Territories of Empire

Many historians comfortably position American expansion across North America (and beyond) in the frameworks of manifest destiny and imperial ambitions. These provide familiar themes with which we can package and contextualize the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), the Mexican Cession (1848), the Gadsen Purchase (1853), the Spanish-American War (1898), and various activities in the Pacific and Caribbean. Andy Doolen's Territories of Empire offers a word of caution, however, in reading those concepts backward onto the preceding decades. His counterargument is important, challenging how we think of the twenty-odd years following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The story of those years was more complex than a straightforward federal narrative of inevitable and steady territorial acquisition and political integration. By focusing on the writings of nonstate actors, Doolen forwards a convincing argument: American expansion from 1803 to 1821 was cautious, even timid and uncertain. The voices of “quiet expansionism” contrast the confident and even bellicose voices that dominated the latter half of the century (p. 9). This thesis imbues American expansion with contingency and upends assumptions of uniform, top-down federal control of a systematic westward expansion

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