Dedicated to the late David J. Weber, this edited collection appropriately reflects numerous facets of his work, starting broadly with his belief in a common history of the Americas. “Early America” refers here not to British North America, but to the entire hemisphere prior to the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of nation-states. The editors characterize it “as a single unified space defined by indigenous experiences with colonialism” (23), a colonialism that continued beyond independence. Weber's dedication to the Spanish borderlands is also well represented—five of the twelve essays focus on regions now part of the United States Southwest and northern Mexico. The themes brought forth in these comparative essays—relations of power, land and commerce, kinship and alliance, forced labor and enslavement—reverberate throughout the book.

Not surprisingly, maps figure prominently in this volume dedicated to “spaces,” representing territories, geographical regions, ecological zones, landscapes, and sites. The editors' introduction provides a brief, but insightful historiographical review of spatial representations of the Americas by Europeans and natives, starting with ancient petroglyphs. The two overarching essays in Part One emphasize a comparative approach. Pekka Hämäläinen places native-European interactions into three categories based on relations of “power.” The Iroquois, Comanches, and Lakotas were able to dominate others and use colonial rivalries to their advantage. In the French Great Lakes region and Spanish upper Rio Grande Valley, networks of kinship, mutual accommodation, and ethnic mixing encouraged collaboration. In the Southeast and Great Basin regions, an active slave trade engendered pervasive and highly destructive violence.

Allan Greer shows how British and Anglo-American commodification of land and use of treaties pushed people from their home territories, strategies that stand in stark contrast to the Catholic French, Spanish, and Portuguese incorporation of hierarchical societies and emphasis on labor and trade. Cynthia Radding describes both the native occupation of particular ecological zones, and the “contested spaces of heterogeneous populations” (141) in San Ildefonso de Ostimuri, a territorial unit later divided between the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. Chantal Cramausell challenges the historiographical notion that northern Mexican mines attracted voluntary workers, arguing that natives in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa were forced to relocate. Alan Taylor compares and contrasts the legacies of US immigrants to Upper Canada, Spanish Louisiana, and Texas after Mexican independence. Brian DeLay's provocative essay casts the violence between Navajo and New Mexicans (the allied Spanish, Pueblo, and mixed peoples described by Hämäläinen) as mutually understood “blood talk” that worked to limit conflict. Violence and enslavement escalated when this understanding collapsed after Mexican Independence.

An emphasis on visual representations of space as historical narrative also surfaces. Elizabeth Fenn frames her essay about the ravages of disease among the Mandans, as well as their recovery, by considering a small section of a 1906–07 Mandan map. Ned Blackhawk explores the historical context of the Segesser hide paintings from early colonial New Mexico. Although the paintings are visually more suggestive of tapestry scenes than maps, each depicts a historical event in a particular landscape. Birgit Brander Rasmussen analyzes the sketchbook of a Kiowa, depicting the story of his captivity and journey to his 1875 imprisonment in Florida, as “literary practice.” This reader wished for a closer reading of visual evidence, especially the ghost image of an additional figure on horseback and the atypical style in Plate 3, titled “Young Kiowas dressed for a ceremonial visit.” In the final essay, Samuel Truett returns to the vestiges of ancient civilizations, showing how Anglo-Americans appropriated them during western expansion.

As a whole, the volume demonstrates that borderlands are central to understanding the American past—a fitting testimony to David Weber's legacy.