Colonization and U.S. Imperial Racial Republicanism

Abstract

In The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire, Brandon Mills skillfully explores early-nineteenth-century American discourses and U.S. policies addressing the “Negro Problem” and the “Indian Question,” arguing that “white Americans initially created the ideology of colonization... to manage the domestic racial threats posed by slavery and settlement” (p. 3). What makes Mills’s study unique is his insistence that the fate of Indigenous and Black peoples in the early American republic unfolded in the context of colonization debates in which the campaign for colonizing African Americans outside the republic predated Indian removal as a federal policy. He deftly analyzes a range of printed primary sources to reveal why federal politicians rejected Indigenous peoples as potential settlers in the Western “frontier” and simultaneously refused to monetarily support Black colonization abroad. As he notes, this was not a repudiation of colonization, but rather a reorientation of U.S. imperial strategies. Mills demonstrates that the organizing logic of colonization later informed U.S. global expansion and white Americans’ “racialized worldview” (p. 3). Mills traces the genesis of the American ideology of colonization from the Jefferson administration to the Civil War. Beginning with Jefferson’s seminal writings about the racial makeup of the United States, Mills takes the reader on a journey of letters and political debates where prominent white elites, white politicians, white and Black abolitionists, and subordinated Indigenous nations and African Americans grappled with the meaning of the racial republic that was the “Empire of Liberty.” Mills exposes the myriad ways that these groups framed the debate around a series of questions: Who is an American? Who has rights to citizenship as defined by the white settler empire? Can non-whites be assimilated into the body politic of the American settler state? Colonization emerged as a potential panacea for what white Americans con-