Empire of the people : settler colonialism and the foundations of modern democratic thought / Adam Dahl.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dahl, Adam, author.

Series:

American political thought.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Land settlement--Political aspects--United States--History.

Land settlement.

Indians of North America--Colonization.

Indians of North America.

Indigenous peoples--Colonization.

Democracy--United States--History.

Democracy.

Manifest Destiny.

United States--Territorial expansion--Political aspects.

United States.

Local Subjects:

Indigenous peoples--Colonization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 260 pages )

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Lawrence, Kansas : University Press of Kansas, 2018.

Summary:

American democracy owes its origins to the colonial settlement of North America by Europeans. Since the birth of the republic, observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur have emphasized how American democratic identity arose out of the distinct pattern by which English settlers colonized the New World.Empire of the Peopleexplores a new way of understanding this process-and in doing so, offers a fundamental reinterpretation of modern democratic thought in the Americas. In Empire of the People, Adam Dahl examines the ideological development of American democratic thought in the context of settler colonialism, a distinct form of colonialism aimed at the appropriation of Native land rather than the exploitation of Native labor. By placing the development of American political thought and culture in the context of nineteenth-century settler expansion, his work reveals how practices and ideologies of Indigenous dispossession have laid the cultural and social foundations of American democracy, and in doing so profoundly shaped key concepts in modern democratic theory such as consent, social equality, popular sovereignty, and federalism. To uphold its legitimacy, Dahl also argues, settler political thought must disavow the origins of democracy in colonial dispossession-and in turn erase the political and historical presence of native peoples. Empire of the People traces this thread through the conceptual and theoretical architecture of American democratic politics-in the works of thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, John O'Sullivan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and William Apess. In its focus on the disavowal of Native dispossession in democratic thought, the book provides a new perspective on the problematic relationship between race and democracy-and a different and more nuanced interpretation of the role of settler colonialism in the foundations of democratic culture and society.-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The settler colonial foundations of modern democratic thought

Federalism and Empire

From colonial dependence to imperial equality

The coloniality of constituent power

Settler Colonialism and Democratic Culture

Colonial dispossession and the settler social state

Manifest Destiny and the safety valve of colonization

Slavery and the empire of free soil

Unsettling Democracy

William Apess and the paradox of settler sovereignty

Afterword: Decolonizing the democratic tradition.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780700626083 (electronic book)