The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History) [Hardcover]

Richard White (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 1991 | ISBN-10: 052137104X | ISBN-13: 978-0521371049

This book seeks to step outside the simple stories of Indian/white relations--stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the "Pays d'en haut". Here the older worlds of the Algonquins and various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the recreation of the Indians as alien and exotic. The process of accommodation described in this book takes place in a middle ground, a place in between cultures and peoples, and in between empires and non-state villages. On the middle ground people try to persuade others who are different than themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. From the creative misunderstandings that result, there arise shared meanings and new practices.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this book stands almost like a bible commentary, indispensable for an understanding of the mass of information to be digested by any reader interested in the subject....the voluminous footnotes...contain an overwhelming wealth of scholarship." Wisconsin Magazine of History

"Richard White has written a remarkable book that will change the way historians view the Great Lakes region during the colonial and early national periods. Elegantly written, thoroughly researched, and powerfully argued, the book describes in the clearest possible terms a world in the midst of profound historic change...White succeeds so brilliantly that his approach should shape the way historians conceive of relations between American Indians and Europeans in other times and places as well." American Historical Review

"This is a book of many achievements and it gets the new Cambridge series of Studies in North American Indian History off to a fine start. In the depth of its research, the range of its territory and chronology, and the number of its insights, it is a major work in American Indian history. But White's work goes further and is indispensable reading for anyone trying to understand colonial and frontier America...By helping to bridge the apparent gulf between 'Indian history' and 'mainstream' American history, the book will perhaps build a common ground of its own." Reviews in American History

"The Middle Ground is a brilliant scholarly accomplishment, one of the most impressively researched works in any field of history." Western Historical Quarterly

"In the breadth of its chronological and geographical scope, the depth of its research, and the sensitivity of its analysis, Richard White's book is an extraordinary achievement. Mapping the landscape of 'the middle ground' that native and colonial peoples sought to create in the Great Lakes region, Professor White has done more than chronicle, with unprecedented clarity and fairness to all players in the drama, the early history of that vast expanse. He has also provided historians with a new means of understanding relations between natives and newcomers all across the continent. As a powerful metaphor and as a splendid work of history, The Middle Ground should stand with Francis Jennings's The Invasion of America as offering a new and exciting vantage point from which to view the American experience." James Merrell, Vassar College

"In this extraordinary book, Richard White gives us a fascinating new account of the interactions among Europeans and native peoples during a crucial phase in American history. In his efforts to overturn traditional historical accounts which portray white conquest as inevitable or Indian defeat as absolute, he suggests the rich and ambiguous intermingling of cultures that Indians and Europeans created together in their early years of contact. The Middle Ground will change the way we think not just about Indians, but about American history generally. Scholars will be learning from and emulating this book for many years to come." William Cronon, Yale University

"Richard White's book is one of the most impressive works written in native American and frontier history in many years....White's book is an excellent one that should be of interest to all scholars of the American frontier and native American history." Laurence M. Hauptman, The Historian

"Perceiving the nonexistence of a dividing line in regions where Indians and Euro-Americans mixed, some scholars now strive to understand and explain what actually happened in those regions. Richard White's Middle Ground is a welcome and important addition to this work." Francis Jennings, American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"This notion of the search for a common ground--or, as he prefers to call it, 'the middle ground,' coining a phrase which has now shot to fame and fortune in the vocabulary of Americanists--is brilliantly explored in Richard White's book of this title." New York Review of Books

"For historians interested in the Great Lakes-Ohio valley region, Richard White has added a new and provocative term to the discussion of Indian-white relations for the period from the mid-seventeenth-century Iroquois Wars to the War of 1812." Helen Hornbeck Tanner, EthnoHistory

Book Description

A mutually comprehensible world was established by Europeans and Indians in 1650 in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the "Pays d'en haut". This account reveals how a "middle ground" for sharing values thrived for 165 years.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 564 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (September 27, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 052137104X
• ISBN-13: 978-0521371049
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,203,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Influential beyond its scope, August 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History) (Paperback)

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.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breaking new ground, February 2, 2005

By 

Bill Perez (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History) (Paperback)

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.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A professional work, February 3, 2006

By 

Chris Kostov (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History) (Paperback)

Richard White managed to write a historical book that combines political, social, and cultural history with a wonderful writing style, which captures the readers' attention from the very beginning.

White indicated in the introduction of his book that he "seeks to step outside the simple stories of Indian/white relations- stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural pesistence." The book is about a search of accommodation and common meaning, according to the author.

Richard White maintains that in the Middle ground of the Great Lakes, many different cultures met and accommodated their differences to be able to live together. This Middle ground of overlapping cultures and lifestyles brought mutual understanding, changes in all societies and influence on one another, not assimialtion. The big colonial wars, however, concludes White, led to sudden ruptures of accommodation and common meanings between Europeans and Indians.