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"Yourfyre shall burn no more ". Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701. By Jose Ant6nio Brandao. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xx, 375 pp. $60.00, ISBN 0-8032-1274-7.)
In his provocative reexamination of the nature of the Five Nations Iroauois Confederacv's warfare against its native enemies and against the newly established colony of New France, Jose Antonio Brandao challenges the Beaver Wars hypothesis that since 1940 "has come to dominate historians' explanations of Iroquois hostilities in the seventeenth century." The Beaver Wars interpretation holds that "the Iroquois attacks against New France were . . . part of a general pattern of economic warfare waged to gain control of the fur trade from the Hurons and their French allies." This interpretation of the reasons for the extensive warfare waged by the Iroquois, both large- and small-scale, initially held that their primary motivation was to obtain furs to exchange for European trade goods upon which they...