In this book, Juliet B. Wiersema introduces the reader to a series of eighteenth-century manuscript maps from the Pacific lowlands of what is today Colombia, arguing that such documents form a rich resource for understanding areas of the Spanish empire for whose history documentation can otherwise be scarce. Manuscript maps produced in a variety of local contexts largely by non-professional mapmakers need to be read alongside their accompanying archival text files, to provide, as she argues, ‘a more complete view of empire’ (p. 12). Together, they let historians access the improvisation and uncertainty that defined imperial presence in this region, as well as identifying encounters and negotiations between Spanish, Indigenous and Black populations. This collection of case studies forms a wonderful example of doing history with maps, and lays out a convincing model for using an often under-appreciated type of archival source. This will resonate with the view of scholars already familiar with the archival record for local and spatial histories of Spanish colonialism, and also contributes to existing scholarship that invites us to understand the role of so-called ‘peripheries’ within the Spanish empire.

As the author sets out in the Introduction, the Pacific littoral and its riparian inland landscapes constituted the ‘periphery of the periphery’ (p. 6), geographically but especially politically on the fringes of the viceroyalty of New Granada. These lowlands were nevertheless a region of great economic importance due to the presence of alluvial gold deposits, which were mined largely by enslaved and free people of African descent, and attracted attempts to expand Spanish administrative control and trade to areas previously controlled by independent Indigenous groups. Chapters 1 and 2 provide further essential context to the history of the region, and the creation and use of maps in the Spanish empire. Chapters 3–6 form the book’s core contribution of original research. Each chapter showcases and contextualises one manuscript map of the Greater Chocó region from the second half of the eighteenth century, from the northwestern Pacific lowland region around the Atrato river, to the southwestern region surrounding the Dagua, Naya and Yurumanguí rivers. Each map (all but one drawn from the Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá) is shown as a snapshot of a place and time.

The carefully researched book shines in its identification of the often ephemeral and negotiated nature of settlements (the short-lived reducción of Murindo in Chapter 3, the establishment of the port-town of Cupica in Chapter 4, and a settlement of locally powerful river navigators largely composed of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants in Chapter 5). It carefully signposts how such settlements can be understood as meeting points of different ethnicities and economies, highly consequential within regional history, while being influenced by the viceregal priorities of the day. Wiersema also showcases the varying motivations behind the production of maps, reminding us of the spatial distortions, deliberate omissions or exaggerations that can be part of maps’ visual language. Often, accompanying archival documents identify tensions in mapmakers’ choices: for instance, the depiction of Indigenous settlements on a 1770 map even as Spanish administrators were aware of the devastating demographic impact that colonisation and disease were having on them (p. 101). The case studies intersect with a large number of themes in Latin American history, from Spanish–Indigenous relations and the role of free Black people to the movement of populations and goods along rivers and roads, to the relationship between Spanish regional, viceregal and imperial administration, although each chapter perhaps covers too much thematic ground and alludes to too many social worlds to explore many of them fully. The argument instead maintains a tight focus on the specific context of each map.

The author invites the reader to follow along on an archival journey. She emphasises the detective work required in matching up visual and textual files that have been separated in the archival record, which connects with the broader methodological argument about the potential of these maps and texts and historical sources. She connects background information from Colombian archives to a map held at the Library of Congress in the United States (p. 77), while her link between a ‘Map of the Yurumanguí Indians’ (1770) with written documents previously analysed by ethnohistorians gives a new dimension to that scholarship (pp. 90–1). The archival research process is also imprinted on many chapters in their description of changing Spanish policies over decades, giving a sense of the vast case files attached to such maps and projects. The attention to these written files also means accepting some of their limitations: while the author repeatedly hints at the agency of Indigenous and Black populations in these records, the individual historical actors who appear in the chapters tend to be Spanish mapmakers and the writers of case files.

The book operates at the intersection between art history and history, while also drawing on ethnohistory, anthropology, history of cartography and environmental history. The handsomely produced volume’s ten colour plates reproduce all the key maps analysed, with some overlaid detail to help the reader understand settlement patterns or travel routes. The argument is additionally supported with a large number of black and white illustrations, many of them representing details of maps or sketches. The dizzying wealth of local geographical detail can at times be difficult for non-specialists to follow, but is further supported with key places marked on a modern map of Colombia in the introduction. There is plenty of attention to the visual details of maps, and even an appendix detailing a pigment analysis of one map performed at the Library of Congress. However, the chapters include a methodological meditation about the Spanish colonial archive as much as a specific analysis of visual evidence. This book will be especially useful to scholars working on Colombian history, Spanish colonial history, and the visual history of Latin America, including cartographic history. For a broader readership (including students), it showcases the advantage of taking maps seriously as multi-dimensional historical sources, and highlights the importance of interdisciplinary visual and textual analysis.