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factored into the mix, noting whether along with a definitive decline in the occurrence of representational
art, there is a parallel tendency to destroy the representational art of earlier periods. Though Levine treats
iconoclasm inter alia, it seems that there is not enough
surviving, periodizable, demonstrable evidence to apply
such an analysis and thereby to help to confirm his (entirely reasonable) hunches about anti-iconism.
The central message of the book—at least from the
perspective of a scholar of later periods of Jewish visuality—is that Jewish visual culture in antiquity was
extremely polyvalent and heterogeneous with an utter
inconsistency of both content and intent, the manifestations of which were entirely conditional on the time
and place it was produced. Levine’s work thus falls
squarely within the ambit of the most current expansions of our view of what Jewish antiquity looks like
beyond the limitations of a strictly or exclusively rabbinic lens, including the work of such great historians
of the period as Seth Schwartz and Eric Gruen. They
are what Schwartz himself describes as “minimalists”
regarding rabbinic hegemony, and, thus, influence.
Levine takes a middle ground between this sort of minimalism and the maximalists. While arguing for the limited influence of the rabbis and rabbinic culture, he
does not completely obviate the contributions of either.
Though rabbinic culture eventually won out over other
options, Levine applies chronologically rigorous periodization that considers at which junctures rabbinic culture might have influenced art, but just as importantly,
at which junctures it could not have, because—to name
only a few possible reasons—it lacked hegemony, or
was utterly uninterested in artistic production. He considers the role of rabbinic texts in the formation of Jewish visual culture in a similarly nuanced way. A maximalist might have come to the seemingly unassailable
conclusion that one cannot ascribe rabbinic influence to
art created long before the rise of the rabbis. But Levine
allows the perspective that rabbinic literature may reflect earlier values and thought systems. He does not
advocate such a perspective in the vast majority of
cases, but, to his credit, he presents it without rancor or
ridicule.
Such evenness of tone prevails throughout, made all
the more commendable by the fact that the field of
scholarship on Jewish art in antiquity is such a minefield. But at the same time one does not get the sense
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that Levine is tiptoeing through it. On the contrary, he
strides about confidently, acknowledging with grace
even those theories with which it is obvious he disagrees. Levine manages both to catalogue and to critique the occasional interpretive excesses, groundless
extrapolations, grand metatheories that kludge together the material culture to fit themselves, and anachronistic readings of texts in all directions with admirable restraint, remaining above the fray of the politicized
shouting matches that often riddle the field of the analysis of Jewish visuality: ancient, medieval, or modern.
Visual Judaism in Late Antiquity is a work of pedagogical clear-sightedness and intellectual generosity
that will avail and delight a full spectrum of audiences,
from the beginning student to the advanced scholar. It
is handsomely designed, with legible type, generous
margins and notes on the page, and the illustrations—
though somewhat small and in grayscale—serve to
clearly illustrate the points being made at each juncture. The indices of subjects and citations are comprehensive and very helpful.
The world that Levine paints for us is one more like
our own than like the monolithic outpost of centralized
rabbinic culture that maximalists imagine, sometimes
for their own political purposes. Of course, there are
politics in the promotion of a decentralized and polyvalent view of Jewish antiquity as well, but given the
evidence, Levine’s visual Judaisms—plural—simply
make much more sense than viewing this early and formative period through the retrospective lens of rabbinic
hegemony. The questions raised and the answers tendered by the author have more cogent repercussions for
the study of Jewish art in later periods, as well as for
issues that pervade the study of the visual dimensions
of all cultures: the consideration of the place of central
authority in the creation of art, the relationship between art and texts, and the art of minorities in majority
contexts. Visual Judaism is “good to think with” in many
and crucial ways. Compelled by the music of Levine’s
engaging and naturally flowing prose, one has the feeling that one is walking alongside an extremely gracious
and erudite guide through a Jewish world of geotemporally conditional polyvalence of visual expression.
And that is a very satisfying feeling, indeed.
MARC MICHAEL EPSTEIN
Vassar College
DANIEL STRUM. The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal and the
Netherlands (1595–1630). Translated by COLIN FOULKES,
ROOPANJALI ROY, and H. SABRINA GLEDHILL. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. 537. $100.00.
In A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, Anchors, Compass, &c. (ca. 1610), Sir Walter Raleigh emphasized the
critical importance of seaborne commerce: “whosoever
commands the trade of the world commands the riches
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of the world, and, consequently, the world itself.” Not
coincidentally, the same text found Raleigh mulling
“the sudden appearing of the Hollanders,” a phenomenon he attributed first to the assistance of Elizabeth I
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1632
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but also to the Dutch’s robust participation in the East
and West Indies trades. Raleigh’s truism about the
power of trade inspired the mercantilist policies prescribed by the empires of his time, supposedly jealous
guards of their ports. Yet the merchant networks that
came closest to commanding the world’s trade moved
promiscuously across imperial boundaries, avoiding the
restrictions they supposedly implied.
Daniel Strum’s formidable book examines one significant piece of the world of commerce at the turn of
the seventeenth century. A brisk transatlantic trade
moved Brazilian sugar, distributing it to apothecaries
and household kitchens throughout Europe and even
elevating it to a currency of exchange. Sugar circulated
thanks to the efforts of mercantile networks linking
Portugal and the Low Countries, especially the province of Holland. To research these multinational
routes, Strum relies on an equally multinational research team, funded by the Odebrecht-Clarival do
Prado Valladares Prize, which he won in 2010.
Strum divides his study into four sections, with three
initial chapters of background and context followed by
three thematic sections. He addresses navigation and
seafaring in the second section, the financial details of
the sugar trade in the third, and the relationships
among merchants, agents, and factors in the fourth. Together, these comprise ten detailed chapters covering
the breadth of the sugar trade during a time of explosive
growth in Brazil’s production. The book also boasts numerous sidebars, timelines, graphs, tables, and, most
spectacularly, images.
A vital statistic should join the bibliographic details
of this tome: nine pounds. Printed on heavy stock, the
book’s 376 images are reproduced in lush full color. Every page rewards the reader with visual interest, a fair
tradeoff for its considerable heft. Strum’s period falls
during a golden age of Dutch painting, and he obligingly offers up paintings by Johannes Vermeer, Pieter
Brueghel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Younger, Rembrandt, and many other artists, along with scores of
maps, engravings, illuminations, and photographs of
furniture and building ornamentations. Strum chose
images, he writes, for their instructive and informative,
as opposed to merely illustrative, merits. And many do
correspond directly to material in the adjacent text, as
when a particular merchant’s portrait accompanies discussion of him or when mention of passementerie (fabric adornments) is paired with a portrait of a lace-clad
woman.
Strum does not present a linear chronological narrative, instead he canvasses the world of the merchants
and seafarers involved in the sugar trade with his thematic chapters. He examines the tools, mechanisms,
contracts, and customs of these mercantile pioneers,
nearly turning the book into a hybrid between a reference work and a monograph. Ostensibly addressing a
particular trade circuit for a delimited period of time,
Strum treats a host of broader topics: coin minting,
credit contracts, agents’ responsibilities, and more.
There are also noteworthy gaps. Significant absences
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(each of which Strum acknowledges and explains) include tax regimes associated with sugar, details and
quantitative analysis of sugar refining, and the slave
trade. Attention to the last would have been illuminating given the instrumental role of the Portuguese in the
Africa trade, though Dutch participation only flourished in the decades following Strum’s period of study.
The book shines in describing the routine procedures
and habits devised by merchants to keep the sugar trade
humming. Strum demonstrates with numerous examples how financial and contractual tools and instruments, together with money and ships, were deployed
in real interactions among merchants, shipmasters, and
agents. He draws heavily on notarial records from
Porto, Aveiro, and Amsterdam for examples. One particularly instructive section about the rhythm of merchants’ lives in Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands
comes from the description, in chapter 9, of a merchant
who lived in all three places. Other historians have analyzed the peripatetic Miguel Dias Santiago’s surviving
account book, but perhaps not with such sustained and
detailed attention. Strum also makes excellent use of
merchants’ textbooks, including word problems that
taught aspiring traders how to calculate interest and estimate cargo values.
The book teaches us less about Brazil, Portugal, or
the Netherlands, than about the networks and relationships that connected them through people like Santiago. Strum does not aim to paint a detailed portrait of
any given place and its culture, politics, and economy
in the mode that Jonathan Israel adopted for his massive history of the Dutch Republic’s “rise, greatness,
and fall,” for instance (1998). He provides a thick description of the mercantile bonds that tied people together and moved the goods from one place to another.
Strum’s book offers a broader synthesis than his dissertation on New Christian and Jewish networks, the
research for which provides much of the book’s empirical foundation. The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal and
the Netherlands (1595–1630), appropriately does not
address a particular merchant community. Christopher
Ebert has pointed out that the Sephardim participated
actively in the sugar trade, but Catholics and Protestants also played important roles; therefore, viewing the
trade as the province of a single group distorts its complex reality.
The Eighty Years’ War forms the backdrop for
Strum’s book, and its conflicts spilled across the globe
alongside expanding mercantile networks. That the
combatants formed increasingly dense trade relationships with one another presents something of a historical paradox. Further, the Portuguese endured worse
Dutch harassment than the Spanish, even as Amsterdam-based merchants cultivated stronger trading relationships with counterparts in Porto, Aveiro, Setúbal,
and Lisbon than with Spanish traders. (The Iberian
kingdoms did form a common enemy—the Dutch—
while united under Philip II and Philip III from 1580 to
1640.)
In the 1580s, the Portuguese surpassed the Genoese
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in trading prowess, becoming the most energetic overseas merchants in the Spanish Empire. Brazil’s rapidly
expanding sugar industry dragged their attention from
the East. Portugal had long supplied sugar to Europe’s
aristocracy by the time Brazil’s production flourished
but the Iberian producers who reached out to the Atlantic islands—Madeira, São Tomé, and the Canaries—
depended on capital and investment from northern Europeans, particularly from the Low Countries.
Portuguese merchants also relied on tightly knit family
networks and careful management of multiple trading
circuits, connecting Iberia with northern Europe, the
Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, and the New World.
In the 1590s, Dutch mercantile strength and reach
surged—the “sudden appearing” Raleigh noted—outstripping competitors from the Hanseatic League. In
building what Charles R. Boxer described as the age’s
most powerful empire, the Dutch relied almost exclusively on maritime trade. Lacking land resources, they
accessed capital through a tradition of shared investment in ships and shaved their freight rates to undercut
their Hanseatic competitors. Their famous fluitschips
maximized cargo space with a small crew and cheap
construction. Brazilian sugar helped propel a decisive
shift in commercial dominance from Antwerp to Amsterdam, a city that began the practice of posting commodity prices weekly. Pressing their advantage, the acquisitive merchants founded the Dutch West Indies
Company (WIC) in 1621, joining the earlier East Indies
Company (VOC), which eventually wrested much of
the Brazilian northeast from the Portuguese. That
event marks the close of Strum’s period (the Luso-Brazilians would expel the Dutch in 1654). Along the way,
Amsterdam refined maritime insurance practices and
founded exchange and lending banks.
The last decade has seen strong scholarship on early
modern trade and economic relations and Strum’s book
follows another study of the Brazilian sugar trade,
Christopher Ebert’s Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in
the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550–1630 (2008). Perhaps
we can chalk up this renewed interest in trade networks,
credit instruments, and finance to a recently more acute
investigation of capitalism. The galloping success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)
in recent months might derive from similar curiosities
that have stoked debates on capital in the seventeenth
century. Strum covers a range of financial topics that
make his book relevant to current discussions: Amsterdam’s early stock market, the development of commodity derivatives, the newly sanctioned levying of interest
and the regulation of rates, the broad use of insurance,
the sale of futures and options contracts, and the construction of globe-straddling commercial networks.
The recent recession’s rippling path through the
world economy inspired worried commentary on the
tightly interlinked global economy; some recent histories show the pattern’s deep roots. Daviken StudnickiGizbert argues that the Portuguese merchants’ success
in the seventeenth century depended on their remarkable grasp of the interconnections of markets (A Nation
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1633
upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the
Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 [2007]). They
saw not only how commodity trades interacted with one
another, but also how trade crossed imperial borders in
spite of mercantilist policies. Their economic philosophy followed their practice as they portrayed the actions of markets as following natural, not political laws.
Writing a decade ago, Studnicki-Gizbert expressed surprise that historians of early modern trade had paid so
little attention to practices of communication. He suggests that the Portuguese merchants self-consciously
followed the Dutch in seeking to occupy the center of
commercial circuits. Strum attends carefully to the
question of communication and information-gathering,
devoting much of his tenth and final chapter to the subject. And his detailed exposition of sugar merchant relationships seems to illustrate a pattern in which these
communication networks developed cooperatively
among the merchants from the two places, rather than
as a sequence initiated by the Dutch.
Strum joins a recent trend in contextualizing the
reach of mercantilist policies. The sugar trading practices he describes preceded many mercantilist efforts,
including the establishment of imperially-based trading
companies like the VOC and WIC, and skirted others.
Portuguese and Dutch traders’ success depended on
crossing mercantilist frontiers and leveraging the arbitrage opportunities opened by these imperial divisions
in trade. Together, they contributed to the degradation
of Spanish power, even if they did not pursue that as a
coherent goal. Spanish decline persisted during the period despite the Count-Duke of Olivares’s exertions after 1621. Taking note of the same trends as Raleigh,
Olivares’s advisors told him that the crown’s failure to
dominate trade weakened the empire, with the fruits of
commerce flowing increasingly toward the Low Countries and elsewhere.
Strum directly engages certain key debates, such as
how merchants arranged financing for voyages, how
they handled risk, and how they dealt with debt. And he
offers samples of other historical questions, such as the
Mintzian topic of sugar’s trajectory from a costly rarity
to a multiclass staple. Strum’s historiographical engagement bridges national academies to follow his boundary-crossing merchants. Building energetically on the
work of historians of navigation and seaborne trade, culinary history, the technology of sugar production, and
more, Strum makes good use of works in English,
Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German.
These range from classics by the likes of Boxer and Stuart B. Schwartz to newer and also impressive research
by Israel and Ebert. He also draws on foundational
works by Vitornio Magalhães Godinho and Frédéric
Mauro and more recent important contributions by
Manuel António Fernandes Moreira, Leonor Freire
Costa, Eddy Stols, and the Brazilians Evaldo Cabral de
Mello and José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello.
The systems Strum’s merchants developed were obviously not exclusive to sugar trading. And their influence reached beyond commodities, fueling, Strum
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writes, “the supply chains involving the products being
transacted, including petty commerce, the transport
sector, port activities, ship-building and tax revenues,
among other industries” (p. 542). But sugar did play a
privileged role. As David Hancock and R. C. Nash have
recently noted, the commission system emerged with
British traders of sugar from Barbados. Strum’s contribution shows the British lag in adopting the practices
of their continental counterparts. By the end of the
1600s, foreign merchants, including many Jewish and
Dutch families, had moved in significant numbers to
London and controlled the Baltic and Northwest Europe trades. More than a century after Raleigh noted
their “sudden appearing,” Daniel Defoe wrote that the
Dutch were “the carriers of the world, the middle persons in trade, the Factors and Brokers of Europe.”
Strum shows that Dutch traders found eager partners
in Iberia for their early involvement in the Brazilian
sugar trade. The techniques they developed fit into a
long evolution of practices among Hanseatic traders,
Italian bankers and merchants, and Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch agents. This story of capital is as compelling as our current century’s.
THOMAS D. ROGERS
Emory University
JACQUELINE JONES. A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race
from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Pp. xvii, 381. $29.99.
Jacqueline Jones—author of the prize-winning Labor
of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the
Family from Slavery to the Present (1985) —sets out here
to establish a new, sweeping narrative of power and
domination, ranging from the first settlement of British
North America to the election, roughly 350 years later,
of Barack Obama, hailed as the “first black President.”
Explicitly refusing the idea that race relations have defined American history from the moment of first contact—“race” is a term she labels, at once, as both illusory and distracting—Jones challenges us to scale out,
and to focus, instead, on what she sees as the larger,
more meaningful struggles between those who have
power and those who do not, brutally revealed in the
lives of six touchstone biographies. As she narrates this
history, the significance of race grows slowly and becomes much more important in the later chapters of the
repeated, dramatic clashes between haves and havenots. By demonstrating this gradual emergence, Jones
is trying to change the very terms of the way we talk
about this idea of “American history,” switching from
the language of race to the language of power, advantage, and brute control. The result is an equally unsettling and compelling book, one that forces readers to
think carefully about a densely braided set of arguments
and audiences.
The formal details are simple: A Dreadful Deceit: The
Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America
has six biographical chapters, each of them deeply researched, all of them powerfully written. “[T]he myth of
race,” she notes, “can be best understood through an
examination of the lives that have been defined by it”
(p. 299). The fascinating set of lives she presents are
core samples for different periods of time, and they
challenge, softly, some of our existing periodizations,
spanning well over 300 years. Jones is a lovely writer,
and she makes very interesting choices here. Few readers will know all—or even most—of the lives she illuminates, as they cover a number of centuries and his-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
toriographies. But, maybe that is the point. These are
quotidian lives, not “great” or “important” profiles, and
each one is a marvel of Jones’s abundant professional
talents. They are bound together to demonstrate that
racism was never consistently a part of the national narrative. “At some points in American history,” she
writes, “whites did not feel the need to invoke race, but
at other times they did. Exploring race as a political
strategy peculiar to a particular time and place offers an
alternative history of the evolution of this insidious notion” (p. 299).
Given Jones’s argument about race and power, two
of these chapters—the very first and the very last—are
particularly revealing. In the first, we follow the trial of
Antonio, an African slave who was murdered by his Anglo master. For Jones, the very fact of a trial is proof
that slavery was not necessarily racial. When Symon
Overzee escaped any punishment for Antonio’s death,
Jones argues that it was not a triumph of racism, but a
reminder that Overzee represented the social group in
power, while Antonio was stateless and poor. And in
the last, we trace the life of Simon P. Owens, an onthe-ground working-class man, who astutely recognized
that the common struggles of laboring folks were difficult to confront across the racial divide. Owens would
seem to be a very sympathetic figure for Jones, and his
poignant story establishes the emotional range of the
book. He, in some real sense, is the book’s hero. Steadfastly dismayed by the use of racial language, he
emerges from the decaying core of industrial America
with an acute sense of how race serves power.
Across these lives, Jones struggles to bridge two very
different arguments presently circulating in American
history. The first is a reliance on race—un-interrogated
and static—as an explanatory device; that is, the use of
the facile, capricious categories of race not merely as
supposed stable background data, but also as a driving
force in the nation’s ups and down. Jones wants to shake
free of the idea “that race is real and that race matters,”
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