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Hard Neighbors The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of an

The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of an American Identity

By: Colin G. Calloway

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Hardcover | 2 December 2024

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Hardcover
512 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 17.7 x 3.7

Hardcover

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An intricate portrayal of the early American settlers who came to be known as Scotch-Irish, who through collusion and bloody conflict acted as the tip of the spear for white colonial expansion into Indian lands, embodying what became the American pioneer spirit.

Hard Neighbors highlights stories that have been subsumed by terms such as "English settlers" and "American expansion" and traces shifting relationships involving Scotch-Irish people living on the frontier, neighboring Indian peoples, and more distant governments. It follows the people who came to be known as Scotch-Irish from their genesis on a colonial borderland on one side of the Atlantic to their role in the borderlands of Indian country on the other. It traces their relations with Native Americans over time and across the continent, examines their experiences as marginalized and expendable people living between colonial powers and Indigenous peoples, and demonstrates their roles as protective and disruptive forces on the hard edge of colonialism. The Scotch-Irish fought Indian wars and shaped the frontier, and their experiences living near and fighting against Indians shaped their identity and their attitudes towards government. They influenced national attitudes and policies, and they transformed Indian people into racial others as they transformed themselves into Americans.

The story this book tells is less about the Scotch-Irish as a distinct ethnic group than as a people in motion who, in collusion and conflict with colonial authorities, repeatedly inserted themselves on Native land. Instead of a tale of unified westward expansion, it recovers the experiences, encounters, and humanity of groups of people enmeshed in the violence of colonialism and reconstructs the roles of multiple peoples placed as buffers between competing powers. Expansion, and the accompanying expulsion and killing of Indian people, helped to create American unity and identity and, ultimately, made the Scotch-Irish Americans. Once marginalized as little better than Indians, they reaffirmed their reputation as Indian killers and made a place for themselves in America, as Americans.

Industry Reviews

""Hard Neighbors is a scholarly book, well researched, deeply documented, and set in the colonial and early American past. The author's explicit aim - which he achieves admirably - is to detail the complexity of relations between Native Americans and the Scotch-Irish, and break down monolithic notions of 'white colonists' and 'European settlers.'"" -- Sara Bhatia, Washington Monthly "Colin Calloway seeks neither to celebrate nor to condemn the Scotch-Irish, but to understand them. Using all the skills of a gifted historian, he succeeds admirably in this task. Renowned for his work on Native Americans, he now offers a vivid, judicious, and insightful account of their antagonists-an elusive group of settler colonists who carved out a new American identity through violence." -- Kevin Kenny, Glucksman Professor of History, New York University "In this vivid and trenchant book, Colin Calloway deftly reveals violent frontiers of expanding settlements and persistent Native resistance. Transcending conventional profiling of the Scotch-Irish frontier folk as uniquely combative, Calloway uncovers the broad popularity of their sense of grievance towards imperial or national governments. In their disdain for elites as well as another race, the Scotch Irish literally pioneered an American nexus of assertion and complaint that endures to sway millions of voters." -- Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873 "Arguing that what happened on the frontier was as significant to the foundational myth of American democracy as what happened in Philadelphia, Colin Calloway reveals how the Scotch Irish defined that myth, one born of conflict with Indigenous peoples in an ever-receding West and with the expansionism of an imperial East. Anyone who wants to follow the national narrative unspooling under these contending forces over three centuries should read this monumental and masterful account of the American past." -- Warren Hofstra, Shenandoah University "Colin Calloway seeks neither to celebrate nor to condemn the Scotch-Irish, but to understand them. Using all the skills of a gifted historian, he succeeds admirably in this task. Renowned for his work on Native Americans, he now offers a vivid, judicious, and insightful account of their antagonists-an elusive group of settler colonists who carved out a new American identity through violence." -- Kevin Kenny, Glucksman Professor of History "In this vivid and trenchant book, Colin Calloway deftly reveals violent frontiers of expanding settlements and persistent Native resistance. Transcending conventional profiling of the Scotch-Irish frontier folk as uniquely combative, Calloway uncovers the broad popularity of their sense of grievance towards imperial or national governments. In their disdain for elites as well as another race, the Scotch Irish literally pioneered an American nexus of assertion and complaint that endures to sway millions of voters." -- Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873 "Arguing that what happened on the frontier was as significant to the foundational myth of American democracy as what happened in Philadelphia, Colin Calloway reveals how the Scotch Irish defined that myth, one born of conflict with Indigenous peoples in an ever-receding West and with the expansionism of an imperial East. Anyone who wants to follow the national narrative unspooling under these contending forces over three centuries should read this monumental and masterful account of the American past." -- Warren Hofstra, Shenandoah University

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