Savages Within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain, and: Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830 (review)

The figure of the North American “Indian” has long been appropriated into American national and literary history, generally as either a fierce and cruel savage, terrorizing the colonial settlements of the Eastern seaboard, or as a symbol of the vanishing frontier during westward expansion. In both cases, the “savage,” noble or ignoble, has been seen in exceptionalist narratives of history as a harbinger of or catalyst for the formation of the uniquely American nation. Yet the “Indian” was truly a transatlantic figure, haunting the imaginations of not only colonists, soldiers, and traders in North America, but also the people who remained in Britain. Particularly from the 1750s onward, as the steady stream of Britons crossing the Atlantic both ways for military and economic endeavours increased dramatically, writing from the colonies was widely circulated throughout Britain in the form of travel writing, ethnography, and newspaper reports, and was interspersed throughout the novels, plays, and poetry of the period. And actual First Nations people visited Britain throughout the eighteenth century on diplomatic missions, drawing crowds in the bustling streets of London as well as the fashionable parlours of Bath.

Both Troy Bickham and Tim Fulford explore the perceptions that Britons held of Indigenous North Americans during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for the most part disregarding the sometimes vastly different representations of Native people in North American colonial writing. Bickham’s Savages Within the Empire looks at how representations of First Nations people reflected and affected British culture; since Native people loomed larger than any other non- European group in the British imaginary beginning after 1750, the ways in which “Indians” were perceived offers an important insight into how all classes interacted with the emerging culture and policies of imperialism and nationalism. The book focuses on print culture such as newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets, the consumption of material culture in the form of museum displays and private collections of Indian objects, British governmental policy towards Native populations, Anglican missionary efforts in the colonies, and Scottish Enlightenment discourse on human development. Bickham does not give a central role to “Indians’ cameo appearances in literature and the streets of London” (9), instead arguing that, besides this being a well-explored area, “Indians did not loom large in the art world, and they were not great icons in literary fiction” during the period he is exploring (13). While this observation is perhaps debatable, his point is taken; by looking at the broader public sphere, Bickham is able to cover the ways in which a greater majority of people were likely to encounter representations of Indians.

Bickham’s date range is specifically focused on the years between 1754 and 1783, a period that witnessed the Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s Rebellion, and the American Revolution. These conflicts led to what was an indisputably heightened interest among all social classes in Britain in overseas affairs; his choice of primary texts is meant to range beyond the interests of the expanding commercial middle class. His section on material culture, for example, looks at the various ethnographic collections of Native objects available for public viewing, including the Leverian Museum, coffeehouse displays, and, of course, the British Museum. Of the last, Bickham notes that while Indian artifacts accounted for only 0.2 per cent of the Museum’s collection, they “received grossly disproportionate display space, and with it visitors’ attentions” (40). While he notes that the British Museum was in some ways socially restrictive in terms of who was allowed in for a tour, it was still the case that the demographic for admission was quite broad in comparison to private museums that charged an admission fee.

Fulford’s Romantic Indians looks...