2013 H-Diplo Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Roundtable Review Roundtable Web/Production Editor: George Fujii www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Volume XIV, No. 16 (2013) 14 January 2013 Introduction by Eliga H. Gould Paul W. Mapp. The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3395-7 (cloth, 2011, $49.95); 978-1-4696-0086-4 (paper, 2013, $29.95). Stable URL: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIV-16.pdf Contents Introduction by Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire ................................................ 2 Review by Juliana Barr, University of Florida ........................................................................... 5 Review by Daniel A. Baugh, Emeritus, Cornell University ...................................................... 10 Review by Christopher Hodson, Brigham Young University ................................................... 13 Review by Elizabeth Mancke, University of Akron ................................................................. 18 Review by Matt J. Schumann, Eastern Michigan University ................................................... 22 Author’s Response by Paul W. Mapp, College of William & Mary ......................................... 27 Copyright © 2013 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for non-profit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author(s), web location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses, contact the H-Diplo editorial staff at [email protected]. H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XIV, No. 16 (2013) Introduction by Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire t is time for a change.” With these words, delivered in Toronto as he assumed the presidency of the American Historical Association in 1932, Herbert Eugene Bolton “I sounded a call that still resonates. “In my own country,” Bolton explained for the benefit of Canadian listeners in the audience, “the study of thirteen English colonies and the United States in isolation has obscured many of the larger factors in their development.” Such tendencies, Bolton thought, had “helped to raise a nation of chauvinists.” For Bolton, the solution was obvious. Expand the boundaries of American history — from a “nationalistic” story centered on the British colonies that became the United States to one that included the Americas as a whole — and historians would discover that the “broad phases of American history” were not unique to any one country, including the United States, but were in fact “phases common to . the entire Western Hemisphere.” The result, Bolton predicted, would be a far more compelling narrative with much greater explanatory power.1 For the relevance of Bolton’s words today, one need look no farther than The Elusive West, the splendid new book by Paul Mapp that is the subject of this roundtable. Like Bolton, Mapp takes a thoroughly hemispheric view of American history. Focusing on the period before, during, and immediately after the Seven Years’ War, Mapp insists that the climactic struggle often referred to as the Great War for Empire was about much more than whether Britain or France would control the Ohio valley. On a fundamental level, the war was also a contest over what Mapp suggestively calls “the elusive West.” By this he means not just Western North America but a considerable share of the Pacific Ocean as well. Although Spain exercised a nominal lordship over most of this space — real power, of course, was still in indigenous hands — North America west of the Mississippi was an area where the geographic ignorance of Europe’s colonial powers was matched only by the boundlessness of their ambition. Not surprisingly, the combination proved explosive, as France, Spain, Britain, and eventually Russia vied for supremacy over a region that they neither controlled nor understood. As Mapp shows, their ignorance and ambition eventually plunged Europe itself into the chaos of world war, and the crisis helped set the stage for the cycle of imperial collapse and revolution that was to follow. Unlike “The Epic of Greater America,” as the published version of Bolton’s address was called, The Elusive West is not overly concerned with “nationalistic” tendencies in American historical scholarship, nor should it be. Instead, Mapp’s main objective is to supplement — ‘reject’ would probably be too strong a word — the Atlantic perspective currently favored by most historians of Europe’s mid-century wars for empire with one whose center is several thousand miles to the west. The panelists on this roundtable are in general agreement that in so doing he has taken a familiar story and reconfigured it, in Elizabeth Mancke’s words, “in surprisingly original ways.” According to Juliana Barr, “Mapp makes the most persuasive case yet for framing the history of early America in continental and 1 Herbert E. Bolton, “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review, 38, no. 3 (1933): 448- 449. H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XIV, No. 16 (2013) hemispheric terms,” while Christopher Hodson calls his book “one of the smartest pieces of scholarship on the eighteenth century published in the last decade.” The central place of Spain and Spanish America in Mapp’s analysis is another strength — a “welcome” change, as Matt Schumann writes in his contribution to the forum. The panelists also note with approval the handling of what Daniel Baugh calls the “extraordinary geographical fact” that Europeans knew almost nothing about the area for which they were contending. In a profession that has for the most part internalized Bolton’s demand for broader approaches, this is high praise indeed. Naturally, in a book of this scope, readers are bound to find areas that they might have treated differently, and the panelists on this roundtable are no exception. Still, there can be no question that Paul Mapp has made a major contribution to scholarship on the history of Europe’s early modern expansion. Although readers will have to decide for themselves how far, and in what direction, they want to carry the changes that The Elusive West recommends, they will surely agree that Mapp has made the case for change very well. The issues that the panelists discuss here are likely to be with us for a long time to come. Participants: Paul Mapp is an associate professor in the department of history at the College of William and Mary. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2001, and is the author of The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 (2011). He is currently working on an international history of the American Revolution. Eliga H. Gould teaches history at the University of New Hampshire. His new book, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012), will be released in March. Juliana Barr is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida. She is the author of Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). More recently she published a couple of articles related to the subject of this roundtable: “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early Southwest,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 68 (January 2011), 5-46 and “Beyond the ‘Atlantic World’: Early American History as Viewed from the West,” OAH Magazine of History, 25 (January 2011), 13-18. She is currently at work on a new book about religion and violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Indian-Spanish Southwest. Daniel A. Baugh, Professor Emeritus of Modern British History, Cornell University, was born in Philadelphia, received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He is author of British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), and editor of Aristocratic Government and Society in Eighteenth- Century England (New York, 1975) and Naval Administration, 1715-1750 (London: Navy Records Society, 1977). After publishing articles on English poor relief, 1690-1832, he returned to the study of naval and maritime history in 1983. Two articles of note are “Great Britain's ‘Blue-Water’ Policy, 1689-1815,” The International History Review, X, 1 (Feb. 1988), pp. 33-58, and “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘A Grand 3 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XIV, No. 16 (2013) Marine Empire’” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London, 1994), pp. 185-223. In July 2011 his book, The Global Seven Years War, 1754- 1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest was published by Pearson Longman. Christopher Hodson earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Brigham Young University. He is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and is at work, with Brett Rushforth of the College of William and Mary, on Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Columbus to the Rise of Napoleon, which will be published by Basic Books. Elizabeth Mancke (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) is Professor of History at the University of Akron. Her publications includes The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, c. 1760-1830 (2004), and Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, 1500-1850 (forthcoming), co-edited with H.V. Bowen and John G. Reid. She is currently working on a book project entitled Imperium Unbound: European Expansion and the Making of Modern Geopolitics. Matt J. Schumann teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Washtenaw Community College, having received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Exeter in 2005.