Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country by Lori J. Daggar (review)

Reviewed by: Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country by Lori J. Daggar Jennifer Graber Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country. By Lori J. Daggar. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. 262 pages. Cloth, ebook. In Cultivating Empire, Lori J. Daggar contends that American-style agriculture, as practiced by so-called "civilizing" (3) missions to Native America, played a critical role in U.S. Indian affairs, territorial expansion, and the development of racial capitalism. Beginning with Henry Knox's Civilization Plan (articulated in official correspondence as early as 1789) and continuing through the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, this book highlights negotiations between federal officials, religious philanthropists, and Native leaders that led to dramatic material transformations of Indigenous lands and politics in the Ohio country. Analyzing these relations and the environmental and infrastructure changes they initiated, she argues for the central importance of philanthropy and the ongoing power of Native peoples. This mix of federal policy, public and private projects, and negotiations with sovereign Native nations demonstrates the "blended" (8) rather than unilaterally imposed nature of U.S. imperial power on the periphery. According to Daggar, realizing federal policies from the top depended on engagements by interested parties on the ground. As such, her study challenges cultural historians of religion and reform to consider the material, diplomatic, and even environmental impacts of missionaries and philanthropists.1 Likewise, it calls on historians focused on politics and economics to grapple with the power of philanthropic or religious actors and rhetoric to influence land policies, infrastructure, and the federal budget. And finally, following recent work on the colonial era and early republic, she highlights the ways Native leaders engaged agricultural missions—that is, missions designated to alter Indigenous agricultural practices—from their own traditions of diplomacy and defense of sovereignty.2 [End Page 767] Two phrases encapsulate the power dynamics Daggar aims to highlight and interpret. The first, "the mission complex" (10), encompasses mission activities beyond the evangelistic—namely the educational and agricultural. The term allows her to highlight the "material and economic consequences" (10) of mission farms, schools, and other ventures within the story of U.S. territorial expansion. The second, "speculative philanthropy," highlights the ways mission leaders could be motivated as much by the desire to "acquire economic, territorial, moral, or spiritual capital" (5) as by benevolence toward Indigenous peoples. The author considers specifically how missionaries acted from religious principles, as well as their belief that investments in lands, peoples, and projects would prompt a variety of future benefits. The two terms work effectively to speak across topics in the early republic that scholars sometimes leave siloed. The book is organized in three parts, with the first focused on the long history of "missionary-imperial cooperation" (18). Although much of the first chapter on Spanish, French, and British imperialism will be familiar to specialists in early America, it highlights missionaries' roles in imperial policies and the importance placed on articulating imperial expansion's religious ends. The author then moves to the 1790s to offer a striking analysis of how the developing model of U.S. expansion converged with French, Spanish, and British imperial practices, as well as reasons why American practices diverged. Daggar demonstrates that the Americans' goals of permanent settlement and territorial expansion transformed Native nations first and foremost into obstacles to be removed, a viewpoint that she finds articulated variously in the Northwest Ordinance, the Trade and Intercourse Acts, and Knox's Civilization Plan. Missionaries, who had always served as imperial "go-betweens and diplomats" (46), operated within this new context of the 1790s by establishing mission sites focused inordinately on agriculture and economic development. It might not be surprising to learn that evangelization took a back seat to other concerns, a pattern that can be found in almost every colonial setting. But what is surprising is the way that Daggar attends to the specific consequences of this dynamic in the early American republic: she shows that missionaries played a critical role in the "improvement" (5) and eventual commodification of Native lands desired by settlers. Cultivating Empire then turns to the philanthropists...