Empire And Others: British Encounters With Indigenous Peoples 1600-1850

Much has been written about the forging of a British identity in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the multiple kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. But the process also ran across the Irish sea and was played out in North America and the Caribbean. In the process, the indigenous peoples of North America, the Caribbean, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand were forced to redefine their identities. This text integrates the history of these areas with British and imperial history. With contributions from both sides of the Atlantic, each chapter deals with a different aspect of British encounters with indigenous peoples in Colonial America and includes, for example, sections on "Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race" and "Hunting and the Politics of Masculinity in Cherokee treaty-making, 1763-1775". This book should be of particular interest to postgraduate students of Colonial American history and early modern British history.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements -- Notes on contributors -- 1 Introduction: British identities, indigenous peoples and the empire /Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern -- 2 The British and indigenous peoples, 1760—1860: power, perception and identity /C. A. Bayly -- 3 Encounters between British and "indigenous" peoples, c. 1500-c. 1800 /Philip D. Morgan -- 4 Native Americans and early modern concepts of race /Kathleen Brown -- 5 Praying with the enemy: Daniel Gookin, King Philip's War and the dangers of intercultural mediatorship /Louise A. Breen -- 6 The cutting edge of culture: British soldiers encounter Native Americans in the French and Indian war /Peter Way -- 7 Protecting trade through war: Choctaw elites and British occupation of the Floridas /Greg O'Brien -- 8 Hunting and the politics of masculinity in Cherokee treaty-making, 1763-75 /Nathaniel Sheidley -- 9 Racialization and feminization of poverty in early America: Indian women as "the poor of the town" in eighteenth-century Rhode Island /Ruth Wallis Herndon -- 10 "They are so frequently shifting their place of residence": land and the construction of social place of Indians in colonial Massachusetts /Jean O'Brien -- 11 Legitimacies, Indian identities and the law: the politics of sex and the creation of history in colonial New England /Ann Marie Plane -- 12 Images of aboriginal childhood: contested governance in the Canadian West to 1850 /Russell Smandych and Anne McGillivray -- 13 Authority under challenge: Pikampul land and Queen Victoria's law during the British invasion of Australia /Heather Goodall -- 14 The genocide policy in English—Karifuna relations in the seventeenth century /Hilary Beckles -- 15 William Knibb and the constitution of the new Black subject /Catherine Hall -- 16 "When the saints came marching in": the Anti-Slavery Society and Indian indentured migration to the British Caribbean /Madhavi Kale -- 17 North American experience and British missionary encounters in Africa and the Pacific, c. 1800-50 /Andrew Porter -- 18 Losing faith in the civilizing mission: the premature decline of humanitarian liberalism at the Cape, 1840-60 /Andrew Bank -- Index.

About the Author :
Martin Daunton was formerly the Astor Professor of British History at University College London, before moving to the chair of economic history at Cambridge in 1997. He is the author of Progress and poverty: an economic and social history of Britain, 1700—1850, and is currently completing a book on the politics of British taxation from 1815 to the present. Rick Halpern is Reader in the History of the United States. His most recent publication is Down on the killing floor: Black and white workers in Chicago's packinghouses, 1904—1954. He is currently working on a comparative study of race and labour in the sugar industries of the United States and South Africa.

Review :
'Due to the tremendous scope of the book, there is something for everyone interested in the broad themes a major strength is, undoubtedly, the sophisticated research and the scholarship apparent throughout the book.' - Social History Bulletin