There is a tendency to think about the United States as if it were an emanation of the human spirit, as if its existence and its constitutional arrangements were a bloodless product of the Enlightenment, John Locke, the genius of the Founding Fathers, and the pure democratic spirit of ‘No taxation without representation!' (Though John Kenneth Galbraith remarked that while eight-eenth-century Americans objected to taxation without representation, they objected equally to taxation with representation.
In fact, the formation of the territorial unit that we now know as the usa was a bloody business, not at all dissimilar to the formation of states in Western Europe. If we look back a thousand years, Western Europe was fragmented into numerous tiny territories, each ruled - that is, protected and exploited - by some local warlord. Thinking of Afghanistan after the tender loving care of numerous foreign interventions is perhaps the closest present-day equivalent. Out of the patchwork, over a period of many centuries there gradually emerged a smaller number of larger territories. It was a violent ‘elimination contest' (Elias 2000: 263-78). It is a mistake to see the process as driven by ‘aggression', as if the personality traits of individual warriors were the determining force. In an age when the control of land was the principle basis of power, a peace-loving local magnate could not sit idly by while his neighbours slugged it out: the winner, who gained control over a larger territory, would then be able to gobble up the little peace-loving neighbour. War and ‘aggression' thus had a survival value. The process was Janus-faced: as larger territories became internally paci?ed, the wars between territories came to be fought on a steadily larger scale.
The story of state formation in North America is similar. One difference is that the struggle for territory after the beginnings of European settlement was initially driven exogenously by con?icts between the great powers back in Europe, as much as by rivalries endogenous to North America. In the early stages, the process somewhat resembled the struggle for territory in nine-teenth-century Africa. Most of the early wars there were branches of con-temporaneous wars in Europe, whether the Anglo-Dutch wars, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War or whatever. Through these contests, ?rst the Swedish colonies and then the Dutch were eliminated, and later French and Spanish power was broken. The various Indian tribes were also involved in these struggles as allies of the European powers, and were simultaneously engaged in an elimination contest amongst themselves. Gradually, however, the struggles came to be shaped much more by endog-enous forces.