Burchardt, Hans‐Jürgen and Leinius, Johanna (eds.) (2022) (Post‐)Colonial Archipelagos: Comparing the Legacies of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 370 pp. £40.43 pbk, £80.97 hbk.

On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus paved the way for the transatlantic slave trade; as each island was increasingly forced to compete with other European island colonies, new forms of exploitation emerged. One consequence of his so-called ‘discovery’ was that disparate regions were pitted against each other, among them the Caribbean and the Pacific. The so-called ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ heralded a long, painful period of plunder and enslavement, contributing to ongoing impoverishment. For many who live in the three countries compared in Hans-Jürgen Burchardt and Johanna Leinius's edited volume (Post-)colonial Archipelagos: Comparing the Legacies of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, staying at home is undesirable. Understanding the unique conditions of postcoloniality on these islands requires a form of archipelagic thinking that facilitates the identification of similarities among Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines resulting from their interconnection from the fifteenth century to the present. Significantly, contributors reject a reductive focus on the local, or on the United States, in favour of acknowledging the role that Spanish colonialism played in setting the stage for the inequities that characterise all three countries today. The volume is interdisciplinary, with contributors from fields including history, sociology and international studies. This multivocality allows for an understanding of the roots of contemporary inequities in the unique political economies that developed in the wake of colonialist-imperialist projects and socio-cultural entrenchment of elitism, racism and sexism. Political economy and the proliferation of bigotry are interrelated since systems of enslavement under the Spanish sparked negative attitudes toward Indigenous and African people. Successive waves of migration witnessed the development of new hierarchies and systemic discrimination. The transregional character of the analyses in (Post-)colonial Archipelagos have the added benefit of shedding light on the consequences of the complex interplay between political, economic and cultural registers. At the same time, the contributors acknowledge the risks associated with overstating the importance of Spanish colonialism. Spanish administration of island colonies not only took different shapes depending on the colony but also shifted in accordance with the period. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain profited from trade; by the eighteenth century, however, competition among colonies played a significant role in reshaping their political economies. In chapter 1, entitled ‘Of Archipelagic Connections and Postcolonial Divides’, Johanna Leinius and Hans-Jürgen Burchardt remark: ‘we take inspiration from historical approaches, postcolonial studies, and the modernity/coloniality approach but scrutinise whether the hypothesis that colonial structures have persisted can be upheld in the face of a diligent historical and transregional comparison’ (p. 10). The volume is divided into four parts, the first focusing on methodology and a global analysis of the relationship between the three countries; the second on political economy; the third on the hierarchisation of differences; and the fourth on the legacies of Spanish colonialism. Within parts II and III, chapters move from analyses of the islands under Spanish colonialism to analyses of the effects of United-States colonialism. Burchardt's final chapter, ‘Lessons Learned: The Legacies of Spanish Colonialism’, provides an overview of comparisons and argues for a material turn in postcolonial studies. He warns against Eurocentric overgeneralisations about capitalism and concludes by advocating a postcolonial-structuralist approach to analyses of island societies (p. 348). One pitfall in postcolonial studies is a tendency to ignore the effects of economic rent on ‘the configuration of structures, institutions, and models of collective action’ (Burchardt, p. 348). A striking similarity among the three countries is precisely their economic dependence on tourism, agribusiness, remittances from the diaspora, and/or the international contracting of skilled workers. Burchardt notes that despite the existence of skilled labour in Cuba, for example, only a small portion of household income comes from wages (p. 327). In chapter 6, Emilio Pantojas-Garcia describes Puerto Rico as ‘a postcolonial colony characterised by an absentee ruling class, a weak local entrepreneurial elite, and a rentier political class dependent on metropolitan transfers and subsidies to secure local dominance’ (p. 96). Teresa R. Melgar likewise emphasises the importance of rent in the Philippines, explaining that remittances from the diaspora make up a disproportionate amount of income (p. 144). Political-economic realities in turn help to shape different hierarchies of difference in each country through, for example, elitism, authoritarianism, modern slavery and the devaluation of work. Burchardt and Leinius's framing of analyses strengthens the case for transcending Marxist preoccupations with capital accumulation to consider the local elites who maintain rentier dynamics in the interests of increasing their own personal wealth. The inclusion of the Philippines, the outlier here geographically, may appear anomalous, but its inclusion is rationalised through careful delineations of similarities. The volume distinguishes between disparate imperial projects and the postcolonial colonialisms to which they gave rise as small islands were drawn into vast modern/colonial networks.

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