Prof. Elizabeth N. Ellis, ‘The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South’

Today on the podcast, we speak with Elizabeth Ellis, Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, about her recent book titled ‘The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South’ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).Professor Ellis focuses on Indigenous polities in early America, and how decisions made by Native nations with strategically small governance structures had substantive impacts on how their own people survived colonisation, as well as on the unfolding of empires and colonial entanglements in the lower Mississippi Valley. Co-hosted by Shea Hendry and Megan Renoir (PhD Candidates at Cambridge University)Production by Daisy Semmler (MPhil 2025).