Chapter five examines the more-traditional focus of early American history on imperial clashes, war, trade, and the origins of a racialized identity in the eighteenth century. Richter utilizes an analytical tool in this chapter based on seeing the eighteenth-century histories of Indians and Euro-Americans unfolding on a parallel track, rather than necessarily moving towards inevitable conflict or partnership. Both groups of people, despite their diversity, "moved along parallel paths in a single, ever more consolidated, transatlantic imperial world" (p. 151). Thus, even though Indians and Europeans both fought in imperial wars, engaged in international trade and became more consumer-oriented, produced as well as consumed goods for the market, and began seeing the world in a racialized "red" versus "white" manner, they did so in ways that made sense within their own particular cultures and not because one group exercised coercive power over the other. This balance between parallel paths broke down when France left the continent in 1763 and the imperial contest between that country and Britain ended. Both Indians and Anglo-Americans hardened their racial views of each other and sought to remove the other from their lives.