Reviewed by Peter Way | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Peter Way | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Peter Way, Bowling Green State University

The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000. By Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton. New York: Viking, 2005. 544 pages. $27.95 (cloth), $16.00 (paper).
A mythology persists that America has always abhorred militarism, instead offering refuge to those escaping such tyranny and going to war only as a last resort to defend liberty. In part because of these beliefs, the Revolution, Civil War, and World War II, in particular, have resonated strongly in the national consciousness, whereas the Seven Years' War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War, all tainted by imperialistic expansion, have stirred fewer memories. Yet these conflicts directly led to crises of governance that necessitated the more vaunted wars of liberation. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton have sought to draft "a history of North America that emphasizes wars and their effects and stresses the centrality of imperial ambitions to the development of the United States" (xiii). They have structured their book both chronologically and biographically, covering five time periods and crafting capsule biographies of eight individuals to personify the complex historical changes they document. The book constitutes neither a traditional military history nor a general survey of American history. Rather they ruminate on the strained relationship between militarism and liberty within North American history; clearly, this intellectual exercise was cultivated in the ground (zero) of 9/11 and harvested during the war in Iraq.	1
The authors first explore the life of Samuel de Champlain to reveal the pattern of warfare that developed from the "Age of Contact (the 1500s)," when the "radically different systems of war, trade, and empire" (xv–xvi) of Europe and the Americas collided. Just as Champlain was drawn into native practices of warfare, diplomacy, and social interaction that bound the French colonial project in reciprocal relations with les sauvages, Indian peoples' exposure to European technologies ensnared them in expanding circuits of warfare and commercial exchange. After the devastating Beaver Wars (French and Iroquois Wars) of the mid-seventeenth century, the French and their native allies established relations in which European gift giving and mediation established mutual cultural bonds to avert warfare and present a united front to counter the developing English-Iroquois axis. Such was Champlain's legacy, a bicultural world in which native autonomy balanced European expansion in uneasy equipoise.	2
William Penn pursued another objective in the "Age of Colonization and Conflict (c. 1600–1750)" (xv): the establishment of a community of religious tolerance in his colony of Pennsylvania, where relations with the Delaware Valley's native peoples would be based on "peace, fair trade, and liberality in dealing with Indians on terms that Indians found acceptable" (56). Given form by the treaty of 1682, this accommodationist strategy enabled Pennsylvania to expand without precipitating warfare with the Delaware and Shawnee until the mid-eighteenth century. The success of Penn's model, however, bore the seeds of its own destruction, as unhindered Euro-American expansion inevitably met the limits of Native Americans' capacity for retrenchment. When the great imperial war erupted in the 1750s, these peoples sided with the French.	. . .

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