History textbooks often frame the founding of America as a series of battles and physical conquests. But early American colonialism wasn't just built with brutal force - it was engineered in libraries, museums and scientific societies, too.
In his new book, The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin, UC Berkeley Professor Diego Pirillo argues that settler colonialism - a form of colonialism built on Indigenous dispossession and replacement - was shaped by Euro-American scholars who worked hand in hand with land speculators and military leaders to drive the country's violent formation.
To understand how this happened, Pirillo looks to the theories of 20th-century Italian Marxist philosopher and communist political leader Antonio Gramsci. Imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci argued in his Prison Notebooks that a ruling class maintains control not just through physical force, but through consent - a concept he termed "cultural hegemony." In this framework, everyday beliefs and cultural institutions like schools and churches help make dominance feel natural, and intellectuals act as the ruling class' "deputies" who create and defend social hierarchy.
"The sources I've studied show that 18th-century American intellectuals envisioned and coordinated the colonial project," says Pirillo, Terill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the history department.
This fall, Pirillo is bringing together Berkeley scholars to form a Gramsci Working Group, where they will study the philosopher's extensive literary corpus and explore how his ideas can help us understand debates around some of today's most pressing issues, including economic inequality, authoritarianism, race and climate change.
Adds Pirillo: "As Gramsci wrote: Even when all is or seems lost, one must quietly go back to work, and start afresh from the beginning."
Below, Pirillo explains how early American intellectual culture served as the bedrock for settler colonialism, dismantling enduring historical narratives in the process.
UC Berkeley News: Many of us imagine Euro-American expansion as an inevitable, unstoppable force that began with Columbus and was always destined to win. What does your research show about the reality on the ground?
Diego Pirillo: Colonialism was not just brutal violence; it was also an ideology, and colonial intellectuals strove to convince everyone that conquest was unstoppable. Reducing early America to the history of the settlers is one of the most enduring legacies of Euro-American colonialism.
Studying the history of early America gives us a very different picture. We see that Western colonialism has often been precarious. It was stopped. There were many failures and failed plans. In fact, as historian Pekka Hämäläinen shows in his beautiful book Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, until the 19th century, North America was an Indigenous continent controlled by Indigenous powers, which repeatedly thwarted Euro-American conquest.
In your research, you read historical documents "against the grain," examining the sources to uncover the marginalized voices that colonial authors actively sought to erase. What do these documents, like Indian treaties or botanical journals, tell us about the power dynamics between Indigenous people and settlers?
Many sources bring to light the strength and determination of Indigenous peoples. Indian treaties, for example, show that settlers could not dictate terms, but had to adapt to and accommodate Indigenous demands, introducing Native American diplomatic rituals into their own protocols. For a long time, at least until the 18th century, Indian treaties were really a laboratory of cross-cultural diplomacy. The two parties had to learn to communicate and talk to each other, and nobody could dictate terms.
Precisely because colonial authority was so precarious, settlers invested in "cultural capital" - especially scientific knowledge - to imagine a kind of mastery and dominance they did not yet possess. Scholars could easily implement taxonomies and classification systems over books, artifacts and natural specimens, but had little power over the Indigenous peoples that inhabited the continent.
The Enlightenment and early modern science are usually associated with Europe. But you contend that Indigenous knowledge played an important role in shaping how Euro-Americans understood the natural world. How so?
The 18th century is commonly referred to as the Age of Enlightenment, marked by secularism, scientific progress and human rights. What we call Enlightenment science - defined by the mapping, collecting and cataloging of the natural world - was actually the result of continued and prolonged interactions between Indigenous and European epistemologies.
Every European botanist who came to America had to rely on Indigenous informants to study plants and understand their uses. These botanists kept records of their interactions about the specific plants that could be used to treat certain illnesses, and often included Indigenous names for plants.
In the 19th century, which is really the golden age of European imperialism, these exchanges were erased and we lost memory of them. Crucial in this process was the famous Swedish scholar Carl Linnaeus, who developed a new Latin taxonomy still used today, naming plants after European explorers and erasing their Indigenous names, which had been accepted in Europe until the 18th century.
We tend to think of libraries today as neutral, peaceful spaces for learning. How did early American book collecting in fact reinforce colonial power and the slave trade?
In early America, book collecting was hardly a disinterested pastime. European books served as the embodiment of colonial authority. They were not only scholarly tools to be read and annotated but also markers of status and cultural distinction, and were consciously used as such in the processes of elite formation and consolidation.
On rare occasions, activists challenged slavery and turned libraries into forums for the advancement of the abolitionist cause. Much more often, however, libraries reinforced social hierarchy and served as meeting places for an early American elite that regarded books and enslaved people as exchangeable commodities. Cultural philanthropy enabled wealthy merchants and political leaders to consolidate their social status and to construct an intellectual persona, safely detached from a world saturated with slavery and colonial violence.
How did French Enlightenment author Voltaire and Philadelphia-based intellectual Benjamin Franklin help turn Philadelphia into an Enlightenment ideal, and what did that idealized image obscure about the city's actual social and colonial realities?
Since the 18th century, Philadelphia has been imagined as a utopian city, and the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution regarded as an ideal democratic government that placed power directly in the hands of the people.
Yet women and Black people had no political rights. While some women actively participated in the intellectual life of early Philadelphia, they were also relegated to a subordinate position. The city's abolitionist credentials have also come under intense scrutiny. As we know today, the economy of early Pennsylvania was deeply tied to the slave trade.
In his 1733 book Philosophical Letters, Voltaire writes about Philadelphia as a social utopia. He described it as the opposite of 18th-century France under Catholic monarchy - a place where everyone was equal, there were no kings and there were peaceful relations between Europeans and Indigenous people. But Voltaire had never actually been to Pennsylvania; he simply projected his own beliefs onto it. When Benjamin Franklin was serving as the American diplomat to France, he took advantage of this myth to win French support for the Revolutionary War.
In your research, you found that conquest produced knowledge, but knowledge also produced conquest. Can you explain how early American museums directly collaborated with the military?
There's a terrifying moment at the beginning of the American Revolution - the Sullivan Expedition, against the Iroquois. It's an expedition led in 1779 by the American general John Sullivan, but it was designed by George Washington himself to exterminate the Iroquois. There was a clear, deliberate, genocidal intent behind this expedition.
Many dozens of Indigenous artifacts stolen from the Iroquois by the U.S. Army were given to collectors in Philadelphia and became objects for display in early American museums and cabinets of curiosities as a way to celebrate U.S. victories, to exhibit the spoils of war, the culture of the vanquished. It's a great example of how collectors and intellectuals collaborated with military leaders to support and enhance colonial expansion.
But these museums were not simply a result of the conquest; they also promoted the conquest because they became a place where army officers went to learn about Indigenous peoples in order to dominate them.
In what ways is the intellectual history of settler colonialism relevant today?
The story that I traced in my book doesn't simply belong to a distant past. It has long-term consequences for the history of higher education in North America. Land-grant universities, such as the University of California, were built not just on Indigenous land, but using profits that they reaped from controlling the land.
The controversy that erupted in 2021 after the unnaming of UC Berkeley's Department of Anthropology's Kroeber Hall made me realize to what extent the colonial past still haunts the present. Berkeley linguistics professor Andrew Garrett has written a wonderful book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California, on that controversy, and I've learned a great deal from it. In it, he details the anthropologist Afred Kroeber's deeply exploitative relationship with Ishi, the last-known living member of the Yahi people who spent the last five years of his life in the UC Museum of Anthropology exhibited as the "last wild Indian in North America."
Regardless of what the verdict is on anthropologist Kroeber's intellectual legacy, the removal of his name speaks directly to the unresolved relationship between intellectual culture and settler colonialism that I have examined in my book.
