Reviewed by Andrew Cayton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Andrew Cayton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Andrew Cayton, Miami University

Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism. By Andy Doolen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 283 pages. $60.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper).
Fifteen years ago Andy Doolen's immersion in Latin American literature "challenged [his] nationalist perspective by repositioning it in the hemispheric context of Las Americas" (185). Particularly memorable was Gabriel García Márquez's depiction in El Otoño del Patriarca of a U.S. gunboat anchored in support of "an evil regime and its puppet dictator who murders dissidents and disappears his country's children" (185). Fugitive Empire is Doolen's impassioned, indeed outraged, response to this image and all that it symbolizes. His purpose is to trace the symbiotic development of American imperialism and white solidarity. His method is to interrogate "special national narratives that appear in moments of acute social tensions in the late colonial and early national periods" (xxiii). The result is a powerful and deeply flawed book.	1
Doolen finds the origins of the American triad of war, empire, and race in Daniel Horsmanden's Journal, the only eyewitness account of the New York "Conspiracy" of 1741, in which local authorities terrorized enslaved African Americans and some poor whites in the wake of a series of suspicious fires.¹ Doolen reads Horsmanden's problematic Journal as "a war narrative; it tells a story about how an evil Spanish empire, enticing the enslaved with promises of freedom, turned New York's once loyal, obedient, and dutiful slaves into fierce enemies of the state ... the war and the conspiracy scare work together to reinforce white solidarity" (4).	2
The pattern repeated itself at the end of the century. The British Empire was now called the American Empire, but little else had changed. Exploiting an undeclared naval war between the United States and France to complete their military buildup, Federalists "appropriated the logic of the old British empire: on the Caribbean frontier, imperial foes were plotting invasion with slave rebels in the West Indies; both enemies, Catholics and slaves, would invade a weakened United States and spark a massive insurrection in the South, a fateful situation that only Federalists could defend against" (40). Partisanship did not really matter, however, for Charles Brockden Brown's Monthly Magazine suggested that "it was over the figure of the slave rebel—race war personified—that white Federalists and Republicans could unite behind the logic of imperial aggression against foreign enemies and find a common expression of white America" (43).	3
Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) explores the costs of the efforts of the United States "to establish an imperial presence in the West Indies" (77). International commerce imported instability as well as people and goods from a Caribbean world supposedly "infected with disorder and violence" (83). Living through the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Mervyn "constructs his sense of whiteness against the political pressures of imperial conflict" (98). Doolen concludes his analysis of the 1790s by putting Matthew Carey's A Short Account of the Malignant Fever (1793), which ignores blacks altogether, "in dialogue" (101) with Absalom Jones and Richard Allen's A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (1794), which argues, according to Doolen, that African Americans "had done more to save the national capital than those prominent citizens who fled to country estates, and had at least equaled the efforts of those who remained in the city" (109).	. . .

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