From Borderlands to the Sea: Recent Studies of Indigenous Atlantic Travellers

The dominions, political strategies, and diverse lifeways of Indigenous peoples in the early modern Atlantic world have been treated generally as rural and terrestrial-ending at the shore-while European supremacy over the high seas has been taken for granted. These conceptual assumptions have extended into methodological approaches to encounters between Indigenous polities and European empires that emphasize borderlands, frontiers, and middle (or native) grounds. Four recent monographs depart from such framings by focusing on Indigenous actions in cities such as Lima, Madrid, and London, travel across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and exertions of naval supremacy on the sea. In doing so, they provide new vantage points for reconsidering the meanings of freedom and slavery, diplomacy, trans-oceanic legal networks, and piracy.