Endgame for Empire: British-Creek Relations in Georgia and Vicinity, 1763–1776 by John T. Juricek (review)

During the past quarter century, an abundance of historical monographs and articles have emphasized the centrality of the Muskogee (Creek) Indians to the history of the southeastern United States. Scholars such as Robbie Ethridge, Kathryn E. Holland Braund, and Joshua Piker have shown the Creeks to be key power brokers in the region, lying at the center of trade routes and diplomatic networks that encompassed Native peoples and Euro-Americans alike.¹ Feared for their military prowess and renowned for their political cunning, the Creeks were held in high regard by European observers, and historians have begun to do the same.

Yet this relatively recent proliferation of scholarship does not lack for antecedents. A prior generation of scholars laid the foundation for this work as pioneers of Creek ethnohistory. John T. Juricek is one of these scholars, having begun his career as a Native American historian in the 1960s. His work on the Creeks developed out of his editorship of the Georgia and Florida volumes of Early American Indian Documents, the first of which was published nearly thirty years ago. Along with David H. Corkran and J. Leitch Wright Jr., Juricek conducted one of the earliest modern ethnohistorical studies of Creek politics and diplomacy. In these volumes, Juricek not only transcribed and edited documents but also organized them thematically and chronologically, added substantial explanatory footnotes, and composed a series of chapter introductions that provided concise overviews of British-Creek diplomacy from Georgia’s founding in 1733 through the beginnings of the American Revolution in 1775–76.²

More recently, Juricek decided to build upon his editorial work by publishing two separate monographs exploring the same subject. The first of these works Colonial Georgia and the Creeks, expanded upon the chapter introductions Juricek wrote for his documentary collections. An analysis of diplomatic relations between the Creeks and the colony of Georgia from the latter’s founding in 1733 to the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Colonial Georgia and the Creeks highlighted Creek domination of regional politics and diplomacy. Yet, toward the end of the volume, Juricek introduced a narrative turn, arguing that the Seven Years’ War would reshape imperial geographies and reduce the Creeks’ negotiating leverage over British officials and colonists.³

Endgame for Empire advances this narrative cliffhanger while also continuing its predecessor’s work in serving as a companion to the documentary collections that Juricek edited. Juricek uses British-Creek relations as a sort of case study to analyze postwar British imperial reforms in Indian affairs, arguing that Britain sought to both improve relations with Native peoples and impose greater control over them. The author joins scholars such as Gregory Evans Dowd and Richard White in arguing that postwar aggressions between British colonists and Native warriors demonstrated the need for reform in Britain’s diplomacy toward North American Natives. With the French and Spanish presence (mostly) eliminated in the region, Juricek asserts that colonists felt emboldened to seize Creek land, trampling upon Creek territorial sovereignty with impunity. Indeed, he argues that colonists behaved as if their nation’s victory in a European imperial war had granted them the right to Creek lands by conquest, as they invaded Creek hunting grounds to establish settlements and routinely cheated Creeks in trade. These colonial encroachments provoked Creek counterattacks, threatening to engulf the entire region in violence.⁴

The author demonstrates that British officials understood the danger that colonial aggression posed and sought to implement reforms to correct the worst of colonists’ abuses. Their inability to enforce such regulations exhausted all remaining confidence that Creek leaders placed in British imperial leadership. Juricek observes that colonists disregarded regulations aimed at preventing them from intruding upon Creek lands, plying Creeks with liquor in order to secure land cessions, and cheating Native peoples in trade. On one level, the author presents the reform effort as a futile endeavor. Juricek argues...