There is general agreement that the decades on either side of 1800 marked a pivotal moment in global history. Just what to call that moment, and hence how to define its transformational character, is less clear. Contemporaries called it an age of revolutions, and students of Euro-American democracy such as R. R. Palmer followed them in defining it as a revolutionary age. For global historians such as C. A. Bayly and John Darwin, it comprised a “world crisis” amid the collision of agrarian empires and the worldwide engagement of fiscal-military states. For still others, it was the era of the Great Divergence between Asia and Europe (Kenneth Pomeranz) or of the Settler Revolution across an array of frontiers in the Americas and Australasia (James Belich). Despite their differences of emphasis, what these paradigms share is their focus on the experiences of empires and colonies, settlers and their states. As a result, the Indigenous peoples of the globe have rarely taken center stage in accounts of this transformative time. Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age breaks ground as the first collective volume to emphasize their agency in this era.

The volume's editors, Kate Fullagar and Michael McDonnell, view the revolutionary age generously as spanning the decades from roughly the Seven Years’ War to the Treaty of Waitangi, or from the 1750s to c. 1840. They pose the collection's key questions in their wide-ranging introduction: “What did revolution look like to Indigenous peoples? What connections did they make between themselves, newcomers, and other Indigenous peoples, and what lessons were learned? In what ways did Indigenous people … shape this critical moment in the global past?” (4). A baker's dozen of chapters provide answers that are diverse but not diffuse: by treating more than the interactions between Indigenous peoples and the British empire, they range cogently and comprehensively from the Scottish Highlands to New South Wales, and from the Great Lakes to Tahiti via the Persian Gulf and the Cape Colony. Read together, the chapters provide a global view without losing sight of exchanges across imperial networks or the entanglement of frontiers in parallel projects of settlement and colonial conflict. They do so consistently by writing “histories of empire with Indigenous peoples as the main subject” (4), as Fullagar and McDonnell forcefully assert.

This novel perspective on the Age of Revolution emerges both in chapters derived from their authors’ earlier works and in those where the writers strike out in new directions. Among the former, Bill Gammage deftly defines Indigenous Australians as “future makers” whose long-developed stewardship of the land and natural resources was disrupted by incomers who could not see the evidence of careful cultivation, leading to desolation and desecration in a kind of agricultural revolution in reverse. McDonnell and Colin Calloway draw on their classic studies of native North America to show how the British became enmeshed in indigenous empires and their diplomacy, to erect their own “architecture of empire” (the term is McDonnell's, chapter 2) on firmly indigenous foundations. Jennifer Newell reprises and extends her classic earlier studies on the environmental history of the Pacific to reveal how the interaction of the “Tahitian, Samoan, and British social-ecological systems” (108) shaped the natural world, while Kate Fullagar builds on her reconstructions of Indigenous travelers’ encounters with metropolitan societies to determine how deeply the motivations of the Cherokee leader Ostenaco and the Polynesian cosmopolitan Mai reflected long-running social imperatives more than the individual motivations often attributed to them. Finally, among these chapters, Robert Kenny digs deep into the Indigenous Australian understandings of the settler revolution on the Victorian frontier and Joshua Reid complements treatments of struggles over land with his salutary reminder that the “Settler Revolution and settler colonialism … were also about marine spaces and resources such as the skins of fur seals and sea otters” (258), as seen in the struggles of the Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Makah whalers of the Pacific Northwest, with consequences that cascaded into our own century with Indigenous legal challenges to settler states.

Until recently, most studies of the Age of Revolution have overlooked Africa and the Middle East: particularly welcome in Facing Empire are chapters by Rebecca Shumway (on struggles over sovereignty in West Africa), Nicole Ulrich (on inter-Indigenous relations in the Cape Colony as class struggles under colonialism in the transition from Dutch to British rule), and Sujit Sivasundaram (on the Persian Gulf as more than the matrix of revolutionary Wahhabism—a nexus between imperialism and revolution and as one of multiple sites where indigeneity was newly forged as a “changeable category of belonging and classification” in the period [116]). More broadly, Tony Ballantyne's crisp consideration of “entanglement” rather than “encounter” as a controlling concept, and Justin Brooks's ambitious comparison of Indigenous implication with empire in the Scottish Highlands, Bengal, and native North America, together highlight connections and parallel patterns of action and reaction that help to tie the concerns of the book together both conceptually and chronologically. A brief but suggestive afterword by Shino Konishi reinforces this integrative impulse with reference to the scholarship of the late Tracey Banivanua Mar (1974–2017): Facing Empires is dedicated to her memory. Indigenous peoples across the British Empire shaped the Settler Revolution, and by the 1830s they bore the brunt of what Lisa Ford has called “settler sovereignty” around the globe. The commonalities in their struggles and convergences in their strategies stand out in greater relief thanks to the kaleidoscopic array of essays Fullagar and McDonnell have collected. In light of Facing Empires, the history of the revolutionary age will never look quite the same again.