Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the lost tribes of Israel

Abstract

that were inscribed in the social and political rules of Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan societies, and lastly by the persistence of corsairing in the Mediterranean. Such challenges are further analyzed in a third part, discussing developments between 1651 and 1683. A last part focuses on gift giving, and the apparent “cultural incommensurability” (160) between Maghrib and western European societies. Heinsen-Roach does well in pointing out that contemporary European commentaries on the inferior status of tributary relationships when compared to self-perceived European ideas on diplomatic ties fits within a developing discourse of European superiority, and the book is very successful in its attempt to steer away from the superiority discourse to arrive at a more nuanced history. The focus on the imprint left by the North African Regencies on European diplomatic developments is what makes the work interesting and important, but it also points to a common problem in studying history in or of the Islamic world in the early modern period – a lack of source material. The author relies on important primary source material, both published sources as well as archival documents – but these are all European. Preservation difficulties and linguistical barriers surely render the inclusion of North African and Ottoman material in the analysis complicated, but the ability to distill the Maghrib point of view more directly from such material – if available – would have provided even more evidence for Heinsen-Roach’s important claims.