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

Attempting to predict what Colin Calloway will write about next is something of a fool's errand. The only things that seem certain are that his next project will focus (to one degree or another) on Indians, that it will be grounded in early America history (broadly considered), that it will appear soon (perhaps even before this review is published), and that it will be worth reading (and possibly award-winning). No specialist in early Indian history can approach Calloway's combination of diversity of subject matter, scholarly output, and quality. White People, Indians, and Highlanders represents Calloway's second book from 2008. It builds on earlier interests–in an Indian history encompassing peoples from across North America; in the intersection of Indians and empires–while moving Calloway into the booming field of comparative indigeneity. To be sure, Calloway avoids the term "indigenous," opting for "tribal" instead, a decision which–for my money–calls for more justification than he provides. Nonetheless, Calloway's discussion of the parallel and divergent colonial experiences of Indians and Scottish Highlanders and his treatment of the two peoples' many encounters in North America will be appreciated by anyone interested in empires and native peoples.

There is, of course, an often essentialist literature on the connections between Scots and Indians. Scholars familiar with those works may be pardoned for avoiding this book for fear of wading into another such swamp, but Calloway is far too good a historian to lead his readers into bogs of that sort. His book does detail similarities between Highland and Indian cultures, but it goes well beyond these sorts of characterizations, both by acknowledging the real differences between, for example, Cherokee and Scottish clans and, more importantly, by using colonialism to frame the discussion of Highlanders and Indians. Fundamentally, Calloway argues, "what Highlanders and Indians had in common had less to do with dress, language, and social structure than with their historical experiences as tribal people living on the edges of an empire and confronting historical currents at work on both sides of the Atlantic" (p. 10). Moreover, he notes, romanticized portraits of Highlander-Indian relationships overlook the twin facts that Highlanders were likely to share their fellow Britons' prejudices and that Highland victims of colonialism "brooked little resistance when they themselves became colonizers" (p. 37). Indians, for their part, knew that Highlanders were cogs in the colonial machine. "The notion that peoples were less prone to abuse or kill one another because they shared similar tribal structures does not stand up to historical scrutiny anywhere in the world" (p. 18).

Instead of reassuring platitudes, then, Calloway offers his readers a complicated "triangular relationship" (p. xii) among Indians, Highlanders, and colonialism, a relationship in which the colonial agents confronting Indians included Highlanders and (quite often) other Indians, while Highlanders confronted not just the English but also Lowland Scots and (quite often) other Highlanders. The end result is a nuanced and compelling story. Calloway repeatedly calls attention to the ways in which parallel colonial processes played out in the Highlands and Indian country, but he just as frequently points out that, because Highlanders eventually "not only found a place in the British Empire but also played a large role in running it," their experiences and those of North America's Native peoples "diverged dramatically" (p. 230). And, throughout, he is attentive to the moments when Indians and Highlanders came together and to the new societies and novel possibilities they created.

The book itself consists of a loosely connected series of thematic chapters; Calloway characterizes it as "an unfinished tapestry of stories" (p. xiii). Some chapters are explicitly comparative, as when he discusses the Indians and Highlanders' respective experiences with "Cycles of Conquest" and the "Changing World" brought about by colonialism's socio-economic forces. Other chapters are more "connective" (p. xi) and examine the results of specific types of North American...