Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers (review)

Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers have assembled a collection of essays that analyze North American state-making in the 1860s by employing a continental perspective "that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach to this period" (1). As Towers helpfully explains, people typically associate sovereignty with government power and define it as "a right to decide and therefore to rule" (2). However, some scholars have cautioned against ascribing tidy definitions to the term. Moreover, many definitions of sovereignty have roots in the nineteenth century. Thus, this volume is as much about multifarious understandings of sovereignty as about how people contested and remade sovereignty and the relationships between nations and empires.

Part I, "Making Nations," contains chapters by Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijongos y González, and Robert Bonner. Hahn analyzes the United States from the "inside out" and the "southside north" to illustrate "connections that have long been difficult to conceive" (32). Smith argues that ideas about racial and ethnic hierarchies played a critical role in the creation of the Canadian Confederation. Mexico and the United States experienced constitutional revolution, Mijongos y González observes, whereas Canada followed a path of constitutional gradualism, but despite the divergent paths, all three nations arrived at a similar endpoint. Bonner notes the importance of images to sovereignty and examines how mass-circulated images "distilled and shaped popular engagement with capital cities" (80).

Part II, "Indigenous Polities," features chapters by Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante. Dinwoodie focuses on Eastern Cherokees and Bayou Lacombe Choctaws to reveal how Indigenous communities in the U.S. Southeast "fought to sustain a world of contested and persistent sovereignties" (122). Hall analyzes treaty-making between the Blackfoot and U.S. and Canadian authorities. Blackfoot leaders attempted to make treaties that preserved their own sovereignty as they faced similar expansionist states on both sides of the border. Terrazas y Basante observes that Mexicans, U.S. settlers, and Indigenous people understood sovereignty, territory, and free transit in different ways and illustrates how Mexicans saw Indian raids as a threat to the nation's sovereignty.

Part III, "The Complications of the Market," includes chapters by Christopher Clark, Benjamin H. Johnson, and Mary P. Ryan. Clark explores the relationship between ideas about the role of land and sovereignty and illustrates how farm populations shaped state power and market forces. Johnson focuses on Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to narrate national histories from border areas. Defeat in the Cortina War and the North-West Rebellion replaced "longstanding aspirations for autonomy and self-determination" among ethnic Mexicans and Métis with "violent incorporation into national communities" (215). Ryan concludes by analyzing San Francisco, California, to demonstrate how cities were key political players. Anyone interested in Texas and the Southwest will particularly enjoy Terrazas y Basante and Johnson's chapters.

In many respects, Remaking North American Sovereignty is truly a transnational volume. The chapters began as conference papers at a conference held in Canada. The resulting volume features contributions by scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Mexico that focus on Mexico, the United States, and Canada. However, the definition of North America in this volume—encompassing the three aforementioned nations—is too narrow. Weaving the nations of the Caribbean and Central America into this volume would have allowed the contributors to say even more about sovereignty and nation-states. This point aside, the contributors illustrate the richness of their topics and provide models for other scholars interested in exploring sovereignty and nation-states in the nineteenth-century world. These lively essays will appeal to a general as much as a scholarly audience and many would make excellent additions to graduate seminars.