Terrae Incognitae and the Calculus of Empires

The Elusive West is a masterpiece of the historical art and one of the most significant works on eighteenth-century empires to appear in recent years. The book’s title suggests a work on imperial histories, but its sheer depth and breadth also speak to the history of exploration, cartography, indigenous peoples, international diplomacy, warfare, geography, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the uncharted North American West. The book moves seamlessly from London, Paris, and Madrid to Pecos, Comancheria, Cartagena, Manila, le pays d’en haut, Siberia, Hudson’s Bay, and places in between. Mapp’s work is commendable on a number of fronts: graceful prose, a jugular sense of historical problématiques, an incredibly skillful unfolding of the argument, and a thorough mastery of Spanish, French, and British archival sources and maps.

Mapp’s point of departure is the Ohio Valley, the region where imperial conflict burst its bonds in 1754 and 1755 and where scholars have traditionally situated the origins of the Seven Years’ War. But Mapp beckons his readers to a “perspective comprehending more than the Great Lakes, the Belle Rivière, and the Atlantic’s shores” (p. 3). The unknown and uncharted North American West—encompassing “the western shores of Hudson Bay, the forbidding lands around New Mexico, the enticing reaches of trans-Mississippi Louisiana, and the Pacific littoral”—exerted a decisive influence on the trajectories of empires (p. 3). For eighteenth-century imperial officials, these lands “remained realms of rumor and imagination” and they were too dangerously valuable to be ignored. The central problem the book explores is how European statesmen made “choices involving vast North American territories about which they knew very little” (p. 14). Mapp convincingly demonstrates how ignorance of geography was often a crucial mechanism of imperial decision making and ultimately “influenced in unfamiliar and surprising ways the contest for America and empire” (p. 3). A vital part of that mechanism’s operation was the “entanglement of doubt about distant lands’ contents with worries about rival polities’ intentions. The indeterminacy of each magnified unease about the other. . .” (p. 25). The Elusive West takes areas such as Hudson’s Bay and makes them not just peripherally but centrally important to imperial decision making and miscalculation. For example, Mapp argues that French officials’ “militant response” against British movements into the Ohio Valley in the early 1750s reflected their deeper concerns over Britain’s activities in the Hudson’s Bay area and presumed designs on Spanish America (p. 285).

This work reshapes eighteenth-century history in a number of ways. With its focus on the far West and the Pacific Ocean, the book is a persuasive exemplar of the continental approach to early American history. Mapp challenges the still-entrenched view of the western borderlands as “colorful but inconsequential historical byways rather than crucial contributors to North American historical evolution” (p. 16). The continental and Pacific dimensions of the book also represent a formidable challenge to the Atlantic history paradigm. Spain’s and Portugal’s global empires extending across two oceans have always been thorns in the side of Atlantic history, and avowed Atlanticists will have great difficulty fitting The Elusive West into the more constricted confines of one ocean. (How, exactly, do French cartographers working in Siberia to gain knowledge of the Pacific coast of North America constitute an Atlantic story?) The work’s comparative dimension is another mark of distinction. There have been many works that consider individual imperial frontiers or borderlands, but The Elusive West handles with equal felicity the character of the eighteenth-century French, British, and Spanish empires and their peripheries. Through these juxtapositions, Mapp restores the Spanish empire to a prominent place in the eighteenth century and challenges the dominant binary theme of a British and French struggle for mastery of North America. Finally, Mapp restores the incredible significance of the early eighteenth-century imperial...