The final installment of Jennings' Covenant Chain trilogy (The
Invasion of America; The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire), in which the
author disputes the cozy concept of brave white settlers taming the
North American wilderness in favor of the view of the settlers as
civilizing thieves. This is history with a hefty serving of venom.
Respected historians are not so much engaged in gentlemanly debate
as flounced - the scholarly version of wrestling's atomic smash:
Francis Parkman is not just wrong, "Parkman was a liar" who
fabricated, misquoted, and used shoddy research to support "an
ideology of divisiveness and hate based on racism, bigotry,
misogyny, authoritarianism, chauvinism, and upperclass arrogance";
Charles and Mary Beard wrote "undeterred by factuality"; in Daniel
Boorstin's pages, "bigotry and racism are very thinly veiled" and
his research is "trivial." Focusing upon what he calls the
"so-called" French and Indian War, Jennings himself writes in the
extreme. To him, all settlers wear horns and all Indians wings.
Among Jennings' villains: Thomas (son of William) Penn, who "wholly
without scruple" discredited Pennsylvania's Assembly and Quaker
leaders in order to line his own pockets; incompetent British
generals who wasted their men's energies via corporal punishment
and wrong-headed attacks; Europeans who sent smallpox-infested
blankets as gifts to Indians; General Braddock with his unnerving
arrogance; Wolfe, the conqueror of Quebec, whose orders resulted in
the needless deaths of civilians. No one, not even young George
Washington, survives Jennings' acid pen. He concludes, somewhat
presumptuously, that "historians now generally accept that the
European colonization was an invasion rather than a mere
settlement." A thesis for revisionist-minded academics. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Empire of Fortune is vintage Jennings. He writes with as much flair
and involvement as his predecessors, while challenging their
assumptions and research at every turn. No one has done more to
demystify the early American wilderness or worked harder to
dynamite the anglocentric folktales of colonial history. Peter H.
Wood, Duke University"
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