Kate Fullagar's The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in the Age of Empire examines the eighteenth-century British empire through the lives of the North American Cherokee leader Ostenaco, Pacific Ra'iatean traveler Mai, and famed British painter Joshua Reynolds. The connection between them hinges on Reynolds, who painted both of these Indigenous men on their respective visits to Britain. Fullagar weaves their lives together, with attention to their cultural and historical contingencies and specificities, to reflect “two resurgent cultural concerns: the possibilities of life writing and the moral legacy of empire” (5). This “experiment in New Biography” (5) provides a different kind of cultural history, which decenters British narratives in favor of Indigenous negotiations with empire, and the focus on individual biographies helps complicate stories of supposedly inevitable dispossession and loss.

The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist is structured around the lives of the three men, in three interwoven narratives. It begins with Ostenaco, the warrior-diplomat, born in the 1710s in a Cherokee town in the Appalachian Mountains. Fullagar's account of the matrilineal, clan-based Cherokee society is informative and a reminder that the individualized sense of identity ascendant in British culture of the period was not universal. Ostenaco and Mai would not have understood the meaning and narrative of their lives in the linear way we encounter them. Indeed, Fullagar suggests Reynolds's own generation in Britain would not have shed their communal selves in favor of “modern” subjectivity, and as a “phiz monger” (51) turned preeminent portrait painter, Reynolds played a part in negotiating the individualized subject versus collective universality in his art (45).

Ostenaco and Reynolds met for the first and only time in London in 1762, where Ostenaco had come with two other Cherokee men to meet George III on a somewhat hastily arranged diplomatic mission. Reynolds's close friend Oliver Goldsmith met the Cherokee first, disappointed by the heavy ochre Ostenaco wore on his face as it signified to the writer that the vanity of the age existed even among the supposedly humble Indigenous people of North America, and soon after Reynolds secured a portrait sitting. It is not clear how this transaction was arranged, but as Fullagar convincingly argues, Reynolds was unhappy with the finished painting. It was never shown and never sold, though he did store it rather than destroy it. Did it present an uncomfortable opinion about empire, in depicting a Cherokee “savage” stare confidently and unnervingly at the metropolitan viewer? Or did it fail aesthetically, for other reasons known only to Reynolds? It would have been useful to consider this portrait and its mixed significations in the broader context of Indigenous portraiture in the century, from the “Four Indian Kings” to, more importantly, Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (also known as Thayendanegea), but this is perhaps beyond the scope of these focused biographies.

Mai arrived in London in 1774, having joined Cook's second voyage of discovery at Huahine in the Sandwich Islands. His motivation, besides travel, appears to have been revenge on the Bora Borans who had invaded his native Ra'iatea; in Britain, Mai hoped, he could assemble weapons and perhaps manpower to defeat his enemies. For his British hosts, he might drum up interest in the business of empire in the South Pacific. He stayed in London for two years. By this time, Reynolds was the inaugural president of the Royal Academy of Arts, formed in 1768, and he likely met the Ra'iatean man in late 1775 at a dinner documented by the author Frances Burney. Thanks in part to his connection to famed naturalist Joseph Banks, at whose house he stayed, Mai had access to the literary and cultural elite of London. And because Reynolds's own diaries for 1774–1776 are lost, Mai's celebrity status and his appearance in newspapers and the writings of those with whom he rubbed shoulders provides the balance of detail in this instance.

Reynolds was happier with his portrait of Mai, and he showed it at the Royal Academy's annual exhibition and kept it hung in his studio until his death. Certainly, it is a compelling painting, with the turbaned Pacific Islander revealing “a conglomeration of a wide range of stereotypes” that “avoids, mostly, all sense of cliché or parody” (207). Yet, like his painting of Ostenaco years earlier, Reynolds never sold it. Fullagar's discussion of the portraits ingeniously highlights both the British ambivalence toward empire in the period, and Reynolds's own conflicted feelings about expansion. His great friends Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke serve as foils in the book, as respective critic of and apologist for overseas expansion, which is rhetorically effective though perhaps not entirely fair to both men.

If it is an “experiment,” then The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist is successful and Fullagar has achieved what she set out to do: critically examine the eighteenth-century British empire and its effects through the lives of these men. There is, inevitably, some unevenness given the available archive, which in the case of Mai is particularly lacking prior to his joining Cook's voyage. But Fullagar sensitively handles the lives of the Indigenous men, and she resists both tragedy and romance in telling their stories. The British Empire was profoundly damaging for most Indigenous nations, but The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist reminds us that people found ways to negotiate and survive in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming force.