Review of Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America (2015), by Eberhard L. Faber.

Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2016) 1e2 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg Review Eberhard L. Faber, Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, 456 pages, US$35 hardcover The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Eberhard L. Faber reminds us, touched off a tumultuous process of negotiation between a burgeoning republic and New Orleans, the territory's geopolitical linchpin. Building the Land of Dreams presents an original and complex analysis of New Orleans during that transformative period in its history and details the political and economic integration of the city into Jeffersonian America. The study restores the city's prominence within the fundamental development of the United States in the early-nineteenth century and beyond. The book, Faber's first, recounts with engaging prose the hectic nine-year stretch between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and its statehood in 1812. Rather than unilateral annexation, the study reveals the reciprocal rise of both a city and a nation. It places Jeffersonian America in dialogue with the strategic port city at the mouth of the Mississippi, demonstrating how the integration of New Orleans into the burgeoning USA transformed both polities and influenced the republic's subsequent expansion. Faber's analysis paints the early-nineteenth-century westward expansion of the United States and its ideology of democratic capitalism not as means for general empowerment, but as malleable frameworks of subjugation easily appropriated by a small but powerful class of local elites. Trading the ordered, transatlantic hierarchies of colonial rule for local empowerment, elite planters and merchants molded US territorial rule to amplify their influence and control in New Orleans. Faber details how elites exploited Jefferson's ‘empire of liberty’ (p. 333) to expand slavery and other racist policies and consolidate power throughout the antebellum period. In that way, the early-nineteenth century New Orleans revealed in this book foreshadows not only Manifest Destiny and the Civil War, but more subtly, the sorts of awkward compromises and precarious coalitions that have always bound (and continue to bind) the United States of America. Flowing chronologically, the book begins with a sweeping treatment of colonial Louisiana (1718e1802). Here Faber charts the rise of the colonial elite and the ethno-racial stratification that emerged across French and Spanish rule, as well as the complex trade networks, both riverine and maritime, that linked New Orleans with the Ohio River Valley and the Atlantic Seaboard. Subsequent chapters carefully and thoroughly examine early republican New Orleans, most focusing on periods of one or two years. This meticulous approach enables fine levels of analytical detail and nuance over a period of nine years (1803e1812), resulting in a complex rendering of New Orleans's entrance and integration into the United States. Chapters six and seven provide the book's analytical http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2016.05.002 0305-7488 core, the former narrating the short-lived ban on the international slave trade, and its swift defeat, to illustrate the rise of the city's creole elites as well as the contours of negotiation that came to support the nascent New Orleans-USA alliance. Chapter seven scrutinizes tensions between creoles and US Americans over the crucial period of 1805e1807, demonstrating how a series of compromises led to cooperation and consolidation. The book excels with deliberation and multiplicity. The study defaults to complex and versatile positions, using nuance rather than sweeping claims to present the negotiations and convolutions that bound New Orleans with the Unites States, however precariously. The concluding chapter exemplifies that approach as Faber lays bare the tensions between the Union and the city that remained after statehood and the Battle of New Orleans. He deftly balances the coalitions and shared interests that some, including Jefferson, could perceive as national unity with conflicts and animosities that lingered through the antebellum period and beyond. While real cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences worked at times to unhinge the union, legal and economic concessions including protectionist tariffs, river dredging, and other public works, and especially the continued tolerance of slavery and its domestic trade, combined to appease creole elites and preserve the delicate partnership linking New Orleans and the United States. Faber's analysis thereby reinforces a more general historical and political truism: national unity is negotiable, ephemeral, and remains an unstable work in progress. Despite its many strengths, the study misses a few opportunities. The book's narrative analysis of riverine networks as ‘threads of connection’ linking New Orleans with a broader American economy is quite effective, especially early on in the work. Yet there is no map visualizing the interlinked geographies that brought people and goods from the Ohio River Valley and helped fuse New Orleans with trans-Appalachian America decades prior to the Louisiana Purchase. And what is in some ways a fascinating treatment of diverse ethnic, national, and local identities and loyalties only tangentially engages race, gender, and the influence of non-elites. Chapter two offers a thoughtful discussion of the city's dynamic racial and ethnic compositions, but the complex gradations it presents remain descriptive rather than analytical, and play only limited roles in subsequent chapters. Chapter five provides one useful exception with its analysis of race relations in the city and their influence on the question of slavery and the slave trade negotiated during the US take over. Yet readers are left to wonder in what other ways did Afrodescendants (and other non-elites) influence the Americanization of New Orleans? Discussions of the gendarmerie, or slave patrol, examined in chapter seven and the influx of free and enslaved Haitians discussed in chapter nine missed, it seems 2 Review / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2016) 1e2 to me, opportunities for more complex analyses of race and the making of a city and a nation. Still, this book effectively presents an important, and hopefully provocative, historical, geographical, and political argument: the histories and geographies of New Orleans and the early United States are inseparable. Whatever their differences, compromises and common interests generally prevailed. Case Watkins James Madison University, USA