Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World, 1400–2000 (review)

This ambitious book looks beyond the histories of the nation-states that have dominated our vision and understanding of how the Atlantic world developed, instead highlighting peoples, regions, and stories long considered to be “peripheral.” Focusing on ethnic homelands on both sides of the Atlantic and on three continents, Chávez traces their evolution and transformation over six centuries; examines the impacts of trade, imperialism, colonialism, internal colonialism, decolonization, and federalism; and draws on wide-ranging scholarship.

His study embraces Inuits, Mi’kmaqs, Iroquois, and Cherokees in North America; Tlaxacans in Mexico; Arawaks in the Caribbean; Berbers, Temne, and Wolof in Africa; Canary Islanders; and Basques, Bretons, and Irish in Europe. He shows how European imperialism imposed new structures, built colonies on homelands, and set people in motion. For example, the Mi’kmaq homeland became the French colony of Acadia, then the British colony of Nova Scotia, and finally a Canadian province. Mi’kmaqs clung to whatever piece of their homeland they could; Acadians found themselves dispersed at the dictates of the British Empire, building new homelands in Louisiana and elsewhere. Attachment to place remained a crucial marker of identity in a world characterized by movement. The globe’s migrants “while looking for a living, always seemed to be searching for a home” (5); sometimes they built new homelands on other people’s, older, homelands. U.S. Indian policies demonstrated that a republic could be just as devastating as the old empires in its disruption and dispossession of native peoples, but Chávez concludes that federalism, in the form of the Iroquois Confederacy, the United States, Canada, or the European Union, offered the best chance for individuals to maintain concentric loyalties and identities.

Such a broad survey inevitably invites criticism from a particular field or region. Chávez is not at his best in Indian country, where he sometimes relies on general secondary sources. He emphasizes that Native Americans envisioned themselves as members of communities—tribes, bands, towns, nations, confederacies—and he recognizes the existence of clans, but nowhere does he discuss kinship as the core of community, the key to identity, and the basis of a different kind of nationhood. He cites the Bering Strait theory of the populating of America but ignores Native insistences that they have always been here. He refers to the Laurentian Iroquois as a single nation, which they were not, and he calls Powhatan a king, which he was not: his was a chiefdom, not a kingdom. The chronology and content of the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worchester [sic] v. Georgia are confused (136), and southeastern Indians were not transplanted into Arapaho lands. In fact, the Southern Arapahos were relocated to Indian Territory on lands surrendered by the southeastern Indians. Such criticisms could be dismissed as nitpicking, but an accumulation of quibbles undermines confidence in a global history built on local histories and detracts from an otherwise welcome perspective on the Atlantic world.