Why was Richard White so Surprising?

When I wrote about Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes earlier this fall, I noted that Pratt's point of departure - that travel writing tells us more about the writer than about the place it describes – seems obvious in 2012. What I found most surprising about Richard White's The Middle Ground is that his central insight struck me as anything but obvious. I'd encountered the general notion of the middle ground in an anthropology course on Native people in the Northeast, but until this week, hadn't read white first-hand.

Writing in 1991, White examines a discrete geographic location, known to French fur traders and Jesuit missionaries as pays d'en haute, and explores the historic circumstances that allowed Native people and European interlocutors to create a world, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, that was neither French nor Algonquin, but something fundamentally in between. Following the fates of the Algonquins in the region for the next two hundred years, White's monograph traces the change over time, and eventual demise of, the middle ground.

White describes the middle ground as a place at the periphery of empire, characterized by “the inability of either side to gain their ends through force” (52). In everyday life and in more formal diplomatic forums, the French and the Algonquins provided willing “to justify their own actions in terms of what they perceived to be their their partner's cultural premises” (52).

White reinforces the contingency of the middle ground by showing how relations between the French and Algonquins were affected by imperial contests between the British and French. The middle ground faltered during the Seven Year's War as Algonquins entered into closer trade and diplomatic relations with the British. The British initially insisted on viewing their relationship to Native people as that of “conquers and unruly subjects” (268), but reemerged following Pontiac's Rebellion (269). For all its rhetoric of liberty, the American Revolution sounded the death knell for the middle ground. While newly minted American politicians recognized the importance of mediating disputes between Native people, “the federal government put the functions of patriarchy to other uses” (473).

So what is it about White's monograph that seems so unfamiliar? At least part of what strikes me is that White is concerned with finding a new way to describe interactions between people, rather than analyzing representations of those interactions. In contrast to scholars like Alida C. Metcalf in Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, or Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes, White has almost nothing to say about how representations of the New World and its people were created and circulated.

And while White avoids romanticizing the relationship between the French and the Algonquins, he does provide us with a way of thinking about the fact of imperialism in North America that complicates European dominance and Native submission. A scholar commenting on White's work in 2002 captures what I find most exciting about the concept of the middle ground. By examining the historical specificity of life among the French and Algonquins, White shows that European imperialism, at least in this case, cannot be understood through “the residual nineteenth century attitude that 'Lo, the poor Indian' must give way to the inexorable tide of white civilization” or the notion that “contact was nothing but all-white genocide.” The imperialism of White's study is “a world system in which minor agents, allies, and even subjects at the periphery often guide the course of empires” (xi).