Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor's latest book concerns the Six Nations Iroquois and their relations with British, American, and New York officials from the end of the Seven Years' War through the first decade of the nineteenth century. In particular Taylor examines how new political and proprietary boundaries emerged to divide the Iroquois Confederacy's homelands between the United States and British Canada, each of which relegated politically and geographically fragmented Iroquois survivors to a racially inferior status. He argues that throughout their ordeal the Iroquois drew on their cultural traditions and on their experiences with Europeans and European-Americans to shape, with diminishing degrees of success, the course of events. And he maintains that the dispossession of the Iroquois is integral to our understanding of the origins of the American republic.

Taylor's story is filled with characters, communities, interest groups, and governments pursuing various goals. To inject narrative coherence, he focuses particularly (but not exclusively) on two remarkable figures, Joseph Brant, a Mohawk Iroquois, and Samuel Kirkland, a white New Englander, who met in 1761 as young men attending a biracial boarding school for prospective Christian missionaries to Indians. Brant went on to become a culturally hybrid Anglican and charismatic leader of Iroquois and Loyalist forces during the Revolution and thereafter the most prominent of those Iroquois who chose exile in Canada over remaining in homelands nearer the victors. Kirkland became a Congregationalist missionary, lived most of his life among the Oneida Iroquois in what became upstate New York, and is best known for having persuaded the Oneidas to support the Americans during the Revolution. The two men's careers, intersecting occasionally and ending when they died three months apart in 1807–8, symbolized the parallel fates of Iroquois people in Upper Canada and New York.

Brant and Kirkland met at a moment of uncertainty for the Iroquois and other eastern Indians. After Britain drove France from North America, Indians lost their ability to play the two empires off one another diplomatically, leaving them more vulnerable than ever to incursions by speculators and squatters and to the prospect of incorporation within the seaboard colonies. Seeking to limit colonies’ claims to land and authority, British officials asserted direct imperial authority over Indians and lands west of the Proclamation Line (1763), a north-south boundary that was modified in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768). Taylor notes that colonists’ repudiation of British claims to authority over trans-Appalachian lands and people paralleled their denial of imperial powers to tax them and regulate their commerce without legislative consent. Whereas Britain regarded Indians, recently conquered French Canadians, and Anglo-American colonists alike as constituents of its “composite” empire, the colonists resented being consigned to an inferior status. The upshot of this clash was the American Revolution. The Revolution drove Brant and Kirkland apart and shattered the Six Nations Confederacy. The divided Iroquois’ vulnerability became evident in the Treaty of Paris (1783), in which the United States and Britain each ignored the contributions and sovereign claims of its recent allies and drew an east-west boundary perpendicular to and overriding that established at Fort Stanwix.

The increasing fragmentation of the Iroquois and their lands after the Treaty of Paris is reflected in Taylor's narrative, which shifts often among multiple plot lines. Recognizing that Britain needed the support of Iroquois refugees in order to prevent American expansion northward, Brant maneuvered shrewdly to secure Iroquois homelands in Upper Canada. Brant's fortunes ascended until, under terms of the Jay Treaty, Britain evacuated the forts on American territory it still occupied contrary to the Treaty of Paris. Most critically for the Iroquois, Britain in 1796 abandoned Fort Niagara, which rendered the east-west international boundary and its division of Iroquoia irrevocable. Thereafter Upper Canada officials sought to transform Indian allies into subjects and to reduce Brant's personal power. He became decreasingly effective and increasingly desperate, even plotting briefly with Aaron Burr in 1802 to effect a French-Spanish-Indian uprising.

In New York, the Oneidas sought to adapt to the American victory in ways that would maximize their control of their environment and minimize the impact of settler incursions. Like Brant in Canada, they leased some plots and granted or sold others to carefully selected, friendly whites (including Kirkland). But the pressures exerted by virtually unlimited quantities of capital and land-hungry settlers were overwhelming. One of Taylor's signal contributions is to catalog how public officials and private interests (often competing with one another) employed an astonishing array of means, ranging from mere lies to swindles of astonishing proportions to outright theft and violence, to reduce the Oneidas (and other Iroquois within the United States) to scattered, impoverished enclaves of collective demoralization surrounded by thriving communities of white Americans.

Taylor's book inevitably invites comparison with Anthony Wallace's classic The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1969), which examined the Iroquois during the same period but focused on the westernmost Senecas as opposed to the easternmost Mohawks and Oneidas. While the two authors’ skillful renderings of post-Revolutionary Iroquois individuals and communities complement one another nicely (and occasionally overlap), anthropologist Wallace was primarily concerned with cultural deprivation and revitalization within one Indian tribe while historian Taylor examines the place of the Iroquois within the new political order that emerged in eastern North America. Taylor argues that the priorities and values of that order were expressed above all in officials’ insistence that Indians not own land on which white people lived or exercise authority of any kind over whites. South of the new border this racialized insistence articulated the deepest meaning of America's “empire of liberty.” In demonstrating meticulously the processes by which whites disempowered and dispossessed the Iroquois, Taylor contributes significantly and brilliantly to historians’ current reconsiderations of what was revolutionary about the American Revolution and the implications of that revolution for the nation's subsequent history.