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Michael Meranze | Culture and Governance: Reflections on the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century British America | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4 | The History Cooperative
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October, 2008
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Culture and Governance:
Reflections on the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century British America


Michael Meranze



CU'LTURE. n.s. [cultura, Latin.]
1. The act of cultivation; the act of tilling the ground; tillage.


To CU'LTURE. v.a. [from the noun.]
To cultivate; to manure; to till.
—Samuel Johnson, A dictionary of the English language1


THE cultural history of eighteenth-century British America, like cultural history more widely, remains a vibrant and provocative field. For three decades now, early American cultural historians, literary critics, material culture scholars, and art historians, among others, have successfully explored varied realms of meaning, experience, and subjectivity; rethought the place of numerous (especially subaltern) peoples in the colonial and revolutionary worlds; and mapped out new understandings of commerce, gender, nature, politics, race, religion, and the imagination. In all these ways, the expansion of cultural history has been dispersive and democratic, prompting scholars and students of eighteenth-century British America to engage not only with new topics but also with new ways of imagining those topics. 1
      These developments have been largely for the good. But given the seemingly unavoidably dispersed character of the cultural history of the eighteenth century—in terms of its emphasis on particularities and the instabilities of the cultural itself—reflection on and critique of the field seems in order. I do not intend to join in the repetitive calls for a new synthesis or the fashionable but ultimately empty announcements that we should move beyond the cultural or linguistic turns. There can be no turning back or away from recognizing that history is mediated through language, concepts, and symbolic forms. Instead I am proposing that we radicalize and historicize the cultural turn, reconsidering our notion of culture itself, and thereby try to open up new departures for the cultural history of eighteenth-century British America. 2
      Cultural history needs to break from its roots in the diffuse nineteenth- century notion of culture as a realm of value and resource of meaning. Though scholars and critics have productively and powerfully used this understanding of culture to address the alienation that accompanied the emergence of industrial capitalist society, thinking of culture in these terms has effectively separated it from systems of governance, power, and constraint. Rooted in the upheavals of the early nineteenth century, this notion of culture as realm and resource has proven surprisingly long lasting. In recent decades it has shaped early American cultural histories, whether in the guise of a cultural hermeneutics or of a literary historicism that has given pride of place to cultural wholes and the history of representations. But this legacy has become disabling for the study of the eighteenth century (and particularly the later eighteenth century), a period when the connection between culture and governance was especially intimate. 3
      As Samuel Johnson's dictionary entries indicate, eighteenth-century notions of culture retained their connection to the cultivation of land and things, to planting, tilling, growing, and directing. Culture and cultivation were active practices; they were immanent to relationships between people and between people and things. But just as important, this eighteenth-century linkage of culture to direction, and thereby to governance, existed in a British colonial world where competing and overlapping systems of governance were coming into being, intersecting, and struggling for dominance. These struggles over culture as governance took clearest shape in the relationship between commercial society and slavery, the reflections on politics that accompanied the American Revolution, and the meditations on truth that were part of the Enlightenment. Yet they cut across a far larger range of institutions and problems: the household, the relationships between generations, the organization of the emotions, the ordering of different forms of life, and, indeed, the very possibility of imagining a world other than what it was. Culture was central to the eighteenth century because governance was up for grabs. . . .
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