Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America

McDonnell (The Politics of War), associate professor of history at the University of Sydney, deploys impeccable research skills to challenge the “middle grounds” historical interpretation of Native American–European encounters. He reveals how the Anishinaabeg, a Great Lakes tribe that has received little attention from outside chroniclers of the 17th and 18th centuries, treated the arriving French and English as minor characters in a long-standing series of tribal rivalries. McDonnell opens with a compelling account of the politics and culture of the region, already riven by indigenous competition and warfare when the French arrived in the 17th century, and introduces Charles Michel Mouet de Langlade and his mixed-race family. In 1752, de Langlade led an attack on a Miami Indian village in the Ohio Valley that set the stage for the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), which “has long been mistakenly called ‘the French and Indian War’ ” and which pitted Native Americans and French and English settlers against one another for control of the area. With a fascinating reexamination of the political, military, and economic details of the war, as well as a stunning final chapter on the American Revolution and the meaning of (in)dependence, McDonnell admirably expands readers’ understanding of “Indian country on its own terms.” Maps & illus. (Dec.)