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Book Reviews
This is a wide-ranging and informative book which brings together twenty-one scholars to tackle as subject as vast as it is complex. From the outset it should be said that the editors have been successful in holding together a coherent volume, which, given the subject-matter, could have easily drifted off in different tangents. By comparing and contrasting the experience of the ‘colonised’ and the ‘colonisers’ over different areas and at different times, what emerges from this volume is the fact that the process was exceptionally diffuse and that, in the formation of identities, the boundaries were often blurred and constantly shifting. By deconstructing the traditional ‘national’ boundaries, the editors and contributors to this volume have brought the North American experience of encounter within the parameters of British history and at the same time, emphasised the amorphous nature of British identity by pointing out the sub-national and regional components inherent within British imperial expansion. North America features disproportionately in this volume, as one of the key objectives of the editors was to bring to a British audience the greater sophistication and pedigree of American historiography in the field of indigenous encounters. The quid pro quo was the possibility of alternative American chronologies within the wider experience of European expansion as a whole. On the whole, this trade-off, which was partially conditioned by the need to combine the Neale Colloquium in British History and the Commonwealth Fund Colloquium in American History, has worked well and the conference organisers are to be congratulated on taking a risk which has paid handsome dividends.
The book begins with two overview essays by Chris Bayly and Philip Morgan, which explore the formation of British and indigenous identities from imperial and New World perspectives. Bayly focuses on ideology and economics, while Morgan draws more on cultural perspectives. It is a successful marriage and although cultural studies and economics make unusual bedfellows, they are, by and large, integrated throughout the book. This is one of the volume’s most refreshing strengths as military, gender, cultural, political, social and economic historians enable the full historiographical toolkit to be used on the subject. The contrast of historical approaches and techniques helps to highlight the diffuse nature of indigenous encounters and promotes the necessary multiperspective dimension that is essential to understanding the cultural interactions of different peoples.
In a short review it is impossible to do justice to all the individual contributions, but the following might help convey the flavour of the book. Peter Way demonstrates how British, French and Native Americans combatants ‘forged’ their own shared culture of conflict with the adoption of enemy tactics and customs. Greg O’Brien highlights the importance of culture, custom and politics in the Choctaw Creek war during the British occupation of the Floridas. Whereas conventional accounts of the war have portrayed the British as instigators of a ‘divide and rule’ native war, O’Brien demonstrates that war was a necessary means of social cohesion for the Choctaw elite at a time of economic crisis. Catherine Hall explores the ways in which the Baptist missionary, William Knibb, sought to create the ‘new black subject’ in Jamaica, based on the promotion of British, Christian middle-class values. Andrew Porter demonstrates the considerable impact of transatlantic missionary endeavour in Africa and the Pacific where Christianity mattered more than British or American identities.
Arguably the one important issue which is missing from the volume is a detailed discussion of the nature of British ethnicity itself from a contemporary British per-spective. After all, this was the template from which comparisons and judgements were made. While the importance of Britain as a multinational state and the complexity this entails is given due recognition by most of the contributors, there remains an assumption that we know what it was. As Colin Kidd has recently demonstrated in his British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), the peopling of the world after Noah formed the key plank in the rise of ‘ethnic’ theology. While religion and missionary endeavour are discussed in the book, the baggage of early-modern ‘ethnic’ theology that was taken overseas is largely absent.
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