[October 7th
marks the 250th anniversary of the convening of the
Stamp Act Congress, one of the most significant moments in
pre-Revolutionary American history. So this week I’ll highlight and
AmericanStudy three such pre-Revolution moments, including the Congress itself
on Wednesday. Leading up to a weekend post on some of the best scholars of this
period, past and present!]
Two important
contexts for a conflict that was more than just historical foreshadowing.
In the brief
time that my secondary school American History textbooks and courses spent on
the French and
Indian War (1754-1763), it was framed almost entirely as offering a series
of preludes to the Revolutionary period: from the quartering of
English soldiers in colonial homes that would become one of the colonists’ principal
grievances against the Crown to the youthful George
Washington’s military service in the war, and in many other ways, the
French and Indian War helped
point the way toward issues and histories that would come to dominate the
American landscape in the subsequent two decades. Given that our communal narratives
of the Revolution often begin with the 1765 Stamp Act and its aftermaths, it
makes sense to extend our historical lens further back, to consider other
moments and factors that moved the colonies toward hostilities with England,
and this sweeping global conflict represents one of the mid-18th
century’s most prominent such moments to be sure.
The war’s global
sweep, however, also helps us engage with its own histories and complexities in
ways that don’t simply seek to look beyond it and toward the next American
conflict. For one thing, this American war became the first such military conflict
to spread to the Old World, prompting the Seven
Years’ War (1756-1763) that would come to involve virtually every prominent
European power (pitting an alliance of France, Russian, Sweden, Austria and
Saxony against one of Prussia, Hanover, and Great Britain). Even on the
colonial level, the war
represented a conflict over India and global trade routes as much as over
the Americas, an international element of which I’m quite sure those American
History textbooks made precisely no mention. For all those reasons, when viewed
through a global lens—something that the
transnational turn in
AmericanStudies rightfully demands that we consider—the French and Indian
War seems at least as significant as the American Revolution, and likely more
so; only one of those conflicts has often been called the
first world war, after all.
Even if we
return to a more specifically American lens, there’s an element to the French
and Indian War that has frequently been elided or downplayed: the “Indian”
part. I’m sure that those aforementioned textbooks mentioned that some
Native American tribes fought alongside the English, and some alongside the
French. But that framing continues to view the conflict in terms of the
European powers and colonies, and still doesn’t get close to considering what
it meant for Native perspectives and peoples. Fortunately for us
AmericanStudiers, we have a prominent, multi-layered historical text that offers
us precisely such a perspective: Chief
Pontiac’s impassioned 1763 speech to the Ottawa, Huron, and Potawatomi
tribes, an oration that both illustrated a Native perspective on the concluding
French and Indian War and helped prompt a subsequent conflict, Pontiac’s
Rebellion (1763-1766). Bringing together Native mythology and present
political issues, and addressing his audiences as both longstanding cultural
communities and players on the contemporary global stage, Pontiac’s speech
illustrates just how much that term “Indian” comprised and included, and opens
up an entirely distinct way to AmericanStudy this international war.
Next
pre-Revolutionary post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Pre-Revolution moments you’d highlight?
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