As Colin Calloway speculates in his introduction to The Indian World of George Washington, “probably more books have been written about Washington than about any other American” (4). Yet, in this crowded field, Calloway offers a novel perspective on the first President's life by contextualizing it within the Indigenous world that dominated eighteenth-century North America. Using Washington as a narrative anchor, Calloway presents an early America in which Indigenous people outnumbered European colonists demographically, outranked them militarily, and controlled the fate of colonial ventures. From the lands that they speculated in to the allies they courted, eighteenth-century colonial leaders never doubted that they lived within a fundamentally Indigenous realm. George Washington was no exception. As Calloway asserts,

The book falls into three parts, each aligned with a stage of Washington's life and a significant period in early American history. The first, “Learning Curves,” details Washington's youth speculating in Indian lands and soldiering in the Seven Years War. Calloway characterizes this period as an apprenticeship in Indian diplomacy that taught Washington lifelong lessons about the extent of Indigenous power and the value of Indigenous lands. He also stresses that Native nations held the power to influence colonial and global events, including the conflict's outcome. The second part, “The Other Revolution,” places Indigenous stories at the centre of the American Revolution. Building on Calloway's earlier work, these chapters emphasize that Indian alliances shaped the war's outcome despite the high stakes of involvement in the conflict. His passages on the brutal campaigns of violence and food destruction against the Iroquois are especially harrowing reading. In closing this section, Calloway clearly states that American victors facilitated widespread Indigenous dispossession to bolster and extend their settler colonial republic after the war.

The final part, “The First President and the First Americans,” charts federal Indian policy and diplomacy through to Washington's death. Again, Calloway leaves no doubt that the acquisition of Indian land was the key goal of the new republic. He argues that Washington's speculation efforts and new policies – despite seemingly benevolent intentions – directly enabled violent postrevolutionary landgrabs. He also acknowledges that Washington's so-called civilization policy enacted processes of cultural and legal erasure that could be seen to constitute “genocide by another name” (484). The final chapter brings the story to Washington's death, emphasizing that Indigenous people continued to exercise considerable influence over the new republic into the early nineteenth century, but makes clear that the balance of power and dispossession had shifted towards the United States over the President's lifetime. Weighing Washington's overall legacy, Calloway argues that the first President personally created precedents of Indian policy and instruments for Indigenous dispossession that would endure for hundreds of years, and whose legacies continue today.

The Indian World impressively weaves Indigenous perspectives and events into the well-known story of the first President and the American founding. Calloway ranges across a vast geography, from Philadelphia down to the South and across to the Great Lakes. His story incorporates numerous Indigenous polities and actors, yet, unlike other recent works on Indigenous experiences of this period, focusses on lands immediately within the United States’ purview and does not extend to the wider Indian world which existed west of the Mississippi. Throughout the book, Calloway's prose is engaging and his narratives are compelling. He successfully draws on a wide range of scholarship on Indigenous history, Washington, the Revolution, and the early republic. Because of its largely synthetic nature, specialists will be familiar with much of the story they find here; nonetheless, they will surely appreciate Calloway's valuable achievement in offering a single-volume, Indigenous-anchored narrative history of this era. Its neat, easy-to-read overviews of crucial events will make this book well suited for use in undergraduate and graduate classes. Calloway's rich storytelling will also appeal to nonacademic audiences interested in the founding era, reminding them what Washington always knew: eighteenth-century America was first and foremost an Indian world.