The Early Midwest in the Atlantic World

Histories of early America used to presume that the most important aspects of the process of early American development were the things that happened in the New World and that separated the American experience from the Old World. Over the past two generations, an “Atlantic world turn” in early American studies has challenged this basic understanding in two ways. First, by contextualizing local early American histories in a wider frame, historians have called into question how unique New World experiences actually were, challenging the previously exceptionalist narratives of colonial American history. Secondly, by exploring the important connections and entanglements between early American places and events and their counterparts in the Atlantic basin, historians have demonstrated that certain aspects of early American history simply cannot be understood as local stories but demand to be understood as part of larger processes. As these insights have gained acceptance, historians have revised the basic narrative of early America, tying it to a larger transnational story organized around themes of economy, culture, migration and exchange.

Three new books add to our understanding of the Atlantic dimensions of the early American Midwest. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany explores the tension between early Detroit’s status as a frontier colony and Atlantic outpost, elucidating the fascinating contours of this distinctive city along the way. In Nobility Lost, Christian Ayne Crouch vividly reconsiders the Seven Years War not simply as a colonial fight, but as a moment when French colonial and metropolitan military cultures came into contact and disagreement, with important results for the future of the French empire. Finally, in Lives of Fort de Chartres, David MacDonald expands the local history of Fort de Chartres in colonial Illinois Country by considering the transnational and cosmopolitan experiences of many of its important personages during the French regime, especially through the institution of the French Navy. Together, these studies shed valuable new light on the early Midwest, even as they remind us that, like early America generally, the Midwest was never just an isolated frontier divorced from the larger story of empires and global processes.

In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany defines an explicitly Atlantic research problem: how was the frontier city of Detroit simultaneously a frontier zone as well as an Atlantic entrepot? Founded in the early 1700s, Detroit began as a fur trade center, a place that was utterly remote from the colonial metropole, but also critically attached to it by its economic purpose. Picking up her history at the end of the fur trade phase and at the beginning of Detroit’s colonization by British and later American entrepreneurs, Cangany investigates how Detroit’s history continued to be defined by its remote situation as well as by its relentless cultural, political, and economic connections to the wider Atlantic world. Detroit was, Cangany writes, “poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery,” and this defined its history (3).

For Cangany, Detroit was defined by important local idiosyncracies—“localisms”—that made it distinctive economically, politically, and culturally. This makes sense, given Detroit’s roots as a refuge for often defiant and self-interested traders, Indians, and later settlers. The dictates and preferences of central authority and empire often meant little to pragmatists on the ground in a place like Detroit, where Europeans with diverse agendas came together with Native people to fashion a hybrid world. At the same time, however, the frontier colony was not independent and its inhabitants wanted many of the economic, political, and cultural benefits that connection to the Atlantic offered. Thus was Detroit’s history centrally shaped by the tension between localisms and the standardizing tendencies of Atlantic world connections.

Cangany...