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Elaborations
Jack P. Greene
| THE nation-state is the final and most formidable bastion of the paradigm of power that dominated historical studies through the middle decades of the twentieth century. During the past two generations, historians and other social scientists and humanists have succeeded in problematizing the previously largely unexamined assumptions about the intrinsic importance of those regions, polities, cultures, peoples, and social entities that had shaped the modern world to their disproportionate advantages. Driven by the desire to recover the histories of neglected areas and peoples and fueled by the logic of the civil rights and feminist movements, scholars have largely succeeded in bringing the history of women, the enslaved, the exploited, and subaltern racial and ethnic groups as well as neglected areas of the globe into the mainstream of historical studies. In this effort they have dramatically expanded the scope of historical studies and significantly enriched historical understanding of human development. Equally important they have succeeded in exposing the self-serving character of the stories earlier generations constructed to celebrate the winners while neglecting the substantial contributions subordinate groups made to their victories.1 If this conceptual revolution had been confined to the academy, if, in the United States, it had not penetrated deeply into popular culture and school curricula, the National Endowment for the Humanities would not be spending so much of its budget on heritage studies and the Florida legislature would not have proscribed from the state school system all discussion of history as a construction. If the winners are not yet on the run, they are at least having to share the stage in a history that explores not just the benefits but the costs of modernity. |
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Yet neither this conceptual revolution in historical studies nor the growing interest in Atlantic and other large-scale histories has much affected the primacy of the nation-state as the principal focus of historical discourse. Even as developments such as the expansion of the European Union, the beginnings of devolution in several national states, and the failure of many postcolonial nations (themselves artifacts of colonialism) to achieve political or social coherence call into question the future of the nation-state as the ultimate form of political organization, most political historians continue to work within national contexts and contribute to national histories. With relation to the nature of the state and its collective public life, this focus on the national arena has greatly inhibited the sort of expansive decentering that has enriched economic, social, and cultural history. |
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The opening essay lays out a strategy by which, in the specific case of the early United States, this situation might be remedied. While students of state formation have been demonstrating the limited reach of national state authority in early modern composite states, historians of the colonial Americas have been busy showing the extent to which state building in early modern overseas empires was centered in the new societies and provinces that settlers were creating on the peripheries. In the analysis of the construction and operation of early modern empires, these parallel historiographies have shifted attention away from national or imperial officials and central policies to the role of the many new provincial polities as the principal venues for imperial expansion and the primary sites for the inscription of inherited cultures on new environments and the formation of new and distinctive corporate identities. In the process they have called attention to the extensive agency of the settlers, traders, and other bearers of European culture, to the extraordinary latitude that such people enjoyed in organizing and constructing those provincial polities, and to the extent to which they shaped them to their own designs and in their own interests, with scant regard for the interests of subordinate groups within or without their borders. Postcolonial insights, especially as scholars have applied them to settler colonies in the many works cited in Kariann Yokota's commentary and in the opening essay, also seem to be relevant because they emphasize the ubiquity of the colonial process as it extended into the period of national political independence and the centrality of settler power in the formation of new provinces and states, whether the new territories were wrested from indigenous peoples directly or from settlers representing other European cultures.2 |
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