Applied Settler Theory: Four Recent Histories

Since 2000, older American exceptionalist narratives have been challenged anew by what has come to be known as Settler Colonial Theory (SCT). Spearheaded in the late 1980s by Canadian and Australian literary theorists Alan Lawson, Helen Tiffin, Steven Slemon, and Bill Ashcroft, the field found its taxonomy and maturation in work by dominion-based historians and anthropologists Lorenzo Veracini, Peter Wolfe, Lisa Ford, and James Belich. Early Americanists such as Lawrence Buell and others began applying its ideas in the 1990s, but they also incorporated ideas about American imperialism running back through William Appelmans Williams and Amy Kaplan. Since 2010, SCT has contributed to the broader proliferation the dynamic field of early American studies in many and metamorphic ways.

SCT itself re-places the territorial United States back in the history of Anglophone empire building and European diaspora over the last five hundred years, alongside more conventionally identifiable (sets of) white majority Anglophone settler colonies—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and so on—by distinguishing them from administered colonies in which a minority exogenous population exploits local resources using the labor of a majority indigenous population. In settler colonies, a majority exogenous population occupies the colonial space with an eye toward permanent inhabitation, unilateral sovereignty, and the full cultural and demographic removal of the indigenous populations. SCT humbles exceptionalist narratives by identifying how resulting communities and, later, nations, disavow both their origins as marginal colonies and their implicit and derivative aspirations to empire. By reducing the settler colonization of "America" to simply a component of a global "white" diaspora rather than a manifestly destined mission and, second, by reframing as imperial its dominion over issues of race, land, and economics, both at home and abroad, SCT challenges the fundamental assumptions of American cultural historiography rooted in traditions of older scholarship that have long shaped the field.

However, like all synthetic Theory, SCT has been challenged for its purported inability to account for local particularities and divergencies from its master narrative of invasion, conquest, removal, and sovereignty. Its lack of particularity was specifically discussed in the summer 2019 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. Its editors collected essays, as a whole, that doubted the wholesale applicability of SCT to early American historiography, at least as SCT has been theorized by Wolfe, Veracini, and Walter Hixson. Nonetheless, each of the four books under review here employs the language of SCT, often through direct reference. While each makes a significant contribution to its subject and subfield, as a group, they capture a moment when early American historians are testing how SCT might inform their work, yet each only cautiously deploys the theoretical discipline of doctrinal SCT ideology, creating an experimental moment that assumes SCT's maturing articulation and thus the initiation of its application to documentable historical circumstances. On the whole, while they use SCT to overturn older historical narratives and reframe their topics globally in insightful and innovative ways, they also concede the inescapable messiness of settlement and colonization of the years between the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the mid-seventeenth century through the advent of Indian Removal two hundred years later, a complexity often at odds with SCT's assertions that settler colonization is both inexorable and inevitable and that it followed the same sequence of racial replacement in every settler colony.

McShea's The Apostles of Empire takes up the imperialist side of settler inhabitation in its study of Jesuit activity between 1611 and 1764 throughout the St. Laurence Basin and (mostly) the lower Great Lakes region. Mc-Shea observes that the Jesuits "viewed their central work of proselytization...