BethelSaler, The settlers' empire: colonialism and state formation in America's old northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp 392. 10 figs. ISBN 9780812246636 Hbk. $45/£29.50)
本书研究美国如何通过殖民统治控制旧西北部，重点分析威斯康星地区从领地到州的漫长过渡，揭示美国作为后殖民共和国与国内帝国的双重性质，对理解早期美国西部征服至关重要。
The 1783 Treaty of Paris awarded the US not only independence but a vast national domain west of the Appalachian Mountains, an area then only sparsely populated by European American settlers. Saddled with a heavy wartime debt, home to a rapidly growing population, and committed to building an agrarian republic, everyone recognized that the nation's future hinged on its ability to capitalize on this great resource. Bethel Saler's The settlers' empire tells how the US took control over the continental interior of North America and changed its demography, economy, society, and landscape in the process. The particular focus is on colonialism and state formation in Wisconsin, which became a state only in 1848. In contrast to states like Ohio and Louisiana, the period of transition from territory to state was unusually prolonged in Wisconsin, lasting for over six decades. At first sight this might seem a narrow topic of primarily local interest. The territory that would become Wisconsin, the author says, was after all a ‘periphery within the territorial peripheries carved out of the Old Northwest’ (p. 87). But Saler's book is in fact of broad scope and of central importance to our understanding of the early US and the conquest of the west. At the heart of Saler's book is the dichotomy signalled by the title. Independence created a nation that was ‘both a postcolonial republic and a contiguous domestic empire’ (p. 1), dedicated to the ideal of popular sovereignty but also to incorporating the west into the national domain. This dual aim found its first expression in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which defined the region bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes as a territory governed directly by the federal government, but which also formulated the process whereby European American settler societies would in time become full member-states in the American union. Territorial status was thus designed to be but a temporary colonial interlude to ‘the manifest formation of self-governing territories and autonomous settler states’ (p. 115). This temporary interlude is the topic of Saler's book. The federal government exercised two forms of colonial rule in the west, directed at the two principal resident groups: the original inhabitants at the time of the adoption of the Northwest Ordinance and the European American migrants that the ordinance attracted to the region. In the latter case the federal government came to accept an expedited transfer of power to the settler migrants while at the same time it actively shaped federal territories into geographic spaces organized by the common law, republican principles of government, and patriarchal power. The former group the federal government organized into something Saler calls ‘Treaty Polities’. Native Americans and their trader allies were made to sign away land claims in treaties that also formulated the route by which they would become ‘civilized’ and thereby subject to inclusion as citizens in the US. Here, too, the federal government shaped people and landscapes to conform better to ideals of sedentary farming, private property rights, and patriarchal households. Of the three parties present in the west, white settlers held the strongest hand because the end point of American colonialism was always settler self-government. The native populations and the federal government were the weaker parties and in the end the latter would be the instrument that subdued and displaced the former in the interest of white settler migrants. The first half of the book brilliantly outlines American colonial rule in the Northwest Territory. Next follow chapters on the economy, missionary activity, and marriage and family. In Michigan and Wisconsin Territory, which would become the state of Wisconsin, European American migration replaced an older economy centred on the fur trade not with agriculture but with mining. The territory therefore presents an early instance of a story that would later become familiar in US western expansion. These chapters highlight the surprising extent to which the American empire shared in the ‘civilizing mission’ associated with nineteenth-century European overseas empires. Government agents and missionaries tried to populate the Northwest Territory with an educated Christian citizenry. The promotion of marriage and stable families reveals their concern with hygiene, sex, order, and cleanliness and their intention to transform a rowdy western population into patriarchal households that allowed for the ordered intergenerational conveyance of property claims. The settlers' empire seamlessly integrates a wonderfully rich political and cultural history. Saler is sensitive to the limited reach of the federal government, to the gap between government intentions and the actual realization of policy, and to the power of subjugated peoples to shape government action on the ground. Nonetheless, she powerfully demonstrates how a government apparatus under the control of white settlers made a real difference to the fate of the west and its inhabitants. This is a book of undoubted value, combining meticulous scholarship with a sophisticated yet clear and nuanced argument. It should be read not only by students of the American west but by historians interested in the expansion of the ‘British world’ and the antebellum US, and indeed by anyone seeking to understand the origins of the American empire.