#  Herzog, Tamar - Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas 

 





December 11, 2014

 

 

   ![herzog_book.jpg](/sites/g/files/omnuum9191/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/history_winter_reading_list/files/herzog_book.jpg?itok=NiUYi9yb) 

 

Tamar Herzog. Harvard University Press, 2014  
[Publisher's Link](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674735385) *Frontiers of Possession* asks how territorial borders were established in Europe and the Americas during the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are largely determined by military conflicts and treaties. Focusing on Spanish and Portuguese claims in the New and Old Worlds, **Tamar Herzog** reconstructs the different ways land rights were negotiated and enforced, sometimes violently, among people who remembered old possessions or envisioned new ones: farmers and nobles, clergymen and missionaries, settlers and indigenous peoples. [More...](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674735385)

Sort      ![herzog-5123_0.jpg](/sites/g/files/omnuum9191/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/history_winter_reading_list/files/herzog-5123_0.jpg?itok=vjYu5XR-) 

 

 

  **[Tamar Herzog](http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/tamar-herzog)  
Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor**

 Tamar Herzog's work centers on the relationship between Spain, Portugal, Portuguese and Spanish America and the ways by which Iberian societies changed as a result of their involvement in a colonial project.

 Her first set (of four) books examined the working of colonial institutions in everyday situations. It included an analysis of the relationship between legal norms and social and political practices, and was mainly concerned with the way institutions and normative orders responded to changing circumstances, and to material and symbolic constraints. Her fifth book dealt with the way individuals negotiated being members of both local and kingdom communities, and with how immigrants became citizens, and citizens were transformed in outsiders. Her latest book examines the formation of the border between Spain and Portugal in both Europe and the Americas. Rather than a political, military or diplomatic history, it analyzes how boundaries were formed on the ground by neighbors and how the right to land and the use of territory were discussed, negotiated, obtained or denied. [Read more...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/therzog/home)

 

 





 

 

 



 

 

 Share on:- [     Facebook ](#)
- [     Twitter ](#)
- [     Linkedin ](#)