Bethel Saler.The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest.

Abstract

In this impressive study, Bethel Saler offers the kind of careful, diversified, and comprehensive analysis of territorial development and state formation that has been lacking in recent literature on the Old Northwest. This is a historiographical domain once ruled by Frederick Jackson Turner, whose oft-forgotten first book on the Indian trade in Wisconsin pioneered the field of western regional studies. Modern historians of the American West, following the lead of Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Anne F. Hyde, and others, rightly have found the Turnerian view to have been insufficiently documented and too narrow in scope, lacking in multicultural sensitivity, unsympathetic toward Native Americans, sexist in ignoring women’s roles, and racist as being exclusively white-focused. Saler’s contribution, like those of other “new” western historians, lies in pushing far beyond the analytical limitations and misconceptions of long-outdated scholarship. Although it focuses primarily on the evolution of Wisconsin Territory from early stages of white settlement to its eventual conversion to statehood, the reach of the book is much more ambitious than that, addressing tension in the early nation between its dual identities as a westward-expanding “postcolonial republic” and as a “contiguous domestic empire” (1), composed of entangled—and often conflicting—cultural and political interests. Saler’s well-researched picture of early Wisconsin forms mostly from the ground-up. She asserts limited impact of central governmental planning, with territorial development unfolding haphazardly along the rivers, hunting trails, and trade routes of the Great Lakes area. As she tells it, the story is a messy one of contested spaces, clashing desires, and competing visions, all involving both genders and various types of white settlers and proprietors, including the original French. She also addresses an assortment of Native American groups, sometimes adapting culturally but also struggling, against all too familiar odds and persistent racism of whites, to preserve traditional ways.