In March 1645, a large number of Potiguara people from various regions of north-eastern Brazil gathered in the aldeamento (Indigenous settlements under colonial control or supervision) of Tapesserica on Itamaracá. The primary objectives of the assembly included the establishment of Indigenous câmaras (municipal councils) and deliberations on the law of native freedom. Notably, in this period, some Indigenous people in Brazil were still held as slaves in territories under Dutch jurisdiction. The Tapesserica Assembly produced a remonstrance (‘remonstrantie’), which was delivered to the Dutch government in Recife by the Potiguara. This article scrutinises the Potiguara Assembly, the earliest recorded Indigenous assembly in Brazil, and reconstructs its connections to Indigenous political culture predating the European arrival in Brazil. It explores the Indigenous perspective on the Dutch–Portuguese wars and demonstrates the role of the Potiguara as historical agents, navigating the complexities of conflict and decision-making processes that ultimately shaped their destiny.

On a November evening in 1618, the newly appointed governor of Virginia, George Yeardley, dined with James I at the royal hunting lodge in Newmarket, speaking to the king about his plans to turn Virginia into the English civil society investors had long promised it might become. One of Yeardley’s primary tasks was to inaugurate what has become known as the First General Assembly, held in Jamestown in 1619 in the heart of a region that its Powhatan inhabitants called Tsenacommacah. This article examines the assembly within the context of the Powhatan Chesapeake, examining how English attempts at establishing this meeting, ‘in the nature of a Parliament’, operated within a broader Indigenous political landscape. It considers some of the methodological challenges that historians face when writing about political assemblies in colonised spaces, arguing for the value of approaches that place a greater emphasis on Indigenous sources, knowledge and perspectives. A focus on material culture and archaeological remains, from embroidered deerskins to goffering irons, demonstrates how different claims to authority were tangibly imparted and contested, offering a more expansive archive of seventeenth-century transatlantic political culture.

This article explores the role of representative assemblies in the diverse territories of the early modern Spanish and Portuguese empires spanning the Americas, parts of Asia, and Africa. It begins with a concise overview of the Portuguese and Spanish representative assemblies, commonly referred to as the Cortes. The second section raises some preliminary questions about how the parliamentary culture brought by the Spanish and Portuguese to their overseas possessions shaped, and was shaped by, local understandings of political participation in institutions with a representational character. The third section examines the complex debate over the integration of representatives from overseas municipalities into the Castilian and Portuguese Cortes. The fourth and final section analyses the interaction between Iberian parliamentary culture and a range of Asian, Indigenous American, and African perspectives on participation in representative gatherings. The principal argument is that representative assemblies, the debates they generated, and their varying degrees of prominence, reflect the fundamental changes observed in the political and legal structure of the Portuguese and Spanish empires.

This article assesses the cultures of assembly in the Dutch global sphere of influence. It focuses on so-called landdagen (‘land days’), formal assemblies of Dutch provincial communities. While originating in the late medieval Low Countries, several such bodies were instituted in Dutch colonies in the seventeenth century. This article is the first to compare contemporary reflections on three such land days, namely that of the province of Guelders in the metropole, and those in New Netherland (North America) and Formosa (now Taiwan) in overseas territories. These three assemblies offer an illuminating case study, for, while differing in some respects, they possessed similar powers in the political structure of the Dutch Republic. This article examines how the Dutch traditions of assembly interacted and/or hybridised with other European parliamentary cultures and Indigenous traditions of assembly in overseas contexts. It argues that early modern Dutch perceptions of the genesis and functions of the landdagen reveal a pragmatic commingling of different assembly traditions, calculated to foster a shared sense of political community.