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Negotiating the endless mountains: native geographies, diplomacy, and empire along the eighteenth-century trans-Appalachian borderland
Langton, Ryan
Langton, Ryan
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2025-12
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History
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This dissertation examines the interpersonal networks developed by diplomatic actors along the trans-Appalachian borderland during the eighteenth century. Along the Appalachian Mountains, figures working on behalf of the British colonies and Indigenous polities including the Muscogees, Cherokees, Lenapes, and Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, among others, cultivated networks of interpersonal relationships that they relied upon to attain their diplomatic goals, mediate the forces of colonialism, or administer their empire. The strategies these figures utilized and the resulting diplomatic networks they built developed from competing and often contradictory understandings of geography, diplomacy, and empire.This dissertation centers Native geographic paradigms in tracing the development of trans-Appalachian diplomatic networks to reveal how Native worldviews shaped the human geography of diplomacy and empire in North America. It utilizes executive records, legislative journals, treaty minutes, travel journals, and correspondence along with Native material culture, language studies, ethnographic reports, and community traditions to ground a history of trans-Appalachian diplomacy in Native conceptions of geography and space that were rooted in Indigenous understandings of reciprocity.
The distinct geographic paradigms held by trans-Appalachian Natives informed the strategies they drew on when crafting interpersonal relationships with their diplomatic partners. These relationships, which ranged from the conspicuous to the quotidian, ultimately formed wide-ranging diplomatic networks that structured the human geography of trans-Appalachian diplomacy. Though these diplomatic strategies were often deeply personal and grounded in local and regional exigencies, they nonetheless shaped the contest over empire on a continental scale. They determined who wielded diplomatic influence along strategic corridors; how, where, and when Native and European diplomats negotiated the end of warfare; and the efficacy of imperial policies along the borderland. By the 1770s, Native geographic paradigms and the interpersonal networks they inspired played a central role in determining the shape of Britain’s Appalachian boundary line, the contradictory policies applied to the line, and the subsequent confusion and unrest that contributed to the American Revolution.
In centering Native geographies and their influence on the geography of diplomacy and empire in the eighteenth century, this dissertation proposes an alternative framework for analyzing trans-Appalachian diplomacy more suited for recognizing Native agency, contingency, and sovereignty compared to settler colonial theory. Rather than centering Native elimination, this approach centers Native survivance by underscoring the endurance of Native worldviews and their legacies on the landscapes of empire that settler-colonial regimes could not erase.
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