Illinois Authors

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis : ©2005.

"In Fugitive Empire, Andy Doolen investigates the relationships among race, nation, and empire in colonial and early national America, revealing how whiteness and American identity were conflated to stabilize racial hierarchy and to repulse challenges to national policies of slavery, war, and continental expansion. Fugitive Empire begins not in 1776 but in 1741 with the New York Conspiracy trials. Linking them to the British conflict with the Spanish in the West Indies, Doolen describes how white colonists were led to suspect all foreigners, particularly slaves, as insurgents. He catalogs the fear of aliens in Charles Brockden Brown's novels; places James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers in the context of efforts to relocate African-Americans to Liberia, and considers the work of Pequot writer William Apess. Doolen concludes that imperial authority lies at the heart of American republicanism, an unstable mixture of idealism, force, and pragmatism, wielded in the name of freedom even today."--Book cover.