The Cromwell Article Prize is awarded by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, in consultation with a committee of the American Society for Legal History for the best article in American legal history by an early career scholar. This year's prize, announced at the ASLH's recent annual meeting, went to Emilie Connolly, “Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in Early America,” American Historical Review 127:1 (2022): 223-253. Here is the citation:
--Dan ErnstEmilie Connolly’s “Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in Early America” examines an oft-forgotten aspect of dispossession of Native lands: compensation. Connolly explores the consequences of payments for Native lands, focusing not on violent force, but “subtler coercions and negotiations afforded by economic relationships (226).” Central to these economic relationships between sovereign Native nations and the U.S. federal government were annuities: yearly payments made to Native peoples in specie or goods in exchange for their land. Yet such funds “evolved,” Connolly deftly shows, into longstanding economic and fiscal relationships between “sovereignties of sharply unequal power.” Annuities served to increase federal control over Native lands by holding back payments to pry land out of Native hands and compel migration. In an innovative and compelling argument, Connolly shows that such polices amounted to a “fiduciary colonialism: a mode of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Native peoples’ wealth.” Importantly, therefore, fiduciary colonialism highlights the often forgotten two prong method of U.S. imperialism: indeed, Connolly demonstrates that the early United States operated not simply as a “settler colonial formation” (characterized by its deliberate attempts to erase and replace Native peoples and societies) but also as a “colonial formation” (characterized by the administration of Native people and federal trusteeship over their wealth, as well as grabbing their land). This article, the committee agreed, is a tour de force: lucid, well-sourced, and subtly argued. Her contribution to the scholarship on United States/Native relations is nothing short of remarkable. While scholars have most often focused on force and violence to explain dispossession, Connolly shows that, ultimately, annuities (and their manipulation, as money could both be promised and withheld) bolstered U.S. federal power. As such, controlling annuities became instead the preferred method of engineering legal/extralegal dispossessions, forcing removal treaties, and compelling expulsions.
Emilie Connolly
