H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (February, 2000)
Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds. _Empire and Others: British
Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850_. David Ludden, gen.
ed. Critical Histories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1999 (paper), ISBN 0-8122-1699-7.
Reviewed for H-AMINDIAN by Gregory Evans Dowd,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Department of History, University of
Notre Dame
Identity Crisis
According to Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, editors of this volume
and authors of its introduction, there is a need for greater
trans-Atlantic dialogue about British imperial history. North
American scholars, they suggest, can offer to British scholars the
experience of having incorporated the history of American Indians
within "their own national history," while British scholars and
those in the Commonwealth can provide American Indian and American
colonial historians with comparative perspectives. The book is the
product of a 1997 conference in London. A heady whirlwind tour of
three centuries of global history, it includes eighteen essays by
twenty authors from Manitoba to Jamaica to Sydney in less than four
hundred pages of text. The result is unexpectedly exhilarating,
though like many great trips, it leaves one also with a sense of
wonder at missed opportunities.
Including the introduction, three sweeping essays invite the reader
into this vast imperial world. Daunton and Halpern submit that the
concept of race became central to the construction of a British
identity after the middle of the eighteenth century, a point which
the essay by C. A. Bayly supports. The editors call for more study
of capitalism, which, they persuasively argue, has been neglected in
the scholarly shift toward the investigation of identity. While not
an analyst of capitalism as such, Bayly, like the editors, looks for
the forces behind the British quest for empire, and finds them in
the exigencies of British military finance, which drove the state
from the Seven Years' War through the Napoleonic era. He also lays
out trans-global chronologies for the development of racism and,
contrapuntally, humanitarianism. Philip D. Morgan's essay is less
concerned than Bayly's, Halpern's, or Daunton's with causality and
process, and seeks rather to establish a taxonomy of encounters, and
even -- skeptical that one epoch shared attributes across the globe
even within the British empire -- a taxonomy of chronologies. Some
contacts are fleeting, others become regular, often they become
violent; the moments of transition from one type to the next will
vary from place to place, but the study of one may well inform us
about another. The editors agree that such comparative history has
value, not the least because it provides historians with sets of
alternatives to the course history has taken in any one region.
The rest of the essays get down to particular colonial regions and
to case studies. Most of them discuss British imperial thought and
white racism. Kathleen Brown treats the importance of American
Indians to the developing English interest in skin color to about
1650. Louis Breen investigates a clash in late seventeenth-century
Massachusetts between popular Indian-hating and a more tolerant,
cosmopolitan (if somewhat self interested) approach. Ruth Smandych
and Anne McGillivray discuss the European fascination with
permissive Indian child-rearing, the British traders' adaptation to
those practices, and the colonial state's desire to impose
discipline. Heather Goodall's piece on Australia, Catherine Hall's
on Jamaica, Andrew Porter's on South Africa and the Pacific, and
Andrew Bank's on South Africa all treat the changing approaches of
British imperial, humanitarian or evangelical enterprises. Although
they differ incrementally about the exact chronology, these essays
for the most part work together very well, establishing a brief,
vexed, British humanitarian flirtation with the idea of full
equality after 1820, and a rapid retreat from it before 1860.
Madhavi Kale's (and to some degree Hall's) essay, acknowledging the
flirtation, discusses the persistence of hierarchies within the
British anti-slavery society, leaving us wondering how influential
were the few advocates of equality. Colonizers, far more than the
indigenous peoples, are the subjects of this volume, especially of
the essays that do not treat North America. Indeed two patterns
suggest that historians of North America look more to indigenous
peoples than do those who study other continents. First, of the six
authors who examine in any detail indigenous agency, five explore
North America. Peter Way evocatively describes regular soldiers' and
Indian warriors' mutual influences upon one another in the Seven
Years' War.
Greg O'Brien and Nathaniel Sheidley separately reveal the role
indigenous cultural constructions of leadership and gender played in
their negotiations with the British in the Southeast. Ruth Wallis
Herndon, Jean O'Brien, and Anne Marie Plane independently bring into
focus Indian efforts to cope with New England governments that
increasingly denied the natives' existence. The sixth essay, by
Hilary Beckles, is the exception that proves the rule, for though
not on North America, it concerns American Indians: the Karifunas
(Caribs) of the West Indies.
The second pattern involves identity in a more prosaic sense than
that conveyed by this collection. We meet here roughly two hundred
eighty individuals with names, of whom some two-hundred- twenty are
either Europeans or European-descended settlers, four are
twentieth-century politicians, seven are Afro-Jamaicans, five are
Caribbean natives, two are Australian Aborigines, one is an
African-born freed slave, and, strikingly, forty-three are North
American Indians (including two whose fathers were Britons). In
other words, historians of North American and Caribbean Indians
record individual names, while historians of the rest of the
"empire," who nevertheless lace their articles with the names of
Britons, do not much bother with the names of indigenous persons.
This is not so much a criticism as an observation; in a volume that
is so dedicated to identity, the attention to the names of
indigenous individuals on one continent and its attendant islands,
and the absence of individual names (unless "British") elsewhere,
reveals a sharp difference between English- language scholarly
traditions in each hemisphere. In the Western Hemisphere, scholars
attend more to the indigenous "experience" -- which requires a name
-- while in the Eastern they work harder to isolate broad historical
"processes" and workable chronologies -- which require more
attention to such impersonal forces as military finance, the drive
for wealth, and the massive elaboration of racist feeling. Giving
us both traditions, this volume enriches the revived field of
British imperial history. Let us hope for more such encounters.
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Louis Proyect
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