Robert Paulett, in An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732–1795, traverses the space that the commercial trade in deerskins once occupied in the American South during the eighteenth century. Paulett uses two frames in his analysis – geography and empire. Paulett understands that “empires” are not large, homogeneous spaces, but instead are composed of small spaces characterized by much diversity – physically, ideologically, temporally, and humanly – yet bound to a dominating state. The “small places,” in this case, comprised the physical space of the Indian deerskin trade, and they included waterways as well as overland trails, large and small trade houses, and both Indian towns and frontier communities. The human geography included enslaved and free Africans, various Indian groups, and Europeans of varying class and social stature, and each experienced their spaces differently. Ideologically, the spaces of the trade system meant different things to different people at different times. Paulett gets this heterogeneity, but his focus is on the British perspective of empire. And while not he does not ignore altogether the Native and African perspective, neither are central to his analysis except insofar as these perspectives informed British perspectives.

All of this diversity, though, is bound together by a booming transatlantic market in deerskins, guns, and cloth, and anchored by British imperial interests in the commercial trade and Indian alliances. At the time, the diversity of small spaces of the Anglo-Indian southern trade system vexed British leaders to no end because the place, so distant and with so many varying interests, agendas, parties, and spaces, defied most attempts at imperial regulation.

Paulett calls his analysis a “mapping,” because rather than using a bipartite model of metropole–frontier, he finds a more useful unit of analysis in the “transect,” in this case an east–west swath of space through which flowed the goods and people involved in the southern deerskin trade. And indeed, this transect captures well the myriad of small places. Paulett begins with a chapter on the eighteenth-century cartography of the South. Maps, as is well known, are conceived as imperial controls. However, Paulett demonstrates that southeastern map makers were dependent on colonists traversing and experiencing the place; hence these maps of empire reflect more about the traders' and Indians' geography than about the imperial one. In chapter 2, Paulett gives us an absorbing treatment of life on the Savannah river during the heyday of the trade. This chapter is perhaps one of his strongest contributions because of the inclusion of this waterway as a major thoroughfare and because of his intimate look at enslaved African boatmen, both of which have been mostly overlooked in previous treatments of the Anglo-Indian trade. Chapter 3, another strong chapter, moves into the founding and flourishing of Augusta, the gateway to the Indian trade and home to British businessmen busily establishing far-flung trade empires. At a distance from imperial oversight, Augusta did not become a vision of British empire. From the town's irregular, dispersed settlement pattern to its emergent leadership of merchant traders, Augusta was the antithesis of an orderly British settlement. Paulett argues that Augusta, in fact, was a colonial settlement, forged in the messy, colonial geography of the deerskin trade. Chapter 4 examines the pathways and trails connecting Indian towns to Augusta and the possibilities and problems of travel along them. This chapter does not break new ground, but the nicely detailed trials and tribulations of packhorses and packhorse-men and others involved in the trade makes for good reading and is a necessary part of Paulett's transect. Finally, chapter 5 brings us into the westernmost part of the transect – to the British trade houses in Indian communities, run by (usually) employees of the Augusta trade houses and (usually) their Indian wives. In an innovative analysis, Paulett understands the trade houses to be contested spaces in Indian country, symbolizing, simultaneously, both British expansion and control and Indian domination and control. In the end, though, this geography of trade was tied to empire and to British commercial interest and British dependence on Indian allies. Paulett carefully explains that when the deerskin trade faltered and failed and when Indian alliances began to be obsolete with American ascendancy, this geography faltered and failed, and was remade into a new geography of southern planters, cotton, and black slavery.

In summary, An Empire of Small Places is an engaging and new look at the Anglo-Indian trade of the eighteenth-century American South, capturing both the places and the people who lived and worked during a unique time in American history – a time wherein an empire of small places with great diversity could and did flourish.