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InModernity and Its OtherRobert Woods Sayre examines eighteenth-century North America through discussion of texts drawn from the period. He focuses on this unique historical moment when early capitalist civilization (modernity) in colonial societies, especially the British, interacted closely with Indigenous communities (the \"Other\") before the balance of power shifted definitively toward the colonizers.Sayre considers a variety of French perspectives as a counterpoint to the Anglo-American lens, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Philip Freneau, as well as both Anglo-American and French or French Canadian travelers in \"Indian territory,\" including William Bartram, Jonathan Carver, John Lawson, Alexander Mackenzie, Baron de Lahontan, Pierre Charlevoix, and Jean-Baptiste Trudeau.Modernity and Its Otheris an important addition to any North American historian's bookshelf, for it brings together the social history of the European colonies and the ethnohistory of the American Indian peoples who interacted with the colonizers.

In my view the travel account holds the preeminent place in the literature of encounter with Amerindians, moving decisively away from the zero degree of violence and adventure, though not excluding it entirely. I begin with two French voyagers and their narratives, which will serve as cultural counterpoints for the Anglo-American accounts that follow. Before taking up the French texts, though, I will make some preliminary remarks on the travel account as a genre and on New France and its travelers. The type of text that I am concerned with here is strictly speaking a subgenre of the travel account

Since the early development of capitalism in Anglo-America was closely linked to the expropriation of land—land inhabited and used by Amerindians but also imbued with crucial cultural meanings for them—the relation between the natives and the settler colonists could only be highly conflictual.¹ A merciless struggle for control and possession of land was engaged, and the Indians responded to the continual incursions of whites by a ferocious resistance that often took violent forms.² By its very nature the situation discouraged fruitful cultural exchange, naturally tending toward the “zero degree” of contact—confrontation, misunderstanding, rejection, and hatred. In these

Following Jonathan Carver’s expedition in the 1760s, Anglo-American travel—and accounts of it—increased in “Indian territories” as well as in areas of colonial settlement. Those who crossed the frontier in the last third of the century and sometimes recorded their experiences included explorers and fur traders such as Alexander Henry (discussed in chapter 4), John Long and Alexander Mackenzie (treated in chapter 8), speculators such as John Filson, settlers moving west, naturalists, and British visitors whose itineraries took them into “wild” parts.¹ But none of the Anglo-American narratives of encounters with North American Indians in this period has the

Until the end of the Seven Years’ War, which opened to the British the vast regions to which the French had earlier laid claim, the genre of the travel account in Indian territory was dominated by French authors.¹ Accounts of trips made by travelers from the English provinces are not lacking, especially from the beginning of the eighteenth century on, but most of the travel they chronicle took place near the coast, not beyond the “frontier,” and involved the kind of discovery of British colonial society discussed in part 1. Before the middle of the century accounts of journeys beyond

A third record of personal discovery of American modernity—the most external view of the three—is the little-known account of travel and sojourn in the early United States by Moreau de Saint-Méry, a French Creole from Martinique and Saint-Domingue who spent part of his adult life in the metropole. There had already been numerous accounts of the British colonies by French visitors during the War of Independence, but the volume of French travelers further increased in the late 1780s and early 1790s, first due to interest in the new national “experiment,” then as a result of developments in France.¹

I will begin by looking at the onset of modernity in the English colonies through the eyes of Saint-John de Crèvecoeur, an author who has received considerable attention, but not in this perspective. The coming of a fully market-driven society to British America did not, of course, take place all at once; it occurred progressively and over the long term. Recent historiography has generally placed the beginnings of the transition period at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the northern colonies. In the southern colonies the new trends really started to make themselves felt in the

Two travel accounts from the very end of the eighteenth century involve a specific category of traveler: the fur trader. Several of these works have already made an appearance in this book, but only episodically. In several places I have cited in passingHistory of the American Indiansby James Adair, trader among the Chickasaws and other southeastern Indians from the 1730s to 1770s. In chapter 4 I dealt with the travel narrative of a fur trader who operated farther north and west after the French and Indian War: Alexander Henry (the Elder). But I analyzed as textualized “adventure” only

The cessation of hostilities and independence initiated a decisive new point of departure in the socioeconomic development of the original thirteen colonies of British North America. J. Franklin Jameson, a pioneer historian in the sociological interpretation of the American Revolution, wrote in 1925 of the “transforming hand” of this event, which he saw as constituting a great leap toward “the America we know.”¹ More recently historians of different schools of thought have insisted on the Revolution’s role as a trigger in the unfolding of capitalist modernity by removing some of the traditional constraints that persisted in both economic structures and

The definition of what constitutes the “West” later tended to become fixed and singular, but in eighteenth-century North America several geographical conceptions coexisted, and notions of the region also shifted over time. In the Anglo-American sphere, because the colonies had been for so long limited to the narrow east-coastal strip, the West was often thought of as the region west of the Allegheny Mountains, extending to the Mississippi River—the area into which settlers were increasingly moving over the course of the century. This understanding of the term is reflected in the title of an influential work by the land