New West Indian Guide Vol. 84, no. 1-2 (2010), pp. 107-178 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-100171 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 1382-2373 BOOK REVIEWS Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750. L.H. ROPER & B. VAN RUYMBEKE (eds.). Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2007. vii + 423 pp. (Cloth US$ 155.00) ELIZABETH MANCKE Department of History University of Akron Akron OH 44325-1902, U.S.A. <[email protected]> Philip Boucher notes in his contribution to this volume (“French Proprietary Colonies in the Greater Caribbean, 1620s-1670s”) that proprietary ventures are “a most unfashionable topic” (p. 163). Yet as the book’s essays make clear, the topic of how European governments transferred and transplanted institutions overseas is gaining attention, and though it likely will never be a mainstream pursuit, scholars are acknowledging that understanding the polit- ical and institutional structures of Atlantic empires is critical to understand- ing migration patterns, social relations, settlement persistence, investment strategies, and a range of other developments. Constructing Early Modern Empires is an important contribution and will surely be consulted by histori- ans in many areas of Atlantic history. The collection is particularly useful for scholars of the West Indies, because the political history of the region is understudied and nearly half of the essays have some bearing on the region. Two of them – Boucher’s and the one by Sarah Barber on the English Caribbean – deal specifically with the island colonies. Boucher’s is an extremely helpful primer on the seven different French companies that operated in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, which he categorized as one of two types and analyzed in terms of their purpose and reasons for their eclipse. Barber’s, which focuses on Lord Willoughby’s claims in the Leeward Islands, Barbados, and Suriname, cap- tures the complexity of personalities, transatlantic politics, and proprietary power in the English Caribbean where more colonists went in the early sev- enteenth century than any other parts of English America. Kenneth Banks offers a provocative essay on two French companies operating in West Africa, defining them as proprietary in contrast to “private trade companies” (p. 81) Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:18:29AM via free access 108 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 84 no. 1 & 2 (2010) such as the English and Dutch had. He argues that they were “organized ... as tax-farming ventures in France” (p. 82), thus underscoring the close linkages between metropolitan concerns and overseas proprietary ventures. Two more chapters on French proprietary ventures, one by Leslie Choquette (“Proprietorships in French North America”) and another by Cécile Vidal on Louisiana (“French Louisiana in the Age of the Companies, 1712-1731”), testify to a growing interest in early modern French expan- sion. Choquette’s chapter follows on her earlier work on the relation between French enterprises and transatlantic migration, a theme also addressed by Vidal. All of the essays on the French emphasize the need both to question the function of these proprietary ventures and to assess whether they were for commerce, colonization, a metropolitan concern, or a strategic interest of the French state, and the balance among them. Two contributions emphasize the early and persistent challenge of finding adequate institutional mechanisms for projecting power across the Atlantic, keeping subjects tied to their monarch, providing sufficient governance and personnel to secure territory, and doing it all without excessive violence toward the indigenous population. Mickaël Augeron and Laurent Vidal, writing on the sixteenth-century Portuguese donatary captaincies in Brazil, argue that the use of captaincies helped secure the Portuguese settlement of Brazil because the crown would not have been able to provide the long-term involvement that elite men and their families provided. “Adelantados and Encomenderos in Spanish America,” by Olivier Caporossi, emphasizes how the malleability of the adelantamiento and especially the encomienda allowed the Spanish to impose control, albeit imperfectly, over people and territory. The adaptation of European systems of social organization to the Americas is a theme Jaap Jacobs analyzes in his discussion of patroonships in New Netherland. He makes it clear that rather than an atavistic replication of feu- dal institutions, as an older scholarship argued, they were instead attempts to privatize colonization by shifting the costs of recruiting settlers to merchants in exchange for other benefits, most particularly land, but also commercial concessions. Patroonships also had devolved governmental powers, but ones consistent with changing practices in the Netherlands. Maxine Lurie’s analysis of the New Jersey proprietorship shows how contested the meaning of proprietary enterprises could be. New Jersey’s proprietors received their grant from the Duke of York and therefore not through a royal charter, leav- ing unclear whether they had received only the land or governing powers as well. The royalization of the colony in 1702 definitively separated land from governance and effectively created two land companies that survived through the twentieth century. David Dewar’s essay on the claims of John Mason and his heir Robert in New Hampshire is similar to that of Barber’s in his detailing of how access to land in the Americas became entangled with English politics and personali- Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:18:29AM via free access BOOK REVIews 109 ties, though New England did not have the wealth of the Caribbean. The ambi- guities over land and legitimate government kept settlement unstable through most of the seventeenth century. No proprietorship had more devolved power than Maryland, as Debra Meyers demonstrates, but the Calverts’ commitment to religious toleration encouraged Protestant settlers, who resisted the powers of their Catholic proprietor. L.H. Roper’s essay on the Carolina proprietor- ship emphasizes the difficulties of weighing the importance of articulated vision, as with the Fundamental Constitutions, applications on the ground, and the verdict of history. In a close analysis of orphanages in early Georgia, James O’Neil Spady persuasively argues that they affirmed the proprietary vision for the colony, even as detractors agitated for an end to proprietary strictures and the allowance of slavery and fee simple landownership. In the introduction, the editors attempt to make sense of the prevalence of proprietary ventures, their diverse functions, the meanings of success and failure in the Atlantic world, and what these enterprises can tell us about early modern political developments, both within Europe and in the Americas. They are self-consciously provocative and suggestive, and problematic in their invocation of modernization. But the issues they raise deserve further consideration, and this book will assure a significant place for their ideas in future scholarship. Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. AlejANDRO DE LA FUENTE with the collaboration of CÉSAR GARCÍA Del PINO & BERNARDO IGlesIAS DelGADO. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xiii + 287 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00) LUIS MARTÍNEZ-FERNÁNDEZ Department of History University of Central Florida Orlando FL 32816-1350, U.S.A. <[email protected]> Eight decades ago historian Irene A. Wright published two books in Spanish on early colonial Cuba – one covering the sixteenth century, and the other the first half of the seventeenth century (Wright 1927, 1930). As unbelievable as it may sound, no comprehensive history of early Cuban colonial history had been published since then. In fact, there is a noticeable dearth of studies focusing on colonial Cuba’s formative centuries. Alejandro de la Fuente’s Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:18:29AM via free access 110 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 84 no. 1 & 2 (2010) Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century thus fills an enormous gap in Cuban historiography. The book is an in-depth study of Havana and its relations with the broader Atlantic world. While the title states that it covers the sixteenth century, it actually examines the second half of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth century. De la Fuente pays attention to multiple aspects of Havana’s social, eco- nomic, and physical development. He devotes the first chapter to Havana as a port city. This is important because one of the book’s overarching arguments is that Havana was shaped by its privileged geographic location which, in turn, led to a host of economic activities. Cuba’s capital was settled and built in a location favorable to the development of large-scale naval commercial activities. It possessed a splendid, large, well-protected bay, strategically situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Gulf Stream squeezed through on its way to Europe’s shores. Aware of this, Spanish colonial offi- cials selected Havana as an obligatory port-of-call for all trade fleets return- ing to Spain. The fleets and their sizable crews required numerous services which led to the creation of a broad service sector, ranging from providing water and repairing vessels to storing large amounts of precious metals mined from Peru and New Spain. Crews and passengers, which often spent months in Havana, also required a host of personal services such as boarding, laun- dering, cooking, and in some cases, female companionship. Havana’s role as fleet hub also spurred the development of a variety of economic linkages, including shipbuilding, foundries, and tile works. Havana’s shipyards were the most important in all of the Americas, and among the best in the world. Because defending the fleets and navigation routes was of such paramount importance, Havana also became a military bastion with an impressive forti- fications complex and a large military population.