A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730.

A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730. By Steven J. Oatis. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 399. $65.00, ISBN 0-8032-3575-5.)

The literature on the Southeast's colonial frontiers has expanded dramatically over the last thirty years. With this growth has come an increasingly sophisticated understanding of both cross-cultural relations and their impact on the peoples involved. Given this trend, it is surprising that historians still know so little about the Yamasee War (1715-1717), the region-wide conflict that--like King Philip's War in New England--set the terms for subsequent generations of Indian-European relations. With the publication of Steven J. Oatis's excellent book, we finally have a comprehensive and persuasive interpretation of this critical war. Scholars who have relied on Verner Crane's admirable but dated The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Durham, N.C., 1928) and a handful of more recent articles will welcome a book that seeks "to integrate insights about numerous intercultural relationships into a general interpretation of the lengthy power struggle that resulted from South Carolina's incursions into the Southeast" (p. 8).

As the phrase "lengthy power struggle" suggests, this book's scope extends well beyond the Yamasee War itself. Oatis argues convincingly that the war "was merely one, short-lived form of expression of the numerous, longstanding ties that connected the region's distinct and contesting groups." Understanding its "causes and consequences ... requires a long, hard look at a lengthy period" (p. 3). He begins by laying out the region's history prior to the 1680s before turning to the various southeastern theaters of Queen Anne's War (1702-1713). These first two chapters provide a detailed overview of the diplomatic and military situation on South Carolina's northern, western, and southern frontiers. The four chapters that follow are the core of the book. In chapter 3, Oatis discusses both South Carolina's rising influence in the early eighteenth century and the "numerous chinks" in the system of Indian alliances that served as the colony's "armor," arguing that tensions within this system "had far more to do with major 'structural' flaws ... and deep cultural impasses than they did with the misdeeds of traders and the ineffectiveness" of government officials (pp. 84, 104-5). He then turns to the outbreak of the war itself, effectively rebutting the notion of a widespread Indian conspiracy: "South Carolinians faced not a single monolithic Indian enemy but a number of different Indian enemies who fought with different motives and different levels of intensity" (p. 113). Chapters 5 and 6 consider the "Wartime Adjustments" (a phrase that appears in both chapter subtitles) of the South Carolinians and the Indians, respectively. Each chapter provides a nuanced reading of the many changes the Yamasee War brought to the region' s inhabitants. The book ends with two chapters that develop Oatis's argument that the Yamasee War did not end in 1717. Chapter 7 focuses on the Creek-Cherokee War of the 1720s; chapter 8 considers South Carolina's efforts to expand south and, eventually, to destroy the Yamasees once and for all.

Throughout, Oatis foregrounds the diversity of experience that characterized the region during this era. There were, he demonstrates, many Yamasee wars, each of which involved peoples whose identities were much more complex than labels like Creek, South Carolinian, or Yamasee--to say nothing of Indian or British--would suggest. He succeeds, moreover, in placing this complicated world within the context of European imperial competition. Of course, in such a wide-ranging book, readers will find themselves second-guessing the author's treatment of one topic or another. For my money, Oatis's attempt to incorporate African slavery into the book's analysis of the British colonists' evolving sense of self is underdeveloped. More significantly, I found his focus on South Carolina to be problematic once his narrative reaches 1717. There is a certain logic to concentrating on South Carolina prior to that point. After all, the colony's founding and the aggressive actions of its inhabitants were the primary forces behind the region's cycle of escalating violence; the agendas of other European and Native American peoples played a part, but South Carolina was the dominant actor. For a generation or more after 1717, however, South Carolina's dominance was no longer so clear cut, and Oatis's focus on "South Carolina's Frontiers" obscures this important development. South Carolina still had frontiers after 1717, of course, but I am not convinced that our understanding of those regions after that point is enhanced by putting South Carolina at the center of the analysis. That point notwithstanding, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730 remains a valuable and impressive book, one that any scholar of the colonial-era Southeast will wish to own.

JOSHUA PIKER 

University of Oklahoma