Sklansky defines the book’s two-century span as “early America,” which might be either an interpretive deci- sion or, perhaps, an editorial one concerning the least bad way to describe its chronological scope. Moving to the present day, and depending upon one’s point of view, Sklansky is either admirably restrained or overly reticent in noting the parallels between his historical figures’ contentions and more contemporary debates. The money question constitutes a highly consequen- tial element of governance that, Sklansky notes, has been largely politically submerged after 1913. Ameri- cans still debate policies, such as when Richard Nixon took the nation off the gold standard and the more re- cent reaction to quantitative easing. However, the legiti- macy of the nation’s federal reserve system, which places bankers in the catbird seat of monetary adminis- tration, has rarely been broadly questioned. Despite clear and sometimes eloquent prose, in its substance and its frequent expectation of broader knowledge, this is more a book for specialists than for undergraduates. Regardless, Sklansky has performed a valuable service of illuminating how the personal experience of compet- ing architects of money supply informed how they con- ceptualized the effects of their programs. ANDREW M. SCHOCKET Bowling Green State University YAEL BEN-ZVI. Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories. (Re-Mapping the Trans- national: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies.) Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 276. Paper $45.00, e-book $39.99. Colonization was initially premised on the notion that a European monarch or sovereign could allow his sub- jects to carry their birthrights and other privileges with them as they traveled outside the realm. They claimed the right to conquer and pillage in specific locations be- cause they were born somewhere else. Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories is dedi- cated to the ways in which the correspondence between the location of someone’s birth and their residency eventually became an “indispensable element in the production of political empowerment” (2). Rights were then rhetorically linked to being born where one was. This was a global transition in the ways political claims could be crafted, but it had significant implications in settler-colonial contexts, including colonial America and the early republic, the focus of Yael Ben-zvi’s book. In these locations there were three distinct col- lectives engaging with ideas surrounding birthplace in order to augment the legitimacy of their political claims: the Indigenous peoples, who were of the place and were being dispossessed; the “arrivant” Afro- descended communities, who were not of the place and remained disenfranchised; and the settler colonists, who were not of the place and were politically enfran- chised. It is unsurprising that even though the political texts produced by spokespersons belonging to these different collectives converged in suggesting that birth- place carried important consequences, they differed in appraising what these consequences may be. Native Land Talk thus explores radically different modes of claim-making. Ben-zvi focuses on “expressions of freedom and belonging by the colonized” and assumes that these were not “marginal commentaries” (5). It is a well- substantiated assumption and a significant departure from existing scholarly approaches. Native Land Talk also argues that a joint appraisal of Indigenous and arri- vant claim-making is a necessary step toward under- standing their contextual significance and developing an “integrated critique of settler colonialism” (6). A si- multaneous assessment is especially needed because while both Indigenous peoples and arrivants equally opposed settler colonialism, Indigenous people “tended to acquiesce to settlers’ objectification of arrivants,” and arrivants “tended to adopt imperialism as the nor- mative framework” (210). Likewise, when facing set- tler colonialism, Indigenous peoples attempted unset- tlement projects and to “dethrone imperialism” (16); on the other hand, while facing an oppressive regime, African-descended writers “tried to nativize themselves and thereby gain recognition as settlers” (13). The latter were projects advocating a resettlement of the U.S. Un- settlement is not resettlement, and these are significant differences, and yet, as Ben-zvi emphasizes, both approaches upheld claims to “inhabitation-based free- doms” (5). The settler modes of claim-making, however, did not embrace inhabitance. Settlers too aimed to control the “precise relations between freedom and space” (20), and they had the power to do so, but the settlers needed their birthrights to be eminently portable. As they tran- sitioned from references regarding the rights of “free- born” Englishmen (rights that were consistently con- strued as portable) to other ways of claim-making in the era leading to Manifest Destiny, they adopted notions of “nativeness” that retained portability. To elucidate this point, Ben-zvi unpacks one of the lesser known of Thomas Jefferson’s proposals. Jefferson had called for a universal settler isopolity (see 28–32, and 223 nn. 119–120). Citizens of the polity constituted by the treaty he was determined to propose to his Euro- pean counterparts would immediately acquire native status wherever they would travel. As a result, native status would be then liberated from “its place-based logic” (28). Ben-zvi remarks that the treaty was never ratified, but it should be noted that even though it never became an instrument of international relations, the iso- political rights Jefferson had evoked were indeed ex- tended for a long time to settlers moving to the U.S. from northern and western Europe. Noncitizen voting and noncitizen access to federal lands, for example, 652 Reviews of Books AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2019 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/124/2/652/5426388 by Swinburne University of Technology user on 09 April 2019