The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815

by Richard White

• ISBN13: 9780521183444
• ISBN10: 0521183448
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-01
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

Author Biography

Richard White holds the Margaret Byrne Professorship in American History at Stanford University and is widely regarded as one of the nation's leading scholars in three related fields: the American West, Native American history, and environmental history.

Table of Contents

List of abbreviations	p. ix
Preface to the twentieth anniversary edition	p. xi
Introduction	p. xxv
Refugees: a world made of fragments	p. 1
The middle ground	p. 50
The fur trade	p. 94
The alliance	p. 142
Republicans and rebels	p. 186
The clash of empires	p. 223
Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground	p. 269
The British alliance	p. 315
The contest of villagers	p. 366
Confederacies	p. 413
The politics of benevolence	p. 469
Epilogue: Assimilation and otherness	p. 518
Index	p. 525
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