The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War ed. by Michael A. Blaakman, Emily Conroy-Krutz and Noelani Arista (review)

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• The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War ed. by Michael A. Blaakman, Emily Conroy-Krutz and Noelani Arista
• Kevin Kokomoor

The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War. Edited by Michael A. Blaakman, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Noelani Arista. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. vi, 339. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-5278-1.)

There are several reasons, according to Michael A. Blaakman and Emily Conroy-Krutz, that when one thinks of “empire,” or “imperialism,” one does not necessarily think of the earliest years of the United States of America. The connection might be there by the late nineteenth century, but not the late eighteenth. There are several ideological and historiographical reasons for such scholarly hesitation, obfuscation, or downright exclusion, as the editors draw out in the very important introduction to The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War. The early republic was a place of exceptionalism and triumphalism. It was also weak, and the idea of an empire did not mesh well with the idea of a republic. Lastly, each possible vector of American imperialism is usually pigeonholed in specific historical subfields that make rendering a larger narrative difficult. It is for these combined reasons that the early republic has escaped most recent debates on the nature of empire.

The Early Imperial Republic offers to connect the dots: to chart American imperial ambitions from the earliest years of the country’s history to better understand chapters in the Civil War era and to “reframe scholarly understandings of the new republic” (p. 13). To do so, this collection’s impressively varied essays are divided into three categories. The first is largely continental, and focuses on sovereignty. Here the contributors grapple with the ways the [End Page 608] federal government sought an orderly expansion of the nation’s borders, how interested local and Native groups either enabled or contested those efforts, and how both the problems and the solutions look a lot like “familiar imperial forms and practices” consistent with traditional European-style empires (p. 18). The second section expands in a noncontiguous way, to Mexico as well as to Hawaii and Africa, in an effort to highlight the global nature of American imperial ambitions. The third section transitions to a more intellectual look at how various American groups, from the Seminole Wars to the Mexican- American War, conceived of, reacted to, and even resisted the United States’ imperial ambitions, as the final three essays suggest.

In the collection’s introduction, Blaakman and Conroy-Krutz emphasize that the volume is not bound together by one specific idea of what is “imperial.” It suggests no paradigm shift, no alternative language, no new unifying definition. In fact, the essays that follow interchange the terms imperial, colonial, and settler colonial regularly. They follow various Native groups, merchants, missionaries, slaves, and abolitionists across the Atlantic and Pacific, attempting to connect various disparate fields and helping prove an important introductory point about the confused, overlapping, and fragmented nature of the field.

While this variety is indeed the volume’s great strength, it is not necessarily borne out equally across the sections. In fact, as Blaakman and Conroy-Krutz acknowledge in their introduction, if there is a best-known imperialism during the early republic, it is the continental variety—settler colonialism—which is best articulated in the collection’s first section. At six chapters, this section is the largest one and is twice as big as the third section. Despite an attempt to create a sprawling framework with equal attention given to global and intellectual perspectives, the sheer number of contributions seems to suggest that while early American imperialism went lots of places and involved lots of people, the trans-Appalachian West was its home.

While the editors do not dwell on definitions, either for imperialism or for what constitutes the early republic chronologically, the loose framework established in the introduction otherwise works well. It allows The Early Imperial Republic to go wherever the contributors like, and they go in all sorts of intriguing, even surprising, directions. Essays move from the...