The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest by Bethel Saler (review)

in her important book the settlers’ empire, Bethel Saler examines state formation in the Northwest Territory from American Independence through the ratification of Wisconsin’s constitution in 1848. Unlike other historians who study state formation, Saler frames the early American republic as a “both a post-colonial republic and a contiguous empire” (1). By seeing young America in this light, Saler demonstrates that state formation came from the hands of settlers. Put another way, “settler societies possess an ambivalent double history as both colonized and colonizers” (2). This take on state formation importantly highlights how state formation was contingent on the actions of both the federal government and settlers who, more often than not, improvised their way through the process.

Although she could test her claim on a number of American states, Saler anchors her work in the last territory in the Old Northwest to gain state-hood—Wisconsin. Before the agents of the American empire arrived in the region, the land that would become Wisconsin had a long history of housing Native American towns and European traders. As demonstrated by the historians Gary Clayton Anderson, Richard White, and Jacqueline Peterson, among others, Europeans and Native Americans throughout the Great Lakes region used the bonds of kinship and the region’s flexibility as a “middle ground” to mutually accommodate one another. Saler’s story essentially begins where White’s ends. With the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States gained claim to the region and became “at once a settler republic and a continental empire, a postcolonial and aspiring colonialist nation” (15). The trick of early Americans, then, was simultaneously to forge their state and national identity while dispossessing and acculturating the residents of their newly acquired empire.

Saler inspects six cultural and political aspects that overlapped with one another in the colonial project of state formation in Wisconsin. First, Saler peels apart how Federalists and Republicans diverged from one another in managing the public domain. This section does the best out of all the chapters in demonstrating how U.S. Americans in the early republic were still negotiating and debating whom the public domain, and the nation itself, was principally for. These top-down developments show how the early state forged a gendered and racial hierarchy in the Old Northwest at the expense of the Native Americans, African Americans, and women in the region. Next, Saler analyzes how the treaty system “provoked ongoing formal and informal, written and face-to-face negotiations between Indian groups and a spectrum of local and national government officers” (86). This chapter is particularly fascinating, as Saler recounts how Christian Indian settlers from the East Coast, including the Stockbridges and the Brothertowns, relocated to the region and created a treaty polity in Wisconsin. The other chapters in Settlers’ Empire analyze how fur trade gift economies transformed into markets based on capitalist ventures and commodity values, how missionaries provoked Native Americans to reform their “Indianness,” how the state regulated marriage formation, and how settlers reworked their history to imagine a collective past. These chapters are less impressive than the others, and are not distinctive from the multitude of other works on the fur trade, missionaries in Native America, mixed families, and the interplay between history and nationalism. Still, at the heart of each of these stories is the important reminder that both the settlers and the government imposed cultural uniformity on the diverse population living in the public domain in order to create a state.

Saler’s study is a great contribution to the historiography of state formation, reminiscent of Walter Hixon’s American Settler Colonialism. Like Hixon’s text, Saler’s work is brilliant yet frustrating. Both monographs importantly show that state formation came from the hands of postcolonial settlers. While some sections of this text retread old ground, Saler’s emphasis on gender brings something new and valuable to a field that often solely focuses on race. Her organization...