Comparative Indigenous History of the Americas
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 January 2013
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 January 2013
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0173
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 January 2013
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 January 2013
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0173
Introduction
The Atlantic world as an organizing concept for the history of the region bounded by Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the age of exploration to the age of revolution that often takes Europe as its starting point and fractures along the lines of the North (British) and South (Iberian) Atlantic. An important critique concerns the degree to which Atlantic history is a repackaging of the narrative of European imperial expansion into the Americas and the political and territorial expropriation of native peoples. At the broadest level the historiography of America’s native peoples tends to be organized along geographic lines—North America (including borderlands), Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America), and South America (primarily the Andes but with growing interest in Amazonia)—without much explicit reference to the Atlantic world paradigm. However, there are points of interest that stretch across these separate traditions and that resonate with themes in Atlantic history, such as empire, culture contact, flow of ideas, movement of peoples, systems of labor and exchange, construction of racial ideologies, and making of hybrid identities. Undergirding these historical emphases is a shift away from a view of native people as victims in their encounters with Europeans and toward a consideration of them as active historical agents who participated in the making of a “new world,” even if it was on terms that were ultimately unfavorable to them. Emphasis on native agency has arisen from distinct traditions in regionally based literatures. The “new Indian history” (North America), the “new philology” (Mesoamerica), and Marxist historiography of the Andes, all of which emerged in the 1980s, put native people at the center of historical narratives and argued for their indispensability in the making of the societies in which they lived although with very different theoretical and methodological approaches. The trend toward native agency found institutional support in the American Society for Ethnohistory and its journal, Ethnohistory, both established in 1954 to promote interdisciplinary research on the native peoples of the Americas. More recently the society has tried to bridge the divides among scholarship of North America, Mesoamerica, and South America though with limited success. Yet ethnohistorians have clearly succeeded in making indigenous history a central aspect of the history of the Americas and in reorienting the narrative as a whole. Although there is seminal Spanish-, Portuguese-, and French-language literature on native peoples in the Americas, the historiography that is most broadly comparative and that engages most fully with Atlantic world themes is generally published in English. For these reasons and for the sake of a coherent overview, the citations here are confined to English-language historiography.
General Overviews
There are no general overviews of the history of indigenous people that treat the entire Atlantic world. Each of the major geographic regions—North America, Mesoamerica, and South America—was home to diverse native societies with distinct forms of political and social organization. Despite the difficulties posed by generalization, a few synthetic works have emerged, each bearing the mark of the scholarship that is specific to these broad regions. In the case of Mesoamerica, Carmack, et al. 2007 integrates the histories of Mesoamerica’s many ethnic groups, including the Nahua, Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec, through the analytic lens of Mesoamerica as “world system.” The authors argue that on the eve of contact with Europe the powerful city-states of Mesoamerica were bound in a complex web of interaction involving trade and empire building that situated some regions at the center and others at the periphery. This world system set the stage for the confrontation with Spanish invaders and provided the foundation for colonial society. These assumptions run through the new philology, an approach to Mesoamerican history that emphasizes cultural continuities in the face of Spanish colonization based on analysis of indigenous language sources produced by native people during the colonial period. Andrien 2001 provides a synthesis of Andean history that takes the Inca Empire as its starting point and that situates pre-Columbian Andean institutions and practices, such as “reciprocity,” as the basis for colonial society. Despite continuities, the relentless labor demands of colonial mining transformed the Andes in profound ways. Scholars have argued therefore that colonial society in the Andes was more exploitative and protocapitalist than in Mesoamerica. The synthesis in Andrien 2001 incorporates both the economically driven historiography and the more recent culturally driven historiography dealing with questions of colonial consciousness and identity. Richter 2003 synthesizes the new Indian history, rewriting the narrative of early North America from the perspective of native people and with the assumption of their centrality in its making. Daniel K. Richter challenges long-held assumptions and reconsiders historical events, figures, and sources. His work does not, however, treat the history of native people west of the Mississippi or the Spanish borderlands, areas of North American native historiography that have boomed in the early 21st century. Into this void steps Calloway 2003, which synthesizes ethnohistorical research with the author’s own empirical work to present a masterful overview of the history of native people in what would become the western United States.
Andrien, Kenneth J. Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532–1825. Diálogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.
This overview, appropriate for undergraduates, synthesizes the history of the indigenous people of the Andes with a strong emphasis on Peru, focusing on themes such as preconquest Inca history, Spanish conquest, colonial administration, economy, labor, social organization, religion, and the 18th-century Andean rebellions.
Calloway, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. History of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Calloway presents a native-centered history of the American West from 500 BCE to 1804, analyzing how native peoples jostled with expanding European empires for regional power. Of particular note is his argument that the 18th century rather than the 19th was formative of social and cultural relations in the West.
Carmack, Robert M., Janine L. Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen, eds. The Legacy of Mesoameríca: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization. 2d ed. Exploring Cultures. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007.
This overview, appropriate for undergraduates, synthesizes the history of the Mesoamerican culture area, from its foundations to the early 21st century. Unit 2, “Colonial Mesoamerica,” coauthored by Louise M. Burkhart, engages most fully with Atlantic history themes, such as conquest, colonial society, and indigenous literature produced during the period.
Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
In this narrative of early American history from the perspective of native people, Richter argues that prior to 1763 native and European societies moved along parallel tracks rather than on a path toward inevitable conflict. After Britain won the French and Indian War, racial attitudes hardened, and conflict became inevitable.
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Article
- Abolition of Slavery
- Abolitionism and Africa
- Africa and the Atlantic World
- African American Religions
- African Religion and Culture
- African Retailers and Small Artisans in the Atlantic World
- Age of Atlantic Revolutions, The
- Alexander von Humboldt and Transatlantic Studies
- America, Pre-Contact
- American Revolution, The
- Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery
- Argentina
- Army, British
- Arsenals
- Art and Artists
- Asia and the Americas and the Iberian Empires
- Atlantic Biographies
- Atlantic Creoles
- Atlantic History and Hemispheric History
- Atlantic Migration
- Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries
- Atlantic Trade and the British Economy
- Atlantic Trade and the European Economy
- Bacon's Rebellion
- Baltic Sea
- Baptists
- Barbados in the Atlantic World
- Barbary States
- Benguela
- Berbice in the Atlantic World
- Black Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Bolívar, Simón
- Borderlands
- Bourbon Reforms in the Spanish Atlantic, The
- Brazil
- Brazil and Africa
- Brazilian Independence
- Britain and Empire, 1685-1730
- British Atlantic Architectures
- British Atlantic World
- Buenos Aires in the Atlantic World
- Cabato, Giovanni (John Cabot)
- Cannibalism
- Capitalism
- Captain John Smith
- Captivity
- Captivity in Africa
- Captivity in North America
- Caribbean, The
- Cartier, Jacques
- Castas
- Catholicism
- Cattle in the Atlantic World
- Central American Independence
- Central Europe and the Atlantic World
- Charleston
- Chartered Companies, British and Dutch
- Cherokee
- Childhood
- Chinese Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World
- Chocolate
- Church and Slavery
- Cities and Urbanization in Portuguese America
- Citizenship in the Atlantic World
- Class and Social Structure
- Climate
- Clothing
- Coastal/Coastwide Trade
- Cod in the Atlantic World
- Coffee
- Colonial Governance in Spanish America
- Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World
- Colonialism and Postcolonialism
- Colonization, Ideologies of
- Colonization of English America
- Communications in the Atlantic World
- Comparative Indigenous History of the Americas
- Confraternities
- Constitutions
- Continental America
- Cook, Captain James
- Cortes of Cádiz
- Cosmopolitanism
- Cotton
- Credit and Debt
- Creek Indians in the Atlantic World, The
- Creolization
- Criminal Transportation in the Atlantic World
- Crowds in the Atlantic World
- Cuba
- Currency
- Death in the Atlantic World
- Demography of the Atlantic World
- Diaspora, Jewish
- Diaspora, The Acadian
- Disease in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas
- Dreams and Dreaming
- Dutch Atlantic World
- Dutch Brazil
- Dutch Caribbean and Guianas, The
- Early Modern Amazonia
- Early Modern France
- Economy and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Economy of British America, The
- Edwards, Jonathan
- Elites
- Emancipation
- Emotions
- Empire and State Formation
- Enlightenment, The
- Environment and the Natural World
- Ethnicity
- Europe and Africa
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Northern
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Western
- European Enslavement of Indigenous People in the Americas
- European, Javanese and African and Indentured Servitude in...
- Evangelicalism and Conversion
- Female Slave Owners
- Feminism
- First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil
- Fiscality
- Fiscal-Military State
- Food
- Forts, Fortresses, and Fortifications
- Founding Myths of the Americas
- France and Empire
- France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean
- France and the British Isles from 1640 to 1789
- Free People of Color
- Free Ports in the Atlantic World
- French Army and the Atlantic World, The
- French Atlantic World
- French Emancipation
- French Revolution, The
- Gardens
- Gender in Iberian America
- Gender in North America
- Gender in the Atlantic World
- Gender in the Caribbean
- George Montagu Dunk, Second Earl of Halifax
- Georgia in the Atlantic World
- German Influences in America
- Germans in the Atlantic World
- Giovanni da Verrazzano, Explorer
- Glasgow
- Glorious Revolution
- Godparents and Godparenting
- Great Awakening
- Green Atlantic: the Irish in the Atlantic World
- Guianas, The
- Haitian Revolution, The
- Hanoverian Britain
- Havana in the Atlantic World
- Hinterlands of the Atlantic World
- Histories and Historiographies of the Atlantic World
- Honor
- Huguenots
- Hunger and Food Shortages
- Iberian Atlantic World, 1600-1800
- Iberian Empires, 1600-1800
- Iberian Inquisitions
- Idea of Atlantic History, The
- Impact of the French Revolution on the Caribbean, The
- Indentured Servitude
- Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World, Indian
- India, The Atlantic Ocean and
- Indigenous Knowledge
- Indigo in the Atlantic World
- Insurance
- Internal Slave Migrations in the Americas
- Interracial Marriage in the Atlantic World
- Ireland and the Atlantic World
- Iroquois (Haudenosaunee)
- Islam and the Atlantic World
- Itinerant Traders, Peddlers, and Hawkers
- Jamaica in the Atlantic World
- Jefferson, Thomas
- Jesuits
- Jews and Blacks
- Labor Systems
- Land and Propert in the Atlantic World
- Language, State, and Empire
- Languages, Caribbean Creole
- Latin American Independence
- Law and Slavery
- Legal Culture
- Leisure in the British Atlantic World
- Letters and Letter Writing
- Lima
- Literature and Culture
- Literature of the British Caribbean
- Literature, Slavery and Colonization
- Liverpool in The Atlantic World 1500-1833
- Louverture, Toussaint
- Loyalism
- Lutherans
- Mahogany
- Manumission
- Maps in the Atlantic World
- Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Maritime Literature
- Markets in the Atlantic World
- Maroons and Marronage
- Marriage and Family in the Atlantic World
- Maryland
- Material Culture in the Atlantic World
- Material Culture of Slavery in the British Atlantic
- Medicine in the Atlantic World
- Mennonites
- Mental Disorder in the Atlantic World
- Mercantilism
- Merchants in the Atlantic World
- Merchants' Networks
- Mestizos
- Mexico
- Migrations and Diasporas
- Minas Gerais
- Miners
- Mining, Gold, and Silver
- Missionaries
- Missionaries, Native American
- Money and Banking in the Atlantic Economy
- Monroe, James
- Moravians
- Morris, Gouverneur
- Music and Music Making
- Napoléon Bonaparte and the Atlantic World
- Nation and Empire in Northern Atlantic History
- Nation, Nationhood, and Nationalism
- Native American Histories in North America
- Native American Networks
- Native American Religions
- Native Americans and Africans
- Native Americans and the American Revolution
- Native Americans and the Atlantic World
- Native Americans in Cities
- Native Americans in Europe
- Native North American Women
- Native Peoples of Brazil
- Natural History
- Networks for Migrations and Mobility
- Networks of Science and Scientists
- New England in the Atlantic World
- New France and Louisiana
- New York City
- News
- Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
- Nineteenth-Century France
- Nobility and Gentry in the Early Modern Atlantic World
- North Africa and the Atlantic World
- Northern New Spain
- Novel in the Age of Revolution, The
- Oceanic History
- Oceans
- Pacific, The
- Paine, Thomas
- Papacy and the Atlantic World
- Paris
- People of African Descent in Early Modern Europe
- Peru
- Pets and Domesticated Animals in the Atlantic World
- Philadelphia
- Philanthropy
- Phillis Wheatley
- Piracy
- Plantations in the Atlantic World
- Plants
- Poetry in the British Atlantic
- Political Participation in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic...
- Polygamy and Bigamy
- Port Cities, British
- Port Cities, British American
- Port Cities, French
- Port Cities, French American
- Port Cities, Iberian
- Ports, African
- Portugal and Brazile in the Age of Revolutions
- Portugal, Early Modern
- Portuguese Atlantic World
- Potosi
- Poverty in the Early Modern English Atlantic
- Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages
- Pregnancy and Reproduction
- Print Culture in the British Atlantic
- Proprietary Colonies
- Protestantism
- Puritanism
- Quakers
- Quebec and the Atlantic World, 1760–1867
- Quilombos
- Race and Racism
- Race, The Idea of
- Reconstruction, Democracy, and United States Imperialism
- Red Atlantic
- Refugees, Saint-Domingue
- Religion
- Religion and Colonization
- Religion in the British Civil Wars
- Religious Border-Crossing
- Religious Networks
- Representations of Slavery
- Republicanism
- Rice in the Atlantic World
- Rio de Janeiro
- Rum
- Rumor
- Russia and North America
- Sailors
- Saint Domingue
- Saint-Louis, Senegal
- Salvador da Bahia
- Scandinavian Chartered Companies
- Science and Technology (in Literature of the Atlantic Worl...
- Science, History of
- Scotland and the Atlantic World
- Sea Creatures in the Atlantic World
- Second-Hand Trade
- Settlement and Region in British America, 1607-1763
- Seven Years' War, The
- Seville
- Sex and Sexuality in the Atlantic World
- Shakers
- Shakespeare and the Atlantic World
- Ships and Shipping
- Signares
- Silk
- Slave Codes
- Slave Names and Naming in the Anglophone Atlantic
- Slave Owners In The British Atlantic
- Slave Rebellions
- Slave Resistance in the Atlantic World
- Slave Trade and Natural Science, The
- Slave Trade, The Atlantic
- Slavery and Empire
- Slavery and Fear
- Slavery and Gender
- Slavery and the Family
- Slavery, Atlantic
- Slavery, Health, and Medicine
- Slavery in Africa
- Slavery in Brazil
- Slavery in British America
- Slavery in British and American Literature
- Slavery in Danish America
- Slavery in Dutch America and the West Indies
- Slavery in New England
- Slavery in North America, The Growth and Decline of
- Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa
- Slavery in the French Atlantic World
- Slavery, Native American
- Slavery, Public Memory and Heritage of
- Slavery, The Origins of
- Slavery, Urban
- Smuggling
- São Paulo
- Sociability in the British Atlantic
- Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts...
- Soldiers
- South Atlantic
- South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos
- South Carolina
- Sovereignty and the Law
- Spain, Early Modern
- Spanish America After Independence, 1825-1900
- Spanish American Port Cities
- Spanish Atlantic World
- Spanish Colonization to 1650
- Subjecthood in the Atlantic World
- Sugar in the Atlantic World
- Swedish Atlantic World, The
- Technology, Inventing, and Patenting
- Textiles in the Atlantic World
- Texts, Printing, and the Book
- The American West
- The Danish Atlantic World
- The French Lesser Antilles
- The Fur Trade
- The Spanish Caribbean
- Theater
- Time(scapes) in the Atlantic World
- Tobacco
- Toleration in the Atlantic World
- Transatlantic Political Economy
- Travel Writing (in the Atlantic World)
- Tudor and Stuart Britain in the Wider World, 1485-1685
- Universities
- USA and Empire in the 19th Century
- Venezuela and the Atlantic World
- Violence
- Visual Art and Representation
- War and Trade
- War of 1812
- War of the Spanish Succession
- Warfare
- Warfare in Spanish America
- Warfare in 17th-Century North America
- Warfare, Medicine, and Disease in the Atlantic World
- Weavers
- West Indian Economic Decline
- Whitefield, George
- Whiteness in the Atlantic World
- William Blackstone
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611)
- William Wilberforce
- Wine
- Witchcraft in the Atlantic World
- Women and the Law
- Women Prophets