Collected in honor of a retiring David Weber, and published after his untimely 2010 death, the essays in Contested Spaces of Early America are a worthy tribute to a great historian.
In their introduction Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman place Contested Spaces’ essays within the kind of hemispheric frame Weber used in his 2005 Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. Barr and Countryman, however, view the peoples and places of the Americas from a different angle than Weber did. Where Weber worked out from a Spanish imperial center, Barr and Countryman focus on “Indian cores” (24). They imagine the Americas not as a collection of regions organized around European polities but as a “unified space defined by indigenous experiences with colonialism” (23), and they hope to make Indians the axis around which the gathered analyses of colonization will revolve. The challenge for the volume as...
