the criteria by which a territory could be attributed to the Spanish or Portuguese
monarchies. Such criteria were based on the one hand on treaties, papal bulls and diplomatic documents, on the other they relied more and more on "performing juridical acts": jurisdictional acts, such as giving assignments, collecting taxes, pursuing criminals but also daily economic activities, such as farming, grazing, gathering, hunting, fishing. These acts implied possession of the land, but also required to be understood and interpreted by others, whose silence could be exchanged for consent unless it was imposed by ignorance, fear or external pressures. This approach has the great merit of recognizing the discontinuous nature of territory, "taking the form, of an archipelago, with 'islands' of occupation surrounded by a 'sea' of 'unoccupied land'" (42) and makes a great contribution to the deconstruction of the notion of space in historical studies.
Chapter 2 deals with the relationship between Europeans and Indians through the acts of conversion, subjugation and their implications for land rights. Considering the mission as a frontier institution (Bolton 1937), Herzog argues that religious conversion implied a civic conversion as well: the natives became Christians and at the same time vassals of the power that had evangelized them. Theories linking conversion to subjection, and missions to possession, intensified territorial occupations. The author shows that
theoretical reflection on the conditions of possession - from Vitoria to Locke – centered more and more on the “better” use of land rather than on its antiquity, thus dispossessing the majority of natives.
Chapters 3 and 4 shift the focus to Europe by carefully studying a series of long-lasting border disputes between Spanish and Portuguese communities. The cases concern areas that were disputed between a number of communities which changed over time depending on the configurations of power (Muslim, Reconquista, Old Regime, XIX century); islands that were created by rivers on the border between the two monarchies; mountains that were exploited jointly – although through different practices – by neighboring communities which belonged to Spain and Portugal; mixed areas that were inhabited jointly by subjects of the two crowns, each one maintaining her/his own personal jurisdiction.
The analysis focuses on the disputing parties, the coveted objects and litigants’ claims and seeks to identify factors of change – from immemoriality of possession to past agreements and to “natural” and then
“historical” borders.
Herzog’s book can be considered one of the best outcomes of the "new history of law" animating
international historiography since the mid-1980s by stressing that the separation between law and legislation lasted at least until the eighteenth century (Clavero). This new relevance of the law paved the way – as Herzog does - to the thorough reading of the huge and forgotten documentation of court proceedings of the old regime and making reference to practice, justice and equity rather than to legality: possession, which gives the book its title, is one of these key categories.
The culture of possession states that the right to enjoy an asset is based on the continued consent of the onlookers, therefore urging them to make their immediate reactions manifest, if not to express in advance a possible opposition. On the basis of this common legal culture, neighbors interpreted respective actions and intentions and therefore constructed their mutual interaction. The consequence was that peace as well as war - and perhaps peace more than war - was an arena for conflict.
Being the result of a huge archival exploration on two continents and ten nations, this book irredeemably displaces the focus of early modern territorial policy from the center to the periphery. The disputing parties are in fact places, to be intended as formal legal bodies. It was places, and not rulers, that made borders, by starting quarrels which would eventually request arbitration and negotiation rather than justice by the king. Herzog brilliantly shows that the culture of possession has an enormous analytical potential, and the reader wonders whether this insight could have been pushed forward. In this perspective, let me make two observations.
I am wondering if the exclusive emphasis on the legal nature of practice somehow prevents the author from taking full advantage of the material under scrutiny: perhaps a greater attention could have been payed to the relevance of intertwined jurisdictions - especially the secular and the ecclesiastical ones – on the local configurations of power: it is not by chance that Counterreformation bishops called the parish tythe the "law of the land". The presence of the landlord(s), the parish, the town council as well as the one of a fragmented, or dispersed or “united” settlement, created very powerful intracommunal dynamics. It's the intertwining of jurisdictions to determine the way in which practices are (mis)represented by a royal justice that tends to distort the work of actors belonging to other jurisdictions. In a way, border disputes created royal jurisdiction.
Further on, I am wondering if taking the intertwining of jurisdictions more into account, ultimately could lead to a more thoroughgoing analysis of economic practices. Herzog interpretes relations between herders, gatherers and farmers through a rather traditional economic history approach that used to artificially oppose their respective productive practices: on the contrary, as historical ecologists have been claiming for a long time, they actually co-existed, and the multistranded nature of policultural practices had profound technical as well as legal implications. However, Herzog’s book lays undoubtedly the basis for getting into the world of practice as a world of possession, and it’s one of its greatest merits.
