On the Middle Ground

The picture above is some alt-history thing, but it does do a good job of showing the pays d’en haut that Richard White discusses here. It’s important to have a sense of geography when reading this.

Realistically, this book is almost more interesting from a theoretical perspective than an empirical one. While I do think the actual source-work and narrative here are really interesting, the conceptualization of the “middle ground” is where this book really shines through.

While most studies of imperial polities frame their subjects in a way where there is one dominant group that coerces others to accept their cultural frameworks, White’s book does something a little bit different. While Montreal was dominated by the French, upstate New York dominated by the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Atlantic seaboard dominated by the English, there was a region of North America where no power was dominant. Because no power was dominant, all powers involved approached others from a position of weakness. They sought to employ the “other’s” cultural systems in order to draw sympathy, but in doing so, they were bound to face misunderstanding. In fact, this book is fundamentally about misunderstanding. While this text discusses little about the English, neither the French nor Native American peoples understood one another well. However, in spite—or perhaps because of—the misunderstandings about the belief and cultural systems of Native peoples and the French, the pays d’en haut of North America became a coherent space that combined French and Native cultural practices.

While many historians have devoted time to studying “middle grounds” as interior practices—mediating between different groups in other contexts—I think one of White’s most important points is that “the middle ground” must be grounded spatially. While the interior framework originally seems to come from Greg Dening’s Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774-1880, White pushes this forward and says that this sort of accommodation happened in a bounded, territorial space. While we can find interior “middle grounds” everywhere, spatial “middle grounds” are much more difficult to come across.

While reading this text, I took the time to think a little bit about my own research. While Europeans who arrived in Tunisia during the mid-late nineteenth century surely experienced some degree of interior “middle ground” when facing the administrations of a variety of Tunisian beys, there was no spatial middle ground. Instead, the French immediately pushed themselves into a position of dominance, and cultural spread took place through a system of acculturation (spreading culture from one culture to another) rather than accommodation (in White’s view, a practice where neither society was in a strong enough position to spread culture to the other, so both were transformed). If there was a middle ground in the region, it would have been deep in the Sahara, but I think that highly unlikely.

The reason I mention this is because thinking about “middle grounds” in different contexts permits us to see the very real limits of White’s conceptualization. Not everything is or can be a middle ground. I would be surprised if anyone could successfully conceptualize Iroquoia or New England as a “middle ground” during the colonial period, for instance.

Anyways, this is a good book from a historical perspective, and a great book from a theoretical perspective. There’s tons to chew on and I find White’s conceptualizations to be remarkably useful and resilient.