A thread on how Trump-offering-to-buy-Greenland fits into the long and mostly bleak history of U.S. territorial expansion. 
I know Trump’s idea has been received as a joke, but today I heard a BBC interviewer casually observe that the U.S. used to buy territory (e.g. Louisiana) “so what’s wrong with doing that now?”
There are quite a few famous territorial purchases in American history, the things you might learn about in school, and they’re mostly in the nineteenth century: the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), and the Alaska purchase (1867) in particular.
The Louisiana Purchase (from France) transferred a huge swathe of the central portion of continental North America to the United States in return for $15m.
Guadalupe Hidalgo (from Mexico) transferred the northern half of Mexico to the American republic, also for $15m.
The Alaska purchase (from Russia) transferred nearly 600,000 sq. miles from the Russian-American Company to the United States for just $7.2m. That's an area nearly three times as large as Texas, the biggest state in the lower 48 - itself recently, uh, 'transferred.'
The contexts of these purchases were very different: Napoleon & Alexander II offloaded Louisiana and Alaska after military defeats in the Haitian Revolution and the Crimean War. Both were imperialists but opted to cut their American losses & consolidate the rest of their empire.
Guadalupe Hidalgo, on the other hand, was straight-up conquest: the U.S. spent $15m to launder its gains from the Mexican War, a conflict which Lincoln (then a congressman) called “unnecessary, unconstitutional and wrong.”
Here I won’t get into the effect of the LP and G-H on the expansion of U.S. slavery, though the impact of both acquisitions on Black people was profound and lasting.
Instead let me focus on what all three purchases had in common: a total disregard for the opinion, sovereignty and welfare of Indigenous people.
The overwhelming majority of peoples living west of the Mississippi in 1803, and north of the Canadian border in 1867, was Indigenous; there were also large and powerful Native nations in northern Mexico in 1848.
These three purchases effectively ignored Indigenous sovereignty and performed a transfer of land rights from one group of white people to another.
In this respect, these three famous purchases helped to frame thousands of purchases that are less well known — i.e. the slow and methodical dispossession of Native American land across the continent.
Those smaller purchases from Native Americans — via treaties from the 1780s through the twentieth century — were usually made via violence/duress and/or through fraudulent means: negotiating with the wrong Native nation, e.g.
A huge number of them took place _within_ the area marked out by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 — see the fascinating work of my colleague Bobby Lee on this. slate.com/articles/news_…
But it was the large purchases that made foreign spaces seem suddenly domestic, in the eyes of white Americans; even today we often teach the history of expansion as if it’s a domestic story when it’s clearly an international one.
[Lots of great work pushing back on this, of course, and stressing the colonial/imperial/international dynamics of U.S. expansion - see Bethel Saler, @KathleenADuVal, @Jeff_Ostler, @BrianDeLay & many others.]
There were many purchases/attempted purchases after 1867, too; see the work of @dimmerwahr in particular. But what’s interesting about the Trump proposal is that Louisiana and Alaska were the standard points of reference for the media.
And that seems especially unfortunate since 90% of Greenland’s population is Indigenous — for decades Inuit peoples have been waging their own struggle for more autonomy from Denmark.
That struggle is likely to escalate given the implications of climate change and the coming struggles for strategic supremacy in and around a warming Arctic Circle. The Defense Department just updated its Arctic strategy and it’s…bracing. media.defense.gov/2019/Jun/06/20…
The Economist actually did a piece last month on the prospect of indigenous people getting more political power in the Arctic, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone in the White House saw this and thought - we'd better hurry up and buy Greenland, then. economist.com/international/…
NB that last year a UN Special Rapporteur (below) noted that the existing US military installations in Greenland had inspired a lively resistance movement among the Inuit population - but that the Danish government calls the shots on US access to Greenland, not local people.
So although the ‘US Offers to Buy Greenland from Denmark’ headlines seem typically Trumpian, this is actually part of a longer history in which territorial expansion makes Native people invisible.
That story goes WAY back; in fact, it’s one of the most important narratives in American history. If many of us still struggle to acknowledge it, that’s because it was designed to be hard to see./
