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

by Richard White

• ISBN13: 9780521424608
• ISBN10: 0521424607
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-09-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book 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 virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually conprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the 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.

Author Biography

Richard White is Professor of History at the University of Washington.

Table of Contents

List of abbreviations

Introduction

1. Refugees: a world made of fragments

2. The middle ground

3. The fur trade

4. The alliance

5. Republicans and rebels

6. The clash of empires

7. Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground

8. The British alliance

9. The contest of villagers

10. Confederacies

11. The politics of benevolence

Epilogue

Index.