Global Goals, Local Acts:
Grass-Roots Activism in Imperial Narratives

Lori D. Ginzberg

Judging by the array of conferences, forums, and round tables, North American history is indeed becoming more international. Scholars across various disciplines have increasingly attended to the ways that empires and nations are disparate and congruent and have historicized the concept of nation itself. At the same time, the sometimes but not always related feminist and postmodernist projects of rethinking how power is exercised—in families, sex, labor, and language—have led to a greater attention to the intimate. These concerns underlie the current essay; for Ann Laura Stoler it is the imperial politics of intimacy that begs for a comparative lens, as she explores the ways that the politics of sex, reproduction, child rearing, manners, and desire intersect with empire, conquest, and exploitation, and how colonial governments' control over people's intimate lives shores up categories of racial exclusion and domination.1	1
For me, as a United States historian interested in the connections between intellectual life and people's lived experience, Stoler's essay provokes questions about who builds empires, who initiates and operates the local, national, and global institutions of control, and how those with power articulate the "us" by defining the "them." But these processes are hardly specific to empires or even to nations with imperial designs. With widely ranging levels of explicitness, consistency, and rage, people commonly create categories that bind them together by leaving others out; almost always, these categories serve to justify economic, political, moral, and/or sexual power over others. Various rationales have emerged for the exercise of power: patriotism, racism, and religion have proven especially effective at shoring up the racial and gender hierarchies with the moral authority they require. Of course, each of these categories can have a state, national, or imperial institutional component, as Stoler shows, which acts impersonally to shape even the most intimate interactions. But global institutions are ultimately shaped by human beings, and power relationships reflect the dynamics of social, intellectual, and political movements organized by people themselves.	2
My own area of interest has long been that of social reform, sexuality, and religion—and especially of the ways that movements shape middle-class women's gender identities while maintaining class and racial hierarchies. What is striking about many nineteenth-century social movements is how aware their participants were of their place in a global narrative. Elite, white, Protestant women in the United States participated in christianizing efforts that would prepare the way for an American empire—and they did so with comparable fervor and no apparent sense of irony among American Indians, in urban slums, and in far-off countries. Interactions that were face to face, as well as those in the unimaginable distance, expressed a largely common goal, one that further established the connections among building a nation or empire, intimate life, exclusionary categories, and movements for social reform. While some movements' efforts blended into the institutions and policies of imperial states, the area of Stoler's concern, I would suggest that they reflect the variety of ways that individuals, acting collectively, exercise control over sex, reproduction, alcohol, manners, and education in the lives of people defined in some morally essential way as "other." The ties between grass-roots activism and imperial design were often strong and explicit; understanding the shadows that empires cast upon intimate matters requires that we look to social history to see how actual people impose their moral standards upon others.	. . .