Eliga Gould puts law and international legalities to the forefront in this innovative and elegantly written book on the emergence of the United States as a new world empire during and following the Revolutionary War. Adopting a broadly transatlantic framework, Gould contends that the early American republic depended upon European acceptance in its quest for international legitimacy. The United States may have diverged from British imperialism, but it could not escape persistent English power and influence through the War of 1812 and beyond.

Gould's interpretation builds on his previous scholarship elucidating Britain's eighteenth-century empire as simultaneously encompassing “zones of law” and “zones of violence.” England's governing class generally imagined continental Europe as an arena for controlled hostilities between regular military forces. British rulers doubted, however, whether this model was relevant to embattled American frontier zones where recalcitrant foreign colonials or natives stood in the way of imperial consolidation and supremacy. British intolerance for ambiguous colonial allegiance was glaringly revealed by the deportation of Acadia's French colonists under wartime pressures from 1754 to 1760.

Gould offers a brief but cogent analysis of the growing rift between Britain and its American colonies in the years 1763–1775. In his view, London was not insisting on colonial subordination so much as compliance with a unitary imperial law. Stringent English customs enforcement upset Americans even more than the crown's opposition to unrestrained colonial expansion into trans-Appalachian Indian territories. Gould characterizes America's patriots as particularists thwarting British conceptions of “a European diplomatic republic” representing a statist model of law and order (42), but this diplomatic republic was itself fragile, as conflict between Britain and Bourbon foes France and Spain precluded any lasting international comity.

Issues of freedom and slavery within the British Empire and early United States occupy a central place in Among the Powers. English imperialism had a strongly moralistic cast, influenced not only by common law and Enlightenment principles but also by nationalistic pride and Protestant religiosity. Gould offers an insightful reading of the Somerset case, in which Chief Justice Lord Mansfield prohibited a Jamaica slaveholder from forcing James Somerset, a black man, to return to the Caribbean from England against his will. This ruling of 1772 signaled rising British antislavery sentiment, although it did not directly outlaw slavery in England, let alone in the British colonies. Eleven years later, British General Guy Carleton deftly turned aside Washington's demands for the return of blacks who had escaped to British lines during the war. Britain was a slave empire moving toward freedom in fits and starts during the late eighteenth century. Gould rightfully calls our attention to the free black colony at Freetown in Sierra Leone, founded under British auspices. His account devotes less attention to the thousands of black refugees who embarked from Charleston, Savannah, and St. Augustine with British troops in the wake of English defeat in 1783. White Loyalists and the king's officers commandeered a great many blacks who were re-enslaved in the Bahamas, Caribbean, and other venues. The United States meanwhile witnessed a growing sectional divide over slavery, along with mounting national opposition to the African slave trade. Gould astutely examines British and United States actions in sometimes interdicting, but at other times tolerating, slave smuggling outside of their respective jurisdictions. Gould's interpretation of the international scene is superb, although it may overstate the depth of antislavery sentiment in Maryland and Virginia in the postrevolutionary era. Neither state came close to legislative approval of proposals for gradual emancipation contingent on the deportation of freed blacks.

Gould's most original contribution is to emphasize how the United States empire emerged within an international legal milieu. From Washington's presidency through James Monroe's, American leaders were highly sensitive to European criticism of the United States as an aggrandizing nation unable to restrain its own citizens from freebooting and other illicit ventures. The Washington administration upheld national authority by opposing American adventurers who conspired with French agents to invade Spanish Louisiana and Florida in 1793–94. As Gould shows, the American republic wished to prove itself a “treaty-worthy sovereign” so that it could gain equal membership in the European family of nations (140). Gould captures ambiguities in federal policy under Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. The Virginia triumvirate made a habit of pressuring Spain into territorial concessions and subsequently justifying American occupancy of Florida districts on the basis that Madrid could not establish law and order in those areas. Federal authorities, meanwhile, took charge of treaty-making, dispossessing Indian peoples and consequently empowering state jurisdictions and white citizens. The United States was an empire in territorial extent, but grew in a manner diffusing governmental authority within its bounds.

The American republic viewed itself as the bastion of liberty; however, it was Britain that offered the most alluring hope to Indians and blacks ensnared by the United States in the first 15 years of the nineteenth century. Gould examines how African Americans and Creek Indians in the Southern borderlands looked for British protection or alliance during the War of 1812 and its aftermath. For Gould, the key watershed in North American history was not simply the Battle of New Orleans, but above all Andrew Jackson's campaign against the Seminoles in 1818. During this conflict, Jackson executed two Britons within Spanish Florida for aiding the Seminoles. Eschewing an aggressive response, the British government bowed to United States power by disavowing the executed men for acting in an unauthorized manner outside its purview. Law, power, and empire thereby coalesced on both sides of the Atlantic.