684 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 648e688

Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern BritishAmerica, Hanover and London, University Press of New England, 2005, xvC307 pages,US$29.95 paperback.

In this interesting and innovative book, historical geographer Stephen Hornsby explores the for-mation of the diverse economies and societies that developed along the Atlantic coast of BritishNorth America, from Baffin Bay to Barbados, during the colonial period (c.1480ec.1780). Hebegins by criticising the way that the study of this period has been artificially separated into Amer-ican and Canadian containers, and takes the more expansive ‘British Atlantic’ (a term recentlyadvanced by imperial and cultural historians) as his unit of analysis. The result is an originaland insightful six-chapter discussion of the core/periphery relations that articulated and frag-mented British North America. Ranging impressively over scattered American, Canadian andBritish sources, and making excellent use of graphical information (there are 104 black and whiteillustrations in the book, including 49 computer-generated maps and diagrams), Hornsby seeks toshow that ‘this Atlantic world was far from being a uniform space or an homogenous system’(p. 2). He argues that early modern British America revolved primarily around two sorts of spacesand empires: first, an oceanic space, which he calls ‘the British Atlantic’, with the regions of New-foundland, Hudson Bay and the British West Indies becoming part of Britain’s maritime empire,dependent on metropolitan commercial investment, and based on staple trades (the cod fishery,fur trade and sugar plantations); and second, a territorially-oriented space and settler empirestretching from Maine to Georgia, which he calls ‘the American frontier’.

Hornsby takes many of his conceptual cues from Harold Innis’ staples thesis and F.J. Turner’sfrontier thesis (and subsequently elaborations and revisions of them). But he also draws on thework of many historical geographersdin fact, his assessment of how others in his field havehelped (and skewed) the development of an ‘Atlantic approach’ forms an important sub-text tothe study. Cole Harris’ work on the geographic influences on the formation of New World immi-grant societies is particularly important to Hornsby, in that it helps him to posit a third, interme-diate space connecting (and pulling apart) the two primary spaces/empires with which he isconcerned: a vast mid-Atlantic region of continental staples, agricultural frontiers, and colonialtowns (the New England cod fishery, Chespeake tobacco plantations, and rice plantations inthe Carolinas). The middle three chapters of the book examine how American elites reinvestedprofits from ‘the dynamic world of Atlantic commerce.in the equally expansive world of the con-tinental frontier’dprincipally in agriculture and urban real estatedand thereby ‘developed theirown economic, political and cultural integrity’ (pp. 124e25). A key conclusion to the book is thatsuch opportunity in a continental frontier, and the autonomy from Britain it facilitated, helps toexplain the bifurcation and demise of the British Atlantic, and provides more than just a commer-cial or agrarian backdrop to the War of Independence.

This book displays many of the finer qualities of North American historical geographyda coreconcern with land and livelihood, regional synthesis, and the cartographic depiction of geograph-ical patterns and change. The variegated connections between land, labour and capital lie at theheart of Hornsby’s historical geography. His analysis of such connections helps him to explainwhy urban growth was far more ‘stunted’, and urban society more stratified, in the staples regionsof Newfound/Nova Scotia and the West Indies, than they were in the mid-Atlantic, where thepublic buildings, mansions and churches of Boston, Philadelphia and otherdin time avowedly

685Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 648e688

‘American’dcities were ‘marks of capital accumulation and cultural confidence’ (p. 203). I wasalso largely convinced by Hornsby’s argument that different patterns of social change in the Brit-ish Atlantic and American frontier were rooted in the differential availability of agricultural land.

But I have a few niggles. First, while the question of power is flagged in the sub-title it is notexplicitly theorised (or fully indexed), and ideological and political power subsequently receiveconsiderably less attention than economic and social power. Hornsby could have fruitfully delvedinto questions of discourse and representation (there is now a large literature on their NorthAmerican colonial purchase) without losing sight of the material geographies that (rightly) matterto him. Second, while the book is publicised as a contribution to ‘comparative’ and ‘transnational’approaches to the past, we get only a slender understanding of what was going on in the metro-politan core and other parts of the British imperial world, or of how North American colonialprocesses impacted on Britain, London or Liverpool. Hornsby seems more interested in what hap-pened to metropolitan ideas, capital and colonists once they got to British North America than inwhere they came from, and more interested in land than in the oceanic circuits and spaces thatshaped metropolitan/colonial connections and asymmetries. This book is very much about colo-nial North America (with port towns as key metropolitan/colonial break of bulk points, if youwill), and less fully about a British Atlantic world. On the other hand, and mercifully, Hornsbymitigates the metropolitan bias in many recent works on the British Atlantic. Read thus, thisbook reveals that the ‘Atlantic approach’ he sees his work as a part of is struggling to bring metro-pole and colony into a coeval and integrated analytical field. Finally, historians and specialists willprobably carp about the peoples and problematics that Hornsby pushes to one side: how BritishNorth America was backed into a French and Spanish colonial presence (which is only really dealtwith at the end of the book); and particularly, perhaps, native people. Lines such as, ‘To be sure,native people had to be dispossessed. but overall there was enormous potential’ in the agricul-tural frontier, do little to assuage the impression that I picked up that Hornsby views native peo-ple and an ‘Amerindian approach’ as playing unimportant roles in the advance and study ofBritish settlement and trade (p. 175).

But while the book does not quite live up to all of the words on its dust jacket, let us not dwellon its silences and limitations. What Hornsby does provide is a lucid and persuasive synthesis ofsome basic geographical differences and cleavages that made (and unmade) British NorthAmerica.

Daniel ClaytonUniversity of St Andrews, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.04.017

Richard Armstrong,ACompulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the AncientWorld, Ithaca and London,Cornell University Press, 2005, US$35.00 hardback.

Classics departments are ‘survivals’ e to use a word much beloved of psychoanalysis. They arelike fragments broken off European pre-war culture, which have somehow persisted into the pres-ent. In this book Richard Armstrong, a Classics professor at the University of Houston,