Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850 by Cameron B. Strang (review)

That the production, circulation, and application of information about American environments and societies contributed significantly to imperial expansion and domination is by now an indisputable assertion in Atlantic world studies. The examination of how actual interaction among peoples in the borderlands of European empires might have influenced the pursuit of such knowledge, however, is a relatively new line of inquiry.¹ Among the most ambitious and imaginative studies written so far in this budding field of early American history, Cameron B. Strang's Frontiers of Science explores the vast space of the Gulf South across three centuries in order to demonstrate "how knowledge developed and circulated amid the ongoing encounters and unequal power relations engendered by imperialism" (7). The author achieves this objective with much skill, gathering evidence from a stunning array of archival and published material and making the case across chapters that analyze an assortment of situations and settings. It took an especially adventurous and versatile historian to cross the national and linguistic boundaries required to reveal the scope, intensity, and specific contours of imperial dependence on American knowledge.

Chapter 1 shows how Indigenous and "Atlantic networks of exchange penetrated each other . . . because of fundamental congruencies between them" (62). Strang begins by comparing patronage relationships that operated in Indigenous and European systems of knowledge during the early colonial period. Native chiefs relied on the learnedness of Native priests to support their authority as well as on access to prestige goods to sustain their power, while Euro-American naturalists' shipment of American objects to patrons back home enhanced their reputation and status. An overlap between things considered natural history specimens, gifts, and commodities, as Strang explains, facilitated an effective "tapping into Indian exchange networks" (65) by acquisitive imperial naturalists. The chapter shows how surprising similarities and parallels between different systems of knowledge encouraged the development of new interactions and claims about nature.

In chapter 2 Strang examines a wide range of men engaged in the circulation of natural knowledge—Governor Antonio de Ulloa and Intendant Martín Navarro of Spanish Louisiana, West African herbalists Carlos and Cipion in that same colony, Swiss planter Francis Philip Fatio in East Florida, and guide Yaolaychi from the Creek town of Hitchiti—in order to illustrate "that individuals and nations in the Gulf South approached knowledge production from a position of weakness that severely limited their potential to benefit from investigations of the natural world" (76). Spanish officials were unable to know and govern Louisiana without cooperation from the local populace, enslaved people were vulnerable to exploitation and violence, and Native Americans' place in the contested borderland was becoming more fragile. These weaknesses, however, motivated people to risk their respective uses of natural knowledge in improvisational ways that encouraged the crossing of cultural boundaries. As vividly depicted by Strang for the Gulf South with comparative implications beyond the region, scientific inquiry in early America emanated from countless episodes of exchange and negotiation.

Most of the intercultural crossings that Strang closely explores, however, occurred over European or Euro-American borders, with intermittent examples of cross-cultural exchange among enslaved and Indigenous people. Focusing on astronomy in chapter 3, most notably, he primarily wants to show why science was not simply an instrument for U.S. expansion into the Gulf South—for too long treated by historians as a region of Spanish backwardness—by foregrounding intellectual exchanges between Spain and the United States. Encounters between the region's white inhabitants are consequently featured in case studies of Stephen Minor and Thomas Power, Anglos who served as astronomers for Spain, and of Andrew Ellicott and William Dunbar, boundary surveyors who worked for the United States. Passing accounts of their reliance on African American slaves and American Indian guides are included in Strang's discussion...