Summary

Patricia Seed

Patricia Seed received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin.   Seed worked at Rice University before moving to the University of California, Irvine.  Seed’s other books include To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico:  Conflicts Over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 and American Pentimento:  The Pursuit of Riches and the Invention of “Indians”.  Most recently, Seed has published studies on the continuity of Iberian Arabic love poetry in the early Atlantic world, and a comparative study of treaty systems in Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640

Seed’s work is principally a study of the ceremonial practices Europeans employed to initiate colonial rule in the New World.  Seed’s goal is to compare “how Europeans created political authority over New World peoples, lands, or their goods between 1492 and 1640″ (3).  In the end, Seed finds that each European polity employed unique ceremonial practices because they had different conceptions of what political authority over the New World meant and the legal manner in which authority was demonstrated.  This book, then, is a comparative analysis of the early European experience in the New World, a legal history of European expansion, and a also a comparative intellectual history.

Seed begins with an analysis of English possession in the New World.  Here, she argues that the English concept of possession relied on the cultivation of land and the construction of material boundaries.  In analyzing the French experience, Seed argues that the French employed highly ritualistic ceremonies involving alliances with native populations in order to claim legitimacy.  The Spanish used legal protocol in order to establish their right to conquest in the form of the Requirimiento.  Seed argues that the Requirimiento was both a continuation of martial protocol from Al Andalus and a specific invention of Spanish lawyers responding to the objections of Dominican friars.  Seed maintains that the Portuguese saw discovery as their legal right to possession of territories.  In the Portuguese understanding, their invention of the technology that enabled overseas expansion allowed a claim to whatever lands they discovered, whether or not any conquest or territorial possession occurred.  Finally, Seed turns to the Dutch, whom she finds likewise employed a notion of discovery, but with the added element that formally describing a region was necessary in order to lay claim to it.  Additionally, the Dutch concept of possession  was largely commercial, and in the Dutch understanding, the maintenance of trade routes and continued commercial interaction with the natives was necessary to claim possession.

Ultimately, Seed’s book offers a new look at the variety of the European experience in the New World.  Seed demonstrates that it is probably not correct to speak of a single European experience or goal in the New World, but to treat each European polity on its own terms.