Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought by Adam Dahl (review)

ADAM DAHL’S Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought argues that “settler-colonial discourses constructed ‘the sovereign people’ as an imperial constituency who demanded territorial expansion as a necessary correlate of democracy and self-rule” (9). While attentive to material and institutional manifestations, Dahl outlines theories of colonial dispossession that facilitate the ideological obfuscation of conquest, a foundational violence that “establishes the basis of democratic sovereignty” (4).

Dahl focuses on the disavowal of colonial dispossession in U.S. political thought. Disavowal, he maintains, is necessary in order to sustain the legitimacy of settler political thought. The territorial basis of U.S. democracy and the characteristics of the active agents of that democracy cohere through ideologies of disavowal. Disavowal broke with British legal traditions, in which royal prerogative in the colonies derived from an affirmation of conquest. Dahl juxtaposes the imperial affirmation of conquest with assertions of settler sovereignty, which represent Indigenous land as terra nullius. The disavowal of conquest and of Indigenous political life interweaves democracy with colonial expansion.

Placing questions of land and indigeneity at the center of U.S. democratic theory, Dahl asserts the centrality of conquest and colonization. Unlike other ideologies of colonialism and imperialism, he contends, settler colonialism revolves around a shared racial identity “with citizens of the mother country” and in correlation with “fully developed capacities for self-rule . . . [and] political maturity prior to settlement” (11). Race, in his reading, can be linked to a capacity for self-rule. For Dahl, this imprints settler-colonial ideology with its emphasis on the politics of land and space. Indigenous peoples, then, are not simply racialized as inferior bodies but also depicted as absent from the land, a political absence that informs the settler disavowal of conquest.

Dahl proposes the concept of “democratic empire,” which he distinguishes from liberal imperialism, to discuss how core democratic principles (such as freedom, popular sovereignty, consent, and equality) emerged out of the practices and ideologies of settler colonialism. Theories of settler expansion, according to Dahl, proposed that the constituent parts of empire were not dependent entities but instead were equals in their ability to facilitate Indigenous dispossession. Federalism, then, was not an alternative to imperialism. Rather, it provided a way for settlers to combine imperial sovereignty with popular sovereignty. Democratic empire, for Dahl, “enlists” people, establishing Americans as an “imperial constituency” (10). The settlers who broke away from the British Empire, Dahl demonstrates, had no disagreement over imperialism. To the contrary, they accepted empire as a political form consistent with their understandings of liberty and consent. Instead of inaugurating an anti-imperial republic, Dahl continues, U.S. independence from Great Britain was a moment of origin for an “infant empire” that “extended the dominion of European colonists” (46), an empire that would mature into a global rival within a mere 150 years.

Dahl’s arguments might advance Gerald Horne’s crucial insight in his 2018 work The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean that settler colonialism manifests through class collaboration. As Dahl demonstrates, in the U.S. context, modern liberty substitutes revolution with colonization as a primary means of exercising power. The material realities of liberal democracy and of bourgeois society, he notes, were products of settler expansion. Settler political thought, seemingly concerned with the abolition of feudal hierarchies, is in fact rooted in “the deracination of indigenous sovereignties” (152). The expropriation of Indigenous land, Dahl emphasizes, “lays the material foundation for a bourgeois class order premised on the destruction of feudal hierarchies and the elimination of class struggle” (93). Where the working classes rose up across Europe in 1848, delusions of democratic empire suffused settler expansion in North America. The collaboration of North American working classes with centralized agrarian and industrial capital imprinted settler colonialism with its distinct character. This collaboration shaped the moderation of...