The Merchant John Askin: Furs and Empire at British Michilimackinac

Abstract

Justin M. Carroll's The Merchant John Askin is a refreshing addition to the literature on Great Lakes borderlands. While much attention is appropriately lavished on theories of space and place, indigeneity, and a reworking of the colonial and imperial paradigms, these discussions sometimes lapse into abstraction, risking loss of touch with the individual lives that might surprise and disrupt current trends. In the end, “remember[ing] Askin's life is to appreciate how he twisted, tied, and bound competing and contradictory impulses of trade and empire into a workable understanding of what it meant to be a successful British subject and merchant in the Great Lakes” (p. 147). Carroll structures his book not unlike a biography, but unlike most biographers he is not shy about plumbing the depths of Askin's humiliations during some of the Great Lakes region's most jolting episodes, such as Pontiac's War (1763–1765), the American Revolution, and countless other moments involving simple imperial personnel changes. The book takes up three central strategies that help explain Askin's life and, by extension, the fading British Empire in North America. First, Askin emerges as a man of contacts who never lost touch with important figures in the British military who could help him avoid the isolation and stressors that came with trying to pick up the pieces of defunct French trading patterns. Second, Askin represents the localized, often-ruinous propensity to invest in the infrastructure of the region—a ploy to build his status and further his interests in the fur trade. Third, Askin formed kinship networks that eased his movements within a variety of ethnic spaces. Carroll appropriately references Richard White's The Middle Ground (1992) to explicate his focus on kinship and to make room for Askin as a figure who lived in the politically and economically unstable Great Lakes region.