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Bethel Saler , The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2015, $45.00). Pp. iv + 382. isbn 978 0 8122 4663 6 .
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As the Treaty of Paris (1783) brought an end to the Revolutionary War, the United States also inherited "an immense swath of western country that ... doubled the territorial girth of the original thirteen colonies." Despite such good fortune, though, the new American nation-state was still reeling from the war, and surrounded on all sides by European and Native threats, all of which produced a "situation rife with both possibility and vulnerability" (1). This dilemma - forging and expanding a nation-state amid such uncertainty during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries - is at the heart of Bethel Saler's insightful work. As Saler argues, the United States in 1783 was a "postcolonial republic" struggling to create stability and order "in a world of powerful empires." Yet at the same time the young republic acquired "its own domestic empire in need of protection," which reveals the "dual political demands [that] inevitably collided" as the United States embarked on a process of "state formation" (1-2). In other words, from the very beginning, the American nation-state was both a republic and an empire.
Saler's work revolves around this paradox of American republicanism...