White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (review)

Calloway borrows his title from Georgia's founder James Oglethorpe, who raised a motley army of "White people[,] Indians, and highlanders" to fight against Spanish Floridians (xi). In Oglethorpe's time, many Britons categorized Highland Scots and Indians as savage non-whites, pointing out that both held land communally, used kinship to structure their societies, and maintained warrior traditions. Highlanders and Indians, Calloway argues, did have much in common, but he emphasizes their parallel and sometimes convergent historical experiences rather than their seemingly similar cultures. Living at the borders of an expanding English empire, Highlanders and Indians confronted colonialism with all its variegated assaults on their autonomy, land, and culture. Calloway, the son of a Highland Scot and a renowned scholar of Native American history, is well poised to explore the tangled histories of these two groups.

The English saw Highlanders and Indians as fierce warriors because the two groups often had to protect their homelands from invasion. Highlanders had repelled imperial armies since Roman times, but they suffered a devastating loss at the 1746 Battle of Culloden, which facilitated colonization. After Culloden, Highlanders served on the front lines of the British army and poured into Indian lands on the North American frontier. Like Highlanders, Indians fought to retain their homelands and, though they did so for their own reasons, some also joined European and American armies. Outside of warfare, Highlanders and Indians met one another in a variety of colonial contexts; they often traded and many intermarried. Such intimacy seemed to confirm the English belief that Highlanders and Indians were similar, and although Britons welcomed their enlistment in the army, they generally discouraged other aspects of both peoples' supposedly savage character.

Drawing upon the stadial theory of social evolution developed by Lowland Scottish intellectuals, who placed Indians and Highlanders below "civilized" Britons, reformers sought to transform both groups by teaching them English, converting them to Protestant Christianity, breaking their clan systems, and overhauling their economies. Such reforms, at their worst, resulted in the Scottish Clearances and Indian Removal, policies that "separated people from their homelands in the name of progress" (175). Indians and Highlanders became absorbed into others' empires, but carved out separate spaces for themselves. Both peoples also became romantic heroes who featured prominently in their empires' imagined pasts; Scott and Cooper depicted them as tragically doomed but noble races.¹ Although Calloway argues that the trials of Native Americans were "more severe, more devastating, and more enduring" (13), the occupation, dispossession, and oppression wrought by colonialism profoundly affected both peoples.

Readers of the JIH will appreciate how Calloway incorporates postcolonial theory, cultural anthropology, and literary analysis. However, in some chapters, especially those dealing with shared historical experiences in North America, Calloway might have offered more analysis of issues like Scottish–Indian métis culture and the gendered dimensions of colonial encounters. Nonetheless, Calloway succeeds in the challenging task of distilling centuries of Scottish and Native American history into concise, topically oriented chapters, and scrutinizing the ways in which those histories met and departed. His final chapter and epilogue, in particular, stand out as brilliant and sometimes personal meditations on empire, heritage, and identity.