Rob Harper’s new work, Unsettling the West, is a welcome entry in the literature that examines early modern state building. Focusing on the eighteenth century Ohio Valley, Harper explores the interconnections between violence, state building, and colonialism. American state building in Ohio, Harper argues, challenges both top-down and bottom-up interpretations of the subject, and particularly disputes long-standing assumptions that only minimal violence accompanied American state formation. Classic Weberian models of orderly top-down state formation did not occur, nor was the Ohio Valley a region where individualistic Turnerian settlers, disdaining established political authority, developed a state-building process that was both democratically bottom-up and violence free. Harper emphasizes that the Turnerian interpretation, by skimming lightly over the violence that accompanied what used to be disingenuously termed “American westward movement,” missed an important opportunity to analyze the centrality of violence to American state formation, not to mention Native dispossession.Violence in the Ohio Valley also owed much to the region’s long history as contested colonial space. The French and British empires, British settlers from the seaboard colonies, and Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, and Haudenosaunees, all jockeyed for control of the region in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. None completely succeeded, making the Ohio Valley a place where multiple representatives of multiple polities sought to exercise power, including British imperial agents and military commanders, Indigenous diplomats and political leaders, and colonial officials ranging from governors and influential legislators to local militia officers and traders. In response, Ohio’s tribal nations and settler colonists made selective, opportunistic alliances, with each other as well as among themselves. Through these interethnic and intercultural coalitions and the patronage networks they created, Ohio’s inhabitants attempted to manipulate multiple sources of governmental power in pursuit of locally desired objectives. One of their major concerns was containing intercommunity violence. Individual mediators or larger coalitions strove, often successfully, to prevent violent encounters between small parties of Native peoples and colonists from spiraling into general warfare.Engaging with colonial governments was risky business, however. State officials sought to bolster their feeble authority by extending state power into the Ohio country, frequently by force of arms. Government-supplied weapons and soldiers destabilized the painstakingly constructed local coalitions, allowing Native peoples and land-hungry colonists the means to wage renewed war while, in Harper’s words, “leaving their respective peoples desperate for state protection” (20). Each outbreak of organized violence drove Ohio Valley residents into closer alliances with emergent state power in an attempt to restrain the violence that state officials (possibly even the same ones now being incorporated into a reconstituted coalition) had unleashed in the first place. The result remained a complex political landscape of negotiation and networking in which Native nations, colonists, and government officials participated in remaking the political order after the collapse of the British colonial system in the 1780s.A new American “imperial republic” (176) fitfully emerged by the 1790s. Harper emphasizes that both Native peoples and settlers participated in the creation of this state, though with diametrically opposed expectations of their place in it. Harper claims that Native peoples remained a recognized component within the new American polity, an analysis that seems to rely on present-day legal understandings of Native nations as third sovereign spaces. This assessment seems dubious; the immediate reality of the early American state was an unwelcoming one for Native peoples. Settlers would continue forcing Native peoples from the Ohio Valley, by fair means and foul, using the legal mechanism of treaty-based land cessions but also through all-too-familiar acts of violence.