The contributors to Facing Empire reimagine the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encounters and contacts between peoples around the world.
Focusing in particular on indigenous peoples' experiences of the British Empire, this volume takes a unique comparative approach in thinking about how indigenous peoples shaped, influenced, redirected, ignored, and sometimes even forced the course of modern imperialism. The essays demonstrate how indigenous-shaped local exchanges, cultural relations, and warfare provoked discussion and policymaking in London as much as it did in Charleston, Cape Town, or Sydney.
Facing Empire charts a fresh way forward for historians of empire, indigenous studies, and the Age of Revolution and shows why scholars can no longer continue to exclude indigenous peoples from histories of the modern world. These past conflicts over land and water, labor and resources, and hearts and minds have left a living legacy of contested relations that continue to resonate in contemporary politics and societies today. Covering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia, and West and South Africa, as well as North America, this book looks at the often misrepresented and underrepresented complexity of the indigenous experience on a global scale.
Contributors: Tony Ballantyne, Justin Brooks, Colin G. Calloway, Kate Fullagar, Bill Gammage, Robert Kenny, Shino Konishi, Elspeth Martini, Michael A. McDonnell, Jennifer Newell, Joshua L. Reid, Daniel K. Richter, Rebecca Shumway, Sujit Sivasundaram, Nicole Ulrich
Foreword, by Daniel K. Richter
Introduction: Empire, Indigeneity, and Revolution
Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell
Part I: Pathways
1. The Future Makers: Managing Australia in 1788
Bill Gammage
2. The Indigenous Architecture of Empire: The Anishinaabe Odawa in North America Michael A. McDonnell
3. Exploiting British Ambivalence in West Africa: Fante Sovereignty in the Early Nineteenth Century
Rebecca Shumway
4. New Ecologies: Pathways in the Pacific, 1760s-1840s
Jennifer Newell
5. Closed Sea or Contested Waters? The Persian Gulf in the Age of Revolution
Sujit Sivasundaram
Part II: Entanglements
6. Red Power and Homeland Security: Native Nations and the Limits of Empire in the Ohio Country
Colin G. Calloway
7. Between Reform and Revolution: Class Formation and British Colonial Rule at the Cape of Good Hope
Nicole Ulrich
8. Christianity, Commerce, and the Remaking of the Maori World
Tony Ballantyne
9. Broken Treaty: Taungurung Responses to the Settler Revolution in Colonial Victoria
Robert Kenny
Part III: Connections
10. Envoys of Interest: A Cherokee, a Ra'iatean, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire
Kate Fullagar
11. Makahs, Maori, and the Settler Revolution in Pacific Marine Space
Joshua L. Reid
12. Imperial Structures, Indigenous Aims: Connecting Native Engagement in Scotland, North America, and South Asia
Justin Brooks
13. Shawundais and the Methodist Mission to Native North America
Elspeth Martini
Afterword, by Shino Konishi
Contributors
Index
"A new, compelling, and important examination of the British Empire from the perspectives of the colonized during the transitional period of 1760 to 1840. Demonstrating that themes of indigeneity might well stretch beyond the conventional reaches of the burgeoning field of indigenous studies, Facing Empire will help set the agenda for future research." Gregory Evans Dowd, University of Michigan, author of Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier
"I am tremendously impressed by this collection. Not only have the editors assembled a very fine array of scholars at varying career stages, all of whom have produced first-class studies attuned to the objectives of the volume, but they have also carefully and helpfully drawn together the major themes articulated across the chapters." Alan Lester, University of Sussex, coauthor of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
"This wonderful collection of essays profoundly alters the way in which historians view indigenous history, the British Empire, and the Age of Revolution. The authors focus on indigenous perspectives and experiences across an extraordinarily diverse range of contexts, showing how they shaped ideologies and practices of imperial expansion and created new transnational patterns of resistance, exchange, and communication." Clare Anderson, University of Leicester, author of Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 17901920
"Facing Empire is a major scholarly accomplishment. Michael A. McDonnell and Kate Fullager have woven together a diverse range of essays in a volume that is striking for its clarity and persuasiveness. Taken as a whole, Facing Empire advances our understanding of transnational and comparative indigenous histories in original and important ways." Gregory D. Smithers, Virginia Commonwealth University, author of The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity
"This landmark collection explores the many faces of empire as they were turned towards Indigenous people: this stellar cast of scholars offers fresh insights and perspectives that provide an exciting challenge to the new imperial history.'" Jane Lydon, The University of Western Australia, coeditor of Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre
"By placing American Indians, Maori, Polynesians, Asians, Xhosas, and other indigenous peoples in the same frame, this stunning volume charts a new vision for indigenous history, the Age of Revolutions, the history of the British Empire, and the history of colonialism. It is hard to think of another collection that has done so much to boost the emerging field of global indigenous history." Pekka Hämäläinen, University of Oxford, author of The Comanche Empire
"Scholarship on the 'age of revolution' has long had a heart of darkness: indigenous peoples have usually been excluded in the histories of this great moment of transformation. Glowing torches in hand, Kate Fullagar, Michael A. McDonnell, and their talented colleagues brilliantly illuminate a revolutionary epoch with a new global 'history from below.'" Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History
"This wonderfully rich and diverse collection, featuring contributions from world-leading scholars, traces a myriad of connections, comparisons, and echoes between far-flung Indigenous experiences during the 'imperial meridian' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These essays place Indigenous people at the heart of the Age of Revolution, forcing us to ask new questions about empire, 'progress,' and the creation of the modern world." Nicholas Guyatt, University of Cambridge, author of Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
"A rich and valuable collection of essays demonstrating that comparing Indigenous entanglements with empire during the Age of Revolution has the potential to transform our understanding of Indigenous people, the empires they dealt with, and the revolutionary age that they shared. This volume will attract a wide and appreciative readership." Joshua Piker, editor, William and Mary Quarterly
"In comparing, contrasting, and interlinking the rich contributions of Indigenous peoples across the globe, the editors have brilliantly offered readers new historiographical grounds for original thinking about the age of industrialization, Indigenous agency, and global revolutionary conquest... Facing Empire is a brilliantly written transnational work and a landmark impact on critical Indigenous and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, settler colonialism, borderlands history, decolonization studies, history of the British Empire, and the Age of Revolution." Baligh Ben Taleb, University of NebraskaLincoln - Western Historical Quarterly
"Indigenous peoples of the globe have rarely taken center stage in accounts of this transformative time. Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age breaks ground as the first collective volume to emphasize their agency in this era... The commonalities in their struggles and convergences in their strategies stand out in greater relief thanks to the kaleidoscopic array of essays Fullagar and McDonnell have collected. In light of Facing Empire, the history of the revolutionary age will never look quite the same again." David Armitage, Harvard University - Journal of British Studies
"How did Indigenous peoples respond to an empire as it encroached on their territories?... The editors of this collection hope to spur a comparative conversation about the subject by bringing together contributors who specialise in encounters on different frontiers of the British empire in 'a revolutionary age', running from the mideighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Thirteen chapters examine Indigenous responses to empire in Australia, Bengal, New Zealand, North America, the Persian Gulf, South Africa, the Scottish Highlands, the South Pacific, and West Africa. While widely varied in argument and approach, these chapters offer a stimulating introduction to the rich scholarship on this topic." Dane Kennedy, George Washington University - Australian Historical Studies
"Unlike many comparative histories of empire that adopt a European lens, this volume treats indigenous peoples as its main subjects... Facing Empire is a stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to global indigenous histories. The essays are high quality, and the editors effectively draw out similarities in how the histories, rivalries, expectations, and interests of indigenous peoples defined the terms of encounters." Jon Chandler, University College London - Journal of American History
