Reviews of Books

Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850. Edited by Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 400. $24.95 paper.)

We are becoming increasingly self-conscious over how historians of early America have contributed to the formation of national identity in the United States. As long as the inevitable emergence and destiny of the new republic was traced to the first arrival of English colonists, three centuries of European colonization in the Americas could easily be reduced to a prologue to American Independence. The exaggerated sense of continuity and familiarity once fostered by colonial history is finally being undermined by closer scrutiny of the dynamic and diverse experiences of peoples inhabiting North America from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century. Greater sensitivity to the construction of texts and narratives has also made a difference, thanks to the influence of literary criticism and cultural studies. Earliest contact between inhabitants of America and travelers from England, long represented as the beginning of Anglo-Americans' advance across a continent and of Native Americans' retreat, requires serious re-examination.	1
In Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America, Karen Kupperman boldly attempts to rescue English colonization in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century North America from its still familiar place in the national history of the United States. She captures the uncertainty of early colonial projects, interrogates the discrepancy between accounts produced by writers with and without firsthand experience, and suggests the role played by American Indians in the evolution of colonial experiences and narratives. The overall objective is "to recover this early period as it was lived, erasing as much as possible our knowledge of the ultimate growth of the settlements" (p. 14). Consequently, Kupperman brings us substantially closer to complexity in the earliest encounters between English colonists and Native Americans.	2
"As colonists and native peoples observed each other," Kupperman states in her introduction, "they thought in novel ways about their own identities" (p. 4). Indians and English explores this process by focusing on several features of cultural interpretation and interaction along the Atlantic seaboard. The book begins with the mixture of fear and anticipation that Elizabethan Englishmen felt on approaching American shores and shows how they hoped to learn as much about themselves as about the indigenous population. Kupperman notes the influence of Tacitus on early English colonizers, who identified with both the Germans and the Romans depicted in his record of ancient conquest. In the face of this ambivalence, American Indians also represented themselves to English invaders in ways that might serve their own material and ideological interests. Epidemics and other disruptive forces suddenly introduced by the European presence imposed severe stress on the stability of native societies and the effectiveness of their resistance.	. . .