Overview

Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia's founding to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Previous scholars have focused on the contested relationship between the British imperial state and the colonies it established along the Atlantic Coast without addressing how sovereign Native nations shaped the colonial process through warfare, diplomacy, trade, peace-making, and treaty-making. Prior adopts a new interpretive framework for examining sovereignty in early America, arguing that the Native and colonial spaces of the Northeast were a treaty ground thickly layered with agreements and negotiated rules of interaction. Drawing on an extensive range of treaty records, writings on colonial and imperial affairs, letters, and official documents, Treaty Ground argues that sovereignty was negotiated within diplomacy and shaped the norms of war, the terms of peace and alliances, the rightful ownership of territory, and appropriate responses to treaty violations. This process in turn structured relations between the Crown and colonies and framed initial positions on how the power of congress related to that of the states. Treaty Ground offers historical depth to our understanding of how Native nations articulated Indigenous power within colonialism, cuts settler colonialism down to size, and expands contemporary understandings of the sovereign relationships between Native nations in the United States and Canada.

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9781496244840

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Reviews

""Treaty Ground connects Native American history to the history of Anglo-American political and constitutional thought, which hasn't been done before, at least not through the lens of diplomacy. Charles Prior's focus on war and the sovereign powers it summoned forth is a valuable corrective to scholarship on Anglo-American thought, which has been almost exclusively focused on the tensions between English subjects and their rulers, and between colonists and royal officials in London.""--Craig Yirush, author of Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675-1775

Author Information

Charles W. A. Prior is a professor of history at the University of Birmingham. He is the author and editor of several books, including Settlers in Indian Country: Sovereignty and Indigenous Power in Early America and A Confusion of Tongues: Britain's Wars of Reformation, 1625–1642.

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