An up-to-date ethnohistorical study of the war called Pontiac's is long overdue. Gregory Dowd has provided a masterful narrative and analysis of the war, grounded in deep research and insightful readings of the primary sources. He offers an important new interpretation of the conflict, showing how the British and Indian nations understood the war as a struggle for social and political status within the empire. War under Heaven represents a major contribution to understanding eighteenth-century America. -- Colin G. Calloway, Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College and author of New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America A striking achievement. Massively researched and beautifully written, it demolishes old stereotypes of Pontiac as some crazed, if nobly doomed, genius resisting the inevitable triumph of European civilization. Just as effectively, it challenges recent scholarship to argue that the provocations for 'the war called Pontiac's' were not the result of mere ignorance or arrogance but instead revealed fundamental tendencies of British policy. Placing native actors at center stage and exploring large questions about the legal structures through which imperialism rationalized itself, this book confirms Dowd's status as one of the leading historians of colonial North America. -- Daniel K. Richter, Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Facing East from Indian Country

The 1763 Treaty of Paris ceded much of the continent east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, a claim which the Indian nations of the Great Lakes, who suddenly found themselves under British rule, considered outrageous. Unlike the French, with whom Great Lakes Indians had formed an alliance of convenience, the British entered the upper Great Lakes in a spirit of conquest. British officers on the frontier keenly felt the need to assert their assumed superiority over both Native Americans and European settlers. At the same time, Indian leaders expected appropriate tokens of British regard, gifts the British refused to give. It is this issue of respect that, according to Gregory Dowd, lies at the root of the war the Ottawa chief Pontiac and his alliance of Great Lakes Indians waged on the British Empire between 1763 and 1767. In War under Heaven, Dowd boldly reinterprets the causes and consequences of Pontiac's War. Where previous Anglocentric histories have ascribed this dramatic uprising to disputes over trade and land, this groundbreaking work traces the conflict back to status: both the low regard in which the British held the Indians and the concern among Native American leaders about their people's standing-and their sovereignty-in the eyes of the British. Pontiac's War also embodied a clash of world views, and Dowd examines the central role that Indian cultural practices and beliefs played in the conflict, explores the political and military culture of the British Empire which informed the attitudes its servants had toward Indians, provides deft and insightful portraits of Pontiac and his British adversaries, and offers a detailed analysis of the military and diplomatic strategies of both sides. Imaginatively conceived and compellingly told, War under Heaven redefines our understanding of Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial period.