Empire, Land, and the Construction of Racism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800

Abstract

Over the last fifteen years, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Ohio Country and western Great Lakes have come into focus as scholars probe the interactions of the Indians, French, and British who lived, traded, farmed, and explored the region. No longer on the far side of the historian's frontier, the Ohio Country, one book at a time, is ceasing to be much of any frontier at all. As scholars uncover and air a wealth of information that twenty years ago was, for most historians, quite unimaginable in its richness, the challenge remains of finding the language and analytic tools to explain its meaning. It is why Richard White's middle ground, as a concept to explain diverse multi-ethnic relationships, proved so immediately attractive and has entrenched itself in the language we use.1 Historians have been less successful in connecting the trans-Appalachian West to the history of the seaboard colonies, which for so long have dominated our understanding of early modern North America. We can find examples of the middle ground of cultural accommodation from Nova Scotia to Florida, but we are just now tackling the problem of conceptualizing the linkages among the Ohio Country, the Atlantic seaboard and St. Lawrence colonies, European imperial states, and the post-1776 United States. It is this challenge that Eric Hinderaker takes on in Elusive Empires. Hinderaker defines his organizing concept, as processes [more] than structures, and more as creations of the people immediately engaged than of policy directives (p. xi). Three models of empire, in his rendering, competed for dominance in the Ohio Valley: empires of commerce, empires of land, and an empire of liberty, with the last being the most successful and the most racially exclusive. While Hinderaker acknowledges that these three imperial types are not mutually exclusive, he uses commerce, land, and liberty as economic, political, and ideological systems that Europeans and