M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire examines the challenges
that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the
United States gained a colonial European population whose
birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of
their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic
tensions and possessed little experience with republican
government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a
trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between
federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this
process of gradual accommodation served as an essential
nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana. After the
acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local
French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the
territory of Orleans-easily the region's most populated and
economically robust area-a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S.
officials looked to groups 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
territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators,
despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law,
regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently
co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes.
Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing
Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices
implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth
century. While historians have previously focused on Washington
policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United
States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the
integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous
power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound
insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well
as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics,
democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early
national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes
perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the
nineteenth century and beyond. Instruments of Empire serves as a
rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S.
South, as well as 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.
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