Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Poses a significant departure from other works on American imperialism and transnational analysis, which traditionally focus on the colonial era or the 19C from the 1840s on
Draws on an impressive, extensive array of cartographic texts: exploration narratives, novels, oratory, and natural histories, to autobiographies, travel narratives, poetry, and periodical literature
Opens up a critical discussion about the relationship between state and non-state agents

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Description

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.

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

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.

Territories of Empire

U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence

Andy Doolen

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Reviews and Awards

"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