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Book Review
| A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History. By Thomas Bender. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. xii, 368 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-8090-9527-0.)
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| Thomas Bender's book is a welcome historical narrative of that portion of the world's surface usually designated as the United States, but told here with reference to contemporary developments among global states, economies, and societies. Bender intends his book as a demonstration of how American historians should overcome the exceptionalism and, indeed, provincialism that he argues have dominated our national narratives since l945. His book is not a world history, but rather a contextualization of American development in light of global processes. Nations, he believes, remain fundamental units of development, but all are shaped by global history, and their histories must be constructed with that awareness (pp. 296–97). |
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Bender has chosen five major epochs and themes to demonstrate his approach. What is often called the age of discovery or encounter is summarized as part of the discovery of "the ocean world," including the Portuguese, Spanish, and other European voyages around Africa, to the Indian Ocean, and then to transatlantic shores. Drawing on the work of Robin Blackburn, Philip Curtin, Ira Berlin, and many others, Bender rightly devotes much attention to European interaction with the African states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He outlines the transformation of slavery from the longstanding practice of impressing captives for service in urban centers in Europe or the Levant to the wholesale shipment of African laborers for harsh latifundial labor in the Americas under coercive discipline, whether with little regard for mortality (as in sugar cultivation) or with greater concern for preserving and reproducing its value as human capital (as in the southern colonies). |
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A second major unit places the American colonies' break with Britain in the context of the European wars over their imperial territories outside Europe. The third section looks at the American Civil War and Reconstruction in the context of global nation building—what seventy years ago, the Ohio State University historian Robert C. Binkley shrewdly identified as a global federative crisis, as agendas of nationalism and liberal democratization first conjoined across the Western world in l848 and then diverged as state building, territorial consolidation, and the protection of racial elites became dominant aims (Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852–1871, 1935). This unit provides the most successful interweaving of parallel stories. The fourth section takes a similar approach for the history of American colonialism and empire, while the final part—following the work of such authors as Robert Wiebe, Daniel Rodgers, and James Kloppenberg—examines reformist responses to industrialism and urbanization. |
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Bender brings as usual a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity to his research and historiographical manifestos. He has read widely in English-language secondary literature and ventured into some French and Latin American sources. The deployment of comparisons from outside the United States and the citation of revealing commentaries by European observers of American development reinforce his argument for a global framing of U.S. development. I share many of his interpretive orientations—above all concerning the importance of territory, state building, and empire—so I can only welcome his program for American history. |
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Obviously, no historian can master the history of every large state and society, above all when language mastery is limited, as it must be. Although the historians of other countries and regions may cavil, Bender's source base is adequate for the outline he attempts. Many important foreign contributions exist in translation, and Anglophone scholars have been active in synthesizing the results of research in Asian, African, and imperial history. |
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