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Neo-European Wests: Frontiers of Empire, 1607–1754

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A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History

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Abstract

This chapter looks at the period 1607 to 1754—from the establishment of the first permanent European settlements in Indigenous North America to the eve of the French and Indian War—during the first phase of the War for North America. It traces and interprets events during this period, within the book’s main themes: conquest (invasion and occupation); dispossession (theft of Indigenous lands and resources); depopulation (the logic of elimination and the genocidal imperative); and repopulation (supplanting the Indigenous inhabitants). It also summarizes the demographic and geopolitical outcome of the first phase of the Anglo-American settler-colonial supplanting project.

[B]y right of Warre … wee shall enjoy [the Indians’] cultivated places … Now their cleared grounds in all their villages … shall be inhabited by us.

Jamestown colonist (1622, quoted in Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975, p. 80)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Russell Thornton, ‘Population History of Native North Americans’, in A Population History of North America, eds. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13.

  2. 2.

    Robbie Ethridge, ‘European Invasion and Early Settlement, 1500–1680’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 41.

  3. 3.

    Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 24–25, 37–38, 48–49.

  4. 4.

    Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 63.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 65.

  7. 7.

    Gregory H. Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997), 54.

  8. 8.

    Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 43.

  9. 9.

    Frederick E. Hoxie, ‘Retrieving the Red Continent: Settler Colonialism and the History of American Indians in the US’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 6 (2008): 1162.

  10. 10.

    Nobles, American Frontiers, xv.

  11. 11.

    The Acts of Union, passed by the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707, led to the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain on 1 May of that year.

  12. 12.

    Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 497, 503.

  13. 13.

    Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 152–155.

  14. 14.

    Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 47.

  15. 15.

    Nobles, American Frontiers, 63.

  16. 16.

    Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 194–195.

  17. 17.

    Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 179, 193, 197, 204.

  18. 18.

    Fred Anderson, and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America 1500–2000 (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), 44.

  19. 19.

    As historian Bernard Bailyn notes, the British and Dutch conquests in North America were as brutal as the earlier conquests of the Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America and ‘in certain places and at certain times as genocidal’ (Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, xv).

  20. 20.

    Perdue and Green, North American Indians, 28.

  21. 21.

    Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 449.

  22. 22.

    R. David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesqualie Challenge to New France (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).

  23. 23.

    Indeed, as historian Bernard Bailyn notes, ‘one can conceive of a single, continuous Euro-Indian war’, lasting from 1607 to 1664 and beyond, a long litany of genocidal wars against Indian men, women, and children (which often led to retaliatory mass killings and village burnings) (Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 499).

  24. 24.

    Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

  25. 25.

    David La Vere, The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

  26. 26.

    Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

  27. 27.

    Neal Salisbury, ‘Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600–1783’, in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, North America, eds. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 399.

  28. 28.

    Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, 44.

  29. 29.

    Taylor, Colonial America, 56–58.

  30. 30.

    Richter, Facing East, 106–107.

  31. 31.

    Joseph A. Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 27–28.

  32. 32.

    Kathleen DuVal, ‘Living in a Reordered World, 1680–1763’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 68.

  33. 33.

    Conforti, Saints and Sinners, 150.

  34. 34.

    Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 36, 48.

  35. 35.

    Taylor, Colonial America, 85.

  36. 36.

    Matthew Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Low Country and the British Caribbean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 86, 90.

  37. 37.

    Christina Snyder, ‘The South’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 323.

  38. 38.

    Paula Mitchell Marks, In a Barren Land: The American Indian Quest for Cultural Survival, 1607 to the Present (New York: Perennial, 2002), 18.

  39. 39.

    Colin G. Calloway, ‘Treaties and Treaty Making’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 540–542.

  40. 40.

    Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 45.

  41. 41.

    Marks, In a Barren Land, 13, 17.

  42. 42.

    Aron, The American West, 20.

  43. 43.

    Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 3–4.

  44. 44.

    Conforti, Saints and Sinners, 27.

  45. 45.

    Untold numbers of American Indians were, to be sure, killed by diseases European colonists unwittingly brought with them. Yet the emphasis on disease, as historian Benjamin Madley suggests, ‘tends to overshadow the equally undeniable role of violence in the population catastrophe and in the conquest of the United States’ (Madley, ‘Reexamining the American Genocide Debate’, The American Historical Review, 110). It seems the consensus view that disease was the primary cause of this demographic collapse. However, to ignore, downplay, or minimalize the role of war and genocide—and their interaction with disease—is to misunderstand the nature of this demographic collapse. It is also, as Indigenous historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz rightly argues, to ‘erase the effects of [American] settler colonialism’ (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014], 40).

  46. 46.

    Salisbury, ‘Native Peoples and European Settlers’, 455.

  47. 47.

    Gregory D. Smithers, ‘Rethinking Genocide in North America’, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, eds. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 332.

  48. 48.

    John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ix, 12, 13.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 1, 10.

  50. 50.

    In writing the histories of North American Indigenous-settler relations, as has been recently pointed out, genocide has been most often ‘sanitized’ by historians under the rubric of war. Jeff Benvenuto, Andrew Woolford, and Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Introduction: Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America’, in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 15.

  51. 51.

    Grenier, The First Way of Way, p. 13.

  52. 52.

    Alfred A. Cave, ‘Genocide in the Americas’, in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 284–285. As Alfred Cave notes, both the French and the English in Colonial North America made use of scalp bounties, an indiscriminate killing process targeting Indian warriors, women, children, and infants. At a time when the annual income of a New England farmer was around 25 pounds per year, Indian killers received bounties on a graduated scale: 100 pounds for the scalp of male Indians over ten years of age, 40 pounds for women, and 20 pounds for children and infants (Cave, ‘Genocide in the Americas’, 283–284). For a regional study which shows how scalp bounties ‘fused the “logic of elimination” with targeted violence’, see Margaret Haig Roosevelt Sewall Ball, ‘Grim Commerce: Scalps, Bounties, and the Transformation of Trophy-Taking in the Early American Northeast, 1450–1770’ (PhD Thesis, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2013).

  53. 53.

    Grenier, The First Way of Way, 13.

  54. 54.

    Allan Gallay, ‘Introduction: Indian Slavery in Historical Context’, in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Allan Gallay (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 2.

  55. 55.

    Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire, 94.

  56. 56.

    Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 38, 41.

  57. 57.

    Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 500.

  58. 58.

    Ethridge, ‘European Invasion and Early Settlement’, 49.

  59. 59.

    Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 236.

  60. 60.

    Taylor, Colonial America, 84.

  61. 61.

    Claiborne A., Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 5, 136–137. On the whole, French empire-building in North America was based on negotiation and coexistence with Indian peoples. However, when French imperial goals were threatened, as historian Colin Calloway notes, ‘generosity gave way to genocide’ (Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 319).

  62. 62.

    Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 34.

  63. 63.

    Grenier, The First Way of War, 43.

  64. 64.

    Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), xviii.

  65. 65.

    Nobles, American Frontiers, 63.

  66. 66.

    Smithers, ‘Rethinking Genocide’, 325.

  67. 67.

    Anderson & Cayton, The Dominion of War, 103.

  68. 68.

    Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 263.

  69. 69.

    Skinner, The Upper Country, 14, 89, 138–139.

  70. 70.

    Taylor, Colonial America, 82.

  71. 71.

    Eric Hinderaker, and Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 5, 6, 9.

  72. 72.

    Taylor, Colonial America, 69–70.

  73. 73.

    Jean B. Russo and J. Elliott Russo, Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 63, 120. 125, 190.

  74. 74.

    Taylor, Colonial America, 69–70, 75.

  75. 75.

    Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 514.

  76. 76.

    Confonti, Saints and Sinners, 100, 107, 132.

  77. 77.

    Ned C. Landsman, Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 20, 87, 103.

  78. 78.

    Taylor, Colonial America, 84, 89.

  79. 79.

    Walter Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 65.

  80. 80.

    Salisbury, ‘Native Peoples and European Setters’, 399–400.

  81. 81.

    Nobles, American Frontiers, 63–64.

  82. 82.

    Richter, Facing East, 7.

  83. 83.

    Hoxie, ‘Retrieving the Red Continent’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1162.

  84. 84.

    DuVal, ‘Living in a Reordered World’, 58.

  85. 85.

    Nobles, American Frontiers, 65.

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  1. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Carroll P. Kakel III

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Kakel, C.P. (2019). Neo-European Wests: Frontiers of Empire, 1607–1754. In: A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_2

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