The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 (review)

At the end of the French and Indian War (or Seven Years' War), Britain stood as the only imperial power east of the Mississippi River while Spain remained the only imperial power west of the great river—the notional empire of the Comanches notwithstanding. In this sprawling retelling of how Spain and Britain wound up as the only Europeans standing and how France fell victim to its colonial ambitions, Paul Mapp takes us not only to the contested regions of western North America but to the Falklands in the South Atlantic and the Juan Fernández Islands in the South Pacific and to Siberia and China as well. His argument is that as long as historians remain focused on the geographic space of North America they cannot fully understand the role of the largely unexplored part of the continent on imperial decision making in London, Paris, and Madrid. In the end, he concludes, the French became disenchanted with the potential of western North America to provide access to Spanish sources of wealth in the years leading up to the war while the British reached the same state in its aftermath. Spain, of course, had no choice in the matter; its acceptance of trans-Mississippi Louisiana at the end of 1762 was a purely defensive move in the face of Britain's sweeping victories to the north and east.

Much of what The Elusive West tells us, as the author readily admits at times, is already part of the standard historiography. The book's innovation consists in broadening the context to make French, British, and Spanish diplomacy with regard to western North America more understandable, if not always more reasonable. A substantial portion of the book is consequently devoted to explaining how the judgments of European policy makers were informed by an imperfect understanding of the geographical relationship of western North America to more valuable places such as Mexican and Peruvian silver-mining regions and potential Pacific trade routes. Developments and contrasts in the collection and processing of geographic information among the imperial powers in North America, and even in Asia, receive considerable attention. A particularly insightful section delves into how the influence of Locke and Newton (replacing Descartes) on French thinking in the mid-eighteenth century led to Paris policy makers wanting empirical evidence for the fanciful claims of earlier geographers regarding access from the interior of North America to the Pacific Coast and to Spanish territories. To the degree that the facts did not support them, "The old marvels were dropping out of written evidence of foreign office deliberations" (382).

Readers of this journal will be most familiar with the latter part of the book, where matters come to a boil in the decade of the 1750s, although they are bound to be disappointed with the minor role that Mapp assigns to Texas. Mapp does a very good job of explaining the strategic thinking of British, French, and Spanish statesmen based on short- and long-term objectives. However, although some of the major Spanish-French encounters in Texas are briefly discussed—the French trader Blancpain's capture on the lower Trinity River, the Norteño attack on Mission San Sabá—his arguments are mostly built around French encounters with New Mexico. Curiously, the founding of Texas in response to French activities in trans-Mississippi Louisiana is missing from Mapp's narrative.

The Elusive West is an impressively well-researched and thoughtful work, even when its narrative rambles so far afield from the plains and mountains of western North America that it becomes difficult for the reader to see all the connections. The book will amply reward those patient enough to stick with it to the end.