Theorizing Republican, Imperial, and Settler Colonial Dimensions of American State Formation: A Congressional Analysis

Mary Shi, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Debate over how best to theorize the early American state has flourished in recent years, with scholars debating the relative merits of republican, imperial, or settler colonial characterizations. Analysis of an original dataset characterizing legislative activity in the House of Representatives from 1789 to 1861 (N=12,658) visibilizes the significant amount of early federal legislative activity that was concerned with Indigenous affairs, public lands management, and promoting internal improvements such as river improvements and railroads. While republican frameworks describe the lack of a bureaucratically-administered social welfare state in the antebellum period, their characterization of the prevalence of internal improvements topics as a symptom of a state of “courts and parties” organized around distributing the spoils of office to loyal partisans cannot account for why early American state makers were so concerned with building post roads, canals, and railroads extending into their territorial hinterlands to begin with. On the other hand, while imperial frameworks can describe the early development of the fiscal-military nexus in the American state that would fuel territorial expansion throughout the nineteenth century, “empire” is an umbrella concept too general to describe the specific way in which conquered territories and their inhabitants were subsequently incorporated (or not) into the American state. This paper instead proposes a conceptualization of this work of Indigenous relations and territory incorporation as settler colonial. In doing so, this paper theorizes settler colonialism beyond Indigenous dispossession and erasure to consider how settler colonial governmental logics also produce a specific relationship between land, population, and the nascent state. Therefore, in establishing the significant amount of early congressional activity devoted to territory incorporation topics, this paper both contributes towards the empirical characterization of the early American state while placing it in a broader theoretical and comparative perspective.

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 Presented in Session 141. Conceptualizing State-Making