Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 193.
Abstract
James Gump's comparative study of the transformation of the Zulu and Sioux nations as a result of their interaction with whites on "closing frontiers" in the eastern region of South Africa and on the western Plains of North America respectively is an impressive undertaking. His foci are two battles-the Zulu assault at Rorke's Drift in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the United States government's massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1892. According to the author, these two events have become powerful metaphors, "evoking images of Thermopylae in the first instance and systematic genocide in the latter." Both battles served as symbolic benchmarks in the prelude and denouement of Zulu and Sioux subjugation as well. Gump demonstrates that these fates were inevitable: Britain and the United States were empire builders, technologically and culturally superior; the Zulu, an Iron Age culture, and the Sioux, hunter-gatherers, were fragmented and fractious and could not, in the former case, or would not, in the latter, be assimilated and acculturated. They were the "other" or "some other kind of being" in the way of progress and civilization.
Gump's book derives in part from Robin Winks's 1984 NEH Summer Seminar on Comparative Imperialism, Winks's definition of imperialism, Ronald Robinson's model of the collaborator, and the author's own research on the origins of Shaka's Zulu kingdom, in which he tests certain assumptions about the frontier raised by Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson in their Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (1981). Gump identifies the similarities and differences between British and American imperialism, discusses the challenges to American exceptionalism, examines Anglo-Zulu conflict in the context of the growth of an integrated global economy expressed in transoceanic and transcontinental trading and financial networks centered in Great Britain, and places the United States-Sioux War within the context of global patterns of intensified conflict in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He notes that these conflicts arose during a period when the revolution in military hardware and firepower foreshadowed the age of industrial slaughter. Furthermore, he does not ignore the role of the indigenous collaborator and resister in shaping the frontier process. Indigenous groups pursued their own diplomatic and economic interests, often from a position of strength, but the ultimate reality was a foregone conclusion-defeat and annihilation.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln