Reviewed by: At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 Nicole Eustace At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763. By Jane T. Merritt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. In At the Crossroads: Indians& Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763, Jane Merritt offers a compelling look at life in the fractured and often fractious world of frontier Pennsylvania. The plural “empires” of her title provide the key to her perspective. Merritt sets up an implicit contrast with the recent prior work of Timothy Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire, The Albany Congress of 1754 (Cornell, 2000), which considers local, provincial, and imperial influences on the Albany Congress, but ultimately emphasizes the overweening power of the British Empire. Merritt, by contrast, uses her longer study of several decades of cross-cultural colonial interaction to focus on smaller groups of neighbors, kin, and competitors in the Pennsylvania hinterlands. Merritt signals her approach when she argues of the Seven Years War, “however much imperial politics or economics drove the war, for Indians and whites on the frontier it was very personal” (178). Her work closely examines Indians’ daily interactions with numerous empires and elements of empire, from German Moravians, English Quakers, English Anglicans, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, to three separate Delaware language groups and Six Nations of Iroquois. Indeed, she could almost have based her title on that of another recent book, Ann Marie Plane’s Colonial Intimacies (Cornell, 2000), and called her work “Intimate Empires.” However, such a title would have obscured her central point: despite long years of close connection, both Indians and Europeans ultimately gave greater loyalty to distant empires than to those with whom they shared a daily coexistence. Merritt organizes her study both topically and chronologically into four major sections. In the first, on the limits of empire, she demonstrates how weak imperial infrastructure and internal factionalism combined to allow both Indians and Europeans living on the Pennsylvania frontier early in the century a good deal of autonomy. Trade provided one principle point of contact, with Native American kin alliances and traditions of reciprocity coinciding somewhat uneasily with Euro-American market economics. In this section and throughout, transatlantic connections and French competition are assumed but not described, an omission that makes some sense here but is something of a drawback in the book as a whole. In her excellent second section, on religious life through mid century, Merritt details Indian efforts to counter the stresses brought on by accommodation and adaptation. Plumbing a wealth of new source material from the Moravian Mission Records, she argues for the existence of an “Indian Great Awakening” synergized by native revitalization efforts and Moravian teachings, both of which emphasized the significance of dreams and the ritual importance of blood. Merritt provides her own original translations from a trove of German-language documents and also includes the full text of several key conversion narratives in a useful appendix. Her research presents a fascinating counterpoint to more familiar work drawing on the Jesuit Relations. For example, in contrast to Carol Deven’s findings for the Great Lakes region, Merritt argues that Indian women of the Delaware river region played enthusiastic leading roles in Christian conversion, not least because many Moravian beliefs regarding gender complementarity meshed well with Indian principles of social organization. Here, as at many other points, Merritt seamlessly integrates women’s and gender history with the traditional concerns of religious, political, and military history. The next section, on the Seven Years War, sets the stage for the second half of Merritt’s argument, which examines how roads between Indians and Europeans became blocked. Relying on the official minutes of the colony of Pennsylvania as well as on manuscript collections of colonial military correspondence, she shows that the war was fought in “gruesomely intimate fashion” (179). Formerly “friendly” Indians among the Delaware turned against colonists to ally with Ohio Indians hostile to Pennsylvania; meanwhile, Pennsylvania colonists of all backgrounds rallied to the British cause and demonized all Delawares. Violence on both sides served to erase common humanity and inscribe difference. Yet external alliances continued to shape internal...
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Jan 27, 2009
Hanchao Lu 
