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Featured Reviews 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 1631 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 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 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 DECEMBER 2014 1632 Featured Reviews 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 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW (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 DECEMBER 2014 Featured Reviews 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 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 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 DECEMBER 2014 Featured Reviews 1634 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,” DECEMBER 2014