During the late eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain sent joint mapping expeditions to draw a nearly 10, 000-mile border between Brazil and Spanish South America. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to the Americas and coincided with broader imperial reforms enacted throughout the hemisphere. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met considers what these efforts meant to Indigenous peoples whose lands the border crossed. Moving beyond common frameworks that assess mapped borders strictly via colonial law or Native sovereignty, it examines the interplay between imperial and Indigenous spatial imaginaries. What results is an intricate spatial history of border making in southeastern South America (present-day Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) with global implications. Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guarani mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession. It reveals that Native agents shaped when and where the border was drawn, and fused it to their own territorial claims. While mapmakers' assertions of Indigenous disappearance or subjugation shaped historiographical imaginations thereafter, Erbig reveals that the formation of a border was contingent upon Native engagement and authority.
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Yes, you can access The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History by Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Latin American & Caribbean History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
The eighteenth-century RĆo de la Plata was an archipelago of settlements and tolderĆas. Imperial and ecclesiastical population centers were strung along riverine corridors or coastal enclaves and surrounded by mobile encampments of autonomous Native peoples. Both colonial settlements and Native tolderĆas constituted local centers of economic, social, and cultural activity. Each exhibited limited territorial control, yet tolderĆas tended to control much larger stretches of land as their strategic mobility enabled them to arbitrate access to the countryside. In this context, local ties often superseded imperial or ethnic affiliation. Writings and drawings from the regionās settlements often depicted the region as a series of consolidated territoriesāa tripartite borderland between Portuguese, Spanish, and Jesuit-GuaranĆ establishmentsābut neither empire nor the missions possessed contiguous territorial control. Imperial and ecclesiastical spatial visions were simultaneously myopic and ambitious; they projected local relations on the entire region and conflated disparate tolderĆas via uniform ethnonyms. Placing the spatial imaginations and practices of settlements and tolderĆas on even ground reveals the local motivations driving broader regional patterns and the interplay between imperial claims and Indigenous actions.7
Dotting the Landscape
The RĆo de la Plata was a region composed of flatlands and fluctuating rivers, divided by several stretches of highlands. Stretching from its eponymous estuary in the south to the IbicuĆ and JacuĆ river systems in the north, the region was bounded on the west by the RĆo ParanĆ” and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean (map 2). During the first half of the eighteenth century, its inhabitants developed a multipolar, nodal world organized around settlements and tolderĆas. Competing imperial and ecclesiastical settlements dotted the regionās perimeter: the Spanish cities of Corrientes and Santa Fe lay to the west; Jesuit-GuaranĆ missions (subject to the Spanish crown) lined the north; the Portuguese settlements of Rio Grande and SĆ£o Miguel appeared in the east; and ColĆ“nia (Portuguese) was situated between Santo Domingo Soriano and Montevideo (Spanish) in the south. These fixed settlements were superimposed on existing Indigenous geographies. CharrĆŗas, Minuanes, Bohanes, Guenoas, Yaros, and other autonomous Native peoples moved their tolderĆas throughout the regionās interior, incorporating new settlers into existing networks of tribute, kinship, and trade and arbitrating settlementsā access to the feral livestock that proliferated in the countryside. Geographical positioning was paramount, and local affinities and interests often superseded imperial, ecclesiastical, or ethnic allegiances.
Local Settlements
Unlike modern territorial states, early modern governments relied on contingent, reciprocal relationships to define sovereignty. Viceroyalties were not groups of consolidated provinces but series of horizontally unaligned localities connected by their shared vertical allegiances to a common authority.8 The principal territorial designations of the RĆo de la Plata regionāSpanish governorships and Portuguese captainciesādid not exercise complete territorial possession or control but instead constituted collections of discrete settlements tethered to a shared governor and in frequent competition with one another.9 Given their location on the fringes of competing empires, each settlement was of strategic importance for its respective governor and therefore wielded significant amounts of leverage in negotiations with him. They also served as important centers for the social, economic, and political lives of colonial settlers, with city or town councils as their principal governing bodies. Simply put, settlements functioned as a series of relatively au...
Table of contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations in the Text
Introduction
Chapter One: An Archipelago of Settlements and TolderĆas