Throughout its history, the United States has been faced with the problems of governing a disparate population encompassing a wide array of languages, religions and ethnicities. While the immigrant experience in the United States has been the subject of much study, the place in American society and politics of colonized peoples – both within the continental United States and in its island territories overseas – has often been overlooked. Formations of United States Colonialism sets out to redress this weakness. Among the aims expressed by Goldstein in his introduction is restoring the understanding of the United States as a colonial power throughout its national history. Goldstein rejects the traditional tendency to emphasize key dates as the origin or end point of American colonialism, arguing instead that the United States is, was and remains defined by its colonialism (2, 8–9). Intertwined with this rejection of conceptions of a colonialist phase in American history is a desire to restore the understanding that continental expansionism – and the conquering of Indian nations in particular – are part of a broader history of American imperialism which, Goldstein argues, was buried by the foreign-policy emphasis on self-determination begun by Woodrow Wilson and continued into the Cold War. This refusal to view American territorial imperialism as a discrete period in the history of an otherwise anticolonial nation builds, to some extent, upon the work of V. G. Kiernan and Walter Nugent, among others, but its focus is very much on the experience of the colonized rather than on the settler power. Formations of United States Colonialism is also a largely theory-led work exploring race, gender, mapping and the dynamics and utilization of power, among other themes.

Beyond these larger, more sweeping, initial aims, it is clear that this is a work which is very much current – in itself evidence that colonialism is not purely an issue of the past for the United States. Many of the topics addressed in the book's thirteen chapters have some relevance to social and political problems in the modern world. These range from matters of perception, such as Berenika Byszewski's exploration of how the 1849 mapping of Chaco Canyon has left a legacy which still influences how the landscape is perceived and used by the National Park Service and the US government, to more direct political and economic questions, as shown by Fa'anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa's examination of the unusual colonial experience of American Samoans viewed through the lens of American football, and Jennifer Nez Denetdale's discussion of how the clash between Indian and Western concepts of gender roles found expression in the Navajo nation's leadership election of 2010. At times, most notably in Julian Aguon's chapter on the impact of nascent international law (and UN resolutions in particular) on indigenous rights and the fight for self-determination of colonized peoples under the American aegis, the scholarship can border on the polemical, but this only serves to emphasize the immediacy of the issues at stake.

At heart, this is a book about identity: the assumed identity of the United States as ruler and guide, often expressed in the mythologizing of the moments when ancient places and colonized peoples were “discovered” by Americans; the beleaguered or imposed identities of colonized peoples; and the reclaimed identities of those living under American rule, such as the Puerto Rican, Cuban and Filipino nationalists identified by Augusto Espiritu who sought to restore imperial Spain's image as a motherland as part of their efforts to express a Hispanic identity. Indeed these questions of identity go far beyond those of colonizer/conqueror and colonized, with several chapters exploring the fascinating, often overlooked, interactions between two or more colonized groups and white settlers, most notably Barbara Krauthamer's examination of how black slaves acted as conduits for religious conversion between missionaries and their Indian masters in Choctaw country in the early nineteenth century.

As Goldstein himself states, this is a collection of essays replete with “connections and frictions” (21). Ranging from the Philippines, Samoa and Hawaii to Cuba and Puerto Rico, taking in several Indian nations along the way, the collected essays describe a range of experiences each simultaneously unique and connected. The individual chapters each have their merits, but the strength of Formations of United States Colonialism is in the scope it offers for the reader to make their own connections. As such, the ideas it presents should prove fertile ground for further study.