Elusive Empires

This book examines the efforts of France, Britain, and the United States to extend imperial dominion over the Ohio Valley, focusing on relations between Europeans, Euroamericans, and Indians to tell the story.

It treats empires as cross-cultural constructions whose details were negotiated by their participants and argues that three models of empire competed for acceptance in the region: empires of commerce and of land, which both the French and the British sought to build, and an empire of liberty, which grew out of the American Revolution and eventually became the basis for Euroamerican occupation of the valley. Though European trade dramatically reshaped Native American communities in the Ohio Valley, France and Britain each failed to impose territorial dominion there.

The American Revolution invented a new organizing principle of empire, one that empowered middling white landowners while it decisively undermined the sovereignty and independence of Native American communities in the west.