Honorable Mention from the Association of American Publishers
Professional and Scholarly Publishing Awards for History
The 1763 Treaty of Paris ceded much of the continent east of the
Mississippi to Great Britain, a claim which the Indian nations of the
Great Lakes, who suddenly found themselves under British rule,
considered outrageous. Unlike the French, with whom Great Lakes Indians
had formed an alliance of convenience, the British entered the upper
Great Lakes in a spirit of conquest. British officers on the frontier
keenly felt the need to assert their assumed superiority over both
Native Americans and European settlers. At the same time, Indian leaders
expected appropriate tokens of British regard, gifts the British refused
to give. It is this issue of respect that, according to Gregory Dowd,
lies at the root of the war the Ottawa chief Pontiac and his alliance of
Great Lakes Indians waged on the British Empire between 1763 and 1767.
In War under Heaven, Dowd boldly reinterprets the causes and
consequences of Pontiac's War. Where previous Anglocentric histories
have ascribed this dramatic uprising to disputes over trade and land,
this groundbreaking work traces the conflict back to status: both the
low regard in which the British held the Indians and the concern among
Native American leaders about their people's standing--and their
sovereignty--in the eyes of the British. Pontiac's War also embodied a
clash of world views, and Dowd examines the central role that Indian
cultural practices and beliefs played in the conflict, explores the
political and military culture of the British Empire which informed the
attitudes its servants had toward Indians, provides deft and insightful
portraits of Pontiac and his British adversaries, and offers a detailed
analysis of the military and diplomatic strategies of both sides.
Imaginatively conceived and compellingly told, War under Heaven
redefines our understanding of Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial
period.
