The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest
Bethel Saler, "The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest "
English | ISBN: 0812246632 | 2014 | 392 pages | EPUB, PDF | 2 MB + 7 MB
English | ISBN: 0812246632 | 2014 | 392 pages | EPUB, PDF | 2 MB + 7 MB
The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which officially recognized the United States as a sovereign republic, also doubled the territorial girth of the original thirteen colonies. The fledgling nation now stretched from the coast of Maine to the Mississippi River and up to the Great Lakes. With this dramatic expansion, argues author Bethel Saler, the United States simultaneously became a postcolonial republic and gained a domestic empire. The competing demands of governing an empire and a republic inevitably collided in the early American West. traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the Northwest Territory, a process that relied on overlapping colonial rule over Euro-American settlers and the multiple Indian nations in the territory. These entwined administrations involved both formal institution building and the articulation of dominant cultural customs that, in turn, served also to establish boundaries of citizenship and racial difference.
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