Contested Empire

In March 2013 a group of scholars gathered for the annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture series at the University of Texas at Arlington. The five talks from that conference have now been published as Contested Empire, offering some of the most insightful scholarly interrogations of the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 seen within the last generation of Texas history scholarship. The essays in this volume use a transnational approach to understand the revolution. In “Voluntary Mexicans,” Eric Schlereth explores Anglo settlers' notions of “voluntary allegiance,” meaning that Texas settlers understood their allegiance to the Mexican state as being dependent upon fair and humane treatment from the government. Perhaps most importantly, Schlereth's “focus places developments in Mexican Texas in a larger context shaped by earlier political revolutions and international law without treating these developments as simply the prelude to Texas independence” (p. 37). Similarly, in Sam Haynes's “Imitating the Example of Our Forefathers,” readers will receive a wider historical context for understanding the revolution; this time, numerous Texans “saw fit to invoke the memory of those who had sacrificed their lives in the American Revolution” in taking up arms against Mexico (pp. 43–44). This “historical reenactment” helps demythologize the Texas Revolution, giving it a wider historical berth. In “Politics and Profit,” Miguel Soto makes the important point that Mexican land policy dating back to the Spanish period favored the trading of large tracts of land along the northern frontier in Texas, through which, he argues, Mexico lost sovereignty over the northern province long before the successful revolution. Next, in “The Texan Revolution of 1835–1836 and Early Mexican Nationalism,” Will Fowler argues that Mexican intellectuals not only condemned the Texas Revolution upon its completion but also began to propagate a sense of what it meant to be a Mexican—a process that took some time to unfold. Fowler's argument is important in that it places the Texas Revolution at the center of the unfolding drama of emerging Mexican nationalism during the turbulent nineteenth century; most historians argue that Mexican nationalism had its advent only after the nation's wartime loss to the United States in 1848. Finally, in the volume's penultimate essay, “Time's Noblest Empire is the Last,” Amy S. Greenberg analyzes the painter Thomas Cole's epic five-part Course of Empire series of paintings to place Texas within emerging conversations about U.S. empire during the 1830s and 1840s. The developing ideology of Manifest Destiny overshadows the real “Montesquieuian fears of extended territory” and the subsequent potential fallout of western expansion for U.S. republicanism (p. 148). The Texas Revolution, again, receives a wider than usual consideration in Greenberg's insightful and sensitive essay

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