In 1666, during Robert Sandford's voyage along the coast, an Indian came aboard his ship and asked to have his hair cut in a tonsure, “a fashion which I guess they have taken from the Spanish Fryers, thereby to ingratiate themselves,” Sandford wrote. Five years later, William Owen, one of the first English settlers in Charles Towne, wrote that the Spanish friars had taught the natives “onely to admire ye the Spanish nation” (183). If the English hoped to win over the Indians to their side, they would have to adopt—and perhaps improve upon—Spanish methods of Indian governance.
The two quotations above are excellent examples of what the book wants to demonstrate: that most of the people who lived on the Atlantic Basin were connected to countless other communities outside the formal boundaries of empire, enhancing the entangled histories of the Iberian and British Atlantics. The purpose of the book is included in what was called connected history. Since the 1980s, world historical studies have been moving the field of history from nationalist and regional approaches toward comparative and transregional historiography. Historiographies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish Empire have been characterized by the boundaries of national narratives, resulting in works that are too often limited to case studies of nation-states.
However, Atlantic studies has proposed an alternative to national frameworks for the writing of history (anachronistic), thus creating new frontiers for the study of empire (Alejandra Osorio, “Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies: A New Radical History of the Spanish Habsburg Empire,” Radical History Review 130 [2018]: 100–30). Entangled history is a new historical perspective and a consolidating concept in historiography that takes a transcultural perspective on the interconnectedness of societies. The premise is that neither nations nor empires, nor civilizations, can be the exclusive and exhaustive units and categories of historiography. As entities, they themselves were formed through a process of interaction and global circulation in which they related to each other (CIAS-Bielefeld University).
The word entangled was thoroughly analyzed by Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton (“Introduction: Entangled Trajectories: Indigenous and European Histories,” Colonial Latin American Review 26.1 [2017]: 1–17), who used the metaphor of multiple threads forming a new, complex, inextricable, and often-intimate web of relations in an interdependent world. Named for its historiographic concept, this book was produced from a collaborative workshop entitled “Entangled Histories of the Early Modern British and Iberian Empire,” coordinated by Cañizares-Esguerra. The chapters are written by contributors ranging from current students to professors, most of them Cañizares-Esguerra's disciples. The book explores the entangled histories of the Iberian and British imperial worlds from three distinctly separate perspectives: brokers, trade, and knowledge.
This well-organized volume is divided into four sections. The first deals with the role played by the circulation of information in the early construction of empires. The second is devoted to the role played by individuals, especially brokers and translators, in the construction of interimperial relationships. The third focuses on the ideological entanglement between English and Spanish discourses on legitimation. Finally, the fourth section shows how entanglements were enhanced by political and economic circumstances, especially war and trade. Throughout this condensed book, the analysis shows entanglements of different ethnic groups (Amerindians, Spanish, English, Portuguese), social functions (traders, brokers governors, friars), and individuals (Richard Eden, John Winthrop, Antonio Nicolás Briceño, et al.) in a wide range of scenarios from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
The book emphasizes the strong connections between the British and Iberian imperial projects. As Cañizares-Esguerra points out, the colonial history of the United States should be considered part of the history of colonial Latin America, just as Latin American history should be understood as fundamental to the constitution of the United States. Nevertheless, it would be of great interest in a follow-up volume to examine Spanish America's formative role in the colonial history of the United States, including contributions, a bibliography, and analysis of historical debates from interdisciplinary research groups from Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and the United States. It is expected that a book on connections between the Iberian and British Empires would have a balanced representation for public debates on both sides of the entanglements.
By way of conclusion, this study is an excellent example of how using the historiographic concept of entangled history for studying the British and Iberian Empires allows us also to enhance our understanding of the present time and cultural identities.
