Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America by Matthew Kruer

Abstract

From 1675 to 1685, Kruer argues in Time of Anarchy, a “tide of insurrection” swept across England’s North American colonies as frontier settler patriarchs, driven by a combination of conspiratorial fear and material danger, withdrew from the political compact of empire (3). The most significant catalyst for these popular revolts, Kruer compellingly demonstrates, was one of eastern North America’s least understood, and most sparingly documented, indigenous nations: the Susquehannock.The raiding of Susquehannocks in Maryland, Virginia, and Albemarle (North Carolina) wrought popular protest against colonial governments for failing to prevent or adequately respond to frontier violence. Confusion surrounding the identity of raiders, and the perception that government inaction was motivated by alignment with the interests of Native Americans generally over those of settlers, further encouraged conspiracies that imagined coalitions of tributary Algonquian nations, foreign enemies, and complicit oligarchs combined against white Protestant colonists. These conspiracies nourished rebellions—most notably Bacon’s Rebellion—that fomented violent acts of racial hatred against Natives. Such acts provoked further frontier bloodshed and generated a “feedback loop between Anglo-Indian violence and colonial crisis” that challenged central authority in colonial polities for a decade—the Time of Anarchy (201).Time of Anarchy is both an ethnohistory of the Susquehannock people and a political history of English North America in the Restoration era. The work succeeds marvellously in each aspect. The range of themes organizing the work’s seven chapters—“emotional cultures, rumors, migrations, conspiracy theory, peacemaking, captivity, and racial thinking”—marks Time of Anarchy as one of the most methodologically sophisticated treatments of late seventeenth-century America ever to appear (7).Each chapter produces valuable insights, and Kruer’s writing on conspiracies and captivity is particularly novel. He distinguishes conspiracies from rumors by asserting that the former contain “narrative emplotment, with genre conventions” (117); identifies several conspiracies that periodically convulsed through colonial America; and frankly concludes that the most pervasive of them all, that of Franco-Native papist collusion, was based on knowledge of “actual projects” (127). On captivity, Kruer effectively proves that the Susquehannock, while living as supposed hostages among the Iroquois, remained an influential nation whose interests, grievances, and expertise largely directed “Northern Indian” raiding on southern frontiers during the early 1680s. This fascinating conclusion points tantalizingly toward further research in Iroquoian identity and politics during the early historic period, a once vibrant field that has been theoretically staid for several decades.Although the work proceeds in a roughly linear fashion, its thematic organization does render Time of Anarchy’s central thread—the anarchic feedback cycle described above—somewhat difficult to track and assess across time. Discussion of Culpepper’s Rebellion in North Carolina, the critical example of the cycle in motion outside of Virginia and after Bacon’s Rebellion, is scattered across three small sections (136–138, 163–166, 203–204) over the same number of chapters. Challenging details of this revolt, such as the fact that retaliatory strikes against the Susquehannock were in this instance carried out by proprietary rather than rebellious settler forces, are included but not subjected to analysis in this abbreviated treatment. More concerning for broad applications of the anarchic cycle, the two revolts in Maryland that followed Bacon’s Rebellion—the Clifts uprising and Fendall’s Rebellion—were comparatively merely riotous affairs of several dozen agitators. Kruer describes the former as having failed to “inspire a mass rising,” (122) and the latter as an “ignominious repeat” (214) of this flop. The narrative is more attentive to the flurry of frightened, hyperbolic writings that these tumults evoked from colonial officials than to the paltry material scale of the unrest, an emphasis that is perhaps due to its thematic focus on conspiracy. Readers are ultimately left wanting for a detailed explanation of why frontier raiding, conspiracies, and racial hatred produced Bacon’s Rebellion, but no other sustained, massive insurrections.Time of Anarchy is the sort of book that enables such granular critiques of its subject matter through its comprehensive, empirical, and edifying presentation of relevant evidence. Historians of Iroquoian peoples and Stuart Empire will undoubtedly consult its pages for many years to come, and they will be well rewarded for the effort.