Paul Frymer's Building an American Empire argues that conflicts over land propelled joint projects of state and racial formation in the nineteenth-century United States. Each push to acquire additional territory triggered debates over who should populate these settlements, and these debates ultimately led to policies and practices that strengthened white supremacy as the empire spread to new domains. Frymer adopts a panoramic scope to build his argument, examining boundary drawing in the early republic, agrarian republicanism, Indian removal, homesteading, annexation debates, and proposals for African-American colonization. One of the book's key strengths is Frymer's decision to weave the stories of Native and African-Americans into his account of territorial expansion. Race and colonialism inflect his discussion of the history of political and legal thought, from early legal justifications for colonialism to Jeffersonian preoccupations with compact and virtuous settlements, and further to jurisprudence on contract, land titles, and Native sovereignty.
Frymer also mounts a powerful case for considering the United States to be an empire of settler colonies. Rather than focusing narrowly on the notorious removals carried out under President Andrew Jackson, Frymer demonstrates that from the founding onwards, every stage of territorial growth relied on Indigenous dispossession and displacement. However constant, the mechanisms used to dispossess and displace varied, and Frymer asserts that the logistically disastrous removals of the 1830s were actually the least effective. Far more successful than direct federal campaigns were techniques that deployed the corrosive force of individual settlers, such as the Armed Occupation Act, the Homestead Acts, or the Dawes Act, all of which brought the sweeping use of allotments to the Indian Territory.
Frymer's main subject is federal legislative debate, and he is careful to depict expansionist fervor as internally divided. He finds disagreement even within groups—such as proslavery Southern whites—whom historians often paint as unanimous in their support of extending the enslaver's empire. Rather, as Frymer explains, some racists and advocates of slavery feared that integrating new territories could dilute whiteness, both by incorporating unwanted peoples into the American domain and by dispersing white Americans to inhospitable regions too far flung and racially tainted to be desirable. Each chapter tracks the racial politics that churned with fresh waves of policy-driven migration. Yet beneath the roil of disputes, Frymer observes a growing consensus among white people over the aims of territorial acquisition. Even as slavery's sectional divides polarized debates over expansion into the Pacific Northwest, the Indian Territory, Texas, Alaska, Cuba, and Santo Domingo, Frymer observes that “there was overwhelming support” for policies that would accomplish the aim of “making and keeping America white” (150).
Although he builds on the work of historians and social scientists, Frymer's chief audience is scholars of American political development, an interdisciplinary field interested in questions of institutional growth and state capacity. Unsurprisingly, then, his argument weighs in on the perennial debate over the relative strength of the national government in the nineteenth century. Against the now-unpopular notion that the general government could be reduced to “courts and parties” until the Progressive Era, Frymer joins historians such as Brian Balogh, William Novak, and Richard John in affirming the considerable power of the nineteenth-century federal government, in this case by highlighting its control over the acquisition of territory, distribution of public land, and racial calibration of settlement. But Frymer also treats federal strength, paradoxically, as a product of weakness: federal land policies were most effective, he argues, when carried out in full acknowledgment of the national government's relative military and bureaucratic feebleness. In offering this nuance, Frymer reorients a debate that has too often advanced through the retroactive application of twentieth-century concerns to the nineteenth. Colonial historians have long treated claims of imperial omnipotence with a skeptical eye, and Frymer urges historians of nineteenth-century state formation to appreciate this insight.
For a book devoted to debating the federal government's power, however, Building an American Empire displays surprisingly little interest in the administrative arrangements that carried out westward expansion on the ground. Formative institutions such as the General Land Office receive scant attention in Frymer's account, which instead concentrates on the ideological clashes and policies crafted within the halls of Congress. Frymer also tends to elide the matter of federalism, which coupled with his distanced treatment of administration produces an occasionally blurred portrait of government at work. For example, Frymer incorrectly suggests that Alabama and Mississippi, rather than the federal government, were responsible for marketing public lands within their bounds. A closer discussion of tensions among federal, state, and Indigenous sovereigns, as well as the administrative burden of managing public lands, would only have sharpened Frymer's study of state strength honed by restraint.
Nevertheless, these are more missed opportunities than flaws, and the volume remains of significant value to historians of American empire, public land policy, and race, as well as to any scholar invested in understanding the extent and purpose of federal capacity in the nineteenth century.
