Under all of that, there is a theoretical angle that he brings to the table, and it is one that most other historians have really said very little about.
There are many participants in the world that White (1991) describes. There are traders, colonial officials, prophets, chiefs, women, missionaries, and warriors. According to White (1991) these people all had to continually construct the rules of a 'game' of sorts. The traditions and cultures these people had were not capable of handling what was happening on their own, so they had to all work together to play this game so that they could reach some kind of conclusion they all could accept. The natives and the Europeans did not just discard the cultural baggage they still carried with them, however. Instead, they used what worked from their own cultures and then took what they needed, wanted, and liked from the other cultures that they were surrounded by, in order to find something that worked for them and for the situation that they found themselves in.
They took these things and refashioned them for their own purposes, so that they could make use of them in a way that would offer something to everyone involved. Because of this, new cultures actually developed and became ingrained in the people as the years went along. Under White's (1991) careful scrutiny, people who would have otherwise been called something specific, such as 'trader' or 'native' or 'father,' actually become much more, because society becomes much...
There are symbols and terms that are mutually forged and mutually misunderstood by a lot of people during that time period. These symbols and terms shifted and changed and eventually became more solid, but this took time -- and most history books ignore the changes that the people actually had to go through to get from where they were to what they have become.
Careful to make everything as clear as possible, White (1991) traces strategies that were used by the British, French, Algonquin, and Iroquois in order to help them survive in the changing world. Some of those strategies were for survival, and others where for exploitation, but they were all vital to existence in the minds of the people who were using them. The book contains scenes of mercy that are very unexpected and scenes of brutality that is truly sickening, but there is a day-to-day coexistence about all of it that White (1991) is able to show the importance and significance of. It will be interesting to see if other histories work this way in the future, and if other historians and authors follow White's lead to see how and where the world changed -- and then take time to explore the depth of those changes in the people who were involved in that time period. This is not the same as looking at the changes themselves, and White (1991) has realized that, using it to his -- and the reader's -- advantage.
Bibliography
White, Richard. (1991). The middle ground: Indians, empires, and…
