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Reviews in American History 31.3 (2003) 363-371



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Empires, Subjects, and Pontiac

Patrick Griffin


Gregory Evans Dowd. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 384 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $32.00.

In War under Heaven, Greg Dowd offers a fascinating and persuasive glimpse of the world that informed and emerged from Pontiac's War, the famous Indian struggle against British rule of the trans-Appalachian West in the wake of the French and Indian War. Truth be told, I was not entirely surprised by how well War under Heaven reads or Dowd's mastery of the material. After all, a lot of smart folks do the type of history Dowd does. Like the most able practitioners of the "new" Indian history—the names Axtell, Merrell, and White come to mind—Dowd has done some heavy lifting, at once producing an in-depth study of Native American culture and a provocative explanation of the fate of Indians within a broader white society. Like these other historians, he accomplishes all this with a nose for a great story, with a well-crafted narrative, and with brilliant prose. Most significantly, Dowd reminds us that the early American experience makes little sense without bringing Indians into the picture. Any narrative of the British in America or the birth of the American republic sanitized of the presence of Indians ignores a—or perhaps "the"—crucial element in shaping the contours of empire and the emerging nation. Just as importantly, Dowd demonstrates the simple point that the lives of Native Americans, however rich they may be, make little sense if divorced from a broader context. Isolating the Indian story from interaction with Europeans and Euro-Americans leads ultimately to sterile, unsatisfying, and often romanticized narratives that in no way get to the heart of the realities Indians confronted in their "New World."

Dowd's approach also illustrates the maturity and dynamism that define the best work in the field. For starters, note what Dowd does not do in his book. For years after he published his path-breaking study, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (1991), Richard White set the terms of debate for the field. Soon the "middle ground"—cultural spaces of accommodation created by Europeans and Indians—was sprouting up here, there, and everywhere, in new times and [End Page 363] places and different guises. Some hearty souls, such as James Merrell in his book Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (2000), challenged the new paradigm. But the fact that he did so and that so many applied the model elsewhere testifies to its staying and explanatory power. In War under Heaven, Dowd by and largecharts his course free from the long shadow cast by Richard White. Instead, Dowd draws his inspiration from the "new" imperial history, constructing Pontiac's world as part of a larger world centered in London and Indians as "subalterns" trying to adjust to and influence—and of course "contest"—the course of empire. 1

From this perspective we gain an amazing understanding of Pontiac and the war that his name graces. Indeed, with this book we have the clearest and most convincing portraits we have had—or are likely ever to have—of either. But Dowd offers far more than biography or an updated war chronicle; in fact, he gives us no less than a new way of conceiving the British empire in America in the years before the Revolution. Finally, he provides a powerful new interpretation of the tragic fate of Indians within the American nation.

Pontiac, the man and the legend, may seem an elusive character upon which to hang so much interpretive weight. Because of the scanty and scattered nature of the evidence, much of his life lies beyond our grasp. This problem of sources, however, did not slow the creation and recreation of a mythic Pontiac. As Dowd reminds us, historians have portrayed him as a skulking "savage," French lackey, romanticized rebel, or a doomed but...

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