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Reviews of Books
bold new "pre-contact paradigm" of the borderlands as
a zone of cultural interchange between Native American society and the incoming Europeans. The new
view examines the structure of frontier society on the
borderlands, the demographic patterns, and economic
development of the common people-Spanish settlers
as well as Native Americans.
A collection of readings on different regions of the
borderlands, this book draws on the research skills of
several writers. Indeed, editor Robert H. Jackson
asserts that, in many ways, the specialist contributors
can provide more intensive historical review of their
respective regions than a generalist could provide in a
broad synthesis. The specialists, for example, are more
familiar with the colonial sources for a regional history
of the borderlands. They offer the advantage of crossdisciplinary methodology for the new paradigm, and
they are more familiar with the latest historiographical
issues in their own fields.
The range of topics in this book is so broad,
however, that at first glance, it seems to defy a cohesive
analysis. One chapter reviews population fluctuations
in colonial Chihuahua, while another documents the
formation of frontier indigenous communities in California and Texas. The chapters are as varied in
methodology as they are in scope and geographical
region. The book consists of several regional studies
and a mini-book on Florida's colonial experience.
Jackson has successfully coordinated several major
themes from his talented writers.
The first major thread winding through the several
chapters is that the Spanish colonizers struggled to
recreate in the North American horderlands the same
colonization model that they had successfully established in Central Mexico. Their ideal, of course, was a
Spanish society of municipal government and Catholic
families. They failed. For the most part, they were
unable to reduce or to assimilate the various indigenous trihes and hunter-gatherers to sedentary life.
Spanish officials developed modifications to the traditional colonization institutions that had so successfully
controlled labor and tribute among the hierarchical
Mexica-Aztec. But in northern New Spain, the Spaniards encountered semi-sedentary agriculturalist chieftainships that had no great wealth, precious stones, or
large cities. Here, leadership was divided among war
chiefs, elders, and ritual specialists living in extended
families with complementary gender roles. Even where
the Franciscan missionaries managed to reduce the
natives to mission life, the natives often resisted and
revolted throughout the colonial period. In Texas, the
Franciscan missions "must be considered among the
most sustained failures in Spanish colonial history" (p.
111).
The Spaniards were tenacious colonizers, however.
The Spanish vecinos were as motivated by profits from
the mines as the missionaries were by their baptisms at
the altar. They used a variety of effective social devices
to accomplish limited regional acculturation. In New
Mexico, for example, the missionaries used role rever-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
sal by providing a domesticated source of meat to the
mission Indians. This made the women providers of
food while it made the men weavers of cloth. The
missionaries taught the natives to practice skills like
blacksmithing, leather work, cultivation, and herding.
As the Pueblos adopted the Spanish patriarchal family
model and its attendant female submissiveness, their
women began to marry into vecino society. In these
cases, Indian government and communal solidarity
became "a thing of the past." But disease, revolts, and
resistance had a much greater role in the borderlands
than did Spanish colonization.
Perhaps the strongest theme in the book is articulated by Patricia R. Wickman in her chapter on "The
Spanish Colonial Floridas." This mini-book presents as
broad a history of colonial Florida as one might expect
to find in a general borderlands history, but it does so
with specific regional data. The chapter provides the
strongest example of the new "pre-contact paradigm"
(p. 202). It depicts Native American society as a
dynamic system of complex chiefdoms with far-reaching trade relations that continued to evolve before and
after contact with Europeans, rather than as a static
model that ended permanently upon contact. The
argument is forcefully asserted with documentation
from the Archives of the Indies as well as from
specialized literature on the region. Wickman utilizes
sophisticated methodology and convincing analysis of
a dynamic native society as weIl as Spanish impact on
borderlands history.
As promised, the book offers new and specialized
cross-disciplinary methodology, including effective use
of specialized regional archives. The chapter on New
Mexico, for example, documents the lucrative Santa Fe
trade routes with reference to the Archivo Palacio
Municipal of Chihuahua and the archives of Palacio
Gobierno of Durango. In fairness, however, the
strength comes with weaknesses in the wide range of
writing styles. Two contributors, for example, failed to
coordinate their definition of the word "Tejanos,"
which means Spanish settlers in one chapter and
"Texas Indians" in another. In another instance, one
chapter twice repeats an entire paragraph on the
mission economy of Branciforte. Minor editing inconsistencies notwithstanding, the book succeeds in presenting "new views" not only through its assertive
position on the dynamic role of Native Americans in
the borderlands frontier zone but also in its impressive
demonstration of a new paradigm for future historical
analysis of the Americas.
AND RES TIJERINA
Austin Community College
ELl FABER. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the
Record Straight. Reappraisals in Jewish Social and
Intellectual History.) New York: New York University
Press. 1998. Pp. xvii, 366. $27.95.
Jews were certainly more common than Russians and
Mexicans in the Atlantic slave system, although the
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2000
Methods/Theory
Russian and Mexican flags appeared over slave ships in
the nineteenth century. How common were Jews in
this business? Given the number of black owners in the
St. Domingue coffee sector, the Afro-Brazilian slave
trader community in the Bight of Benin, and the
instances of English-speaking black owners of slaves
and even slave ships, Jewish decision makers in the
coerced labor system of the Atlantic may have been as
common as those owners and investors who could
claim enough African descent to be classed as nonwhite (without counting slave merchants of African
descent who were based in Africa). Of course, neither
of these groups are of any significance when set against
the backdrop of the overall control of the shipping and
management of slaves, especially compared to the
numbers of non-Jewish British and Portuguese. The
latter two national groups together probably accounted for four out of five Africans carried across the
Atlantic, and (including their descendants) for only a
slightly smaller proportion of New World slave ownership. Examining the shares of minority groups in the
slave system, especially tiny minorities, is not in itself
especially interesting to serious scholars of the slave
trade. That it is done here, and that the book under
review was written at all, may be attributed solely to
belief in some circles that minorities such as Jews have
had a role in the Atlantic slave systems out of all
proportion to their numbers in the population at large.
For what it is worth, which is not a great deal, a case
could be made that, in the British case, Scots are more
likely-though still improbable-candidates for the
mantle that some have tried to drape over Jews.
That Eli Faber establishes the spurious base of the
belief in the dominance of Jewish merchants and
owners with clarity and thoroughness-at least for the
very large British slave system-will not surprise anyone who has examined the primary sources. Less than
half of Faber's 366 pages comprise text. Appendixes,
mainly of names, are extensive, and references, mainly
to the better known British colonial primary sources,
are abundant. The broad argument is supported by a
database on the transatlantic slave trade (published
since the book appeared) containing the names of
31,260 individual owners of transatlantic slave ventures. Eighty-four of these names are linked to fifty or
more voyages and only one of this "elite" group has
any possible Jewish connotation.
Faber's record-straightening exercise is nevertheless
unsettling. First, he has taken time off from his own
specialist interests to carry it out, undoubtedly at a net
cost to scholarship. Although the author achieves his
aim comfortably, there is little here that slave trade
specialists will find new, and the book contains occasional reminders that the slave trade is not the author's
first field of study. Jamaica did not overtake Barbados
in plantation output in the last quarter of the seventeenth century; the early English slave trade was
substantially greater than the writer suggests, and it is
Barry Higman, not Bernard. Closer to the author's
home territory, Jews were admitted to Barbados be-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
887
fore they were readmitted to England, not after. More
fundamentally, there is the intrinsic problem of structuring a book around establishing a negative. Overall,
what is new here will likely be of greater interest to
students of Jewish history and those interested in what
turns one group of people against another when there
is no objective evidence to support such a swing, than
to students of slavery and the slave trade. In the end,
however, we are still left with the puzzle of why a belief
in Jewish dominance of the slave trade or slave system
has suddenly re-emerged in the 1990s. If the underlying purpose of the book is to force us to reflect on this,
then it succeeds admirably.
DAVID ELTIS
Queen's University,
Kingston
WILSON JEREMIAH MOSES. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. (Cambridge Studies in
American Literature and Culture.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 313. Cloth $54.95,
paper $17.95.
Wilson Jeremiah Moses brilliantly recovers the attempts of black intellectuals-among them Maria
Stewart, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass during slavery, and W. E. B. Du Bois, J. A. Rogers,
and St. Clair Drake in our time-to counter racist
versions of the African past by claiming impressive
black influence in ancient Egypt. "The Afrocentric
tradition," he writes, "is related to utopian ideas of
progress because it promises a glorious destiny for
African people" (p. 42). In particular, Moses enables
us to see how pivotal Egypt has been in AfricanAmerican thought about history, especially among
black nationalists. But he further demonstrates that
although African-American writers turned to ancient
Egypt as a source of pride, rarely have they invoked
the history of modern Africa to counter charges of
African inferiority.
This book will be controversial because issues currently being hotly debated in academic and nonacademic circles receive sustained attention from
Moses. Moreover, he places writers into ill-defined
categories, at times leaving them with little shared
apart from an interest in African history. Since the
dominant Afrocentric designation probably dates in
time no earlier than the 1960s and multiculturalism
even later, those designations are not easily applied to
earlier periods. Still, Moses's discussion, based on
imaginative research, of the uses to which black writers
have put Egyptian history, especially in the nineteenth
century, establishes him as today's unquestioned
leader in this realm of scholarship.
The agreed-upon choices before the mainly black
nationalist writers, who place themselves on one or the
other side, is whether ancient Egypt was a mulatto
civilization of people much like American Negroes in
color and features, or black African, alternatives profoundly at odds with theories of Negro inferiority. In
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