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This multi-authored volume examines the process of European expansion into the Atlantic by focusing on a region that has come to be known as the American South. During the three centuries after Europeans began to cross the Atlantic with confidence, they interacted with one another, with the native people, and with enslaved Africans across the South. The volume's essays offer examples of colonial encounter for those who are curious about how the broad processes of historical change influenced particular people and places. In recent years there have appeared several important studies that address the Atlantic World generally and/or the specific experiences of Spanish, British, and French imperial projects in the South. A key aspect of each of these colonial schemes was finding ways to engage profitably—from the European perspective—with Native Americans. The consequences of Indian encounters with European invaders has long been a principal feature of ethnohistorical research, but during the last long generation scholars of Native Americans in the South have increasingly viewed their subject in an Atlantic World context. With such scholarship as its foundation, the goal of the present volume is to bring together scholars with research linked to each of the three major European colonial powers to draw increased scholarly attention to the South as a significant arena of imperial ambition.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, over twenty different American Indian tribal groups inhabited present-day Mississippi. Today, Mississippi is home to only one tribe, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. This book explores the historical forces and processes that led to this sweeping change in the diversity of the state’s native peoples. It begins with a chapter on Mississippi’s approximately 12,000-year prehistory, from early hunter-gatherer societies through the powerful mound building civilizations encountered by the first European expeditions. With the coming of the Spanish, French, and English to the New World, native societies in the Mississippi region connected with the Atlantic market economy, a source for guns, blankets, and many other trade items. Europeans offered these trade materials in exchange for Indian slaves and deerskins, currencies that radically altered the relationships between tribal groups. Smallpox and other diseases followed along the trading paths. Colonial competition between the French and English helped to spark the Natchez rebellion, the Chickasaw–French wars, the Choctaw civil war, and a half-century of client warfare between the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced Mississippi’s pro-French tribes to move west of the Mississippi River. The Diaspora included the Tunicas, Houmas, Pascagoulas, Biloxis, and a portion of the Choctaw confederacy. In the early nineteenth century, Mississippi’s remaining Choctaws and Chickasaws faced a series of treaties with the United States government that ended in destitution and removal.