Overview

In contrast to later imperial pursuits in Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, the early United States extended its boundaries through less sensational modes of territorialization: land deals, slavery expansion, treaty diplomacy, immigration and settlement, and the addition of new states on the border. Never the exclusive top-down product of any single strategic plan, empire building relied rather on a hazy, ever-shifting boundary between state and non-state action.Territories of Empire examines the border writings of U.S. explorers, politicians, travelers, novelists, merchants, newspapermen, and other eye-witnesses to the rapid expansion of the United States in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase. It traces how different authors and texts imagined the relations between nation-state and border and reveals how continental ambitions were achieved through the uneven and unpredictable process of territorialization. Andy Doolen looks to writings as dissimilar as Kentucky newspaper accounts of the Aaron Burr conspiracy, the explorer Zebulon Pike's 1810 account of making peace with the Santee Sioux before becoming terribly lost near the upper Rio Grande, and Timothy Flint's 1826 novel about a young New Englander who fights in the Mexican independence struggle in showing how national sentiments were galvanized in support of greater territorial and commercial growth. To this end, Doolen makes clear how both private citizens and government officials collectively authored the spatial logic of a continental republic.Combining textual analysis with theories of transnationalism and empire, Territories of Empire reconstructs the development of a continental imaginary highly attuned to the objectives of U.S. imperialism, while often betraying an unsettling awareness of resistance and diversity beyond the border.

Full Product Details

9780199348626

Table of Contents

Reviews

Andy Doolen has provided a compelling and detailed historical account of the development of American empire, which challenges a number of elements of the received story. In addition, through an examination of the 'territory effect', the book demonstrates the multiple practices and texts--legal, political, economic, literary and cartographic--which together constitute the production of territory. --Stuart Elden, author of The Birth of Territory Andy Doolen invites us to explore a keener dialectic of US territorial expansion, messily grounded in Louisiana and deeply entangled with Mexico long before the privileged formulation of Manifest Destiny. As importantly, his original consideration of imperialism's textual front invites us to a reassessment of U.S. literary history's own state-nonstate dimensions. Territories of Empire should inspire new scholarship for some time. --Ed White, author of The Backcountry and the City: Colonization in Early America This is an erudite, well-written literary study of early US expansion. Doolen draws on an impressive, extensive array of what he calls 'cartographic texts, ' eloquently arguing that both state and non-state actors contributed to expansion. --Shelley S. Streeby, author of Radical Sensations: WorldMovements, Violence, and Visual Culture

This is an erudite, well-written literary study of early US expansion. Doolen draws on an impressive, extensive array of what he calls 'cartographic texts,' eloquently arguing that both state and non-state actors contributed to expansion. * Shelley S. Streeby, author of Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture * Andy Doolen invites us to explore a keener dialectic of US territorial expansion, messily grounded in Louisiana and deeply entangled with Mexico long before the privileged formulation of Manifest Destiny. As importantly, his original consideration of imperialism's textual front invites us to a reassessment of U.S. literary history's own state-nonstate dimensions. Territories of Empire should inspire new scholarship for some time. * Ed White, author of The Backcountry and the City: Colonization in Early America * Andy Doolen has provided a compelling and detailed historical account of the development of American empire, which challenges a number of elements of the received story. In addition, through an examination of the 'territory effect', the book demonstrates the multiple practices and texts-legal, political, economic, literary and cartographic * which together constitute the production of territory. *

Author Information

Andy Doolen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Kentucky and the author of Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available