Douglas Harvey's Theatre of Empire outlines a very clear agenda to “engage the myth-making qualities of frontier performances” as a means of understanding how they “work to perpetuate, or resist, imperial expansion” (1). Harvey begins with the assumption that colonial American performance culture extended the imperial mission of Great Britain in its settlement of North America. He also assumes that indigenous populations of North America understood “performance” very differently than did their European counterparts. Over the six chapters of his study, Harvey examines the inevitable and often traumatic clash of opposing performance cultures produced by Britain's expansion across the Atlantic as the colonial empire became the “empire republic” (172).

Harvey's introduction outlines his methodological and thematic approach to the topic of empire, uniting theories of embodiment and embodied performance with cognitive studies. Somewhat puzzlingly, he suggests that cultural histories to date have been dominated by a “naïve positivist historical epistemology,” though it is not clear which historians or which works he is referring to in this context (8).

Chapters 1 and 2 examine the “indigenous/colonial paradigm shifts” from the early eighteenth century up until the eve of the Revolution (13). Here David Shields's Oracles of Empire (1990) (which examines the period from 1690 to 1750) might have laid an excellent foundation for Harvey's study. Shields describes the emerging British empire as an unwieldy amalgam of the various colonial models that had preceded it, cobbled together with the English principles of liberty and equity (Shields 3). The very awkwardness of the juxtaposition rendered the task of empire-building both challenging and necessary, and might explain some of the contradictions Harvey notes in his work. Chapters 1 and 2 are most successful in their exploration of the often blurred line between theatre, play, and violence. For example, in chapter 2 Harvey examines the various uprisings, skirmishes, and ambushes of the 1760s, including the Native American attack on a British fort at Michilimackinac and the Paxton Boys raid.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore the transformation of British into American imperialism in the years during and immediately after the American Revolution, suggesting that the democratic rhetoric of the new nation offered a convenient cover for a more expansionist mission among many white Euro-Americans who saw the frontier as one of the spoils of war. Although chapter 3 covers territory familiar to many theatre scholars in his examination of the colonial ban on theatre; the wartime Mischianza in Philadelphia; and plays such as The Contrast, André, Inkle and Yarico, The Battle of Bunker Hill, and The Glory of Columbia, Harvey offers intriguing new interpretations of some of these events and texts, particularly the phenomenon of the “Vanishing Indian” in The Contrast. In chapter 4, his exploration of the careers of John Ricketts (of Ricketts's Circus), John Bernard, and John Durang as they performed their way across the emerging frontier circuit suggests how the popular entertainments promoted by these performers may have engaged with a larger imperial mission.

In chapters 5 and 6 Harvey explores how the folk culture of the native peoples of North America became embedded in the nation's growing debate about race and slavery. While Harvey may overstate the dichotomy between the market economy of an Anglo-American culture and the gift economy of native populations (127), he argues that the former was effective in coopting the latter. As Harvey notes in chapter 5, “The entrepreneurial qualities so valued by the bourgeoisie became entwined with the archetypical character of folktales … reflecting in the cultural sphere what was unfolding in the economic sphere” (136). Chapter 6 brings together an unusual combination of performances, from the medicine bundle of the Evening Star, to moral reform melodrama, to the minstrel show – and examines them as they converged in “Indian territory” – particularly in performances staged at Fort Leavenworth (164).

Harvey's definition of empire as essentially a British American phenomenon seems restrictive at times, largely overlooking the ways that significant Dutch, French, and Spanish incursions into the Americas shaped the economies of the British colonial experiment and influenced the performance of British (and later American) culture among indigenous populations that had already encountered other imperialist models. Additionally, while he disclaims the wish to create an “evil Europeans versus benevolent Native Americans” dynamic, throughout the work Harvey's rhetoric and the invocation of familiar tropes of native populations as in touch with the environment, spiritually centered, and bewildered by concepts of landownership and market-driven economies perpetuates a potentially reductive model of encounters that recent historians have been striving to render more complex and nuanced (5). However, this study suggests new ways to combine familiar histories that have often been kept separate, and Harvey's work may encourage scholars of both Native American and Euro-American history to rethink performance culture as a vehicle for imperial transformation.