Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South by Alejandra Dubcovsky (review)

In the early American South, a region without a regular mail system or print culture prior to the 1730s, information exchange was not easy. Yet its inhabitants—Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans—created powerful channels of communication across colonial space. In Informed Power, Dubcovsky demonstrates how these largely face-to-face networks both facilitated and complicated the dissemination of news and the redistribution of power within and across communities. This nuanced account weaves together analytically the factors of greed, starvation, disease, customs, technical infrastructures, spirituality, language, and landscape to disassemble the notion that either a dearth of information vexed the early colonial South or that the rise of European power there was inevitable.

Dubcovsky’s thematic questions—“what information did people in the early South want,” “who acquired and spread information,” and “how [did] Indians, Europeans, and Africans use networks to move information”—guide readers across the book’s three parts and chronological unfolding of the early North American southeast (6–7). An opening overview of the vast geographical space linked by indigenous networks before European colonization focuses on the emergence of La Florida, “the center of a tug of war between imperial rivalries and colonial developments,” where Timucuas, Guales, and Apalachees controlled what information the Spanish had and how they acquired it (7). Informed Power then turns to the extensive list of individuals who acquired and spread information—“spies, diplomats, sentinels, messengers, scouts, [and] traders,” among others—against the backdrop of the devastating spread of the English–Indian slave trade, particularly the Westo slave raids from the 1660s to 1710s, to demonstrate the interdependencies of an increasingly volatile South (7). The book closes with an analysis of how Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans used communication networks to challenge existing connections and “reassess which connections to rely on and who to include” in the context of Spanish appeals to fugitive slaves and growing English-sponsored violence (8).

This treatment of the sociopolitical landscape of the colonial South invokes the spirit of Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications (Toronto, 1972), in which the capacity for information transmission is itself a force in history, its infrastructures inseparable from the actions taken through them. In this context, “networking information was not simply about having the latest news or the quickest informer,” but “was a way of establishing parameters, articulating priorities, and enforcing both” (8). Dubcovsky’s interdisciplinary approach embraces non-European sources and nonliterary materials, such as Timucua written accounts and analyses of indigenous languages, pottery, and maps. “Indian networks,” she insists, “offer the best way to reconstruct the interconnections of the colonial world without flattening its many complexities” (212). Hers is a non-Eurocentric approach that requires analysis both beyond disciplinary differences and the cultural ones that dominate early colonial American scholarship.

Nonetheless, the South’s grim lesson is that information access and networking are not enough to preserve autonomy in the face of violence. In this book, information networks are more a lens for exploring causality and agency in the early South’s conflicts than forces themselves or windows onto network theory. In Dubcovsky’s ambitious narrative, the early American South was a complex, confusing region in which information and power formed a powerful nexus and the dissemination of news and ideas could make or break relationships and alliances, express codes of behavior and desires, and construct hierarchies.