Ernesto Bassi's excellent monograph uses a combination of quantitative data, cartography, and close reading of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United Kingdom to argue for the existence during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of an “aqueous territory” that he labels the “transimperial Greater Caribbean” (p. 3). The author's project lies in “uncovering other possible worlds” for his historical actors, stressing the importance of contingency and considering what was seen as plausible in order to understand how people in the Caribbean conceptualized their locations. Joining a growing number of transnational and transimperial histories, this book draws attention to New Granada and refocuses Atlantic history in a way that more fully represents the Atlantic as it was experienced. An Aqueous Territory makes important contributions to the historiography of Colombia and the Viceroyalty of New Granada specifically but also more broadly to the historiographies of the Atlantic world, the...
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