On the Invasion Within

This is a book that, in many ways, sets the ground for Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815. I know that other historians had looked at the interplay between French and English settlers, but Axtell does a good job of pulling Native Americans into the narrative (although, I have to say, I was left wanting more).

Unlike other historians, who have a long history (pun intended) of looking at the interplay and competition between the French and English, especially in North America, Axtell’s real interest is education and acculturation. When I say “education,” I don’t mean the formal education of schools, but of learning about other peoples in the same place. Axtell finds here that the English, French, and Native Americans all drew on one another’s experiences and attempted to “convert” the others to their way of life. Of these groups, the French (although they were numerically inferior to both others) were the most successful, and they managed to convert large numbers of American Indians in the Great Lakes region to Catholicism while also advocating for a “French way of life.” The English, in contrast, were the least successful during the colonial period, given the numerical superiority of English populations in the late 17th and 18th centuries—the French kept English society at arms’ length and the brutality of the English repelled indigenous peoples from joining them. The only exception was in southern New England, where they did manage to pull some Algonquin-speaking peoples who were adjacent to cities into their orbit. Indigenous peoples, while they did have some success, did not manage to attract large numbers of French and Englishmen to the Great Lakes way of life—a few hundred (both French and English) “converted,” but almost all did so at the individual level, not the societal level.

“Conversion” rarely happened through state structures, and almost was entirely the result of actions made by missionaries and traders. French-speaking Jesuits, in particular, were highly successful on this (see The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America for a collection of primary sources on the topic). The failure of the English to convert others to their way of life is actually partially covered in The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England—I was impressed that I was able to make such strong connections between the two texts.

Given French successes in acculturating Native peoples to their society, it may be shocking that they failed to win the Seven Years War in North America. Axtell doesn’t dwell too much on this topic, but I’m willing to bet that the lack of cohesion of French and indigenous states in North America played a large role, while the English managed to great strong, cohesive, and effective states along the Atlantic seaboard.

This is a great text and should be recognized as a classic in the field.