Review of "Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam" by Gregory Daddis

O presente artigo explora a Parte Segunda do volume I do Tesouro Descoberto no Máximo Rio Amazonas, crônica escrita pelo jesuíta João Daniel durante os anos finais de sua vida, enquanto esteve preso em Portugal, após a expulsão dos jesuítas da América portuguesa. O texto, de invejável erudição, tanto mais por ter sido escrito de memória, relata todas as “maravilhas” vistas ou ouvidas pelo autor enquanto atuou como missionário no Estado do Maranhão em meados do século XVIII. A crônica combina uma descrição detalhista com uma visão complexa dos modos de vida dos índios. Por isso, discutimos a lógica da existência e das sociabilidades a partir dos elementos da cultura material mais frequentes na obra, a saber, das armas de guerra, instrumentos de casa (utensílios domésticos) e “brasões de nobreza”; observa-se ainda uma interessante contradição no discurso colonial do cronista.

The aim of this paper is to analyze Masonic sociability in Portuguese America focusing on the city of Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It seeks to identify the representations created by the Luso-Brazilian society and their affiliation with the Masonic order. It also aims to visualize the manner in which the sociability engendered by the Freemason lodges eventually contributed to the construction of a political culture, in which the practice of debate, criticism, and representation were essential elements allowing us to have a better understanding of the final years of Portuguese colonial rule in the American continent.

Editor's Note

In the course of the seventeenth century Dutch merchants created a seaborne empire that provided them with the primacy in world trade. This chapter focuses on the defining traits of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or Dutch East India Company, 1602–1799) and the West Indische Compagnie (WIC, or Dutch West India Company, 1621–1674, 1674–1791), both limited liability joint stock companies with monopoly rights on the navigation to, respectively, Asia and the American continent. Both companies were founded as “companies of the ledger and the sword” in the middle of the Dutch Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) with the Spanish crown, and collapsed in the final years of the ancien régime. The VOC developed with leaps and bounds into an island empire in Southeast Asia that after the demise of the VOC survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first as the Netherlands East Indies and today as the Republic of Indonesia. The WIC never succeeded to wrestle itself loose from close state intervention and, facing the challenges of independent merchants, had to give up its monopolies and simply survived as an umbrella organization for the plantations in Suriname and a couple of islands in the Caribbean. Compared to their neighbors in Europe, the relatively affluent Dutch never felt a strong urge to emigrate and as a result none of their overseas possessions, with exception of the Cape Colony, developed into a settler colony.

Soil and slaughter: a geoarchaeological record of the ancient Maya from Cancuén, Guatemala

“I want a Packet to arrive”: Making New York City the headquarters of British America, 1696–1783 Rohit T. Aggarwala (bio) One of New York City’s key distinctions in the late colonial period was its role as the headquarters of the British Army in America, almost continuously from 1755 to 1783. It is clear that the army’s presence gave Manhattan a far greater exposure to British officialdom than other colonial American cities, and influenced both its social and cultural development as well as its political evolution. How the city was chosen for such a role has been less clear. Most historians mention that New York held a strategic location that London officials had long appreciated; thus, they imply but do not assert that a geopolitical decision placed the headquarters in New York. In fact, however, this focus on broad geographical forces, and on London officials, obscures the very significant story behind how the headquarters came to be in Manhattan.1 This is because New York’s role was not shaped by theory but by several individual experiences of how the city served the British generals. Although some London bureaucrats did imagine New York as a logical headquarters for British America, their ideas were consistently rejected by political leaders and had no direct influence on where the army was based. Instead, each person who held the title of “Commander-in-Chief of His [End Page 7] Majesty’s Forces in North America” chose where to base his operations, and each was—in theory at least—unbound by his predecessor’s decisions. The reasons they chose New York varied with their needs. During the Seven Years’ War, they were driven by Manhattan’s location as the terminus of the transatlantic packet ship. After that, a combination of personal preference and community specialization helped keep the headquarters in New York. While geopolitical analysis did lead to the Army’s return to New York in 1776, the analysis turned out to be flawed. The decisions of the commanders-in-chief reflect many of the forces that geographers and economists identify as the reasons cities form, why they locate where they do, and how and why they prosper. The most powerful forces are transportation costs, through which geography affects prices and the availability of goods; communications advantages, through which geography affects knowledge; and agglomeration economies, through which proximity improves economic performance.2 Historian William Cronon noted the power of “second nature,” through which man-made conditions, such as infrastructure investments, economic logic, and even habits shape human activity with the same power as natural geography.3 Others have observed the power of government to lure—or drive—people to capital cities and places of military investment.4 All of these proved relevant to Manhattan’s case in the final years of British control. But New York’s career as the British headquarters reminds us that while these forces certainly shape urban geography, they do so only through human interpretation and action. Because people are not always rational, nor always perfectly informed, their specific priorities, knowledge, [End Page 8] and interpretations shape how geographic reality is perceived and thus how they act on it. The British generals who placed their offices in New York in the late colonial period were not responding to the city’s theoretical or comprehensive advantages, but to the way the city’s location served their very immediate needs. As such, this episode helps illuminate not only a moment in the city’s history but also the power—and limitations—of geography as an independent force. “The Government is in the Crown” Long before the 1750s, New York had been imagined as a potential capital for all of continental British America. In these imaginings, it was indeed geopolitics that drove decision-making. The Board of Trade—the body in London intended to coordinate colonial policy—noticed that Manhattan was centrally located among the mainland colonies, had a border with the Iroquois and French, and had a government directly appointed by the Crown. This led them to identify New York as the obvious place to house an administration overseeing the entire continent. The board held firmly to...