The short-sightedness and arrogance of British soldiers and imperial officials in the aftermath of the Seven Years War continues to amaze. Determined to teach Americans – whether white or red – a lesson about imperial allegiance, the British decided to overturn a half-century of more or less effective relations in order to assert their own dominance as a matter of principle. We all know how that worked out in dealings with white colonists in the 1760s and 1770s. Yet the British should have had a premonition about what would happen if they disrupted long-standing practices in the colonies from the lessons they could have learned from the great uprising of native Americans under the Detroit Ottawa chief, Pontiac, in 1763. British inability to stop white settlers from violating the boundaries of the frontier established in the Proclamation of 1763, their failure to re-establish the flourishing trade that had existed in the Ohio Valley before the Seven Years War, and their mysterious and idiotic decision to abandon gift-giving, the key ingredient that facilitated European–Indian trade, provoked an enormous and potentially very dangerous conflagration. The loss of life was large – a lot more, for example, than in any British American slave revolt or in the initial stages of the American Revolution – and the shock to the imperial system was considerable.

Middleton, in a fresh and compelling survey of this conflict, provides us with the best account of how this dispute started, what happened in the war and how the dispute was resolved. Unlike other accounts of Pontiac and his war, he focusses intensely on the dispute itself. What is especially valuable is that he addresses, as far as sources allow, the role that Native Americans played in the conflict, assigning particular importance to Pontiac himself. Pontiac was important, like Washington in the Revolutionary war, less for his military skills than for his political leadership and ability to sustain a complicated three-campaign strategy while cajoling a coalition of Indian peoples not accustomed to cooperating with each other. In the short term, Middleton argues, Pontiac proved very successful. The British conceded to Native Americans what they should never have tried to take away, such as their rights to hunting and to trade. Pontiac's war should have been the basis for a lasting peace. Alas, European pressures on Indian land made short-term Native American successes illusory. As Middleton concludes, Indians were fundamentally vulnerable to European expansion, especially as the assumptions of the middle ground began to crumble. The long-term implications of British and then American destruction of the middle ground after the Seven Years War were terrible for Indians. What Middleton shows, however, is that it was not just American colonists who fought for their freedom in the mid-eighteenth century. Pontiac and his allies did so too.