Philip D. Curtin’s book, The World and the West, looks at the past two hundred years and reveals how various cultures across the globe respond to western threats and influences. Curtin acknowledges western dominance during the Industrial Age but does not put Europeans at the center of his narratives. Instead, he illuminates various cases from across the globe of different people and cultures responding to the western threat. These case studies are compared in order to illuminate the various factors at play in different locals and how history is far from a predictable social science. The desires and intentions of western imperial powers are constantly subverted and undermined by the people being conquered or even their own men “on the spot.”
In part three of, The World and the West, Philip Curtin deals with conversion or “culture change by intent.” Whereas cultural transformation often occurs accidentally simply because of close contact between different people from varied walks of life, culture change by intent “can take place on the initiative of the cultural borrowers as well as that of cultural transmitters.” Thus, Curtin avoids a Eurocentric narrative by viewing culture change from the perspective of both the conqueror and conquered.
In many ways, Curtin’s understanding of conversion as a two-way street melds perfectly with Richard White’s study of Anglo and Indian interaction from 1650 to 1815. In his book, The Middle Ground, Richard White attacks previous understandings and histories of Indian-white relations where stories of white domination and stubborn native resistance dominate the discourse. White calls his approach “new Indian History” because Indians are the primary historical actors in his narrative and it “seeks to understand the reasons for their actions.” Instead of viewing Indian culture as resisting or being absorbed by whites, The Middle Ground brings to life the complexity of cultural negotiation and the new identities, meanings and relations that are forged from intercultural contact. The book’s large temporal expanse covers various periods of white-Indian relations where the two cultures overlap, in different ways, and then break down and polarize.
White’s book focuses on North America and the region the French called the pays d’en haut. This area around the Great Lakes is where boundaries between whites and Indians blur and ultimately merge to create the book’s namesake, the middle ground. Not only ascribing a great deal of agency to Indians, White’s idea of the middle ground implicitly concerns Indian-white relations because they are inextricably linked in the pays d’en haut. As the boundaries merge and melt away, the practices of the middle ground were not entirely French or Indian. Both groups come to rely on the other for survival. The change in culture is the result of both sides trying to impose their own expectations in the new shared context. Most importantly, the middle ground depends on neither side being able to gain dominance through force and coercion. This necessitates other means of gaining consent. This includes each side gaining cultural legitimacy in terms of the other and also using the other’s cultural forms. White’s book is a clear assertion that Indians deserve a central place in colonial and early US history because they helped create the world in which we, as Americans, live.
Curtin also argues that culture change on the initiative of the borrowers is in fact more common than any western cultural imposition. Non-westerners were “not, however, so much interested in imitating Western culture as they were anxious to participate in the benefits of high productivity and high consumption.” American Indian culture seems to provide a complex case when analyzing the merits of Curtis’ thesis. While it is true most Indians did not desire to adopt Western culture wholesale, it is debatable whether they were eager to participate in the benefits of high productivity and consumption. Native American hunting and gathering tribes lived subsistence lifestyles necessitated by their highly mobile nature. These tribes were subject to Liebig’s Law that a biological population is limited by the minimum resources at the scarcest time of year. They were not able to store grain in the summer for the winter and thus were kept to low population densities. However, the low ecological strain on the surrounding environment enabled the tribe to enjoy continued abundance on a yearly basis. Therefore, high productivity and consumption are concepts that seem to be incompatible to mobile Indian cultures. Even sedentary Indian cultures did not have individual property rights. Instead, Indians like the Delaware, recognized usufruct rights over the land and the idea of the village through individual sachems. You owned what you made but only as long as it was useful. The names given to geographic locales emphasize the cultural idea of land use and property because they all illustrate the possible uses of the land and not ownership.
However, Indians did participate enthusiastically in trading with Anglos. The Spanish, French, English and later American trading posts were popular destinations for many groups of Indians and even sources of contestation among various tribes in order to secure private access to traders. However, Indians did not necessarily cherish the western goods for their intended utility. Instead, many trade goods gained from the Anglos were desired for symbolic reasons and prestige. Even early muskets brought by European traders were probably admired more for their symbolic nature than any militaristic admiration. Early muskets were incredibly inaccurate, unreliable and slow to reload. In contrast, a proficient Indian warrior with a bow and arrow could do much more damage in a skirmish. Eventually Indians did become largely dependent on European trade goods but it was most likely because of an underlying and continual degradation of their former way of life rather than an impetus to borrow western techniques and tools to participate in high productivity and consumption. For instance, hunting and gathering groups were eventually forced to adopt sedentary lifestyles because of Anglo encroachment on their territory. This newfound reliance on agriculture to provide sustenance meant the need for surplus accumulation in the summer in order to survive the winter. Farming tools were traded from Anglo trading posts along with other items that became indispensible to Indians. These included Anglo style clothing, blankets and, most insidiously, alcohol. The degree that Indians became dependant on Anglo trade goods is illustrated by the impetus to regain independence in the nativist movements of Pontiac and Tecumseh.
Indian women played an interesting role with the approach and increasing importance of western trade. According to Michael Lansing’s article, “Plains Indian Women and Interracial Marriage in the Upper Missouri Trade, 1804-1868,” many Indian women actively married white traders in order to understand the culturally alien others. Additional benefits of marrying the western traders included allying the women’s family and kin with a possible outside source of power and participating as mediators, informants and cultural transmitters. Their mediation often allowed Indian tribes to demystify and humanize whites. Their role is similar to the one played by missionaries in the Neo-Inca resistance where the Indian resistance used the missionaries as a source of information about western outsiders. Therefore, the Indian women of the Upper Missouri were practicing a variety of defensive modernization by gathering important information about the culture and intentions of western traders and their places of origin. Women became the ultimate source of knowledge about the outsiders because through marriage they were able to live with them and have daily contact. Indian men, on the other hand, only had intermittent access with Anglo traders when goods were exchanged. Some women used their knowledge and newfound roles as political and cultural mediators to further their own status and undercut former traditional kinship bonds. “In fact, the lives of most Native women involved in the Upper Missouri trade were changed by its accompanying dynamics to the point where they themselves acted as agents of change…and inadvertently contributed to the breakdown of Native traditions.” The role of Indian women in the transformation of Plains society is incredibly similar to the role that many young and western-educated men played when they returned to their home countries. These men were often sent overseas to learn western militaristic techniques but in the process were exposed to and came to admire other aspects of their western experience. These men often became sources of cultural transformation once they returned home, like the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire. However, unlike cases of successful defensive modernization through western-educated youths, like Thailand, Michael Lansing suggests that the Indian women on the Upper Missouri instead contributed to the collapse and destruction of Plains culture and society. However, while acknowledging their role in the destruction of traditional structures of Plains Indian life, they were instrumental in creating a multicultural culture and society forged on the middle ground. Perhaps a big difference between the defensive modernization of places like Turkey and Thailand from North American Indian tribes was the lack of spatial distance from an imminent western threat. American Indian tribes were unable to internalize the knowledge and incorporate western borrowing before they were forcibly overwhelmed and displaced.
One trade good that some Indians did embrace and utilize was the horse. In fact, the horse became so important to some tribes that their use allowed the expansion of secondary empires. The Cherokee Indians were able to organize a vast trading network in the west and dominate their sedentary Apache rivals thanks to horses. This is a prime example of what Curtin calls cross-cultural borrowing, “when members of one society take over a desirable feature of an alien society, the innovation is pulled out of its original cultural context and fitted into a new one.” In his article, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Richard White details the vast secondary empire that the Sioux were able to acquire through their mastery of the horse and plains warfare. As White says, “The history of the northern and central American Great Plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is far more complicated than the tragic retreat of the Indians in the face of an inexorable white advance.” Instead, other plains tribes often saw a greater threat from the menacing Sioux than the Americans. Therefore, the actions of various plains tribes and their alliances with the Americans against the Sioux must be evaluated from their point of view instead of castigating them as “foolish dupes.” This perspective helps clarify the actions of various Indian tribes when confronted by westerners and why pan-Indian resistance movements did not rise to counter the Anglo presence.
As Curtin says, Europe’s “technological lead was one source of Europe’s ability to conquer and establish its overseas empires.” However, the technological superiority in the subjugation of the Indians in North America is often overstated. Disease played an extremely important role in reducing demographic resistance and allowing European forces to gain footholds throughout the continent. Alfred Crosby points out that the lack of contact with any diseases from the Old World would have made any number of them deadly. These virgin-soil epidemics not only have a high mortality rate, their widespread infection rate limits the number of possible caretakers and they cause widespread cultural and subsistence disturbances. Those who survive the disease epidemic might soon die from starvation.
Curtin’s ideas about conversion and the impetus to borrow from the perspective of the conquered and or threatened have great implications and unexplored possibilities in American Indian history. The fact that English and American expansion west was driven by anxious settlers and traders and not the military illustrates the initial unintended desire for conquering territory. This is not unique to North America as Curtin reveals in several case studies from around the world. Until Andrew Jackson, the United States definitely did not desire any Indian wars in the west. The government was young and poor and the military was weak and inexperienced. Peace with Indians was preferred but the actions of settlers and military men on the spot often dragged the US military into battle. Lastly, Curtin also raises many questions about when or if American Indians truly desired the high productivity and consumption that were the most visible vestiges of western culture. It does not seem like most Indians borrowed from western culture for defensive modernization although Michael Lansing’s study of women on the Upper Missouri does problematize that understanding. There is little evidence to suggest that Indian tribes reorganized their political or social hierarchies to modernize their military, or more basically, their ability to defend themselves. Some did embrace horses and eventually most adopted firearms but the social and political organization of tribes were basically unchanged. As Curtin says, “weapons alone were not always enough…other borrowing from the West, to create an effective government administration, for example, was probably more important.” Through a comparative look at other non-European cultures the failure of American Indians to effectively curtail conquest comes into greater focus. However, just as the picture gets clearer, other parts are still hazy. Where does the middle ground between the Indians and the whites come into play? This largely depends on the reasons for acquiring European goods. Were they merely symbolic and if so, does that lessen their importance as a culturally adopted material? What is certain is the beneficial nature of using comparative case studies to approach and understand similar issues that confronted hundreds of different non-western cultures during the last two centuries.
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