An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World.

• Author: Hickman, John
• Position: LATIN AMERICA - Book review

Bassi, Ernesto. An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

The possibility of alternative histories beckon in this exploration of the world views of the people living around the rim of the southern Caribbean Sea in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In six chapters, Ernest Bassi, an assistant professor of history at Cornell University, investigates the range of geopolitical and geo-economic perspectives of ordinary sailors and their captains, of the cosmopolitan and the parochial, of republican revolutionaries and monarchist loyalists, and of anti-racist and racist state builders. The result is an interesting tour d'horizon of the conceptual and material worlds of the inhabitants of Spanish colonial New Granada and its independent successor states. What is revealed is the unrealized potential for a markedly different, much more Caribbean and much less Andean, trajectory for the political development of the region that now encompasses Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela.

Chapter 1 details the...