The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which officially recognized the United States
as a sovereign republic, also doubled the territorial girth of the
original thirteen colonies. The fledgling nation now stretched from the
coast of Maine to the Mississippi River and up to the Great Lakes. With
this dramatic expansion, argues author Bethel Saler, the United States
simultaneously became a postcolonial republic and gained a domestic
empire. The competing demands of governing an empire and a republic
inevitably collided in the early American West. The Settlers' Empire
traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the
Northwest Territory, a process that relied on overlapping colonial rule
over Euro-American settlers and the multiple Indian nations in the
territory. These entwined administrations involved both formal
institution building and the articulation of dominant cultural customs
that, in turn, served also to establish boundaries of citizenship and
racial difference.
In the Northwest Territory, diverse populations of newcomers and Natives
struggled over the region's geographical and cultural definition in
areas such as religion, marriage, family, gender roles, and economy. The
success or failure of state formation in the territory thus ultimately
depended on what took place not only in the halls of government but also
on the ground and in the everyday lives of the region's Indians,
Francophone creoles, Euro- and African Americans, and European
immigrants. In this way, The Settlers' Empire speaks to historians of
women, gender, and culture, as well as to those interested in the early
national state, the early West, settler colonialism, and Native history.
