The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

Word of warning: It has been several years since I read this book. There are several excellent review on this page which you should read first including Mr. Hendricks critical review (excellent summary, mistaken criticism). My purpose is to give support to those reviewers who have mentioned the influence of this book. I cannot speak to its influence in academia. Me, I work in a production fab as part of the maintenance team. But I read a lot of history and philosophy and the central concepts in this book clarified a lot of issues in those fields for me. I frequently find myself understanding what I am reading in other histories in terms of this concept. Right now I am reading Renaissance Civic Humanism and came across the following line- "as Gilbert interpreted it, a republican ideology could easily become an instrument adopted and manipulated by both parties in a particular episode of class struggle." And the first thing I thought of was White's work. I think what makes this so useful is that White has taken an insight into social dynamics that was nebulous in the thought of many scholars and given it definition. One of the central problems in any theory of ideology has been to explain how resistance and change is possible if there is this hegemonic ideology that shapes the perceptions and thinking of everyone. White's central insight is that this hegemony is contested and fluid especially when the opposing parties are of equal power. The result is that the middle ground (the world of mutual understandings and misconceivings) is constantly changing. Sometimes (and this is where Mr. Hendricks goes wrong) it seperates into seperate spheres entirely where there is not mutuality and one side (like the British and later the Americans) simply misunderstand the other side because of their own conceptual limitations. [Mr. Hendricks also complains about White's reliance on European records to explore the thinking of the Algonquin peoples. I remember White as being fairly clear about that as a limitation. He spent a lot of time in the written records of the French missionaries because he felt they were the one European source that actually tried to understand the Algonquin peoples on their own terms (to better convert them). It struck me as I read White's book, however, that he was mostly claiming to present the European side of the middle ground. In any case, Mr. Hendricks brings up an important theme for any reader of the book to judge for themselves.] As I said, many other scholars over the last forty years or so have circled around a similar insight in their work. By given it a clear definition and a well written historical example, White has given many different fields a research program, a conceptual focus that can be expanded, critiqued and improved. Anyone who reads history should read this book. As a bonus, it is also a classic in the area of revisioning American colonial history. The American Indians were basically defeated after the death of T

This belongs on any list of the five best books of American Indian history, or of North American colonial history. Richard White is brilliant. Read this book.

Richard White should be awfully proud of himself. Using a close examination of a particular time in a particular place, he manages to open one's eyes to an entirely new way of thinking about the long term dynamics of human interaction that we call "history". Works like these are the fruit of all the painstaking hard work that American historians have been contributing over the last one or two generations. The studies of gender, environment, disease and race might seem like annoying "political correctness" to the close-minded, but when divorced from ideological polemics (pro or con) they have proven to be goldmines of fresh perspective. This book is an elegant example of what can be achieved when the primary evidence is reassessed in the light of this new spirit of inquiry. Amply supported by a wide selection of primary sources, White plunges into a detailed dissection of the course of history in what the French called the "Pays d'en haut"--the roughly triangular territory bounded by the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Great Lakes--from the establishment of French hegemony to the defeat of Tecumseh at the hands of the United States. Characters, landscape and events are vividly drawn, but underlying it all is White's astonishing theoretical angle: that the various participants--traders, chiefs, colonial officials, missionaries, prophets, warriors and women--were forced to continually construct the rules of a common game that their respective cultures and traditions were inadequate to navigate by themselves. Of course, neither Europeans or natives discarded their cultural baggage wholesale--rather, they raided each other's ideologies and practices for tools they could use for their own purposes, refashioning them into novel combinations and thus a new "culture". Under White's sharp lens, activities and categories which might seem unambiguous--"murder", "trade", "prostitute", "father", "metal tool"--are shown to actually be embedded in a kaleidoscopically shifting galaxy of symbols, mutually forged, mutually apprehended (and misapprehended) by the resourceful women and men of the "middle ground". White carefully traces the strategies of exploitation and survival mediated by French, Algonquin, British and Iroquois participation in this new world--scenes of sickening brutality, unexpected mercy and clever dealing merge with those of day-to-day business and coexistence in a vast mural that rings as true as any history I've yet encountered. I am eager to see how this brand of method and insight will be employed in other histories.

Anyone who has attended an academic history conference in the last five or so years already realizes the impact that this densely-written, but provocatively argued book by an historian of the American west has had on the study of American history. For both good and ill, White's central thesis -- that Indians and Europeans in the Great Lakes region created together and sustained an elaborate system of cultural and political contact that endured for centuries based not on mutual understandings, but mutual MISunderstandings, often deliberate ones -- has come to set the tone for the most recent studies of cultural encounter and creolization in the New World. Indeed, White's "middle ground" bids fair to assume the blanket hegemony exercised over the American historical imagination a decade or more back by the idea of "republicanism." And, not without cause: White's book is in many respects a stupendous achievement -- exhaustively researched, laser-subtle analyses, and ambitious in scope. What weakens the book is White's tendency to often assert the existence of a so-called cultural "middle ground" between Indians and others in advance of the evidence he presents. The "middle ground" is too often presented as a given, one that can act as the explanation, rather than as the hypothetical that it actually is, the actual subject that should be under investigation. This said, the influence of this book will be felt for years to come.