Instruments of Empire Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803-1815 / M.K. Beauchamp.

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2021]

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021

©[2021]

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"Michael Beauchamp's "Instruments of Empire" is an examination of the challenges posed to U.S. territorial expansion by the Louisiana Purchase, a development that transferred the sovereignty of a territory with a population who by birth, language, and religion differed substantially from the inhabitants of the United States, but who had been guaranteed the rights of full citizens. Beauchamp suggests that the subsequent process of gradual accommodation between federal officials and local elites in Louisiana served as an essential nationalizing experience as the United States expanded during the nineteenth century. After the U. S. acquired the region, federal officials failed to put the Territory of Orleans on a quick path to statehood due to doubts about the loyalty of the local population and their capacity for self-government. Instead, U.S. officials looked to other supporters, including free people of color, native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims to impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as agents of imperial power in applying different rules to different peoples. Most importantly, the new territorial government, in its appointment practices, strove to assign local elites to prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana had much in common with European colonial practices elsewhere on the North American continent. Beauchamp's study is one of the first to fully explore the interactions of U.S. officials and local elites in the territory from the perspective of the people who actually underwent this experience. He places early Louisiana in the broader national and international contexts that both shaped the early state and contoured the nation and region, revealing that Louisiana was not exceptional or outside the American mainstream. His work offers transformational insights about the interplay between class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. It also places the territorial period in early national Louisiana in an imperial context that reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond. Beauchamp's work will be of interest not only to specialists in Louisiana and the South, but also to scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire"-- Provided by publisher.

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August 11, 2021

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