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Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought by Adam Dahl (review)

Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly turned to settler colonialism as a central concept to explain the history of the United States and its relationship to Indigenous people. In Empire of the People, Dahl makes an important contribution to settler-colonial studies by providing an incisive, deeply informative, and thoroughly convincing “ideological history” of the settler-colonial foundations of American democratic thought (13). Dahl focuses most of his attention on non-Native writers, but unlike previous work that analyzes American political thought and practice in relationship to settler colonialism, he makes the crucial move of engaging with Indigenous political theory and practice. In Part I, “Federalism and Empire,” Dahl takes as a point of departure Arendt’s contention that the United States rejected colonialism and imperialism. Instead, Dahl shows that the principle of federalism codified in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance provided the “ideological architecture of settler colonialism” by reconciling imperial expansion with popular sovereignty (65). Not only did the Ordinance allow for the incorporation of new states on an equal basis, it required the taking of Indigenous lands, the elimination of Native people, and the disavowal of conquest by construing western lands as empty wilderness. Dahl’s focus on the Northwest Ordinance is embedded in thick but unfailingly clear descriptions of the political thought that formed the context for the founding of the United States. He combines cogent discussions of well-known figures like John Locke, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson with illuminating analyses of lesser-known settler-constitutionalist texts, including the Vermont Constitution of 1777 and the Cumberland Compact (formed by settlers in present-day Tennessee who declared their independence from North Carolina in 1780). The second part of the book, “Settler Colonialism and Democratic Culture,” focuses on democratic thought in the “settler social state” during the antebellum period (78). As part of a methodology of going beyond a formal constitutional and legal analysis, Dahl begins with an