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  • An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World by Ernesto Bassi, and: New Countries: Capitalism, Revolution, and Nations in the Americas, 1750–1870 ed. by John Tutino
  • Fidel J. Tavárez
An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World. By Ernesto Bassi (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016) 360 pp. $94.95 cloth $26.95 paper
New Countries: Capitalism, Revolution, and Nations in the Americas, 1750–1870. Edited by John Tutino (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016) 360 pp. $99.95 cloth $28.95 paper

Building on the revisionist historiography of Latin American independence, Bassi's An Aqueous Territory provides an innovative interpretation [End Page 581] of the territories along the Caribbean coast of New Granada (roughly modern-day Colombia) at a time of revolutionary upheaval. Bassi begins with a peculiar story involving the legislature of the nascent Republic of Cartagena in October 1815. To retain Cartagena's recently proclaimed independence from the Spanish monarchy, a group of political leaders endeavored to place the new republic under British protection. To their disdain, Britain refused to offer support, and the young Republic of Cartagena eventually surrendered to Spanish forces on December 6, 1815.

Although Cartagena's attempt proved to be unsuccessful, Bassi sets out to reconstruct the political, economic, and geographical context that made Cartagena's request possible and thinkable. Rather than dismissing the request as an aberration of no real consequence for the history of Nueva Granada, Bassi questions the insidious idea that historians should only study "successful" events. Instead, Bassi attempts to recover a set of options that, although ultimately unsuccessful, more accurately represent how contemporaries in Nueva Granada experienced their historical reality.

Bassi's proposition leads to a series of innovative conclusions. He contends that the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, and consequently Columbia, had intense connections with the Caribbean. In fact, Bassi argues that the Caribbean coast of Nueva Granada was part of a "trans-imperial greater Caribbean" geographical space, which national and imperial historiographies have rendered invisible. For Bassi, contemporary historical actors in the Caribbean coast of Nueva Granada were not strictly bound by imperial borders. Quite the contrary, they crisscrossed imperial frontiers and created transimperial networks of exchange.

To explain the origins of the transimperial greater Caribbean, Bassi begins in the 1760s. Although the Caribbean had always been a space of transimperial interaction, for Bassi a key transformation occurred when in 1766 Britain instituted a free port system in its Caribbean colonies. The new system allowed the British Caribbean colonies to trade with agents of competing empires. As a result, subjects of the Spanish Empire, especially those of the Caribbean coast of Nueva Granada, flocked to the British Caribbean islands, Jamaica especially, to buy and sell consumer goods. In the process, participants of this transimperial greater Caribbean created a new geographical space centered on Kingston that defied Spanish imperial designs.

Given the existence of the transimperial greater Caribbean, Bassi demonstrates that Cartagena's attempt to enlist British support in its battle against Spanish forces is hardly surprising. In fact, even Simón Bolívar, the Latin American liberator par excellence, initially sought to gain British support, especially from Jamaican planters, to carry out his liberation project in Spanish America. But Britain's policy of neutrality during the Latin American revolutionary period eventually left political leaders like Bolívar disappointed. It was for this reason that Bolívar reluctantly turned to Alexandre Pétion's Haitian Republic for support. Bolívar surely would have preferred the backing of the more "civilized" British Empire, but he nonetheless welcomed the military and financial support of the black [End Page 582] republic. For Bassi, even though the center of Nueva Granada's trans-imperial greater Caribbean shifted from Jamaica to Haiti, Colombia's future was powerfully influenced and defined by this experience in the Caribbean.

Soon after the independence process, however, political leaders of the nascent Colombian nation began to decouple the country's history from the Caribbean. Instead, they developed the idea of an Andean-Atlantic nation, creating a national myth aimed at fostering stronger links with Europe and the United States. In spite of his insight, Bassi does...

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