Tangled in the Web: Communication, Power, and the Virgin Soil Hypothesis

Most of us view our hyper-connected, web-enabled world with some degree of ambivalence. We are overwhelmed by information of uncertain reliability, our consumption puts us at the mercy of global markets and corporations, and any airplane may carry the next pandemic. While these may seem like quintessentially modern concerns, in Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South, Alejandra Dubcovsky shows us that these are in fact very old problems. Dubcovsky uses the idea of the network—a pattern of connections that links people and places together—as a lens through which to make sense of the complex interactions among multiple European and native polities in the American Southeast, from the Mississippian chiefdoms of the 13^th century through the 1730s. Through her close examination of communication networks and their role in certain key historical events, we see Indians, Europeans, and Africans dealing with competing or unreliable news, using their networks to obtain or distribute trade goods, and ultimately, articulating and projecting power throughout the region. While the technology has changed, the underlying concerns are familiar.

Dubcovsky's work adds to a growing body of work on what she calls the "Early South," a revision that seeks to move beyond the "Old South" and its paradigmatic Antebellum slave plantations. Like Robbie Etheridge's From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010) and Christina Snyder's Slavery in Indian Country (2010), Informed Power benefits from a lengthening of chronology and broadening of focus. First, by extending its lens back before the arrival of Europeans in the 16^th century, the South appears from the outset as a Native landscape connected by networks of exchange. This changes our understanding of the colonial period, as Native nations remained numerous and powerful (and would well into the 19^th century), and occupied a central role in colonial affairs. For example, Dubcovsky's attention to the longer history of Euro-Indian interaction leads her to conclude that it was relations with Indians that drove the British towards African slavery. She argues that the Yamasee War between British colonists and multiple South Carolina tribes reoriented the colony away from the Indian trade, while simultaneously opening up lands for a new source of profit, rice cultivation. This, plus reduced supply of enslaved Indians, led to that colony's plantation complex. Dubcovsky brings skill and creativity to the task of understanding what was going on beyond the knowledge of Europeans in Indian country, using archaeological and linguistic evidence to infer the native world that is absent from the written sources.

The other key feature of scholarship with what might be called an "Early South" orientation is a vision that ranges beyond the British colonies. Here Dubcovsky also brings considerable skill. She is equally at home in the Spanish archives as she is in the British, and this allows her to see what the English and Spanish colonists did and did not know about each other, and how they sought to gather their information. Her description of the Yamasee War, for example, emerges from both British and Spanish perspectives, as English colonists "waded through these conflicting, fear-filled reports" on the strength of Yamasee and Creek raiders, while at the same time, Spanish officials learned to decipher a Yamasee delegation's use of knotted strips of deerskin as a communication method (pp. 166, 171). Recognizing, however, that these public communications were complex and often contradictory, Dubcovsky also attempts to reconstruct the internal politics of the Creek and Cherokee towns as they debated whether to support the Yamasees and join the Spaniards, to assist the English of South Carolina, or even try to pursue both policies simultaneously. She sketches in detail the negotiations and communications engaged in by local leaders (Native and European) eager to preserve...