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

"Doolen's focus on what he calls "cartographic texts" doesn't disappoint: it proves to be a fulfilling, informative, and astute assemblage of writings that chart the multiple forms of expressive culture U.S.-empire building takes historically and geographically. The book uncovers and analyzes U.S. empire's discursive bedrock, a textual and cultural foundation of albeit uneven imperial narratives that pervade obscure newspapers, western travel accounts, presidential diaries, and official governmental acts. These are the figurative "territories of empire," to use Doolen's apt title, that convincingly show how empire and its culture of coloniality inhabit even the most prosaic texts of U.S. print culture and literary history writ large." --Jesse Aleman, merican Literary Realism

"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: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture

"Andy Doolen studies the many narratives created by state and nonstate actors in the trans-Mississippi borderlands to carve out an Anglo empire." -- Hispanic American Historical Review

"In zeroing in on several key cartographic texts, Doolen reminds us not only of the significance of frontier or western writers to national development at an early nineteenth-century moment when the Atlantic seaboard's 'sophisticates' tend to receive more scholarly attention but also of the crucial role such nonstate actors played in the growth of American empire. And in covering the years 1800-30 explicitly, the author also sheds light on a neglected moment before the trope of Manifest Destiny shaped representation of the West and its peoples. What we gain from Doolen's creative periodization is added appreciation for the sense of contingency and possibilities present at a moment when US domination of the hemisphere was hardly assured...[A]n excellent book. Doolen's work speaks to scholars in several different fields, and thus stands to make a lasting contribution to our understanding of early America's nascent empire."-- Early American Literature