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The Nation Is Already There
Robin L. Einhorn
| IN his ambitious and challenging essay, Jack P. Greene proposes to enlist colonial historians on a mission to conquer (or colonize) the national history of the United States. The research of colonial historians, he explains, is being marginalized in the "textbook" accounts of American history precisely because of the field's virtues.1 The leading virtue of research in colonial history, according to Greene, is its abandonment of a teleological narrative that shoehorns the diverse local histories of colonial societies into an anachronistic prehistory of the United States. Greene then enlists two bodies of theory to suggest strategies for recasting the national period in the colonial mold: postcolonial theory that has begun to include the histories of settler colonies and state-making theory that portrays early modern states and empires as contingent efforts to extend control over particular (and particularistic) peoples and territories. |
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Greene's explication of the virtues of early American history resembles the one Joyce E. Chaplin has framed in a similar manifesto. This praise is deserved, and William and Mary Quarterly readers will be aware of Greene's role in helping to build such a strong field. Yet the curious thing about these manifestos is that Greene and Chaplin seem to conceive of historical research as a kind of competition among field-based teams in which each tries to compel the others to adopt its own terms of inquiry. Where Chaplin urges historians of early America to abandon the parochial exceptionalism of U.S. history to influence debates in theory and cultural studies ("leaving their mark on an important conversation about the global fate of modern empires and colonized peoples"), Greene wants to mobilize the insights of colonial history to liberate U.S. history itself.2 |
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As a U.S. historian who works mainly in the nineteenth century, I am not sure whether I would rather be abandoned by Chaplin or liberated by Greene. Nor do I think that scholarship works (or should work) as a field-based competition. It ought to be—and actually is—an open-ended conversation among scholars who apply various research strategies to various historical problems. Greene seems to take particular issue with nineteenth-century historians who stray into colonial materials to find precedents that shaped the national period. He is right to point out that nineteenth-century historians often find colonial histories "useful principally for the light they shed on emergent national institutions and cultures," but this is because the research interests of nineteenth-century historians lie in the effort to explain these national institutions and cultures. Colonial historians (like national historians) should adopt the frames of reference that are most appropriate for their own research. For this reason, Greene is clearly justified in rejecting an "exclusively prenational" focus for colonial history.3 By the same token, however, colonial history is prenational when the nation is the object of study. |
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But Greene thinks historians of the national period pay "a huge price" for this view, since it blinds them to the critical insights that the colonial literature has produced. Early American historians, Greene argues, "have been at the forefront of the effort" to study the Indians, Africans, and other subaltern groups who once were "neglected in the construction of grand narratives" of national history. They have also pioneered the study of colonialism, a process that "actually intensified with the colonization of vast new areas of the continent" in the nineteenth century. Because early American historians understand the decentralized character of American state building, their "localist perspective should be extended into the national era" to persuade national-era historians that "the spread of settlement probably had more to do with the needs, desires, and self-understandings of individual settlers and promoters than with national goals such as manifest destiny."4 |
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