The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

Mills, Brandon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812252500 ISBN 13: 9780812252507

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

According to accepted historical wisdom, the goal of the African Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 to return freed slaves to Africa, was borne of desperation and illustrated just how intractable the problems of race and slavery had become in the nineteenth-century United States. But for Brandon Mills, the ACS was part of a much wider pattern of national and international expansion. Similar efforts on the part of the young nation to create, in Thomas Jefferson's words, an "empire of liberty," spanned Native removal, the annexation of Texas and California, filibustering campaigns in Latin America, and American missionary efforts in Hawaii, as well as the founding of Liberia in 1821. Mills contends that these diverse currents of U.S. expansionism were ideologically linked and together comprised a capacious colonization movement that both reflected and shaped a wide range of debates over race, settlement, citizenship, and empire in the early republic.

The World Colonization Made chronicles the rise and fall of the colonization movement as a political force within the United States—from its roots in the crises of the Revolutionary era, to its peak with the creation of the ACS, to its ultimate decline with emancipation and the Civil War. The book interrogates broader issues of U.S. expansion, including the progression of federal Indian policy, the foundations and effects of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, and the growth of U.S. commercial and military power throughout the Western hemisphere. By contextualizing the colonization movement in this way, Mills shows how it enabled Americans to envision a world of self-governing republics that harmonized with racial politics at home.

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Brandon Mills teaches in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Denver.

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Introduction
The World Colonization Made

At an 1825 meeting of the American Colonization Society (ACS) held in the U.S. Capitol Building, Robert Stockton delivered a warning about the nation's future as an empire. Only three years earlier, he had led the U.S. Navy's effort to create the colony of Liberia in West Africa with the intention that this settlement would ultimately become a republic governed by African Americans. Despite the organization's recent success in establishing this colony, Stockton addressed the ACS with a cautionary tale of imperial hubris. He pointed out that the Spanish empire, a once-dominant global power, had suffered a steep decline in the preceding decades, recently culminating in the loss of nearly all its colonial possessions throughout the Western Hemisphere. Anticipating a time when the United States would preside over its own sprawling empire, Stockton worried that the nation might follow Spain's fateful path, ultimately undermining its effort to build a republic rooted in "moral rectitude and the equal rights of man." For Stockton, Spain's empire was defined by "avarice" and stained by the "blood of thousands of unoffending natives," and he warned that the United States could similarly perish from "a heart blackened by atrocity and countless cruelties to the Indian and the African."

To avoid this fate, Stockton encouraged Americans to support the African colonization movement and to model it around the United States' republican institutions, which were, in his estimation, "the very capital of human freedom" and "the sublimest structure for the promulgation of human rights the world ever saw." For Stockton, planting a black republic in Africa and the parallel "colonization of our aborigines" in North America would allow the nation to forge a benevolent empire: one that allowed for the expansion of liberty through racially separate regimes of self-governance for whites, African Americans, and Native Americans.

Although his speech warned about the dangers of excessive colonial violence, Stockton failed to mention his own violent role in colonizing Liberia. As a naval officer tasked with patrolling the slave trade for the United States, he landed the U.S.S. Alligator on West African shores in late 1821 along with several ACS agents in hopes of securing territory for a colony. Stockton and the prospective colonists entered negotiations with a local Dei leader, known to English speakers as "King Peter," concerning the terms of a potential American colony in Cape Mesurado. When negotiations faltered, Stockton allegedly pointed a gun at the man's head and pressed him into signing a treaty to cede land to the American settlers. Thus, Liberia's founding event reenacted, in microcosm, the use of force to coerce treaties on the indigenous peoples of North America in order to establish the United States' own settler republic. Conveniently omitting this history allowed Stockton to claim that the United States could build an exceptional empire based not on exploitation but rather on the principle of self-government.

As Stockton's speech and actions suggest, colonizationism offered many white Americans a compelling racial framework for defining, and obscuring, the character of U.S. imperialism. From the American Revolution to the Civil War, colonizationists envisioned geopolitical arrangements in which African Americans would be severed from the United States' body politic while remaining part of its broader agenda for expansion. A relatively small number of black migrants left the United States for these colonies, either in search of self-determination or as a requirement of their manumission from slavery. For the most part, free black people in the United States steadfastly opposed these schemes as an affront to their livelihood, natural rights, and basic humanity. On its own terms, the colonization movement was largely a failure, yet it remained an influential fixture for the first century of American political life. As a foundational set of racial ideas within the United States, how did colonizationism evolve to create, and recreate, the United States' ever-shifting imperial priorities?

To answer this question, The World Colonization Made traces this idea across a wide range of political and cultural debates concerning citizenship rights, strategies of settlement, foreign policy, and economic expansion. By examining the broad circulation of this concept in the early United States, it is possible to see why colonizationism remained so attractive and resilient to many white Americans despite its consistent failures. The colonization movement gained so much traction, in part, because it spoke to American aspiration toward empire and connected this vision of expansion abroad with ideas about race at home. The white citizenry that imagined and set into motion colonization proposals was both self-consciously committed to expanding the reach of its republican ideals and intensely concerned about how the principle of self-rule could coexist with racial hierarchies created through enslavement, settler colonization, and overseas expansion. Indeed, colonizationist views of race evolved along with Americans' reconfigurations of the racial terms of their empire. While Americans initially created the ideology of colonizationism in order to manage the domestic racial threats posed by slavery and settlement, it ultimately developed into a thoroughly racialized worldview that foreshadowed later iterations of the United States' global expansion.

The expansive scope of colonizationism is apparent in the fact that Americans proposed colonies in such a wide range of territories both inside and outside current U.S. borders. The ACS campaign to settle Liberia was the central and most successful effort to create such a colony, but it was by no means the only one. At different moments, colonizationists contemplated a sprawling array of settlements in the far reaches of the Atlantic world, including locations throughout much of North America, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and West Africa. That the United States would eventually claim a significant portion of these sites as part of either its own national territory or its informal imperial domain underscores the fact that the nation's continental settlement remained in constant dialogue with its global aspirations.

For a movement literally dedicated to founding and settling colonies, colonizationism has remained largely absent from histories of U.S. imperialism. Most accounts view it primarily as a manifestation of domestic politics, positioning it in relation to antislavery activism, growing sectional tensions, racial ideology, and the emergence of black political identity in the United States. To some extent, this tendency replicates the way that many Americans discussed colonizationism at the time. In the antebellum period, the concept became a central battleground in the war over slavery as a generation of white abolitionists, following the lead of black protesters, defined their movement by rejecting colonizationists' constrained vision of emancipation. Thus, for contemporary advocates and opponents of colonization, questions of empire were not front and center. While acknowledging the importance of these domestic contexts, this book approaches the subject from a different angle by showing that colonizationism held enduring appeal for white Americans precisely because it was multifaceted: it promised to manage the nation's internal racial dynamics by structuring them around particular visions of empire.

Offering a powerful and flexible framework for racial thinking, colonizationism helped define the United States' evolving imperial outlook throughout its early history. Accordingly, the colonization movement revealed Americans' persistent ambivalence about the nature of their empire: the United States forged...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812252500
• ISBN 13: 9780812252507
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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