Book Review

In Elusive Empires, Eric Hinderaker compares the French, British, and American experiences in colonizing the Ohio Valley and interacting with its Native American inhabitants. Central to Hinderaker's analysis is his conception of empires as "negotiated systems" (xi) built upon intercultural exchange rather than centralized policymaking and bureaucratic administration. The book, therefore, focuses on the experiences of people in the field of contact along this frontier--fur traders, Indians, settlers, land speculators--rather than on rulers and officials in Paris, London, Philadelphia, or Washington, D.C.	1
In the first two-thirds of the book, Hinderaker shows that empire was indeed elusive for the French and British in the Ohio Valley. This region was highly prized by both powers for the gateway it provided to the continent's interior, and the French and British had remarkably similar plans for it. Since the days of Francis Parkman, historians have generally stressed the differences in the French and British imperial designs, comparing the French endeavors in fur trading and missionary work to the British efforts in agricultural development and immigration. This book reminds us that when it came to the Ohio Valley, both sides coveted this region for the same reasons: commerce and land. The fur trade held the promise of mercantilist profits for the mother country, while the temperate climate, rich soil, and interlaced river system offered an opportunity to establish a settler society that would replicate the economy and social hierarchy of Europe.	2
Through a deft comparison of the colonization efforts of the French in the Illinois country and the English in Pennsylvania, Hinderaker reveals why plans conceived in Paris and London so often unraveled in America. Indian and European fur traders were too autonomous to be managed by royal officials or to have their private interests subordinated to imperial ends. As Hinderaker puts it, "the world of intercultural trade had a logic and dynamic all its own, which functioned independently of the colonial imperative and consistently defeated the efforts of imperial administrators to control it or direct it into useful channels" (45). Likewise, the "retro-feudal fantasies" (79) of many New World developers, such as William Penn, were defeated by what Hinderaker calls "the alchemy of property" (134): the temptation among settlers and land speculators to pursue private profit at the expense of state interests. This quest for commercial advantage even affected those colonists charged with carrying out imperial designs--such as the British Indian agents William Johnson and George Croghan--souring European-Indian relations and further eroding state power in the process.	3
According to Hinderaker, the United States succeeded in creating empire where the French and British failed only by reversing the strategy and assumptions of those two powers. The last third of the book explains how the United States created an "empire of liberty" (185) in the Ohio Valley by giving free rein to the commercial land markets and individual ambitions that sprouted there after the American Revolution. The federal government enacted legislation in the 1780s that tacitly denied Indian title to the land, legitimized the claims of settlers, and provided a mechanism for moving the region from dependent territorial status into statehood. The cost for this new kind of empire was paid in European-Indian relations. Whereas French and British imperial authorities had always inserted themselves as mediators between settlers and natives, the United States gave license to its citizens to dispossess the Indians and to demonize them with a new rhetoric of racial difference that would shape the Indians' fate throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1760s, the British crown had used its army to prevent settlers from crossing the boundary line between colonial and Indian territory established by the Proclamation of 1763; thirty years later, the United States was using its army to conquer the Ohio Indians so its citizens could push westward in safety. This policy won the settlers' loyalty to the new federal government, but it denied the Indians any meaningful place in the American republic.	4
While Hinderaker has organized the book around the French, British, and American colonial experiences, his narrative pays attention throughout to this region's native inhabitants. Indeed, his definition of empire as a negotiated system seems designed specifically to take into account the Indians' role in this process. Their stubborn autonomy in the face of imperial authority is what ultimately made empire so elusive for France and Britain in the Ohio country, and only after the United States had broken militant native resistance could it claim dominion there. Hinderaker also does an excellent job of detailing how European contact challenged Indian communities and the ways in which Indians adapted their spiritual beliefs, village politics, and economies to deal with these newcomers.	5
Elusive Empires is part of a new historiography of the Ohio country that has taken shape since the publication of Richard White's The Middle Ground in 1991. In weighing equally the experiences of Indians and Europeans, it describes the process of empire building from the bottom up rather than the top down. It also recasts the Ohio Valley in the late colonial and early national periods as a crucible of cultural conflict and racial ideology rather than the laboratory of democracy that historians have so often depicted it as in the past. This book provides a well-written, analytical narrative of the Ohio Valley's colonization that will prove useful to anyone wishing to understand how the meeting of native and European peoples in that region produced a foundation for American empire in the nineteenth century.	6
Timothy J. Shannon Gettysburg College

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.