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The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity
Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire
An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries
“Thrush has certainly offered a powerful corrective to the usual geographies imagined for Indigenous people in the past, as well as a new layer to the palimpsest history of Britain’s imperial capital.”—Kate Fullagar, William and Mary Quarterly
London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.
“Thrush has certainly offered a powerful corrective to the usual geographies imagined for Indigenous people in the past, as well as a new layer to the palimpsest history of Britain’s imperial capital.”—Kate Fullagar, William and Mary Quarterly
London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.
328 pages, Hardcover
Published October 25, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
March 21, 2023
This did not feel like a history book wow… Excellent depiction of imperial history through Indigenous perspectives and experiences of London. Deeply researched yet so descriptive and creative!
November 19, 2016
From New Book (History, Native American, British) Network: "Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity."
"Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience."
"In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor."
"In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city."
"Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience."
"In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor."
"In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city."
December 25, 2022
An excellent read, Coll Thrush presents a vision of Indigenous life that altogether challenges the way many non-Indigenous people, especially in the United States, think about indigenous people across history. Thrush demonstrates powerfully how Indigenous peoples have advocated for their communities and themselves, undertaking journeys to London for diplomatic and other purposes. This is the kind of book that has the power to make readers reconsider gaps in the historical narratives that have been passed onto them and makes them question how these histories have been overwritten and silenced.
June 2, 2018
Important. Relevant. A must read for anyone interested in history and its contestations.
March 18, 2025
Having found this book in the bibliography of Ned Blackhawk's "Rediscovery of America" and made a mental note to read it someday, I was further incentivized to pick it up due to an impending personal visit to London. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, though unfortunately for my trip, I never read anything that made me say, "Oh, I definitely want to go there and see that!" Despite Thrush's walking tours provided as an appendix, Indigenous London has apparently truly left behind very few physical markers in the city.
Nonetheless, this thematically-grouped recounting of indigenous visits to London over the last 500 or so years made for interesting reading. As much as I find monarchy pointless, I particularly liked the idea of indigenous groups trying to go over Canada's head to meet with the British royal family ("I would like to speak with the manager" on the highest political level). It's a pity that the historical record often captures so little of indigenous people's inner reactions to London, though I found convincing Thrush's argument that indigenous critiques reflected contemporary critiques from other foreigners (and locals). Indians didn't find London dirty, crowded, and unfair because Indians somehow embody the opposite of a city; rather, London was simply dirty, crowded, and unfair.
Finally, I loved that the author wrote this book at least in part as a way to justify hanging out in London for a while!
Nonetheless, this thematically-grouped recounting of indigenous visits to London over the last 500 or so years made for interesting reading. As much as I find monarchy pointless, I particularly liked the idea of indigenous groups trying to go over Canada's head to meet with the British royal family ("I would like to speak with the manager" on the highest political level). It's a pity that the historical record often captures so little of indigenous people's inner reactions to London, though I found convincing Thrush's argument that indigenous critiques reflected contemporary critiques from other foreigners (and locals). Indians didn't find London dirty, crowded, and unfair because Indians somehow embody the opposite of a city; rather, London was simply dirty, crowded, and unfair.
Finally, I loved that the author wrote this book at least in part as a way to justify hanging out in London for a while!
February 8, 2024
The author has done an impressive amount of digging on a great number of characters and I did enjoy the work. There were also “interlude” chapters, more poetic in nature. Only rarely did time, place and people seem fully represented, with few of the indigenous people leaving written accounts. This serious historian probably can’t allow himself to get creative in the way I wish he would. Instead we have sensationalist newspaper accounts and famous (largely narrow-minded and intolerant) writers. They probably reflected what the general public thought at the time. Therefore, the author had quite a difficult task. There are 3 walking tours of Londontown in the back of the book. If I was English, I’d do them all.
November 25, 2019
It's interesting to realize, when you've been out of academia for a while and your career involves paring down other people's words, just how much my own opinions on language have changed. Don't get me wrong, I love me some good, juicy vocabulary, but I realize I'm no longer the audience for this kind of dense, academic style of writing.
And this is sad, because the premise of the book is really important. Seeing London (and the colonial experience in general) by focusing on the indigenous viewpoint, seeing their agency and agenda, and emphasizing the many and varied experiences of indigenous people in London is fascinating. The book gets stronger as we move forward in time--modern indigenous journeys to London to locate the graves of ancestors and close the loop was especially good. I learned a lot, but I wanted to hear more about the primary source material and less academic analysis of it.
Too much of a slog for me, I'm afraid.
And this is sad, because the premise of the book is really important. Seeing London (and the colonial experience in general) by focusing on the indigenous viewpoint, seeing their agency and agenda, and emphasizing the many and varied experiences of indigenous people in London is fascinating. The book gets stronger as we move forward in time--modern indigenous journeys to London to locate the graves of ancestors and close the loop was especially good. I learned a lot, but I wanted to hear more about the primary source material and less academic analysis of it.
Too much of a slog for me, I'm afraid.
January 28, 2018
Wow. This was a powerful book. Coll Thrush expected, when he started trying to find evidence of native peoples visiting London that they would be hard to find. In fact, he found there were many indigenous visitors who went to London, from the North American continent (present-day US and Canada), Hawai'i, New Zealand, and Australia), and that their visits were quite public. They left an imprint on London that you can still see today. Thrush's writing style is evocative and provocative; I thoroughly enjoyed looking at this kind of subject in a completely new way.
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February 7, 2019This book shares the stories and encounters of Indigenous people who journeyed to the core of the British Empire. This book could easily have slanted the fish-out-of-water travelers as curiosities and spectacles and objects of humor, but the author avoids these pitfalls by focusing on the travelers' impressions and accounts, which could also help us see London in a new light and in stark contrast to the societies built by Indigenous people- harmonious and malleable to local nature and landscape, and where huge gaps of inequality were by and large not prevalent.
February 25, 2018
This book is an interesting textual study that helps reframe and give presence to indigenous peoples in London over 500 years. Thrush provides an eclectic collection of documents and ephemera from royal visits to public performance, mapping the emergence of fantastic white ideas about indigenous peoples and documenting material presence of people "erased" from broader historical narratives
January 27, 2019
London as a case study in the open-ended nature of a continuously contested Indigenous past and what that past says of Indigenous lives and realities today. This work shows that the history of cities like London and the history of Indigenous people are not mutually exclusive. In fact, Thrush argues, these histories can’t be told without each other. A good read. Beautifully written.
July 2, 2021
I loved the premise of this book and found the research to be fascinating. Found that the use of language at times obscured the point being made rather than illuminating it, but overall an interesting read. Found from the Gilder Lehrmen class on Native American History.
June 5, 2017
Another outstanding book from Thrush! I especially enjoyed the interludes and tours at the end -- they give us another way to experience the history of Indigenous London.
July 12, 2017
Excellent, curiosity-sparking read.
December 11, 2019
Such important work!! Highly recommend.
February 4, 2023
Proposes great ideas (formulation of identity through the other), but doesn't add enough depth to his cases. The poetry was an ... interesting academic choice.
February 6, 2024
Really interesting idea and I think this will be valuable for me going forward. Think each chapter’s subject could turn into a whole book
February 20, 2017
This book, while perhaps theoretically lacking in some ways (Thrush could have been more rigorous in his use of settler colonialism as a lens,) was very, very readable, and really did a great job of exploring London as a site of spectacle for both English people and Indigenous people. Single chapters would work really, really well in an undergraduate course, and the stories that Thrush tells in his book are really a gift. I really enjoyed this book a lot as a reader, though obviously there are critiques to be made, and I really recommend it to people who are looking for easy-to-read good Indigenous history.
August 17, 2022
A thrilling, devestating, sublime dive into my former home. I only wish it had been published while I still lived there, so I could immediately benefit from the walking tours in its appendix. Coll’s work is an exemplar of sensitive, rigorous scholarship.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews