Empire by Collaboration

The historiography of the colony of New France remains a relatively underdeveloped project, in spite of the excellent work done in the past several decades.If one does not include the scholarship that focuses specifically on French-Indian relations in Acadia, Québec, le pays d'en haut (the Great Lakes region), and Louisiana, then that historiography is even scantier.Allan Greer lamented this situation in his assessment in 2003 (see his chapter, "Comparisons: New France" in A Companion to Colonial America, Daniel Vickers, ed.[Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2003], 469-88), and, although there has been some intellectual movement on the topic (I would like to characterize the field as "emergent," but can not), it remains ill-formed.A reason for optimism is this volume by Robert Michael Morrissey, which focuses on an even less developed subset of New France historiography: the Illinois Country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.If that was all his volume did-add another substantial monograph to an anemic scholarship-it would deserve praise.But Morrissey's ambition is made of bigger stuff.He wants to chart a new path that takes on one of the most influential works of not only colonial North America but of any field in the past thirty or so years: Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).White's "middle ground" practically needs no introduction.It was a space in which Indians and European colonists of relatively equal power were forced to come to "creative misunderstandings," or new, hybrid cultural forms that enabled the competitors to reach peaceful agreements without either one capitulating completely to the other.Morrissey instead argues that Illinois, unlike White's pays d'en haut, represents a case not of necessary accommodation but of willing collaboration.The boldness of his claims represents a necessary step to a new way of understanding colonial development and settler-administrator-Indian interaction and cooperation.To do this, Morrissey has first to overturn the older vision of the Illinois Country as marginalized, submissive to imperial power, and dependent on its colonial neighbors of Québec and Louisiana.Instead, he emphasizes a new vision of dynamism, engagement, and collaboration, one that could present a salutary lesson for historians of other regions.He argues that the people of the Illinois Country were not simply unambitious peasants who lived in a satellite colony to Québec and Louisiana, but were French and creolized "fur traders, farmers, missionaries, and Indians who sought to realize alternative visions

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