John T. Juricek’s latest work brings his authoritative narrative of British-Creek relations in the colonial south—which he started in Colonial Georgia and the Creeks: Anglo-Indian Diplomacy on the Southern Frontier, 1733-1763—to a successful conclusion. As demonstrated in both books, no one has a better understanding of the ins and outs of Creek politics than Juricek. In fact, I may be so bold as to say that Juricek’s two-part masterpiece should be read alongside historians who first defined the field of Native history in the colonial south, such as Verner Crane, John Alden and Edward Cashin. But this current volume is important in its own right because it examines the interim period between the Seven Years War and American Revolution, a decade often lost or misunderstood in studies of the indigenous south. In short, Juricek has crafted a work of art that scholars of the Native south must consult in the future.

At the heart of Juricek’s book is the contrast between Britain’s hopes to repair relations with the Creek Indians and the attempts to impose the empire’s will upon the Native south in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. Whereas imperial administrators—like the Superintendent for Indian Affairs John Stuart—recognized the need to restrain settler encroachments upon Creek lands, curb the rampant abuses within the deerskin trade, and generally improve British-Creek relationships, colonial officials—such as Georgia governor James Wright—undermined such efforts by negotiating a series of land cessions that alienated their Creek allies. To make matters worse, the targets of imperial reform—Indian traders, merchants and settlers—largely ignored such regulations and continued to take advantage of the Creeks. As Juricek plainly argues, the “gap between British promises and British performance” was too much for the Creek Indians to ignore and contributed to frequent outbursts of violence between 1763 and 1776 (13).

What is novel about Juricek’s work is his attention to detail, especially when dissecting the reformatory “Plan for the future Management of Indian Affairs” (1764). Juricek challenges our understandings of this era by illustrating the radical nature of this imperial proposal, which borrowed heavily from French precedents (“Medal Chiefs” and reciprocal gift-giving exchange), reduced the power of colonial governors to regulate trade and Indian relations, restricted traders and merchants from exploiting indigenous communities, and policed the purchase of Native lands. In other words, the Plan of 1764 was a “serious attempt to deal with serious problems” (68). However, a sequence of events and conflicts undermined such good intentions. In particular, a flood of new traders into the deerskin trade, settler migrations into Creek hunting grounds, personality conflicts between John Stuart and James Wright, and the “New Purchase” of 1773—which ceded more than a million acres of Creek land—introduced a whole new level of violence to the south. For it is no coincidence that armed conflict erupted time and again between 1763 and 1775—from the Payne-Hogg murders in 1765 to the Ceded Lands clashes of 1773. By 1768, Juricek concludes that “it was hard to find anyone in the region … who was satisfied with the trajectory of events” (125).

In vivid detail, Juricek similarly explores the intrigues surrounding the “New Purchase” of 1773, which stemmed from Creek and Cherokee debts accumulated as part of the deerskin trade. To save that lucrative commerce (and thereby salvage British-Creek relationships that revolved around that exchange), colonial officials joined forces with Georgia merchants and traders to convince imperial administrators, along with key leaders among the Creek, to wipe out such debt in return for land. While Governor Wright and his supporters eventually succeeded in attaining the “New Purchase”, despite opposition from John Stuart, it came at great cost. The treaty ushered in a new wave of land purchases that involved the exchange of Native territory for monetary compensation, abandoned the reciprocal relationships that sustained the British-Creek alliance, opened a “deep divide … between the Creek chiefs and their young warriors,” and produced bitter animosity between British and Creek people (181-182). In the end, it all came down to land and the inability of English leaders to carve out a space for Creek sovereignty in the empire, which created the violence that ultimately defined British-Creek relations after 1763.

While magisterial in scope and detail, Juricek’s work is not without its weaknesses. For instance, some of the comparisons that Juricek makes between British-Creek relations in the south and English-Iroquois relations in the north seem rather forced. While he briefly acknowledges that “there were important differences” between the two, the differences greatly outweighed the similarities (4). Because, when you get down to it, John Stuart was no William Johnson and the relationships Johnson forged among the Iroquois and other Native populations in the north allowed him to do things Stuart could only dream of. Also, Juricek ends his book on a sour note, that “when the Creeks finally entered the [Revolutionary] war, they were too late to change its course, though in plenty of time to share in the British defeat” (236). Such a statement ignores the hotly contested politics that unfolded in Creek Country from 1776-1779, which forced many Creek towns to choose sides. Contrary to what Juricek observes, Creek communities like Cussita, Okfuskee, Tallassee, Yuchi and others aligned themselves with the revolutionaries, which some scholars view as attempts to restore tripartite diplomacy (playing American and British alliances off against one another) to Creek Country, a cultural and political continuity rooted in the seventeenth-century past.

Despite such detractions, Juricek provides one of the most synthetic, masterful and absorbing narratives of British-Creek relations during the eighteenth-century. For anyone who wishes to study early America in the south, they must read this book. Otherwise, one cannot fully understand how the history of the American south was embedded within the intersections and negotiations between Creek and British worlds.