Although long a subject of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines, the travels of Indigenous people to the centers of European empires has garnered increased attention in recent years. Part of the appeal is that such ventures are counterintuitive in that they challenge the presumptive one-way flow of Europeans from the Old World into new ones in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. In this sense, they complement the much wider literature that explores how European engagements with Indigenous peoples deeply affected Europeans, both as individuals and as societies. Equally important, such studies further complicate the impact of European colonization on native peoples by broadening the geographic landscape in which exchanges took place, rather than restricting them to imperial peripheries. In Travellers through Empire, Cecilia Morgan makes a worthy contribution to the field by chronicling the experiences of American Indians from British North America during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Morgan does not pretend her study to be comprehensive. Rather, she focuses on a select range of people—young and old, male and female, obscure and well known—from across British Canada, primarily from the nineteenth century. While Morgan's selection criteria are not entirely clear, together the included characters nevertheless provide an impressive portrait of the diversity of Indigenous travelers and their ventures. Critically, and rightly, Morgan considers her subjects’ experiences as “emblematic” of the imperial currents and rapidly changing worlds of British North America's Indigenous peoples. Thus, she writes, “Far from being idiosyncratic or atypical, in many ways their oceanic voyages register the reordering of their communities” (5).

Morgan organizes her book into an introduction followed by six chapters and an epilogue. Each chapter focuses on either an individual or group. The first chapter considers the most famous of the selected figures, John Norton, the Scottish-born Mohawk leader who is celebrated for his critical role in the defense of Canada during the War of 1812. Although Morgan provides a solid chapter, Norton's celebrity, literacy, and political prominence have already made him one of the best-documented American Indians of the period. The ensuing chapters, in which Morgan explores lesser-known and altogether forgotten figures, contribute more to scholarship in the field. In the second chapter, Morgan narrates the history of the Upper Canadian Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe), who traveled to Britain in association with the missionary wave that swept the Victorian British Empire and, in so doing, associates her work with the larger scholarship on Christian missionary movements that brought Indigenous people from across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Pacific to Europe as converts, fund-raisers, and potential returning agents. In the following two chapters, Morgan examines people who traveled as a result of what she terms “intimate” relationships—primarily marriage and kinship—and in the process considers the more marginalized experiences of women and children. In these two chapters, Morgan truly shines, bringing to bear her exhaustive research to meticulously examine the multifaceted, and sometimes heartbreaking, experiences of individuals who straddled multiple cultural worlds—experiences that were often forced upon them. The next two chapters chronicle the travelers as performers, including a lively account of the Ojibwe who joined the steady trickle of American Indians who toured Europe in companies during the nineteenth century—the most famous being Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. In sum, then, Morgan's chapters constitute a collection of intense gazes on a select few people who represent the wide diversity of experiences that the Indigenous peoples had with the British Empire—either as travelers or as the friends, families, and communities on whom the travelers had an impact.

One might criticize Morgan's study for its lack of a driving thesis or even a tight ensemble of central arguments. However, her willingness to forego a central-thesis-driven approach ultimately releases her to focus on the recovery and retelling of her selected people's lives. And in this respect she produces a work in which any one of the chapters could stand as an independent piece of scholarship. The thoroughness of her research is impressive, as is her thoughtfully constructed telling of the stories she uncovers. Combined, these attributes make Travellers through Empire both an authoritative work in the area of Indigenous travels and a set of exemplary biographies. In consequence, the book, either as a whole or as individual chapters, is a valuable addition to scholars and teachers wanting to explore the complex relationships between Indigenous people and European empires.