Jeffrey Glover's new book, Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664, is a very successful blend of literary and historical scholarship. Glover approaches the topic of Anglo-Indian treaty making through a close reading of two or three key texts in each chapter, supporting his analysis with a thorough grounding in recent historiography. The result is a richly documented, marvelously engaging work that could be read with profit by students and scholars.
Glover focuses on the initial agreements between Indians and English in colonial North America, so his chronological range is narrow. This narrow scope allows him to extend his analysis to both Virginia and New England, examining how English colonists in both locales used treaties with Native Americans to justify their claims to New World territory, and how Natives interpreted those agreements within their own cultural contexts and used them for their own purposes. One of the strengths of the book is how fully Glover fleshes out the world of law, politics, and international competition the English bring with them. Similarly, he draws on recent scholarship on Native Americans to recreate their diplomatic world. While all of the major texts Glover analyzes are European, he does his best to read them from Native as well as European perspectives, modeling the work of literary scholars who see European texts as “a potential medium of Native agendas, intentions, and meanings” (20).
Meanings are key in Glover's analysis: he starts and ends the book by reminding readers that Natives and English understood their agreements differently—sometimes in opposite ways—and without the benefit of hindsight: “Treaties never had only one meaning, and their outcome was always in doubt” (226). While this is not a new insight, Glover is more careful than most scholars about keeping the contingency of the events he studies before the reader. For instance, after he discusses Native adoption of the English practice of signing documents, he complicates the usual commentary over the lamentable long-term results of such signing by invoking the immediate historical context: “In reading treaty concessions . . . it is always important to consider not only what Natives lost but also what they might have hoped to gain, even if those hopes were never realized” (184).
Paper Sovereigns is a short book—five chapters in 226 pages. Two of the chapters are set in the Virginia colony, two in New England, and one focuses on the “freedom of the seas” (trade). While there is no overarching narrative to the book, Glover's discussion of the uses and misuses of natural law and the Law of Nations provides a consistent thread. He uses the writings of Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and other natural-law theorists well known to the English to illuminate their diplomatic approaches. Thus, he retraces the familiar story of English settlers claiming Indian land by virtue of the doctrine of vacuum domicilium, which considered “unimproved” land free for the taking; he examines colonial efforts to identify consensus ad idem, or voluntary consent of Natives to English treaties; and he demonstrates that, faced with resistance to settlement by Natives or European competitors, the English employed mare liberum, or the natural right to travel and trade, to justify establishing footholds in the Americas. Woven into each discussion are Native perspectives on these claims, including instances of native “participation in European debates about territorial possession” through visits or petitions to the English court as well as through interactions with colonists on the ground (15). Glover acknowledges that in the earliest years of English settlement, Native strength required the English to conform to Native diplomatic patterns and to tolerate Native interpretations of agreements that did not entirely mesh with their own. As the English grew in strength, however, they became more assertive in application of legal principles like just war theory to force Indians such as Powhatan to the bargaining table.
Glover goes beyond discussing contemporary legal justifications for possession to explore the impact of the transatlantic political context. Competition for the Americas created a transatlantic conversation in which English-Indian relations served as evidence for or against the legitimacy of English possession. Glover explains that “while the English did not acknowledge Indian sovereignty in any meaningful sense, they needed Indians to recognize English rule in some voluntary way. Without such recognition, they could lose favor with their king or expose themselves to diplomatic challenge” (89). Thus, the English were willing to ascribe Native authority to Namontack, a Powhatan visitor to London, so that his submission to King James I provided weighty evidence of consent. England's international rival, Spain, was just as eager to undermine such evidence. Pedro de Zúñiga, the Spanish ambassador to James I's court, sent a description of Namontack's visit to his superiors in Spain that cast serious doubt on whether Namontack was actually Native royalty authorized to consent to English rule. Zúñiga's little-used letters nicely highlight the fact that the Law of Nations was a shared discourse, malleable to the interpretations of Natives and visitors on both sides of the Atlantic.
Analyses of English versus Native interpretations of their diplomatic encounter are not unique. Other books have highlighted the ways differing cultural backgrounds pushed actors to interpret agreements differently. What this book uniquely does is provide deep, extended readings of select contemporary sources that reveal the disagreements not just between the English and the Natives, or between the English and their international rivals, but between the English themselves. For instance, Glover highlights disagreements over how to bring the Indians to subjection through his careful analysis of the textual debate between Virginia colonists Gabriel Archer and John Smith, and between Roger Williams and the Massachusetts General Court. Glover's combination of traditional literary and historical analysis gives a richer, more contextualized understanding to this formative period. He convincingly demonstrates that the texts themselves were players in an international debate over which Europeans had the right to settle North America and whether Native Americans had the right to compound with those settlers or resist them.
