Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly turned to settler colonialism as a central concept to explain the history of the United States and its relationship to Indigenous people. In Empire of the People, Dahl makes an important contribution to settler-colonial studies by providing an incisive, deeply informative, and thoroughly convincing “ideological history” of the settler-colonial foundations of American democratic thought (13). Dahl focuses most of his attention on non-Native writers, but unlike previous work that analyzes American political thought and practice in relationship to settler colonialism, he makes the crucial move of engaging with Indigenous political theory and practice.
In Part I, “Federalism and Empire,” Dahl takes as a point of departure Arendt’s contention that the United States rejected colonialism and imperialism.1 Instead, Dahl shows that the principle of federalism codified in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance provided the “ideological architecture of settler colonialism” by reconciling imperial expansion...