Rob Harper’s new work, Unsettling the West, is a welcome entry in the literature that examines early modern state building. Focusing on the eighteenth century Ohio Valley, Harper explores the interconnections between violence, state building, and colonialism. American state building in Ohio, Harper argues, challenges both top-down and bottom-up interpretations of the subject, and particularly disputes long-standing assumptions that only minimal violence accompanied American state formation. Classic Weberian models of orderly top-down state formation did not occur, nor was the Ohio Valley a region where individualistic Turnerian settlers, disdaining established political authority, developed a state-building process that was both democratically bottom-up and violence free. Harper emphasizes that the Turnerian interpretation, by skimming lightly over the violence that accompanied what used to be disingenuously termed “American westward movement,” missed an important opportunity to analyze the centrality of violence to American state formation, not to mention Native dispossession.
Violence in the...
