say the least, that one of the main policies of Andrew Jackson, a man who heartily despised big banks and, in particular, the East Coast banking establishment, relied to a considerable extent on finance from bankers in Boston, London, and elsewhere to make dispossession a reality.

To be sure, Southern plantation owners, staunch supporters of Jackson, also played their part in the forced removal of Native Americans. But without financial backing from the big banks, the policy simply could not have been carried out.

The bankers profited considerably from the acquisition of Native American land. This was an ironic outcome indeed in a country whose president prided himself on being an implacable foe of the American and international banking establishment.

The weaknesses of the core arguments presented in Unworthy Republic could relate to the omission of examples, the identification of the “turning point,” and the close connection between politics and inevitability.

First, it'd be helpful to identify Claudio Sant's three main theses. In the introduction, Saunt spells out the book's "three related arguments." The first thesis claims that "the state-administered mass expulsion of indigenous people was unprecedented." Saunt admits the statement is weak or "foolish" but stands by his argument due to America's "formal state-administered process." Saunt sees some connections between what the United States did to the Indigenous people and how European colonists treated them but ultimately concludes that the United States was significantly more orderly and officious.

Here, one could claim that the treatment was different because it was a colony or a set of colonies, and not a united independent nation, so the argument is extraneous. One could also fault Saunt for not providing more examples of official expulsions and violence. During the French Revolution, the government systematically expelled and killed supposed anti-revolutionaries through a “formal state-administered process.” The revolutionary government created the Law of Suspects, which listed people to arrest and kill.

Saunt’s second argument is that “the state-sponsored expulsion of the 1830s was a turning point for indigenous peoples and for the United States.” While this seems like a strong point—if a country is deliberately trying to displace and kill a community, it’s going to have a huge impact on that community—it’s possible to argue that the key “turning point” came when Western colonists began occupying the land centuries earlier.

As for Saunt’s third argument—the “expulsion of indigenous people was far from inevitable”—the weaknesses seem to come down to how Saunt separates inevitability from politics. Saunt describes the expulsion as "a piece of legislation, not the inevitable result of some fundamental incompatibility of indigenous and European peoples." Yet Saunt and the reader might want to consider how the people passing that legislation held an ideology and ambition that made the expulsion likely to happen or inevitable. In other words, laws and fate aren’t so separate.