Territories of Empire tackles a key period of US “expansion,” assembling a series of texts written out of a range of experience at the borders of the new territories. Drawing on a range of recent work on empire and borderlands in the field of American studies, and taking a decisively transnational turn, Doolen sheds light on the tangled cultural arguments produced by this phase of empire building. The book's centre of gravity is the contact zone formed by the border with Mexico, which was troubled with filibustering and complicated by Mexico's move to independence. The grounding of this study in a vivid account of the chaotic life of this setting is one of its great strengths.

Doolen begins with a discussion of how the federal government chose to understand the land acquired by the Louisiana Purchase as an “indefinite” “space of exception” and the instabilities of identity produced by a policy of deferred incorporation into the US. From here, he moves in chapter 2 to Zebulon Pike's troubled survey of the new territories between 1805 and 1807, and his dealings with different populations, including Native nations, narrated in his journals and An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and through the Western Parts of Louisiana (1810); and then in chapter 3 to the dynamics of US–Mexico relations and the Memoirs of the Mexican Revolution (1820) of William Davis Robinson, a merchant captured in 1816. Chapters 4 and 5 focus more closely on the literary work of Timothy Flint, setting up, in the final chapter, a detailed comparison with James Fenimore Cooper's “frontier” novels.

First of all, Doolen has produced a very clear and usable narrative, illustrated with maps, of a historical moment beginning with the purchase and closing with the early 1830s. There is a thickly textured account of the world of the territories and border here, full of familiar and obscure events, and accompanied by reference to a broad range of texts engaging with and shaping those events: newspapers and government reports as well as literary texts and private writing. One has a sense of the unpredictable in the colliding interests of players in the region, as well as the struggle on the part of writers to make sense of what was happening. The author cuts us loose from assumptions and narratives derived from later in the nineteenth century and from a focus on policy, and sets us down in the heart of a maelstrom of “subversive activity”; and he substitutes the writing of William Davis Robinson, Zebulon Pike and Timothy Flint for the usual writers of “frontier.” Cooper's appearance in the closing chapter is all the more refreshing for having got away from the usual story.

This is a volume that one could recommend to readers at all levels both as an introduction to the period and its writing, and as a survey of recent scholarly thinking in American studies. Doolen traces the tracks of his thinking assiduously and helpfully, though his tendency to interrupt paragraphs with lists of those on whose work he is building is distracting at times. Occasionally the charged situations that the author narrates and his tactics for understanding them seem to dominate Territories of Empire to the point that most of the texts under discussion seem squeezed for space. We have to wait until page 76, for example, to read the first extended quotation from any of them. Given that the study presses us to pay attention to this work, and sells its interest to us so very effectively, it is frustrating not to catch more of a sense of the writing itself. Nor is the quotation we do see necessarily chosen to support the argument Doolen makes about the difficult cultural work that these texts undertake. When he gets to more detailed discussion, as with the really excellent treatment of Flint (conducted over two chapters), he makes a really convincing case for his recovery. Doolen is right to complain about the neglect of writing marked as “western.” Territories of Empire makes a powerful case on multiple fronts for paying the writing of early nineteenth-century empire much more attention.