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New Book Bulletins
The ‘Door of the Seas and the Key to the Universe’
Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640-1750
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz
ISBN: 0-231-50373-3
electronic
Columbia University Press 2001
$49.50
“Gallup-Diaz has indeed produced a masterful work of electronic scholarship.”
– American Historical Review
This treatise, on of one the most hotly contested regions of Latin America, tells the story of indigenous peoples’ relations to Europeans and how both the principal Indian group, the Kuna, and the Europeans were affected and altered by the contact. Drawing on manuscript sources from Scotland, England, and Spain, the author demonstrates how native social and political institutions were altered and how Europeans were forced to make indigenous people an integral part of their empires. The great strength of the book is its engagement with ethnohistorical approaches and the use of historical documentation to establish cultural dynamics and relationships. Gallup-Diaz is able to present the Kuna as active players in their own history, able to create new forms of leadership out of the process of contact, enabling them to survive.
About the Author
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1999. He is assistant professor of History at Bryn Mawr College, where he teaches on the history of the early modern Atlantic World. His current research explores the development of autonomous African and indigenous communities in Panamá and Suriname during the period of colonization.