Based on a symposium held at the Fernand Braudel Center for Studies in Historical Social Science, this volume assembles wide-ranging and interdisciplinary perspectives on the making of the materiality of the modern world. The volume's self-defined goal is to situate studies of colonialism within the cultural and historical frameworks of the colonized regions. In doing so, the authors draw on the theoretical legacies of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein to frame their studies by recognizing that deep, Indigenous pasts shaped colonial encounters. In exploring manifestations of colonialism, each author analyzes the regional social and economic networks that existed in the premodern, precolonial pasts of colonized regions, and the way these historical realities shaped European experiences around the globe.
Although not explicitly structured into parts, the volume consists of four sets of chapters bracketed by two standalone chapters. Following an introduction to the volume by the editor, Matthew Johnson opens with the first of these bracketing chapters, which he writes as a fictional account of a journey across Britain and Ireland circa 1492. Based on existing historical and archaeological knowledge, Johnson provides a lively interpretation of what a visitor to these places at this time might have experienced on the eve of the Columbian maelstrom.
Following Johnson's contribution, the first group of substantive chapters frame Spanish colonialism by examining precolumbian networks. Corinne Hoffman provides an overview of the deep history of the precolumbian Caribbean, reflecting on how existing networks were both exploited and changed by the arrival of the Spanish. Guido Pezzarossi takes the same approach through a review of the colonized Maya in Highland Guatemala, arguing that traditional binary definitions of colonizer and colonized cannot do justice to the complexity of either the precolonial past of the Maya periphery or the societies that emerged following the arrival of the Spanish. Kathryn Sampeck rounds out this first group of chapters by exploring how the social and economic meanings of cacao production and exchange shaped the early phase of Spanish colonialism in Guatemala.
The succeeding three chapters discuss various elements of colonial experiences in the Caribbean. Doug Armstrong's chapter on Trents Plantation provides a rare examination of how the well-documented but difficult-to-observe transition from small farms to large plantations unfolded on the island of Barbados. In so doing, it situates his discussion of early British colonialism in the framework of an emerging regional network defined more by Caribbean place than by the national origins of the colonizers. In an analysis of what at first glance would appear to be a very illogical placement of fortifications across the island of Antigua, Christopher Waters asks the reader to set aside preconceptions of the plantation as an independent analytical unit and to consider the plantation as an interdependent sociospatial component of a broader network of places whose boundaries were permeable—which was experienced, and only can be understood, through movement across landscapes. Erik Seeman compares the landscapes of graveyards of Jewish cemeteries in the Caribbean with the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, demonstrating how the material elements of graveyards reveal how regional and global religious and other social processes shaped life and death in colonial contexts.
The next group of chapters focuses on colonial contexts along the western fringe of North and South America. Noa Corcoran-Tadd examines the spatial dynamics of the south-central Andes, focusing on how precolonial mobility of peoples in the region both directed—and was changed by—the development of agricultural and mining operations by the colonizing Spanish. Thomas Tolley follows with an examination of the landscape at Mission San Buenaventura, near the settlement of Santa Barbara in Alta California. Tolley argues that such missions can only be fully understood by upturning prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of mission landscapes, and by considering the deep history of the native peoples who lived and labored in these landscapes. The third chapter in this set—by Andrew Martindale, George MacDonald, and Sage Vanier—examines the Northern Tsimshian colonial experience in what is now British Columbia. The authors provide a rich and deep history of the Tsimshian, focusing simultaneously on (1) how meanings and realities changed in the face of economic and social transformation precipitated by waves of colonial activity and (2) how key elements of Tsimshian principles and institutions, including tribal identity, have simultaneously been resilient for millennia.
The final set of chapters focuses on colonial Africa. In the first of these, Gérard Chouin and Olanrewaju Blessing Lasisi propose that early Portuguese traders were able to insert themselves into existing—although poorly recorded—economic networks established in the Bight of Benin prior to the arrival of the Europeans for the exchange of prestige goods. Given that the region had been suffering a demographic crisis before the arrival of the Portuguese, the initial period of exchange of humans for copper, glass beads, and textiles should not be understood as commodity exchange, but as an exchange of prestige goods designed to elevate symbolic power. Ken Kelly follows this chapter with a discussion of how the development of the private, illegal trade in captives following the abolition of the legal slave trade in the early nineteenth century impacted peoples and landscapes of the Rio Pongo region of coastal Guinea. The final chapter in this set, by Martin Shanguhyia, reviews how the emergence and decline of global demand for wildlife products, particularly ivory, was built upon preexisting social and economic networks in colonial East Africa. These dynamics shaped the landscape through the establishment of game reserves, designed more to create a Eurocentric monopoly on ivory and other commodities than to conserve the population of the hunted animals. The volume concludes with a chapter by Mark Hauser, who uses the concept of colonial enclave to both distinguish and tie together Danish colonial settlements in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
The authors take a variety of approaches to their individual case studies—and as is common with large edited volumes such as this one—with mixed results. Several chapters summarize material that will be very familiar to many archaeological readers, and they read as elementary introductions to several topics. Others go into great depth about specific case studies, whereas others focus more on the theoretical constructions that underpin the revisionist approach to World Systems Theory that bind the volume together. Most chapters adhere to the volume's stated intent to situate colonial landscapes into existing regional networks and to consider how the pre-European historical trajectory of Indigenous peoples shaped the experiences of those who came to conquer and colonize. Taken as a whole, the volume provides an interesting anthology of postmodern approaches to World Systems Theory.
