Book Review

Comparative/World

Notwithstanding John H. Elliott's continuous pleas for early modernists to recognize their potential historiographical import, comparative studies of the British and Spanish-American Atlantics have so far remained remarkable for their absence. In her own idiosyncratic and richly creative way, however, Patricia Seed has cast parochial, microhistorical sensibilities to the wind and has offered a sweeping narrative of the remarkably different ways the English and Spanish (and also the Portuguese) went about conquering and dominating Native American peoples.

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The book under review is clearly a sequel of Seed's Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (1995). In Ceremonies of Possession, Seed identified five different ways Europeans (the English, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch) claimed sovereignty over the lands they conquered in the New World. The English, she argued, took lands without enclosures to be empty; thus for them only fences and intensive farming signified rightful colonial possession. Spaniards, on the other hand, drew on Islamic precedent and protected the land holdings and political and judicial structures of their newly colonized subjects while seeking to remind the vanquished of their subordination through earmarked taxation and exclusionary laws. In this new book, Seed explores in greater detail these two strikingly dissimilar ways of interacting with Amerindian populations and the political fallout for indigenous peoples struggling today for land and "human dignity" in the territories of the former British and Iberian empires. Hence her use of the quirky yet suggestive word "pentimento" in the title: painted-over layers on a canvas, like historical memory itself, can resurface to become visible over time.

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