Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native treaties and the law of nations, 1604–1664 by Jeffrey Glover (review)

In his insightful analysis of seventeenth-century Anglo-Native relations in North America, Jeffrey Glover casts a wide net over what he understands as treaty-making: Native ceremonies such as dancing and feasting that included English visitors; Anglo-Native marriages, illustrated with case of Pocahontas and John Rolfe; property deeds transferring land from Native peoples to English colonists; and Anglo-Native trade agreements. All these interactions, Glover shows, can be usefully analyzed as forms of intercultural negotiation and treaty-making. Through a close reading of dozens of letters, reports, pamphlets and petitions composed by English colonists, traders and promoters between 1604 and 1664, Glover argues that those groups found it necessary to report their interactions with Native peoples, often appealing to the law of nations, as a crucial way to legitimate their overseas claims.

In Paper Sovereigns, Glover makes four important contributions to scholarship on early Anglo-Native relations that go beyond the existing scholarship. The first major contribution is his expansive definition of what should be considered as a form of Anglo-Native diplomatic engagement, the range of people who practiced such diplomacy, and the kinds of documents in which they recorded their intercultural encounters. He enjoins us to question the common preconception of "treaty-making" as occurring between leaders or their high-placed deputies and resulting in documents written in legal prose. Rather, in seventeenth-century North America more prosaic rituals and agreements between Indigenous peoples and English colonists and traders were used to validate discrete English claims, to offer evidence to domestic and international rivals that Native peoples had welcomed them to live and trade in their midst. Given the unsettled terms of overseas expansion among Europeans in the early seventeenth century, English settlers in North America provided evidence that Native peoples recognized and sanctioned their presence.

A critical context for analyzing seventeenth-century Anglo-Native relations, therefore, was international relations, and in particular the contention of Spain and Portugal that all of the Americas had been divided between those two countries. The English, French and Dutch deployed various interpretations of the "law of nations" to challenge those hegemonic claims, and one critical way to challenge the Iberians, Glover argues, was to make agreements with indigenous leaders. During Anglo-Spanish negotiations for the Treaty of London (1604), English diplomats declined to recognize Spain's hegemonic claims and discussed the English crown's understanding of the law of nations and how it allowed challenges by non-Iberians. English colonists, traders and promoters knew the importance of the law of nations and how agreements with Indigenous leaders could validate their claims and undercut Spanish claims. Thus they were keen to record interactions. Glover's analysis is the most thorough to date in exploring the importance of imperial rivalries to Anglo-Native relations from the perspective of the emerging idea of international law. In his rendering, Native peoples were integral part of the entangled Atlantic world and the contests over the meaning of sovereignty in a transatlantic, indeed global, context. This is Glover's second significant contribution to the scholarly literature, and merits consideration by anyone interested in the early modern development of international law and its relation to Indigenous peoples.

The English also competed among themselves for North American territory, so Glover analyzes how some letters and petitions detailing relations with Native inhabitants were composed to persuade a royal official that one party's claim was stronger than a rival's claim. He argues that Native peoples came to realize how they could position themselves between imperial rivals (e.g., England and France) and between English rivals (e.g., Massachusetts and Rhode Island), as well as between colonists and royal officials. By the second half of the seventeenth century, political upheavals at the international level and within England contributed to a marked change in how Anglo-Native interactions in North America were understood in a transatlantic context. Beginning in the 1640s, Portugal and then Spain extended their rivals piecemeal...