American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (review)

A comparative legal history of colonization—especially one focused on the implications of different European legal traditions for indigenous access to and control over land and resources—promises an innovative approach to historical and contemporary developments in the Americas. In American Pentimento, Patricia Seed tackles this challenge, focusing on Iberian and English colonization. Seed starts with an intriguing contemporary divergence: why, she asks, do indigenous-rights activists focus on rights to land in English-speaking nations and on rights to human dignity in Spanish-speaking ones? Seed's book explores the ways in which Europeans claimed rights over indigenous resources in the earliest decades of colonization and conquest and charts the consequences of these claims.

Seed rejects conventional explanations that attribute different patterns of colonization in the Americas to differences in the indigenous populations that Iberians and English encountered. She instead argues that colonial configurations derived from the implementation of two distinct bodies of European legal thought. The English and Spanish held different ideas about property and mineral rights. While the English cherished private property and placed a premium on cultivation as a determinant in titling land, Iberian jurisprudence (as a result of Muslim influences) regarded mineral wealth as a gift from God to be deployed for the communal good; they thus barred private ownership. These legal divergences had profound implications for indigenous people. Iberian colonists, both Spanish and Portuguese, sought control over labor, while English colonists pursued control over land. Europeans developed critiques of indigenous cultures that enabled them to justify appropriating indigenous resources, whether labor or land. Europeans invented Indians through what Seed aptly calls "partial truths." The Spanish exaggerated the prevalence of cannibalism to justify their claims to Indian labor, while the English painted Indians as hunters in order to condemn their "wasteful" use of land and justify seizing it. The Portuguese used indigenous languages, perceived as defective due to the absence of certain letters, to illustrate Indian deficiency.

Seed interprets the invasion and settlement of the Americas entirely through the expectations and behavior of Europeans. Her study, then, minimizes Indian agency and thus occupies a peculiar place when considered next to recent scholarship on indigenous people, which tends to emphasize the complex processes of resistance and negotiation that ultimately shaped colonial configurations. Chronological elisions weaken

Seed's broad comparative study, as she collapses different periods and experiences into a single large unit. The English who sought profit in America read earlier Spanish accounts voraciously, especially those by José de Acosta and Bartolomé de Las Casas. To describe colonization efforts by these two different European kingdoms as if they happened simultaneously is to reject the ways in which English invasions and expectations were shaped by Spanish models. It also ignores the cultural contexts within which American incursions were conceived, whether in Renaissance Spain or early modern England.

Seed deploys evidence in ways that might generate confusion about the chronological separation of events. The English, she argues, claimed land in the New World by virtue of cultivating it. She suggests that other Europeans dismissed these claims and cites Sepúlveda's rejection of such justification as "'mere theft'" (p. 28 ). Yet Sepúlveda could not possibly have been writing about English colonization efforts in America, which did not commence in earnest until the early seventeenth century. Such misleading synchronisms characterize the book throughout, and her depiction of Anglo divergence from Spanish patterns depends heavily on such anachronistic evidence. Because the notion of a land empty of people was important to Anglo colonists and their descendents, for example, she says that scholars continue to underestimate the size of the precontact population in North America. But the only historian she names is Frederick Jackson Turner and his classic frontier thesis, delivered in 1893 (p. 160 ).

Comparative history is a difficult enterprise, and it is impossible to be equally familiar with multiple historiographies. Comparative legal history is particularly challenging...