At the Edge of Empire

Eric Hinderaker is an associate professor of history at the University of Utah and author of Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800. Peter C. Mancall is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and author of Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America and Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700-1800.

• Contents: Acknowledgments PROLOGUE Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Mission to the West ONE Mainland Encounters TWO Conflicts and Captives THREE New Horizons FOUR Clash of Empires FIVE Backcountry Revolution SIX Daniel Boone's America EPILOGUE At the Edge of Empire Notes Essay on Sources Index

Mr. Hinderaker and Mr. Mancall successfully challenge the negative reputation that has clung to the backcountry. They demonstrate that it was an economically vital part of colonial American society... Thanks to the authors' impressive scholarship we now understand how a place once despised as a 'backcountry' quickly became the dynamic frontier of economic and social development in the United States. -- Evan Haefeli Washington Times This short, engaging text provides a useful survey of key themes for an often-neglected region, the backcountry... Particular attention is focused on the numerous wars of the period; the book has excellent short discussions of Bacon's Rebellion, Metacom's War, the Yamasee War, and the Seven Years' War, among other conflicts. Although the idea of the 'backcountry' is by definition a European concept, the authors skillfully outline the impact of trade and war on both Native and Colonial communities. Choice 2004 A fine synthesis of a vastly complex subject, and students assigned this volume will benefit from the authors' successful integration of the backcountry into the broader history of English imperialism in America... Extremely informative and useful. -- Michael Leroy Oberg History: Reviews of New Books An acutely written, meticulously researched, scholarly history which closely examines the manifold causes of conflict between Native Americans and Europeans, as well as the ordinary situations of daily life which were to significantly contribute to the American Revolution. Midwest Book Review Eric Hinderaker and Peter Mancall have written a concise, synthetic narrative of the backcountry from Georgia to Maine. In the process, they successfully argue for its centrality in colonial American history. -- Krista Camenzind Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 2004 Sophisticated but straightforward, At the Edge of Empire is an excellent introduction to the vital role that the backcountry played in colonial American history. -- Kathleen DuVal New England Quarterly Takes a fresh approach to it subject matter... sheds light on the wider Atlantic context in which eighteenth-century British America developed... Hinderaker and Mancall describe the rapid and often violent mixing of cultures on a frontier that imperial authorities could barely control. -- Timothy J. Shannon William and Mary Quarterly 2005 Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall have successfully synthesized the complex world of British backcountry resettlement in a brief, readable format.Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall -- Gray H. Whaley Journal of World History 2005 At the Edge of Empire is undoubtedly the best available introduction to its difficult subject for scholars and students alike. -- Michael Ziser Eighteenth-Century Studies 2005 Intriguing book. -- Gregory Evans Dowd North Carolina Historical Review 2006 Hinderaker and Mancall write a compact synthesis of recent historical monographs that open the reader to the diversity of new scholarship concerning two hundred years of British colonial history. -- David Curtis Skaggs Journal of Northwest Ohio History 2008