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Narrett’s book takes a look at the intrigues that surrounded a portion of the Gulf coast in a period of unsettled transition. It’s far enough off the track of the usual topics of the colonial period to be nearly completely unfamiliar to me. But it’s surrounded by things a bit more familiar.

At the end of the Seven Years War, England acquired Florida from Spain, and broke it into two administrative parts: East and West Florida (with West Florida including the modern panhandle, southern Alabama and Mississippi, and a bit of modern Louisiana), while France secretly handed Louisiana over to Spain as something of an apology for getting them into this mess. This starts the 41-year period of the book, which examines the unsettled nature of power in the area, which comes to a close when the United States purchases Louisiana from revolutionary France, who’d effectively taken it off Spain again.

The main focus is West Florida, which became the main focus of British efforts in the area until they handed the Floridas back to Spain after the Revolutionary War, and the lower Mississippi river, which was already the focus, in one way or another, of all European settlement in the interior of the continent. There’s a few different tracks followed through the book, but the main one is of various individuals who try to make their fortunes in the area, generally by trying to influence the decision-making of one or more governments with promises, bribes, threats of invasion (and one or two actual invasions/raids), or tales of someone else preparing one.

The Indian tribes living in the interior of the region are discussed from the beginning, but don’t get a lot of focus, though they gain some at the end, as efforts to manipulate some of these groups joins the list above. More time is spent on groups of settlers (but at a remove that they don’t gain much more character than the Indians), and various government policies (most especially Spain’s attempts to keep its currency supply internal vs everyone else’s attempts to force open trade).

I’d like to have a bit more detail on the sizes of populations involved. There’s a little at the beginning, but an idea of the population shifts in the area as a whole, and a rundown of just what Indian tribes were there would have been informative. But, this isn’t a book about populations, it is about the individual efforts mentioned above (‘adventurism’) and how the situation let people make these attempts.

Crowley’s book on Venice is about the Stato da Mar, and as such, is exactly one of the things I’ve been on the lookout for.

The first section starts with Venice’s mercantile rise, and then goes into the story of the Fourth Crusade. He’s fairly neutral on everyone’s participation later on, but it’s interesting to see a version that’s sympathetic to Venice for the beginning of it all. He doesn’t quite out-and-out blame Villehardouin for it either, but his over-inflated request for transport to the Middle East is the beginning of it all. Crowley points out that Venice effectively stopped all trade for a year to gather and build sufficient transport for the promised crusading army, which put them in a profit-or-perish position when the bill came due.

The second part talks about the small empire Venice picked up from this… and the long series of wars with Genoa, including a fairly lengthy description of the War of Chioggia. This is even more the centerpiece of the book than the Fourth Crusade’s taking of Constantinople, and almost felt like it got a little drawn out, though I’m sure that’s nothing compared to how the Venetians felt. At any rate, the entire subject is one I wish I could find more on in English.

The last part of the book is on Venice’s thankless war against the Ottomans, and is every bit as interesting as the rest of the book. As ever, there are interesting missed opportunities, but here the entire conflict is one I don’t know much of. Certainly, the loss of Negroponte and the Battle of Zonchio aren’t anything I recall hearing of before. At any rate, Crowley concentrates on this part, and finishes in 1503, before things like the loss of Crete, and finishes with some prescient quotes from a couple of Venetians on what the Portuguese discovery of a route to India was going to do to trade.

As ever, this is a very engaging narrative history, and is full of anecdotes and quotes to help it all come alive. This time his subject is one that gets less attention in English, which makes even better.