Abstract
The book’s Conclusion summarizes Kakel’s explanation of early American history and suggests what we gain by seeing it in this fresh, post-exceptionalist perspective. It also reasserts the book’s main idea: early American history is a central part of—rather than an exception to—the emerging global histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide. It also reasserts its main argument: early American history is best understood as the story of a supplanting society, a society intent on a vast appropriation of Indigenous lands and resources and driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants. And, finally, it also suggests that Indian wars became a template for US imperialism, as well as for other non-US imperial projects.
Remaining faithful to the complexities and contingencies of the past need not entail abandoning the search for patterns and logics.
A. Dirk Moses (‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History’, in Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008, p. 7)
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- 1.
Benvenuto, Woolford, and Hinton, ‘Introduction’, in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Woolford, Benvenuto, and Hinton, 8.
- 2.
Michael Adas, ‘From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History’, The American Historical Review, 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1712.
- 3.
In addition to the ‘American West’, there was its forgotten twin, the ‘British West’, comprising the settler dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; see James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 4.
Walter Nugent, ‘Comparing Wests and Frontiers’, in The Oxford History of the American West, Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 803–833. As Walter Nugent writes, ‘Once one starts comparing, one has accepted that American history is not incomparable or unique’ (ibid., 831). For a thought-provoking essay, along similar lines, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, ‘The American West: From Exceptionalism to Internationalism’, in The State of U.S. History, ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 285–306.
- 5.
Smithers, ‘Rethinking Genocide in North America’, 330.
- 6.
Ostler, ‘Just War as Genocidal War’, 2.
- 7.
Michael Yellow Bird, ‘Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism’, Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2 (2004): 43–44.
- 8.
Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 192–195, 219–222. For more on the legacy of the Indian wars and their impact on the US military outposts of a more recent American Empire, see Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005).
- 9.
Iadicola, “The Centrality of the Empire Concept’, 33–34.
- 10.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 228.
- 11.
Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Thomas La Pointe, and Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Introduction: Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory’, in Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 5.
- 12.
René Lemarchand, ed., Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 16.
- 13.
Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 7–9, 51.
- 14.
Benvenuto, Woolford, and Hinton, ‘Introduction’, in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Woolford, Benvenuto, and Hinton, 3.
- 15.
Chris Mato Nunpa, ‘Historical Amnesia: The “Hidden Genocide” and Destruction of the Indigenous Peoples of the United States’, in Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, eds. Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 98, 106.
- 16.
Irvin-Erickson, La Pointe, and Hinton, ‘Introduction’, in Hidden Genocides, ed. Hinton, La Pointe, and Irvin-Erickson, 10.
- 17.
Yellow Bird, ‘Cowboys and Indians’, 42–43.
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Kakel, C.P. (2019). Conclusion: Understanding Early America. In: A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_7
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