Brothers Among Nations: Mapping and Intercultural Alliances in Early America

During the first eighty years of permanent European colonization, webs of alliances shaped North America from northern New England to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and entangled all peoples in one form or another.

In Brothers among Nations, Cynthia Van Zandt argues that the pursuit of alliances was a widespread multiethnic quest that shaped the early colonial American world in fundamentally important ways. These alliances could produce surprising results, with Europeans sometimes subservient to more powerful Native American nations, even as native nations were sometimes clients and tributaries of European colonists. Spanning nine European colonies, including English, Dutch, and Swedish colonies, as well as many Native American nations and a community of transplanted Africans, Brothers among Nations enlists a broad array of sources to illuminate the degree to which European colonists were frequently among the most vulnerable people in North America and the centrality of Native Americans to the success of the European colonial project.


Author: Cynthia J. Van Zandt
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 07/08/2008
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.24lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.75d
ISBN: 9780195181241

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 08/08/2008 pg. 17
Choice 06/01/2009

About the Author

Cynthia J. Van Zandt is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.

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