Journal of EM HIstory review (Advancing Empire).pdf

551 book reviews environments. The essays of Spaans and Wadsworth, which close this Part, argue that the waning influence and power of both inquisitions and consistories must be seen in the context of “changed disciplinary regimes” (316) and “new forms of social control” (328) which were increasingly secular. In the volume’s conclusion, Monter highlights the shared conviction of Catholics and Calvinists that public acknowledgment of a sinner’s guilt was necessary for the well-being and maintenance of the Christian community. He then moves on to trace the differing historiographical trajectories of research on inquisitions and consistories. The wide-ranging essays in this book will greatly expand the perspective and knowledge of scholars studying the history of ecclesiastical discipline. While clearly embedded within the larger phenomenon of confessionalization, the editors seek “to promote and add nuance to the comparative study of discipline and religious identity” (6) presented in the thesis of Schilling and Reinhard. Unfortunately, the expansive research included in each essay is obscured by the extremely limited endnotes. While keeping the volume to a manageable size is an understandable necessity, this makes it difficult for scholars to pursue the cross-confessional research the collection advocates. Nonetheless, the suggestive comparisons presented are compelling enough that it is unlikely that sparse notes will deter any serious scholar from recognizing the rich potential of cross-confessional studies of religious discipline proposed by this collection. Indeed, this reviewer looks forward to the future work which Judging Faith, Punishing Sin will certainly inspire, considering the editors’ success in creating a volume that will become required reading for anyone studying early modern religious discipline. Jessica J. Fowler IE University [email protected] 10:1163/15700658-12342588-01 L.H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 312 pp. ISBN 978 1 107 54505 2. $35.00. In 1798, the first British civilian governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa, Lord Macartney, set out to provide an account of his new bailiwick. He began by transcribing a seventeenth-century manuscript, recording how Andrew Journal of early modern history 22 (2018) 549-566Downloaded from Brill.com01/15/2019 03:42:26PM via Binghamton University Libraries 552 book reviews Shillinge and Humphrey Fitzherbert took possession of Table Bay in the name of King James in July 1620. On one level, this was a curious document to quote. The claims of the passing English East India Company captains were never developed and the Dutch established a permanent settlement at the site some thirty years later, in 1652. However, Macartney’s concern with this history underlines some of the most important points made by L.H. Roper in Advancing Empire, his impressive and innovative study of seventeenth-century England and its overseas operations. First, this example reminds us that the history of empire is often as much about failure, initiatives that foundered, and plans that went undeveloped as it is about triumphant territorial expansion and success. Second, it highlights the point that seventeenth-century competition between the Dutch and the English was much more significant than historians have generally allowed. (The British acquisition of the Cape is a rare example of Anglo-Dutch rivalry that survived into the eighteenth century—and even here, the historiography frequently presents the Dutch as mere puppets of the French.) Historians of the British Empire often focus on centuries of animosity towards Spain or heroic victories over the French, while the vitriolic Anglo-Dutch rivalry that animated the middle decades of the seventeenth century goes relatively unnoticed in the scholarship. Finally, the fact that Macartney took notice of this manuscript and the incident it describes, at the end of the eighteenth century and at a time when Britain was a global superpower (albeit locked in a deadly conflict with Revolutionary France), alerts us to the power of seventeenth-century imperial history, not just in today’s post-colonial world but in eighteenthand nineteenth-century phases of empire-building and consolidation. Advancing Empire is a major contribution to our understanding of these processes, built on an impressively wide range of archival research and detailed analysis. L.H. Roper offers a refreshingly original interpretation of English overseas endeavors. Instead of looking through the prism of later developments, in which the British state was heavily involved—and with the benefit of historical hindsight—Roper focuses on the limits of the seventeenth-century English state and the constraints under which it operated. But if fiscal and political impediments severely curtailed the state’s ability to project power beyond its borders, how were English overseas activities supported? Roper posits the vital role played by private individuals and their initiatives, which were often in the vanguard, directing state behavior rather more than the other way round. One should never judge a book by its cover, of course. But the fine depiction of East India Company Ships at Deptford, painted around 1683, offers a neat encapsulation of the symbiotic relationship between public and private interests Journal of early modern history 22 (2018) 549-566 Downloaded from Brill.com01/15/2019 03:42:26PM via Binghamton University Libraries book reviews 553 in the development of England’s seventeenth-century overseas endeavors. (As an aside, it is a shame that the image is credited as Francis Holman’s Blackwall Yard from the Thames, 1784.) Private traders and speculators relied on the state to legitimize their overseas exploits and grant them the requisite authority. The state obliged by issuing charters and delegating power. One of the strengths of the book is its success in weaving together the history of England’s mid-seventeenth-century domestic upheavals and the country’s relationship with the wider world. It offers a convincing narrative whereby the downfall of the monarchy brought private initiators into the official ranks of the state and, ultimately, enabled much greater exercise of non-state power after the Restoration. The importance of failure is highlighted by Roper’s book. This is an innovative and original approach to the study of empire. Only by knowing how and why things failed, and the effects and results of this, can we arrive at a more comprehensive understanding. By ignoring the failure of the Courteen Association or the Assada initiative, for example, we lose crucial context. These lacunæ in the historiography might be because they do not fit easily into our twenty-first-century expectation of state-sponsored colonialism. The case of the Assada endeavor—the attempt to plant a colony on the island of Nosy Be, off the north coast of Madagascar—was an effort to integrate English operations in the Eastern Hemisphere with those in the Western. As such, it illustrates both how imperial policy (“mercantilism”) was conducted in seventeenth-century England and foreshadows initiatives in later periods. Roper’s analysis has real implications for our understanding of empire. For example, the detailed examination of seventeenth-century English commercial dealings in West Africa highlights the sophisticated nature of the region’s economy and the commercial acumen of local traders, who were able to manage their relationships with Europeans to their own advantage. These are not, Roper emphatically proves, “naïve dupes in either political or economic terms” and, as a result, “they knew how to manage their encounters with Europeans to their advantage.” (64) Roper’s research also leads to some noteworthy conclusions on the nature of English slave trading. In suggesting significant English involvement as early as the 1630s, Roper helps to reshape the contours of the historiographical debate. How far did this slave-trading activity encourage planters in the Americas to cultivate labor-intensive sugar, for example? Advancing Empire presents a finely textured analysis based on detailed archival research. It largely avoids engaging with the propaganda of people like Richard Hakluyt and the ways in which early chroniclers of England’s overseas activities affected or influenced seventeenth-century ventures. One wonders, Journal of early modern history 22 (2018) 549-566Downloaded from Brill.com01/15/2019 03:42:26PM via Binghamton University Libraries 554 book reviews however, if there is more to say about the interaction between fact and fiction, between reality and representation? And how important were narratives of seventeenth-century empire in later phases of British imperial expansion? The example of Macartney’s account suggests that they played a role worthy of further investigation. John McAleer University of Southampton [email protected] 10:1163/15700658-12342588-02 Peter C. Mancall, Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, 212 pp. ISBN 9780812249668. $29.95 / £22.99. A revised and expanded version of a set of lectures the author delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, this slim but elegant volume presents a synthetic account of how Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas viewed the natural world during what might be termed the long sixteenth century. The book is noteworthy in several ways. First, it draws in particular on analyses of several striking and understudied visual examples (the book is accompanied by 51 black-and-white images and a separate section of 12 color plates); the reader of the book will encounter images from the ceiling of a medieval church in Fréjus in France, from the mid-sixteenth-century “Vallard Atlas” at the Huntington Library, and from the 1590s “Drake Manuscript” of tropical natural history at the Morgan Library, none of which typically appear in textbooks or other general surveys of the period. Second, the book integrates insights from a wide number of fields, including but not limited to environmental history and the history of science (understood very broadly). Third, the author draws on his extensive background in the study not only of European colonists in the Americas but also of Amerindian indigenes to provide an account of both Europeans’ and Native Americans’ attitudes towards the natural phenomena they experienced (or, sometimes, just heard stories about). All of these features make the book a very worthy addition to the existing literature on the backdrop to the Columbian encounters, these encounters themselves, and their considerable impacts in the early modern Atlantic. The book is organized so as to conduct the reader smoothly through the major changes that began to occur during the early modern period in Europeans’ and Journal of early modern history 22 (2018) 549-566 Downloaded from Brill.com01/15/2019 03:42:26PM via Binghamton University Libraries