What’s the name of the book, and where can we find it?

American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2025).

What’s the argument?

Relations with Native American groups were constitutive of early U.S. foreign policy, and this should make us reconsider the notion that the United States was isolationist in this period.

Moreover, the first U.S. war with Native American groups, the Northwest Indian War of 1790-1795, has its origins in the social networks connecting settlers to political elites, and the legacies of the war linger in the precedents it set, the perceived lessons it provided, and the ongoing political contestation its memory provokes.

Why should we care?

American Conquest complicates standard narratives of the history of U.S. foreign policy, and it tells a story not just of the origins of the Northwest Indian War but also of the war’s broader relevance.

After I examine the origins of the war in Chapter 2, I turn in Chapter 3 to the ways that the war provided U.S. political elites with a template for the effective use of military bases to secure U.S. territorial claims on an expanding frontier.

Chapter 4, which is about perceived lessons of the Northwest Indian War and other “Indian Wars” that the U.S. military brought abroad, focuses on the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 and ends with a discussion of modern counterinsurgency and the continued use of the Indian Wars as an analogy in foreign policy discourse.

Chapter 5 brings the book even more fully into the twenty-first century through a study of the ways that the memory of the war has recently been debated in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a city named for Anthony Wayne, who led U.S. forces to victory. In a sort of digital ethnography in which I parse social media debate about whether to commemorate an annual “Anthony Wayne Day,” I shed light on the ongoing processes by which America’s conquest of Native lands is legitimized.

Why will we find it persuasive?

This book is based in part on fieldwork at the National Archives and the Shawnee Tribe Cultural Center, and I have sought to use primary sources where necessary to supplement a wide-ranging engagement with scholarship in IR and beyond.

Other than the sourcing, each chapter is a case study in its own right, and I aim for transparency in my methodological decisions and theoretical influences. For example, I draw throughout on relational theory and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s analyticism, both of which influence the way I think about explaining the origins of a single war, and Chapter 5 departs from the first three empirical chapters in being largely interpretive.

Why’d you write the book?

This book grew out of my dissertation, which began with the observation that studies of U.S. foreign policy often neglected early U.S. relations with Native American groups. I took an interest in the often settler-initiated conflicts that came to be known as the Indian Wars, and I sought to intervene in the literature by asking how we might think about U.S. foreign policy if we took early relations with Native American groups seriously.

As I revised the dissertation and prepared the book manuscript, I sought to speak more directly to modern-day foreign policy discourse, especially insofar as talk of American “isolationism” often elides frequent U.S. uses of force. I thus aimed to write a book that would help us to better understand U.S. foreign policy past and present.

What would you most like to change about the book, and why?

I would most like to change the as-yet unknown typo that I’m sure I have missed despite going through the full manuscript multiple times for revisions, editing, and indexing. Otherwise, I prefer to abbreviate “U.S.” with periods, but Stanford’s house style abbreviates “US” without periods.

More substantively, I might have said more about shifts in U.S. relations with Native American groups in the nineteenth century. I have written about that elsewhere, but it might have been helpful to provide more of that detail in the book to provide more connection between Chapters 3 and 4. I will take up more of that work in my next book manuscript, which will move forward in time to Tecumseh’s War to consider the nineteenth-century politics of Native resistance to U.S. expansion.

The +1: How much difficulty did you have getting the book published?

The most difficult part of getting the book published was turning my dissertation into a book manuscript that was satisfactory to me. In revising the dissertation, I changed the framing of the project and made significants cuts and additions—Chapters 3 through 5 are largely new material.

While I was working on those revisions, an acquisitions editor at Stanford University Press, Dan LoPreto, wrote to me (having apparently seen a forum on “Historical IR” I co-edited) and noted that he would be interested to hear if I had a book manuscript in the works. Everything proceeded smoothly from there even as I made further revisions in response to feedback from Dan and two very helpful, thorough reviewers.