The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5703877 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Timothy J Shannon (Gettysburg College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 98 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 504-505 |
| Publication date | 2011-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jar281 |
| OpenAlex | W2325408834 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Spain, France, and Great Britain reshuffled their colonial possessions around the globe at the end of the Seven Years’ War. In this “great imperial reconfiguration” (p. 5), France ceded to Spain its claim to western Louisiana, a vast territory that would ultimately be added to the United States via the Louisiana Purchase. This territory had figured prominently in French designs to colonize North America since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and unlike Canada, it had not been conquered by France's enemies. Why then, at this pivotal moment, did France so willingly part with a territory that many European observers believed held the secret to possessing the North American continent? In setting out to answer that question, Paul W. Mapp has written a book that combines old-fashioned diplomatic history with au courant borderlands history. Mapp describes the trans-Mississippian West as a zone of imperial competition and crosscultural encounters, but unlike other borderlands historians, he takes his perspective from above rather than below. Relying extensively on foreign office archives in London, Paris, and Madrid, he has reconstructed what European diplomats and policy makers thought about the American West when they imagined their global empires. Borderlands histories are typically written from the margins. Mapp does not ignore the Indians, colonizers, missionaries, and traders who traversed the eighteenth-century American West, but he is more interested in acquiring a satellite view on this region, to see how it fit into European designs to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · CONTEST · Diplomacy · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Globe · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Treaty · American Constitutional Law and Politics · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,43 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2022 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |