Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill (review)

Reviewed by: Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill Gregory Ablavsky (bio) Keywords Native Americans, Muscogees, Creek Nation, Internationalism, Diplomacy, Florida Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818. By James L. Hill. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 332. Cloth, $65.00.) James L. Hill's study of what he terms "Creek internationalism" is an important entry in the expansive and vibrant field of Muscogee (Creek) studies. Hill's volume is in dialogue with much of the field's recent literature interrogating the transformation of Muscogee governance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But, while Creek Internationalism shares these works' interest in Muscogee politics and statecraft, it differs in focus. While prior accounts have been rooted in the heartland of the Muscogee homelands in present-day Alabama, Hill focuses on the Apalachicola Basin; most of the book is grounded in present-day Florida, especially the Panhandle. Even then, this terrestrial focus is misleading, since Hill's book is, at core, an Atlantic history, reconstructing the transoceanic ties of Creek mekkos (leaders). It thus joins a growing body of scholarship exploring Indigenous maritime worlds—though the Creek example is all the more striking because, as Hill observes, Muscogees were "not historically a seafaring people" (4). In building this argument, the book's chapters explore how Creek leaders in the Panhandle forged diplomatic connections through extensive oceanic travel. The volume opens by detailing how, in the wake of the Seven Years' War, which transferred Florida to Britain, Muscogees routinely journeyed to Cuba to maintain their diplomatic (and material) [End Page 500] connections to Spain. After the Revolution, when Florida once again became Spanish territory, Muscogees sought to maintain their links to the now-distant British, too. Hill recounts in detail one extensive Muscogee voyage starting in 1787, undertaken in conjunction with the self-promoting William Augustus Bowles but, Hill argues, actually motivated by some Creek mekkos' desires for continued British connections. This expedition traversed much of Canada, ultimately reaching Britain itself, before returning home via the Bahamas. Those islands continued to loom large for the Creeks into the nineteenth century, as the closest British outpost to their homelands. Recovering this history of mobility is important, Hill shows, because it helps reframe historiographical debates about Muscogee governance in this period. Hill's account of Creek internationalism builds on a growing body of scholarship that has emphasized how Muscogee leaders seized on ideas about nationhood current within the European law of nations as a way to assert their autonomy and independence—what was increasingly called their sovereignty—within the international community. However, this history often gets narrated as a contest between acculturated nationalists who sought to remake the Creek Nation and its governance in the image of their Anglo American neighbors and hidebound traditionalists who sought to defend the long-standing decentralized authority of the Creek talwas (leading towns). In this account, it is unsurprising when a figure like Alexander McGillivray, perhaps the best-known Muscogee nationalist, deployed legal arguments legible within the era's European-dominated diplomacy. But Hill importantly demonstrates that the nationalists' opponents and critics also embraced internationalism. Not every Muscogee who spoke of a Creek Nation, he shows, advocated centralization. "Whether nationalist or localist," he argues, "mekkos appropriated the terminology of nationhood, statehood, and sovereignty to navigate the changing diplomatic climate" (14). This argument is clearest in the book's final third, which turns to the War of 1812, the Creek Civil War, and the First Seminole War—which Muscogee peoples experienced, Hill argues, as part of a single continuous conflict and an important moment of rupture. Many of Hill's localists became Red Sticks who unsuccessfully fought against the Creek nationalists and the United States before migrating southward into Florida, where they coalesced with the region's other Black and Indigenous residents into the people known as the Seminoles. But even these skeptics of Creek nationalism, Hill demonstrates, embraced internationalism: In [End Page 501] one telling example, he shows how Seminole leaders repeatedly invoked Article IX of the Treaty of Ghent to make a bid for British aid against U.S. attacks. Hill suggests the long legacy of Creek...

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