Reviews of Books

Borderland or Border-sea? Placing Early Florida

Florida's Frontiers. By Paul E. Hoffman . (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 470. $45.00.)

The French in Early Florida: In the Eye of the Hurricane. By John T. McGrath . (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. xii, 239. $49.95.)

Religion, Power, and Politics in Colonial St. Augustine. By Robert L. Kapitzke . (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Pp. xii, 219. $55.00.)

Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida. Edited by Jane G. Landers . (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. xii, 220. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Reviewed by Amy Turner Bushnell, John Carter Brown Library

Early Americanists are on an expansionist course. Some have become historians of the British Atlantic, with an emphasis on plantation societies and slavery. Others have spread into the British backcountry to study secondary colonization and frontiers. A few, armed with polycolonial convictions and good grades in Spanish, have begun to colonize the Borderlands, Herbert Bolton's term for the tier of Spanish colonies within the present United States. Florida, founded directly from Spain in 1565, stood guard over the Gulf Stream. New Mexico, Louisiana, Texas, and, much later, Upper California, were colonies of New Spain, separated from one another by the warlike Northern Nations and the difficulties of east-west communications. Early Americanists who cross into the Borderlands discover a well-tilled but fragmented historiography, saved from the outlands of state and local history by a small band of scholars with transcontinental vision. In the Southwest, Borderland historians fight a losing battle with Chicano studies; in the Southeast, they cede to southern history and serve historical archaeology.	1
Surveys of colonial Latin American history generally pause between the high conquest and the Bourbon reforms to reflect on religion, society, and economic life in the colonial centers and their hinterlands. This simplifying approach slights the lightly populated frontiers and virtually excises the Borderlands, as if their destiny were manifest 250 years before 1803. Those whose knowledge of colonial Latin America comes from a one-semester survey may therefore be surprised at the size of the secondary literature that they must engage and pursue into the historiography of the Spanish empire (much of which is in English, thanks to earlier waves of colonizers).1	2
Florida, a one-city colony with a long documentary span, has a special role in Spanish American historiography, for it is in the manageable archives of the peripheries, not the massive archives of the centers, that one can best trace the development of societies and institutions. Yet early Florida wears the Borderland label chiefly for lack of a better one; its literature is as various as early America itself. The books herein reviewed include a history of Florida's frontiers up to 1860, a critical analysis of the sources on the rout of a French colonizing venture, a study of the balance of power in a Spanish American parish, and essays on the Florida economy in the age of Atlantic revolutions. This assortment of subjects and approaches suggests that early Florida studies is leaving the realm of lost lands and redefining itself as a maritime periphery or border-sea, like Chile and the Philippines.	. . .