Colonial Challenges: Britons, Native Americans, and Caribs, 1759-1775.

By Robin F. A. Fabel. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2000. Pp. x, 282. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-1798-X.)

Auburn University history professor Robin Fabel offers an interesting comparative approach to the study of British-Indian relations in the mid-eighteenth century. British interaction with three distinct peoples--the Cherokees, the small Indian groups of the lower Mississippi valley, and the Caribs of the island of St. Vincent--provide Fabel with case studies of British imperial aspirations vis-a-vis American Indians.

The so-called Cherokee War of 1760 and a general outline of eighteenth-century British-Cherokee dealings up to that point form the first study. This is the most well known of the three cases, and Fabel painstakingly recreates the series of events leading up to and including the conflict. For that reason this section provides a useful narrative of the affair, but his conclusions appear anachronistic. Though he recognizes the diffusive nature of Cherokee politics, whereby single villages and even individuals freely pursued their own objectives, Fabel chides the Cherokees for not presenting a more unified front to the British and thus losing the war. Since it was never a Cherokee goal to unite as a nation during the war in the first place, it seems unnecessary to use it as the measure of Cherokee success or failure.

The examination of British, and to a lesser degree Spanish, relations with the small Indian nations of the Gulf Coast sheds much-needed light on post-Seven Years' War Gulf South history. The small nations played an indispensable economic role for the European settlements at Mobile, New Orleans, Manchac, and Natchez, and Fabel shows that they also weighed heavily on the minds of certain British and Spanish officials as they vied for power and influence in the former French colony. His discussion of Lieutenant John Thomas's actions as British Indian commissioner to the small nations exposes the impact that local administrators--even ones serving under the powers of patronage--had over imperial policies.

The final case study moves us out to the Caribbean and the island of St. Vincent. There the Caribs--of Indian and African ancestry--vied for space and autonomy as the British population increased in the 1760s and 1770s. European planters on St. Vincent convinced the British government to move militarily against the Caribs in 1772, primarily to prevent Carib contacts with French citizens on neighboring islands. British military maneuvers were less than successful, but the Caribs did sign a treaty relinquishing claim to some of their lands.

Colonial Challenges suffers from failing to make use of an ethnohistorical approach. We learn much less about the cultural imperatives and societies of the Indian groups discussed than we do about the inner workings of the British imperial ministry and British competition with the French and Spanish. Fabel has done a prodigious amount of research in archival and published primary sources, however, and his comparative approach is useful and enlightening for students of the colonial South and the British Atlantic world.

GREG O'BRIEN
University of Southern Mississippi