Ceremonies of Possession

Patricia Seed’s Ceremonies of Possession is streamlined and short and beautifully written; it was very well received when Cambridge published it in 1995. The argument is simple. Each of five colonial powers—the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch—enacted their ceremonies of possession in ways that were culturally meaningful only for themselves. While it is certainly ambitious to attempt the comparative history of five colonial empires in 193 pages of text (much of which are footnotes), the book is successful and thought-provoking.

But first, to summarize the content. In general, the English believed that the mundane action of building houses, planting gardens, and erecting fences gave them the right to possession. Seed somewhat homogenizes the English here. For example, she equates the super-religious and persecuted Pilgrims at Plymouth with the mercenary Virginia Company at Jamestown. She does not discuss the Pilgrim belief that God had divinely ordained their possession of Indian land, though this is what the Pilgrims themselves might have thought gave them the ultimate right to possession. Also problematic, at one point, Seed oversimplifies, arguing that gardens lured the English to the New World while gold lured the Spanish (26-27).

Unlike the English, the French enacted elaborately ritualized ceremonies of possession that took the form of parades culminating with planting the cross of Christ and the standard of France into Indian land. Some Francophilia is evident here. Seed describes these rituals beautifully, almost reverently, and focuses a great deal on the French focus on the consent of the Indians. The French, Seed says, desired allies won by love. She writes, “No other Europeans so consistently sought the political permission of the natives in order to justify their own political authority” (62). Seed points out that often what the French sought was merely the appearance of consent. But depending on the definition of consent, one can find it in the Spanish conquest as well. What about consent of the Indian allies who made the Spanish Conquest possible (e.g. the several hundred thousand Tlaxcalans who went with Cortés’s much, much smaller group to conquer Tenochtitlan)? Still, her point is well taken–that during the ceremonies of possession themselves, the French focused much more on at least the appearance of native consent than did other colonizers.

The Spanish, for example, used a ritualized text, the Requirement (the Requerimiento in Spanish), to establish their legitimate dominion; here Seed follows Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in tracing the Islamic roots of both the Requerimiento and the Spanish Conquest. Here, there are traces of the Black Legend. She sees the Requerimiento—and the entire Spanish outlook when it is not obsessed with gold—as religious conquest in the name of God. Darn, that Black Legend is persistently pernicious–it rears up its ugly little head even in the best of books! The Requirement, Seed argues, was the principal way that the Spanish established authority. At one point, Seed says “Cortés’s carefully repeated statements that he had made the requirement known to the natives solidified his position as the undisputed representative of Spanish authority in the New World” (98). But, Cortés’s authority was almost always disputed, and reading the Requerimiento was just one of the many ways that he tried to legitimize his authority.

Seed’s sections on the Portuguese and the Dutch are very thoughtful and fairly convincing. Apparently the Portuguese thought that the act of discovery, or really, of noting the latitude of a place previously unknown to Europeans, was what gave them the right to possession. The Dutch, “sailing in the wake of the Portuguese,” have a similar concept, but since time has passed and more places have been measured, the Dutch think describing and mapping a new place should give them possession—as does the all-important trade licensed by the Dutch government.

In the conclusion of her book, Seed reduces all this to its simplest elements. She writes: “Englishmen held that they acquired rights to the New World by physical objects, Frenchmen by gestures, Spaniards by speech, Portuguese by numbers, Dutch by description” (179). What is excellent about Ceremonies of Possession is that it shows the ways that Europe was not a homogenous entity—competing European colonizing powers understood possession on their own terms, in context of their own cultures. Possession seems to have been a cultural construction, intelligible only within the culture that claimed it. Each European power really did have its own ideas about how to go about creating an empire that were rooted in the country’s own politics and folkways, so pointing out the ways in which European ceremonies of possession differ is brilliant.

But the book has its flaws. The big problem with the book is its reductionist tendency. Admittedly, this is understandable in such a broad work of comparative history. Still, downplaying, the construction of crosses (a practice which crossed cultural lines with total disregard for tidy categories) while highlighting the Requerimento (which the Spanish abolished in 1556) and the English love for hedgerows is problematic. Reducing each country’s complicated notions of possession to essentialist elements that are unique to each culture skews the analysis somewhat. One also wishes Seed had not homogenized the English, the French, etc. quite so much.

Since the nation-state had not yet developed, and there was so much interpenetration of trade and elite culture in Europe, one wonders if there can have been so very much misunderstanding? All of this mutual unintelligibility smacks of a problem in Latin American historiography—what Matthew Restall of the Lockhart School calls the Myth of (Mis)Communication. Where other scholars have presumed mutual unintelligibility between Spanish Conquistadores and indigenous Mesoamericans, Restall sees the communication of many ideas, albeit in a translated and altered form. Isn’t it possible that European powers wanted to misunderstand each other so that they could invalidate each other’s claims and get more access to land, resources, and wealth? Even more important, one wishes that Seed would have looked into indigenous people’s perceptions of all these ceremonies, and taken their own ideas about land rights into account.

Seed has written an important and thought-provoking book, and the idea of interpreting each colonizing power’s ceremonies of possession within its own cultural context is brilliant. Despite any quibbles, it is an incredibly useful analysis of a complicated block of time that brings historians one step closer to understanding the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere.