Historians have long recognized the Seven Years' War (1756–63) as a turning point in how the British talked and wrote about their empire. Before this global conflict with Europe's other imperial powers, British commentators and policy makers generally thought of empire in terms of maritime trade and of colonies as outposts populated by fellow subjects loyal to the crown and Protestant religion. After the Peace of Paris, empire took on a different cast. Colonies were now vast territorial dominions populated by indigenous peoples who were ethnically and racially distinct from their British rulers. Power in this empire was hierarchical and centralized and, when necessary, maintained at the point of a gun. The nation of Britain was distinct from the British Empire but also dependent upon it for important cultural definitions that helped Britons explain who they were. Overseas colonies and their indigenous inhabitants made clear the political and racial parameters of Britishness by constantly reminding Britons of who they were not.

In Savages within the Empire, Troy Bickham explores the role that American Indians played in this process. No other indigenous group, he argues, figured as prominently in British discourse about empire during “the crucial empire-building years between the eve of the Seven Years' War and Britain's defeat in the American War of Independence” (3). War, conquest, and rebellion in North America inspired a great deal of popular and elite discourse about Indians and the roles that they played within the empire as allies, enemies, consumers, and converts. Furthermore, Bickham argues, this outpouring of interest in Indians was different in tone and content from what had preceded it. Since the Elizabethan era, Britons had periodically had their curiosity piqued by Indian travelers to London, but the feting of these visitors as kings and plenipotentiaries testified to their status as exotic objects rather than living beings intimately involved in Britain's overseas affairs. According to Bickham, all that changed after 1750, when Britons learned to view Indians as “real peoples living in real places” (5) and as “key players in a struggle that would determine whether or not the British nation would endure and prosper” (14).

Bickham divides his argument into four parts, the first and last of which are the most convincing. The chapters in part 1 focus on popular attitudes toward Indians during the era of the Seven Years' War, and in them Bickham casts his evidentiary net widely to recover the many ways in which Indians permeated British consciousness at midcentury. Whether in public prints, artifact collections, or public exhibitions, the depiction of Indians in this era placed a new emphasis on ethnographic detail and authenticity. The inquiring public, its curiosity whetted by the coverage of the American war in newspapers and magazines, wanted to know which Indian nations lived in which regions, which ones promised to be the most steadfast allies, and which might be the greatest threat to British security. This coverage of Indians offered a more “pragmatic, studious approach that emphasized fact and authenticity” than the “generic exoticism” favored by previous generations (64). In part 4, Bickham returns to the issue of popular media when he examines the depiction of Indians during the American War of Independence. Bickham finds evidence in the public debate over the war of a popular distaste for using Indians as allies against the American rebels. This revulsion had much to do with attitudes about Indian savagery forged during the 1750s and 1760s, and it sharpened the racial identity that the British had attached to Indians in that era. Despite a war effort that was not going well, the British populace never warmed to the idea of fighting their fellow subjects in America, even if they were rebels, with the Indian-style “savagery” they had come to know so well from the news coverage of the Seven Years' War.

Parts 2 and 3 of Bickham's argument are less successful because they stray from his evidentiary base in popular media. Part 2 examines the new Indian policy pursued by the British crown during the 1750s and 1760s, but it offers little new in this regard and does not make much of an effort to connect the decisions of elite policy makers to changing popular attitudes about Indians. Part 3 is likewise concerned with elite attitudes and sources: Scottish Enlightenment philosophers and Anglican churchmen. Bickham admits that his case for the new popular interest in American Indians having an influence on the Scottish philosophers is “largely circumstantial” (182), and he is right. More might be made of the Church of England's attitude toward Indians, but rather than examining the experiences of Society for the Propagation of the Gospel missionaries in America, Bickham confines his analysis to the sermons delivered and published by church officials in Britain.

This is a book written from a decidedly metropolitan perspective. Bickham's chief concern is recovering elite and popular attitudes about American Indians in Britain, and therefore, he does not devote attention or energy to such attitudes as they might have been expressed in North America, even if by Anglican churchmen or British imperial officials stationed there. It is also worth noting one source underused by Bickham: prints, engravings, and paintings from this era with Indian subjects. In discussing the American War of Independence, he incorporates two well-known political cartoons satirizing British complicity in Indian savagery, but he does not bring the same attention to the visual record on Indians that emerged during the 1750s and 1760s. These shortcomings aside, this is a useful book, especially for its illuminating exploration of Indians in Britain's popular media during the second half of the eighteenth century. Bickham does an excellent job of connecting this popular interest in Indians to wider currents in British popular entertainments and literature of this era, and for that he is to be commended.