An 1876 biographical companion, The Kings of British Commerce, was self-congratulatory in noting that imperial trade had not “brought into being new populations . . . but it has brought to our knowledge old and existing ones, in numbers and in territory far surpassing our own.” A durable strain of historical archaeology has endeavored to understand that mercantile reach and its implications for those “old and existing” societies that interacted with or were influenced by the British. A new book, Archaeologies of the British in Latin America, edited by Charles Orser Jr., adds to this expansive area of research.
A brief introduction by Orser and closing remarks by Pedro Paulo Funari situate the volume. Orser advocates modeling European colonialist empires as networks consisting of a metropole linked to scaled peripheries in the spirit of Wallerstein's world-systems theory. The interconnectedness of networks, their overlapping peripheries, and their multiple scales provide subjects for archaeological investigation. Funari aptly identifies recurring themes in 11 case studies, each of which addresses material dimensions of capitalist relations that the British introduced or intensified. Funari highlights the tension between analytical approaches that stress dialectical materialism and those that underscore agency and negotiation.
Orser is forthright in stating that the volume is “limited in scope” (p. 8). His introduction, for example, lays out a chronological span that the contributions do not fully cover. The English started making inroads into Spain's colonial world in the seventeenth century, but the cases largely concern the nineteenth century and often only its final decades. Only two chapters examine eighteenth-century developments, and none deal with anything earlier. In addition, Orser establishes a regional definition that includes the Caribbean, and his historical review emphasizes English control of places like Barbados and Jamaica. Only one chapter addresses the Antilles, resulting in a collection with a noticeable geographical tilt. Placing the book's geoscheme squarely on the mainland may have enhanced its distinctiveness, given the many tomes already dedicated to archaeology of the British West Indies.
The volume's title notwithstanding, several chapters are decidedly un-British in orientation. This is most evident in three chapters on lowland Mayas who fled Caste War hostilities in Yucatán and established themselves near the contested boundary between British Honduras (now Belize) and Guatemala in the 1850s and 1860s. In their chapter on the village of San Pedro Siris, Minette Church, Jason Yaeger, and Christine Kray endorse a decolonized view of territorial claims related to these refugee Mayas. Citing variations in occupational surfaces, they propose that Mayas vacated and then reoccupied village lands as a tactic to elude entanglements with British colonialists. Brooke Bonorden and Brett Houk discuss preliminary findings from a nearby site occupied from the 1880s to the 1930s. They argue that refugee Mayas engaged with British logging and chicle operations while still maintaining considerable autonomy, a posture that made them neither defiantly resistant nor pacified pawns of the colonial system. James Meierhoff explores how a refugee subgroup near Tikal, Guatemala, participated in the global economy through the acquisition of British ceramics and other commodities.
Three chapters concern other aspects of the British presence in Central America. Tracie Mayfield and Scott Simmons illustrate Orser's network conceptualization by making a case for shifting materialities at secondary and tertiary positions within the colonial enterprise. They compare assemblages from two nineteenth-century sites in Belize, detecting greater variety at a coastal port than at an inland sugar and logging installation. In their view, the inland site's impermanence and attenuated market access account for the differences. Lorena Mihok's landscape analysis of Augusta, a royal outpost on Roatán Island, Honduras, stands out for its attention to an exclusively eighteenth-century context. Mihok finds the settlement's spatial organization to be more consistent with military defense than with economic profit. Lauren Bridges and Roberto Gallardo report on ceramics and glass associated with a customs house and iron pier at the port of Acajutla, El Salvador. The assemblage attests to an oligarchical commitment to neoliberal economic policies in the post-independence era.
Four chapters bring South America into focus, with an emphasis on the consequences of changing infrastructure in the industrial age. Cláudia Plens considers the inequality of space and consumption in a village for Brazilian railroad laborers near São Paulo. Her reading of class, nationality, and occupation lends itself to comparative studies of company towns in the Americas. Daniel Schavelzon illuminates Salado Bridge, a riverine relic south of Buenos Aires. Designed by a Scots architect during a time of economic protectionism, it represents an effort to innovate with local resources before international trade transformed Argentina's infrastructure. Alasdair Brooks and colleagues offer a characterization of refined earthenwares imported to Chile, as well as British steamship ceramics from the port of Valparaíso. Irene Dosztal discusses a London-backed agricultural colony established in Argentina in 1870. Ceramics from the colony's Administration House indicate that British directors overcame remoteness by securing goods from their homeland that met certain class aspirations.
The final case study pertains to Betty's Hope, a plantation site on Antigua in the Leeward Islands. Christian Wells and colleagues deliver a theoretically grounded and thought-provoking exploration of human ecology. Employing geochemistry, they contend that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rum production spawned toxic waste that lingers in the form of heavy metal concentrations in the soil. One is left to ponder not only harm to bygone communities but also potential hazards to those who currently live on or near the sites of historic distilleries.
Archaeologies of the British in Latin America invites readers to envisage new arenas for analysis, something that will surely spur dialogue about the extent and legacy of British interests in the Western Hemisphere. Even with its temporal constraints, the book features much skillful integration of documentary and archaeological data. It will be valuable to those seeking a more nuanced grasp of materialities attendant to British commercialism in Central and South America and, most especially, those enthusiasts of local consumption patterns related to nineteenth-century industrialization.
