Jack P. Greene

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Jack P. Greene | Roundtable: Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Roundtable

Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem

FOR more than a century, the relationship between colonial history and national history has been problematic for professional historians of both eras. Since at least the 1890s, colonial historians have been acutely aware that the old-fashioned nineteenth-century conception of American history as the history of the United States and its antecedents is thoroughly anachronistic and insufficiently attentive to the larger contexts in which developments in America took place. During the past generation, the thrust of historical studies has significantly enhanced this awareness. As Michael Warner has noted, a preoccupation "with the localism of early modern colonists, on one hand, and the transatlantic contexts of empire and trade, on the other," has meant that colonial scholars are now much less likely "to assume that colonial history had an inner propulsion toward modern nationalism."¹ Yet the same is hardly true for national historians, including those early Americanists who concentrate on the American Revolution and the creation of the American nation, many of whom continue to operate within the traditional view that colonial histories are subordinate to national histories and are useful principally for the light they shed on emergent national institutions and cultures. But this subordination of the colonial to the national era parochializes and trivializes the history of periods before the adventitious rise of national states, which has exacted a huge price from national as well as colonial histories. This brief essay suggests that the time is right for colonialists to become more imperial by using what historians have learned and are learning to suggest directions for a massive reshaping of what scholars call American history.	1
Two bodies of theoretical literature, postcolonial theory and the new literature of state formation, specifically early modern state formation, neither of which has so far had a wide effect on colonial historians, can serve as a starting point.	2
During the last fifteen years, the term postcolonial has come to be "widely used to signify the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies that were formerly European colonies." Though postcolonial theory has been broadly influential among literary scholars, some of whom work in early modern colonial American contexts, colonial North American historians have neither extensively used it nor systematically tried to relate their findings to the large body of theoretical literature in postcolonial studies. This neglect may be explained by the early and almost exclusive fixation of postcolonial theorists on nonsettler colonialism. Emerging out of an impulse to challenge the universality of the colonialist perspective constructed to justify western colonial schemes during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century era of high imperialism, postcolonial studies initially concentrated on the colonial process in the heavily peopled worlds of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. With the few exceptions of Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Rhodesia, colonies in this era were colonies of exploitation, occupation, or domination, in which the central objective was to mobilize land and labor to produce profitable raw materials for export. The colonizers were relatively small and transient cadres of managers, bureaucrats, merchants, and soldiers whose principal functions were to maintain order and to facilitate resource extraction by outside businesses, and few if any Europeans settled on the land or took up permanent residence. Largely ignoring settler colonies of the sort that developed throughout the Americas in the early modern era and in Oceania and parts of Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the earliest iterations of postcolonial theory tended to suggest that colonialism, as anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has complained, either was "peculiarly modern—and hence did not exist, for example, in the period of the conquest of America—or that ... the logic" behind it was "equally applicable in that case, and in others." The result, as literary scholar Peter Hulme notes in one of the first works to apply postcolonial insights to the early modern Americas, has been that "the relevance of postcolonial theory to America is ... not yet well established."²	. . .

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