Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill

Abstract

In his influential essay “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations,” historian Brian DeLay observes that despite some important calls for correction, American Indian peoples have largely fallen “outside the professional mandate for diplomatic history.”1 Building on an earlier argument by historian Arthur N. Gilbert, DeLay notes that the categorization of Native peoples as “legal oddities” since at least the mid-nineteenth century has fueled the field’s oversight and is itself largely a consequence of colonialism and imperialism.2 Moreover, the continued erasure of Indigenous people from American diplomatic history depends on scholarly assumptions that Native peoples had no “foreign policy” and were both “disconnected from” and “irrelevant to . . . international events.”3 Yet, as DeLay points out and as decades of work within the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies have demonstrated, there is a rich source base providing evidence to the contrary.4 Among the many contributions of James L. Hill’s monograph, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818, its forceful call for greater incorporation of southeastern Indians into the diplomatic history of the Atlantic world is topmost. Hill’s study addresses the intersecting themes of diplomacy, trade, and sovereignty in the Creek confederacy during the tumultuous period between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the end of the First Seminole War, with an emphasis on the Chattahoochee and Flint River regions in present-day Georgia and Florida. But both his subjects and his source material range much further as he takes readers from Havana to Halifax, from Saint Augustine to Quebec, and from Tallahassee to London. Rather than appearing disconnected from or irrelevant to international relations—per DeLay’s indictment of much foreign relations history—Creek, Seminole, and