| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 291 words from this article are provided below; about 603 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Eugene P. Moehring. Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840–1890. (The Urban West.) Reno: University of Nevada Press. 2004. Pp. xxx, 408. $39.95.
This complex, provocative, and sometimes labyrinthine inquiry into American urban-colonial conquest of the Far West examines the formation and promotion of towns and the control of intervening spaces to illustrate the close relationship between urban settlement and control of the outback. Eugene P. Moehring argues that urban networks, ties between subregional cities and smaller communities scattered through tributary hinterlands, served as the forward markers of America's colonial advance across western landscapes. Through eight structured and detailed chapters, the author traces developing urban networks in California (two chapters), Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Arizona. This process also involved powerful metropolitan centers—San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Portland, and Seattle—cities that were extending their imperial reach to distant places.	1
The book's analytical framework is both surprising and unexceptional. The author employs with some success Edward Said's well-known colonial/imperial constructs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to illustrate the imperial appropriation of Native space and its transformation by successful colonizers. Said's theoretical argument, Moehring contends, forces "us to recognize that even America's settlement and development of the Far West cannot be fully understood outside its colonial context" (p. xxiii). There is little new in this assertion, because for more than two decades western historians have produced an impressive body of literature emphasizing the imperial/colonial forces at work in the region. This innovative work examines the marginalizing of Native Americans, the federal appropriation of Indian land, and the long reach of metropolitan capital. The extensive nuclei of urban networks that developed is part of the larger interrelated story of imperial-colonial relationships.	. . .

There are about 603 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.