Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History

Joyce E. Chaplin

If I were a gambling woman, I would start a betting pool: When the 1989 guide to monographs in my field, Books about Early America: 2001 Titles, is brought up to date, how many titles will it have to include? Take a guess. Would 5,001 be too low an estimate? If the hard copy became an electronic guide that was regularly updated, might the number soar to 10,001? While it might be fun to run the pool, the final number of titles would probably give me pause.1 No other field in American history has grown as fast, mostly because colonial history now overlaps with and borrows from so many other fields. It has long taken from and contributed to many other fields of history, but the scope and rate of expansion have increased dramatically. The border crossings now include those between Europe and the Americas, between the early modern and modern eras, between dependent colonies and the independent United States, between imperial regions (British America vis-à-vis New Spain, New France, and New Amsterdam), and along cultural and political borders with West Africa and indigenous America.	1
Why should early Americanists want to keep track of so many other fields? Is all this borrowing cost-effective in time and energy? And who, if anyone, borrows from us? I cannot possibly survey all the relevant points of expansion in this essay; doing so would come close to replicating the problem I wish to analyze. Instead, I will look first at older border crossings (between colonial America and other nations or empires dominated by Europeans), then at newer ones (between early America and non-European populations). In the first section, I will consider the connections that early American history has with United States history, British history, and the histories of other New World empires; in the second, I will examine the borders early America now shares with African history and Native American history and look at the muffled impact of cultural studies, particularly postcolonial theories. I will not examine interdisciplinary borrowing in and of itself (which would take at least another essay) but will instead look at some ways early Americanists' interest in or chariness of new methodologies has affected their crossovers into other historical fields. This approach leaves out a great deal; I will be able only glancingly to address, for example, the question of why most early Americanists ignore certain obvious neighboring fields, such as Canadian history.	2
Neither a borrower nor a lender be? Early Americanists are both, though the resulting debt networks form discernible patterns. The traffic from early America to the United States is extensive, though not always exemplary of the range of historical experience, instead privileging problems seen as contemporary or relevant. Exchange across the boundary between British and early American history is mostly restricted to matters relating to the American Revolution. That event, which divided Britain from the United States, now, curiously, brings together scholars of Britain and of America. Early Americanists' attention to non-Anglophone European colonies has of late focused on "borderlands," areas where the British Empire touched other empires; that focus has generally anticipated the creation of the United States, ignoring comparative colonization in favor of a Manifest Destiny view of North America's history, teleologically driven toward the creation of the Republic.	3
If these forays have moved early American history inexorably toward the history of the United States, new inquiries about non-European populations have likewise flourished only when they easily contribute to discussion of long-standing questions about the American history originally crafted to explain white settlers. The new histories of Native Americans, perhaps the most exciting development in the field, remain the province of a small group of scholars; the demanding nature of that history has made most early Americanists reluctant to do research on Native Americans. Scholars may take on board the conclusions of this subfield when they teach, but not when they do their own work. In contrast, the exchange between African and African American histories provides a rare model of parity in trade relations across a border and of the generation of a new field to which nearly all early Americanists pay attention.	. . .