"Ranging across a wide array of topics and scholarship, this book remaps large parts of American history. In Frymer's telling, the nation's territorial expansion emerges as a far more fascinating and perilous journey than we had imagined."--Edward L. Ayers, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863
"Building an American Empire is a profound achievement in the study of American state formation. Through a dazzling array of sources and a painstaking analysis of federal land policy, Frymer beautifully demonstrates how the 'weak' American state could nonetheless pursue a project of dramatic territorial expansion. In the process, he both highlights the centrality of settler notions of membership to the path of American political development as well as the ideological and racial diversity that persisted at the edges of federal power. This is a foundational work that all students of American politics will have to reckon with, one that links the national experience to global projects of colonial state formation and that captures the deep interrelation between race, empire, and state building in U.S. history."--Aziz Rana, author of The Two Faces of American Freedom
"In this sweeping, authoritative, clearly written, and bracingly revisionist history of the formative era of American land policy, Paul Frymer shows how governmental institutions worked, often in hidden ways, to create a settler society dedicated to white supremacy. It has been fifty years since a scholar has analyzed the mechanisms of territorial expansion in such detail, making Building an American Empire essential reading for specialists in the history of immigration, state building, race relations, and American political development."--Richard R. John, Columbia University, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications
"Building an American Empire is full of interesting ideas, facts, and insights. Frymer argues that the American state vigorously engaged in acquiring and governing land, and built a predominantly white society that employed racial removal and envisioned a marginal role for Native Americans and free blacks."--David Brian Robertson, author of The Original Compromise: What the Constitution's Framers Were Really Thinking
"Frymer has crafted an intellectually ambitious, important book that addresses one of the most significant questions in American history: how did a tiny coastal federation with a weak state effectively settle a rich and contested--not to mention already occupied--land mass?"--Brian Balogh, author of A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America
Paul Frymer is professor of politics and director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America and Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (both Princeton).
