The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray

Abstract

Reviewed by: The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray Eve Eure (bio) The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire brandon mills University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020 254 pp. Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization robert murray University Press of Florida, 2021 282 pp. Studies of the American Colonization Society (ACS) remain an important site of critical inquiry into the scholarship on the African colonization movement. Brandon Mills's The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire and Robert Murray's Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization offer new direction in reassessing the role of the ACS in colonization studies. Brandon Mills's book is an important addition to this robust scholarship on the African colonization movement, an effort led by the American Colonization Society to resettle African Americans in the nineteenth century. Mills demonstrates how a reconsideration of the "decades preceding the formation of the American Colonization Society" reveals that colonizationist ideas about African American resettlement were constantly shifting (5). By drawing our attention to this understudied earlier period, Mills seeks to highlight the "competing visions of the United States' settler state" and to suggest that these debates on African colonization expose how they were "both an extension and reinvention of early American empire" (9). Although Mills is interested in the history of the ACS, he is also concerned with tracing the multiple routes of colonizationist ideas as they were fastened to discussions about race, citizenship, and settlement within the Western Hemisphere. Mills draws on an impressive array of historical and literary archives such as colonizationist pamphlets, newspapers like the Cherokee Phoenix and the African Repository, and the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Delany. Mills presents this history of the colonization movement by sketching a chronological narrative of its emergence in the Revolutionary era and [End Page 234] geographic and ideological circulation in the nineteenth century. The first chapter begins with correspondence between James Monroe, the governor of Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson, president in 1801, about "whether the federal government could help his state create a colony of former slaves somewhere within the western territory of North America" (8). He demonstrates how ideas about establishing a Black settlement circulated before the formalization of the ACS in 1816 and that proposals for a Black colony were in response to fears of slave rebellions and ongoing wars with Indigenous nations. Highlighting the numerous pamphlets written between 1796 and 1805 on the subject of a Black colony in the US, Mills explores a variety of colonizationist pamphlets (authored by St. George Tucker, Moses Fisk, John Parrish, William Thornton, and Lewis Dupré) that imagined not only western territories but also Louisiana as a possible place for a Black settlement. By the mid-1810s, however, colonizationists no longer envisioned a Black colony within North America but in Africa. In one particularly fascinating section titled, "Preventing an 'African Tecumseh,'" Mills suggests that colonizationists looked to Africa because they "viewed African Americans' aspirations for sovereignty within North America as a dangerous prospect when paired with the potential collaboration of Indian allies" (28). What emerges in this discussion is an illuminating reading of the interplay between Native resistance movements, Black freedom, African colonization, and US empire. The World Colonization Made emphasizes the language of "failure" to call attention to the significance of the evolution of ideas on African colonization to later proposals on Black settlements in Africa. Such a framework enables Mills to broaden the historical archive on the colonization movement to include failed attempts to establish an African colony in North America and Africa. The World Colonization Made persuasively suggests that what counts as failure in some respects are the unrealized aspirations of the aforementioned authors of pre-ACS pamphlets. In a footnote, Mills observes that historians have often described these pre-ACS documents as "incoherent and unsuccessful precursors to the formidable organization that would coalesce behind African colonization" (203–4). Instead, Mills argues that they should be considered "an incipient movement" (43). He examines Paul Cuffe's efforts to create a Black settlement in Sierra Leone to...