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Against the prevalent assumption that the United States is and has been a nation-state, this article proposes to reconceptualize it as an empire-state, a state encompassing hierarchically differentiated spaces and peoples. In addition to being descriptively more apt, an empire-state approach provides a firmer basis for understanding the United States as a racial state, a state of white supremacy. Drawing on evidence from constitutional law, I examine the early development of the U.S. empire-state, the long 19th century. The article demonstrates how U.S. state formation has always entailed the racial construction of colonial spaces, specifically “territories” and American Indian lands. Through an extended consideration of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 Supreme Court case associated almost exclusively with African Americans and hardly ever with empire, I argue for a unified framework to analyze the different but linked racial subjections of colonized and noncolonized peoples. The article concludes with several implications of an empire-state approach to the United States.