Elusive Empires

This book examines the efforts of France, Britain, and the United States to extend imperial dominion over the Ohio Valley, focusing on relations between Europeans, Euroamericans, and Indians to tell the story. It treats empires as cross-cultural constructions whose details were negotiated by their participants and argues that three models of empire competed for acceptance in the region: empires of commerce and of land, which both the French and the British sought to build, and an empire of liberty, which grew out of the American Revolution and eventually became the basis for Euroamerican…