Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (review)

42Quaker History in the Welsh Tract. Quakerism flourished in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, London, Bristol, and Norwich. John Woolman and Anthony Benezet condemned the wealth that Levy argues kept Friends' families within the meeting. They saw a middling to middling-poor state as conducive to a religious life. Prosperity was not necessary to love children, create a family based on affection , and stay within a Quaker community. The basic Quaker family pattern is religiously inspired communitarianism in which the quest for wealth and seclusion caused Quakers to amass large amounts of land, migrate to the piedmont, and marry within their class. Not domesticity, but the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and romantic love weakened the Quaker family and communitarian norms. Seventeenth-century Quakers created a sectarian family practice. In the late eighteenth century they added domesticity to it, but the Quaker ideal of an affectionate family with both parents involved in child rearing is not the New England family of 1830. Swarthmore CollegeJ. William Frost Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. By Francis Jennings. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1988. xxiv, 520 pp., maps, charts, illus., appendix, index. $27.50. Francis Jennings, former director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library, is without doubt one of our nation's greatest historians. Interdisciplinary in his approach, flamboyant in his use of language, and controversial in his analyses, Jennings has devoted the past thirty years to correcting Francis Parkman's multivolume history, France and England in America, a "classic" filled with racism, made-up history, and fabricated sources. In three major books and numerous articles, Jennings has promoted the subdiscipline of ethnohistory. He has emphasized the relations between peoples and stressed that "frontiers" were regions of mingling peoples, not just Turnerian lines separating Indian "savagery" and Anglo-American "civilization." Empire ofFortune is Jennings's boldest and best work to date. With typical bravado, Jennings thrashes Parkman as well as other giants: Bernard Bailyn, Charles and Mary Beard, Daniel J. Boorstin, Lawrence Henry Gipson, and Frederick Jackson Turner. In this major work, he points out the inaccuracy as well as the Anglo-American racism in referring to the war as the "French and Indian War." Jennings also makes clear that the Seven Years War started as "a war for more American possessions and more efficient control over them" (p. 138). The war was promoted by the Duke of Cumberland and his cohorts, greedy imperialists, and "heroes" of the earlier massacre of Highlanders at the Battle of Culloden in 1745. Cumberland and his cronies helped make a local brush fire war in the Ohio Valley in 1754 into a global conflict in their desire to build an "empire of fortune." Jennings unravels the "backroom shenanigans" and the "private consultations in the bushes" as well as the greed, corruption, and ineptness at every turn. He carefully analyzes treaty negotiations and exposes the base interests of men such as George Croghan and Sir William Johnson. He provides careful portraits of such important but incompetent figures as the Earl of Loudon and Generals Daniel Webb and Edward Braddock. Jennings writes military history without glorifying combat. Generals Wolfe, Shirley, and Montcalm, Major Rogers, and the Indians are all blamed for the Book Reviews43 numerous atrocities of the war. Jennings, nevertheless, makes it clear that the Indians served as convenient excuses by both British and French to cover up the Europeans' own barbaric actions since terrorism "by authority was the order of the day" (p. 205). At Quebec, Wolfe ordered his artillery to fire on residential areas and threatened to kill French POWs, while Montcalm handled his own city's residents who wanted to surrender by threatening them with Indian reprisals. The true heroes of Jennings's magnificent book are the Society of Friends and, more specifically, Israel Pemberton and the Friendly Association. The Society of Friends, who dominated the Pennsylvania Assembly at the outbreak of war, were vilified by the greedy proprietor Thomas Penn and his major propagandist William Smith. The war became intertwined with the political battles between the proprietor and the Quaker-dominated assembly. The Friends accused...