Commercial Conquest: Empire and Property in the Early US Republic

Abstract

AbstractAlthough consent and commerce were dominant principles of revolutionary political culture, early American expansionists engaged in the continual appropriation of indigenous land. How were these principles of consent and commerce combined with processes of territorial conquest? Rather than a Lockean right of conquest where labor establishes the right to property, architects of early American expansion drew on a possessory right to property in which property is established by social convention rather than natural right. Political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox enlisted the possessory right to property in the justification of early US colonization, emphasizing the importance of purchasing Indian land. Yet when Indian nations refused to sell their land, these same figures cast indigenous resistance and coercive reactions to it as exceptions to the norm of commercial expansion, giving rise to a discourse of commercial conquest that aided in the justification of native dispossession.