Empire by Collaboration. Robert Michael Morrissey

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      This book explores the interaction of peoples and governments in the middle of the continent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Even from the very beginning, when the French at Quebec established a mostly reluctant alliance with the Illinois Indians, and Jesuits and fur traders planted defiant outposts in the Illinois River Valley beyond the Great Lakes Watershed, the Illinois was a territory in tension with imperial plans. In fact, much evidence suggests that the earliest colony in Illinois was not only unplanned but clearly opposite to the designs that French officials had for their North American colonial empire. Although the colony eventually became substantial, its relationship to the imperial governments in the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes was frequently in question. Throughout the eighteenth century, as both Canada and Louisiana alternately claimed authority over the Illinois, and as British and Spanish authorities later tried to divide the region with a political border at the Mississippi River, there was considerable uncertainty about who really would control this colonial region, giving the inhabitants options as they played one government off another. Illinois became a haven for fur traders, farmers, missionaries, and Indians who sought to realize alternative visions for colonial life at the edges of these competing powers. Eventually the colonists and Indians of Illinois asserted a kind of selfdetermination that gave the community a unique identity within the French empire. And yet the colonists and Illinois Indians were not independent. They welcomed and partnered with empire in many ways.

      Scholars have often viewed the French empire as a failure, a backward system defined by weak would-be absolutists in Versailles and truculent colonists and Natives on the ground in America.⁷ And while there is some truth to that depiction, it is far better to see the French empire, and perhaps colonialism in general, in a different way. Moving beyond the question of success and failure, a better question is: what was the nature of colonialism?⁸ For instance, by recognizing the French government’s inability to project power, we refocus our attention to the complex ways that the “empire” built strength through alliance with Native peoples.⁹ And if the government did not always control its colonists with strict legal order, understanding this fact opens up windows into how a distinctive kind of colonialism was achieved even through criminal activity and legal pluralism.¹⁰ Economically speaking, if the government never succeeded in establishing its mercantilist priorities, this only highlights the frontier exchange economies in which intercultural communities, black markets, and even creole cuisines were born as unintentional, if no less “imperial,” creations.¹¹ Far more interesting than the question of success and failure is understanding the nature of colonialism itself as a complicated system mutually created by diverse, entangled peoples.

      These realities defined the nature of French colonialism and early modern colonialism in general. And yet the theme of “failure,” or at least “dysfunction,” still persists in our understanding of the early modern French empire, since so much of the nature of imperialism was so unintentional, so accidental. In most parts of the early modern French empire, there was a persistent dialectic: colonists and Indians were generally hardheaded and defiant, intent on “resistance,” while imperial officials remained flustered and inflexible, intent on “order.”¹² What is more, their interactions proceeded in what often looks like a comedy of errors, since they made almost all of their compromises in spite of their real intentions and sometimes without even knowing they were compromising. For instance, Indians and the French government accommodated their differences to make imperial alliances, but they did this unintentionally and only on the basis of what one scholar calls “creative misunderstandings.”¹³ They never really saw eye to eye. And when it came to relations between French colonists and officials, compromises and accommodations were no less begrudging and tension filled. Rogues basically ran the economy in Louisiana and created a unique, contested system. But imperialists never stopped chasing after smugglers and trying to throw them in jail, and they never recognized just how much their colonies depended on black market activities.¹⁴ In general, would-be absolutists in charge of colonial governments never stopped pursuing their unrealistic dreams of ordre, even fantasizing about placing symmetrical grids on an obviously resistant colonial landscape.¹⁵ Rather than sitting down with the colonial population to “see eye to eye,” so many imperialists kept up bullheaded efforts to “see like a state.” For their part, rather than cooperating with government and shaping it to their ends, colonists and Indians remained resolute in practicing “the art of not being governed.” The result was a frustrated, conflict-ridden, and dysfunctional kind of empire.¹⁶