Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America

In this groundbreaking book, Jeffrey Erbig places autonomous Native peoples at the center of imperial border-making enterprises of the late eighteenth century. It would be difficult to overstate the methodological challenges of such a study. The theoretical and juridical debates around Iberian territorial possession are notoriously complex, and the related efforts on the ground to demarcate an imperial border—the collaborative mapping expeditions by Portuguese and Spanish geographers, engineers, and astronomers, each with their own support crews—generated an enormous and geographically scattered corpus of sources. Expedition diarists seldom dwelled on the Native territories that they explored or on the autonomous groups with whom they interacted; these were simply taken for granted as features of this borderlands world, and they might be alluded to briefly or not at all. This book thus required research in some two dozen archives in multiple countries, as the author collected hundreds of documentary fragments that mentioned...