| From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History | The American Historical Review, 106.5

From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon:
Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the
American Experience into World History

MICHAEL ADAS

The paradox has been there from the early years of settlement along the North Atlantic coast. The Pilgrims, and the Puritans soon after them, had migrated to the "howling wilderness" of New England out of a determination to build a utopian community that transcended history, a New Zion that was free of the corruption and oppression they sought to leave behind in Europe. In his metaphor of "a city upon the hill," John Winthrop captured the Puritans' sense of the exceptional nature of their undertaking, which they believed both divinely ordained and without precedent, at least since biblical times. But while Winthrop underscored the exceptional nature of the Puritan experiment in political, social, and religious development, he also stressed its lessons for the rest of humanity, lessons that he believed would be regarded as "a story and by-word through the world." The city, after all, was on high ground with the "eyes of all people" upon it.¹ 1

As these scenes of frontier expansion from (top to bottom) Argentina, the United States, and South Africa illustrate, the covered wagon was accorded a central place in the iconography of settler societies on several continents. In these diverse locales, wagon trains came to symbolize the progressive advance of civilized sedentary societies into what were represented as unimproved wilderness regions, sparsely populated by backward and savage peoples. Peter Schmidtmeyer, "Caravana de carretas atravesando la pampa," reproduced in Diego Abad de Santillán, Historia Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1965); Samuel Coleman, "Ships of the Plains," in Peter Hassrick, The Way West: Art of Frontier America (New York, 1977); and W. H. Coetzer, "Trek Wagons Descending a Hill," in Oliver Ransford, The Great Trek (London, 1972).

     Winthrop's metaphor proved to be foundational for the American nation that emerged in the following centuries from a scattering of tiny settler enclaves in New England and along the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Additional images and beliefs—such as the rugged individualism exemplified by the frontiersman, the rags-to-riches ascent of the hardworking entrepreneur, and the non-imperialist nature of American expansion—subsequently reinforced exceptionalist formulations of the American experience and national identity on the part of historians and politicians alike. But Winthrop's city on the heights has been among the most enduring and frequently evoked symbols of a national experience that has been seen to be so distinctive that it defies comparison with or incorporation into the history of the rest of humanity. And the discordant internal contradictions of Winthrop's formulation have persisted through centuries of ideological oscillation between exceptionalism and America's variant of a global civilizing mission. 2

     Although fundamental and persistent, this tension between Americans' thinking about themselves and their relationship to other peoples and cultures has rarely been seriously addressed in the now-substantial historiographic discourse on American exceptionalism. And interestingly, it has often been foreign observers who have pointed it out. A number of European historians have drawn attention to what Serge Ricard has seen as "the basic incompatibility of the exceptionalist claim with political messianism, of singularity with universalism."² Akira Iriye, who had grown up in Japan but pursued his college education and career as a historian in the United States, returned again and again to the paradox in tracing the oscillations in late nineteenth-century American responses to Japan and China in the introductory chapter of one of his early works.³ A decade later, William Appleman Williams—an American scholar but one who consistently challenged then-prevailing notions about the exceptional nature of U.S. foreign policies—identified "an intense consciousness of uniqueness" and "a hyperactive sense of mission" as two of a number of critical themes in American history. But he offered no commentary on their apparent opposition.⁴ In view of the long neglect of the paradox in American historiographical writing, it is heartening to find in a recent review of Seymour Martin Lipset's American Exceptionalism, Mary Nolan's succinct summary of the predicament of peoples—in this case, the Germans—who have sought selectively to emulate American ways: 3

The [German] goal was to become Americanized while remaining oneself. American exceptionalism, which proclaims the moral and material superiority of the United States, denies the possibility of such emulation and negotiation. The ideology of exceptionalism thus stands in sharp and ironic contrast to much of American foreign and economic policy, from modernization theory to structural adjustment programs, which are premised on America as the only economic and political model.⁵

As Nolan's emphasis on the dilemmas that the paradox has posed for peoples and states interacting with an increasingly powerful and assertive American republic suggests, perhaps we have begun to reckon seriously with the global repercussions of the contradiction at the heart of our sense of national identity and destiny. 4

Over the centuries, a variety of sometimes overlapping, but often quite distinct, claims for exceptionalism have been made by American thinkers, social commentators, and politicians. Winthrop's metaphor exemplifies the cosmic teleology version of exceptionalism that has dominated both political rhetoric and popular convictions. In this view, the emergence of the United States as a global power represents the working out in the mundane realm of a larger, divinely inspired plan. This sentiment can be found in American readings of their history from the Puritans' conviction that the epidemics that ravaged the Indian population of New England were God's way of preparing the New World for their settlement to Seymour Lipset's recent admission that he believed the "hand of providence" responsible for the strong leaders who have emerged in times of crisis in U.S. history.⁶ Though in some ways a variant of the "Gott mit Uns" impulse that has been a component of the ideological baggage of most societies throughout history, the divinely ordained vision of the American experience has been both more comprehensive and extreme than its counterparts elsewhere. It has also proven a good deal more impervious than most other national variants of divinely inspired mission to the unsettling excesses of human folly and cruelty that have abounded in the twentieth century. 5

     Alternative versions of American exceptionalism are more amenable to empirical testing. They have also had, particularly in the American half-century of the post–World War II decades, a much greater impact on thinking and writing about U.S. history as well as approaches to foreign policy in the Cold War era and the first decade of the "new world order." Although divine imperatives are often implicit, and at times explicit, in these alternative formulations of exceptionalism, they emphasize the uniquely progressive and socially capacious character of American institutional and material development. The decidedly Whiggish thrust of progressivist variations on the exceptionalist theme owe much to expectations regarding the young American republic held by eighteenth-century European intellectuals.⁷ Their fascination with the American experiment appeared to validate the vision of the city on a hill. In the nineteenth century, both Winthrop's metaphor and the acclaim of the Philosophes informed interpretations of U.S. history that privileged it as the culmination of the evolutionary advance of human civilization. Whether grounded in the bounty of what was seen to be an undeveloped New World environment or the unique mixture of attributes that made up the American "character," or both, progressivist exceptionalism has celebrated—in varying blends of attributes and emphases—the unprecedented extent to which democracy, individualism and social mobility, civil society, free enterprise, ingenuity and inventiveness, and material well-being have flourished in the United States. In these areas of human endeavor, which are seen to be definitive in terms of social development, progressivist exceptionalists insist that American achievements have not simply surpassed those of any other society in degree, they have reached distinctive levels of enactment and refinement.⁸ 6

     From a global perspective, these claims to American uniqueness would not have mattered very much if the United States had remained the geographically remote, rather isolated outlier of Western European civilization, which it was at least well into the nineteenth century. But the nation's rise to the status of a world power by the late 1800s, and its emergence after World War II as the epicenter of the process of globalization, meant both that Americans' self-images and the way they represented other peoples and cultures would have increasingly significant repercussions for all of humanity. These transformations gave new salience and intensity to the longstanding contradictions between exceptionalism in its varying guises and visions of America as a model for the rest of humankind. As Joyce Appleby has argued, over the course of the nineteenth century, the antithesis of the exceptionalist vision took on increasing importance in American thinking and policymaking aimed at both those who were considered aliens within the republic and foreigners who were increasingly encountered overseas: "The propagandists of American democracy breached the geographic isolation of their country by universalizing what was peculiar to Americans; their endorsement of natural rights, their drive for personal independence, their celebration of democracy. What might be construed elsewhere as uninterestingly plebeian was elevated by the national imagination to a new goal for mankind."⁹ The persisting conviction that the American experience, despite its unprecedented nature, could serve as a template for the future of less fortunate peoples and less developed cultures not only justified increasing interventionism in the outside world, it often promoted a predisposition to denigrate the worth and viability of foreign, particularly non-Western, cultures. 7

     At times, these negative assessments remained implicit, even unconscious. More often, American policymakers, missionaries, and bureaucrats were openly disdainful of cultures and peoples deemed to be beyond the pale of Western (or increasingly, American) civilization. Though not necessarily racist but decidedly ethnocentric, their approach to these alien societies was premised on the presupposition that their ways of thinking and doing were diametrically opposed to those of an exceptionally progressive and highly developed United States. From missionary tracts on the Plains Indians to the journals of American ambassadors overseas, such epithets as savage and barbaric were standard fare in writings on non-Western peoples from the first years of colonization until well into the twentieth century. Chinese or Japanese leaders who resisted U.S. inroads into their societies in the late 1800s were caricatured as effete, reactionary, or xenophobic, while in the post–Cold War era, Muslim revivalists are indiscriminately lumped together as irrational fanatics bent on fomenting violent opposition to American-inspired efforts to promote economic and cultural globalization.¹⁰ 8

     Although often conceived in ignorance, these dismissive representations played a significant role in shaping policies aimed at promoting the westernization or Americanization of non-Western peoples and societies. The denigration or outright dismissal of alien, non-Western cultures allowed American diplomats, missionaries, and colonial administrators to conclude that they would be highly receptive to the introduction of American values and institutions. These attitudes and assumptions were manifested in early Anglo-American policies toward the indigenous Indian peoples of coastal North America, and they persisted in the centuries of settler frontier expansion and Indian dispossession. As recent historians of these processes have concluded, in these circumstances Americanization literally meant "cultural erasure" for the Indians. And there is perhaps no more revealing measure of the low regard that Anglo-Americans had for Indian culture than the fact that, with rare exceptions, even the most sympathetic missionary educators and government agents made no effort to learn the languages of the peoples among whom they worked.¹¹ 9

     From the nineteenth century, the highly ethnocentric and increasingly racist assumptions of the superiority and universal applicability of Euro-American ways that informed American policies toward the Indians were increasingly deployed in encounters with overseas peoples and cultures. In the 1890s and early 1900s, these presuppositions were worked into a distinctive (but by no means unprecedented or unique) American version of the civilizing mission, and some decades later they undergirded the central tenets of modernization theory. Both ideologies were used to justify social engineering projects designed to transform foreign, and again mainly non-Western, societies whose cultures were essentialized as tradition-bound, materially underdeveloped, and hopelessly backward.¹² 10

Any meaningful attempt to integrate the history of the United States into the analysis of broader global developments over the last half millennium requires comparative or world historians to grapple with the foundational and enduring paradox that I have argued runs through the historiography of the United States and informs the myths and discourses that have shaped the Americans' sense of national identity and purpose. For those who held that key processes in U.S. history were unprecedented and unique, it followed that they were so significant that they must be studied in and of themselves. From this perspective, it was also not unreasonable to conclude that these processes could not be meaningfully compared to what more cross-culturally minded or globally oriented scholars deemed to be similar developments in other peoples' history. These convictions appeared to most practitioners of American history to be well founded, given the sheer size of the United States (and the corresponding bulk of its historical production), its relative isolation well into the twentieth century,¹³ and, conversely in the period since World War I, its preponderant influence in international affairs. 11

     Despite this confluence of constraints, it has long been acceptable, at times even fashionable, for historians of the United States to include explorations of the European roots of the new nation's beliefs, institutions, or patterns of colonization as vital components of, and even partial explanations for, the exceptional trajectory of American history.¹⁴ In fact, as numerous critiques of exceptionalism in American political thinking, social commentary, and historical writing have stressed, America's uniqueness was often articulated through self-laudatory contrasts with the European societies it was seen to have left behind and to be destined to replace in the vanguard of human development.¹⁵ Given this emphasis in much of the literature on the sources and influence of exceptionalist thinking, and mindful of the areas where I have concentrated my own historical research and writing, I will focus here on the ways in which American interactions with or historical experiences comparable to peoples and societies outside of Europe have shaped exceptionalist ideas and imagery. In addition to the Indian peoples of North America, and overseas societies, such as those of China and Central Asia, that were distinctly non-European in history and culture, I will include European settler societies in Oceania, Canada, southern Africa, Russia, and Latin America in my exploration of the ways in which cross-cultural and comparative history can be used to both contest persisting notions of American exceptionalism and to more fully integrate U.S. history into broader global analyses. In my discussion of history of the Western frontier as a key part of this larger narrative, I note the potential of the borderlands approach for framing the comparative and cross-cultural dimensions of the diverse strands of multiculturalism that have been so central to the American experience. But a full exploration of those possibilities lies beyond the range of the present essay, and is perhaps best left for those more expert in the history of migration, ethnicity, or American regionalism. 12

     Until the last couple of decades, there have been few serious attempts to compare the discovery and settlement of the Atlantic littoral to similar processes in Australia, Argentina, or South Africa; the history of American frontier expansion to these areas and others exhibiting obvious parallels in many parts of the globe; or the nature of American empire-building overseas to imperial expansion by other industrial powers, including Japan. On the contrary, American historians have generally confined their narratives and analyses of these and other defining aspects of the American experience to the United States itself. If they attempted to set that history in a broader transnational framework, they were likely to stress, for example, the ways in which industrialization produced a peculiarly "American system" of manufacturing, the fundamental distinctions between America's exercise of informal influence overseas and the oppressive empires ruled by its rivals, and the incomparable magnitude and impact of the European immigrant flow to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Implicit, but also at times quite conscious, comparisons appeared to confirm the exceptionalist nature of key features of American history. These ranged from what were seen to be distinctive modes of labor organization and agitation and the absence of significant socialist parties to the weakness of the state and what were assumed to be higher levels of mobility and material prosperity relative to other industrial societies.¹⁶ 13

     As numerous commentators have observed, the predominance of a national frame of reference for thinking and writing about U.S. history has reinforced notions of American exceptionalism in major ways.¹⁷ Because national units as a whole are difficult to compare successfully, reliance on them has discouraged systematic analysis of transcultural and cross-cultural historical patterns. And nation-centric history has often reduced comparisons inserted into narratives focused on developments within the United States to "one-shot, brief analogies,"¹⁸ which have often proved more misleading than informative. Until the past two or three decades, this preoccupation with national history had also marginalized both comparative and world history within the historical profession in the United States and often abroad. As William H. McNeill, who as early as the 1960s defied these trends by producing widely read and cited cross-cultural studies, has observed, for much of the twentieth century professional historians in the United States have had little regard for world perspectives.¹⁹ These are assumed to yield little more than poorly documented generalizations and deeply personal commentaries on the human condition, such as those authored by Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler in the decades of global crisis following World War I. 14

     In an extended critique of American exceptionalism, Ian Tyrrell has also deplored the neglect, and often the outright dismissal, of cross-cultural research by historians of the United States. In Tyrrell's view, the Americans' preoccupation with their own history has not only discouraged serious scholarship with a transnational frame of reference, it has skewed much of the comparative work that has been written in recent decades. His contention that comparative work undertaken by American scholars has usually begun with questions or patterns discerned in U.S. history that were then tested through an examination of similar phenomena in other areas works well for many of the studies written before the late 1960s.²⁰ As Tyrrell himself notes, his critique of American historians' approaches to comparative history owes much to Raymond Grew, who several years earlier argued that critical topics in U.S. history were usually the starting point for forays into cross-cultural analysis, including those focusing on slave systems, racism, and labor relations. Grew observed that issues arising in the study of the history of other societies had rarely shaped investigations of comparable phenomena in America, and he argued that even scholars who had made significant use of case evidence drawn from elsewhere in the Americas, Africa, or Eurasia rarely sustained a serious research commitment to these areas.²¹ 15

     The fine comparative studies of such scholars as George Fredrickson, Philip Curtin, Jack Greene, Samuel Baily, and Ian Steele render the categorical assessments of Tyrrell and Grew dubious at best.²² But they are even more troubling in view of the unintended and ironic American-centered assumptions that Tyrrell and Grew themselves make. Neither takes into account the very substantial corpus of comparative historical work produced by American scholars that does not feature U.S. case examples or American interaction with other societies.²³ On topics ranging from colonialism and peasant protest to international immigration and environmental transformations, this scholarship has in fact contributed substantially to the development of the comparative and global subfields in terms of theory and methodology, in the identification of critical issues for study and debate, and not the least in enhancing our understanding of the history of other peoples and regions, especially those in the "non-Western" world, which had been long neglected or ignored by American historians. Grew may well be correct in concluding that because of the excessively inward-looking nature of much of American historical scholarship, it has not had an international impact commensurate with the high quality and innovativeness characteristic of much of a prodigious quantity of research and writing.²⁴ But if the major contributions American scholars have made to both comparative and global history beyond that centered on issues rooted in U.S. historiography are taken fully into account, in these subfields of research and writing at least, their influence proves a good deal more considerable than Grew allows.²⁵ 16

     These achievements notwithstanding, the need for the full integration of U.S. history into comparative and global frameworks has perhaps been the most convincingly demonstrated by the important ways in which cross-cultural studies have shaped the research agenda for a diverse range of subfields dealing with processes that have been central to the American experience. In core fields of research ranging from slave systems and racial ideologies to frontier expansion, industrialization, and struggles for civil rights, comparative studies have since the 1960s proved critical to the development of U.S. historiography. They have identified questions that need to be pursued, established issues worthy of serious debate, and plotted broader historical patterns that had earlier tended to be obscured by a surfeit of primary source materials and a privileging of specialized research.²⁶ All of these tasks were, of course, precisely those for which Marc Bloch argued many decades ago that comparative analysis was indispensable.²⁷ And although Americanists have applied comparative techniques to case examples far more separated in time and space, and thus more disparate in cultural and historical origins and trajectories than Bloch deemed prudent,²⁸ their work has proved as potent an antidote to assumptions of national exceptionalism as his seminal studies on medieval Europe. 17

     In conceiving U.S. history comparatively and thus integrating it meaningfully into a larger global context, it is essential to distinguish between exceptionalism and difference. Exceptionalist perspectives have by no means been confined to historians, social commentators, and politicians in the United States. Like their counterparts in earlier societies and in contemporary nations, American exceptionalists have almost invariably presumed the superiority of their own culture and, from the late eighteenth century, of the national character that culture had nurtured. But arguments for the uniqueness of the United States have been both more foundational and enduring, and they have tended to emphasize sources of superiority and trajectories of dominance that distinguish the history of the republic in fundamental ways from that of the rest of humankind. From the first decades of European settlement in North America, exceptionalists have almost invariably stressed unprecedented and qualitatively (and very often quantitatively) distinct patterns of societal, and later national, development that transcend the environmental and social obstacles that are alleged to have prevented earlier civilizations or contemporary rivals from attaining similar levels of individual and collective fulfillment. American exceptionalists tend to see the rise of the United States to global power as part of a larger teleological progression toward—depending on the observer and time frame in question—human virtue, utopian sublimity, civilization, development, or modernity. And, as I have argued above, in apparent contradiction to most of the foregoing assumptions, they have premised their prescriptions for interaction with foreign peoples and cultures on assimilationist imperatives that exceed those of even their most expansive and chauvinistic rivals, past or present. 18

     I think it fair to argue that the findings of most comparativists who make extensive use of case evidence drawn from U.S. history underscore the importance of difference as opposed to the exceptional nature of the American experience.²⁹ Although exceptionalist claims have only rarely been based on well-grounded comparisons,³⁰ that is, of course, the only way they can be empirically verified or disproved. But, as most of the cross-cultural analyses of key patterns in American history written in recent decades amply demonstrate, serious comparison is better suited to determining the extent to which developments in the United States paralleled or diverged from those other societies and why. Much of the comparative work done thus far has stressed difference rather than similarity, which has been troubling for a number of prominent advocates of internationalist history, such as Ian Tyrrell and Akira Iriye. They have urged that we can best counter American exceptionalism by deploying international and transregional (encompassing, for example, the Atlantic Basin or the Pacific Rim) approaches that play down national differences and foreground cross-cultural similarities, which Iriye suggests are ultimately products of the unity of the human condition.³¹ But both recurring and divergent historical patterns are proper subjects for comparative and international history. And both similarities and differences challenge American exceptionalism by placing U.S. history in broader global frames of reference that allow us to identify and explore underlying commonalities in major patterns of societal development across time and space. All societies exhibit variations on these shared themes; and each has experienced transcultural processes of historical transformation, such as agrarian expansion, industrialization, or conquest, in distinctive ways. 19

     Akira Iriye's realization as a student in postwar Japan that his national history "could best be understood when it was examined from without as well as from within"³² provides a compelling point of departure for historians of the United States who have urged in a variety of ways that comparative or international approaches can provide more inclusive, nuanced, and complex understandings of the American experience than those adhering to a constricted master narrative that has been informed by exceptionalist thinking since the seventeenth century. At the most basic level, comparative analyses and global perspectives have contributed significantly to the disaggregation of the unified visions that have long dominated the writing of U.S. history. They demonstrate that national units, taken as a whole or conceived as autonomous entities, are difficult, if not impossible, to compare meaningfully. Comparative and world perspectives expose concepts of national purpose and character as the same sort of essentialisms associated with now-discredited approaches to history that were grounded in racial, religious, or civilizational typologies. And they illustrate the ways in which isolated national frames of reference can obscure or skew our understandings of cross-cultural interactions or transnational phenomena. 20

     Rather than whole civilizations (a term that is problematic in and of itself) or unified national narratives, serious comparison and manageable world history compel us to focus on clearly delineated processes and particular types of institutions, social movements, or discourses. Somewhat paradoxically, this narrowing of the breadth of occurrences and issues to be studied requires comparativists and globalists to concentrate on the history of specific subregions, or even locales, which are then compared in depth to areas in other societies that evince the same types of transformations, institutional developments, or socio-intellectual upheavals. This approach to historical analysis inevitably forces us beyond elite and male-centered narratives, which until recent decades have dominated the historiography of both the United States and the areas to which it has been compared.³³ In this way, comparative and international perspectives have prompted or reinforced broader efforts by historians and social scientists to give agency and voice to a diverse range of ethnic, gender, and class groups that have long been neglected or altogether ignored.³⁴ Close attention to the ways in which global transformations and cross-cultural movements of peoples, ideas, and things have shaped and complicated diversity throughout American history would appear to be essential for a society that, viewed from the long-term vantage point of the history of humankind, is perhaps the most remarkable for its ever more complex pluralism and its intensely creative, multicultural synergy. 21

In the remainder of this essay, I would like to explore some of the ways in which the history of the United States provides important variations on a number of the core processes of world history in the early modern and modern periods. For the United States, I will focus on patterns of European settlement on the North Atlantic coast and key themes in American frontier expansion. At both levels, I will give special attention to the intruders' interaction with the indigenous peoples and the pre-contact natural environment. Each of these key components of the American experience will be framed with reference to comparable processes in other parts of the world as well as with more general global trends. I have chosen to concentrate on these two aspects of American history in part because they have been less studied in a systematically comparative way than other key historical phenomena, such as slavery, racism, industrialization, immigration, labor organization, and popular political participation. But each also illustrates in rather revealing and distinctive ways the tensions between claims of U.S. exceptionalism and more capacious visions of American ideas, institutions, and material culture as models to be emulated by what were regarded as less fortunate societies. Each underscores the ways in which the history of the United States has been both integral to broader global developments and unquestionably distinctive but in no meaningful sense unprecedented or unique. 22

     John Winthrop's fantasy that the "eyes of all people" were fixed on the Puritan settlements of New England bore little relation to the actual isolation, precariousness, and marginality of all of the English plantations established along the Atlantic coast of North America in the first half of the seventeenth century. Though reasonably prosperous and driven by an all-encompassing religious purpose, the Puritans—and the Pilgrims who preceded them and the less religiously motivated settlers then struggling to establish plantations in the Chesapeake region further south along the same coast—accomplished little that the rest of humanity might emulate, much less see as exceptional. In fact, they scarcely attracted the attention of the troubled and deeply divided population of the English metropole from which they had sought refuge. Each of these small bands of English settlers represented a minuscule portion of the growing stream of European migrants who were then carving out enclaves for trade, conquest, and conversion from the coasts of Africa and across the great Indian Ocean trading zone to south China and Japan and throughout the Americas. Far larger numbers of Europeans had migrated in the previous century to Iberian colonies to the south, and in the seventeenth century migration from the British Isles to the Caribbean islands would considerably surpass that to all of the North Atlantic colonies.³⁵ It is true that the English migrants to the New World were predominantly permanent settlers in contrast to the transient merchants, missionaries, and officials who made up the bulk of the European population in Portuguese way stations, New France, and many of the imperial towns in Spain's vast New World empire. But comparable settlement societies were also struggling to survive elsewhere, including the Dutch on the southern tip of Africa and the mid-Atlantic coast, the French along the St. Lawrence River, and often far larger Spanish communities on the major islands of the Caribbean and key points of occupation and exploitation in Mesoamerica and the Andes highlands.³⁶ 23

     The climate in the areas where English settlers chose to establish their plantations proved a good deal less hospitable than in most of the areas selected by their European rivals.³⁷ The new world enclaves also proved unsuitable for the cultivation of many of the crops that English promoters of the voyages of expansion had anticipated the plantations would produce. And little of the mineral wealth that the Spanish had so ruthlessly extracted in South America was to be found.³⁸ Although the resources of the vast continent where the English chose to concentrate their early colonizing efforts would eventually prove equal to those of any of the areas of heavy European settlement, which Alfred W. Crosby has aptly termed neo-Europes,³⁹ in the early decades the very survival of the newly established plantations was in question. Failed experiments with the cultivation of European crops, severe weather, and—in Virginia, at least—the refusal of many "gentlemen" migrants to undertake manual labor left the plantations heavily dependent on supplies sent from England or on foods that the indigenous peoples taught them how to grow, that they received in barter, or that they increasingly extracted by force from local Indian communities. Support from their Nonconformist brethren in England was essential to sustain the Puritan venture in the New World wilderness during its early decades. The plantations in Virginia became economically viable only after the settlers there began to cultivate and market an Indian crop, tobacco, on an ever-larger scale.⁴⁰ Even after a number of the coastal plantations had become significant players in the burgeoning Atlantic trading system, they remained for nearly two centuries overwhelmingly exporters of primary products, especially forest products and foodstuffs. The colonists were also heavily dependent on the English metropole for manufactured goods—including farm implements, weapons, and processing machinery.⁴¹ 24

     If the climatic constraints facing the English in North America were more formidable than those encountered by settlers in many other areas of European overseas expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of broader environmental factors—including perhaps most decisively the disease environment—made for a number of advantages that facilitated the gradual expansion of the original coastal enclaves. In contrast to sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia, where malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and other diseases accounted for daunting mortality rates within European communities—settlers and transients alike⁴² —the disease environment throughout the Americas (and later across the islands of the Pacific) favored the European intruders. Not only did the long-isolated Amerindian peoples of the Western Hemisphere lack immunities to the pathogens of the Old World ecumene, the temperate lands settled in North America were apparently free of serious diseases to which the Europeans had not been previously exposed. Thus, although the proportion of the settlers who perished in the early decades of settlement was high—at times, alarmingly so—malnutrition, severe winters, and familiar diseases, such as influenza and smallpox, were largely responsible. But the settlers, and fishermen and explorers decades before them, transmitted a variety of diseases to the indigenous peoples of coastal America that produced waves of epidemics that proved physically and morally devastating.⁴³ The havoc wrought by the spread of newly introduced epidemic diseases served to reinforce the settlers' claims, which were sometimes based on genuine conviction, that the North American continent abounded in "free," "open" lands, meaning that they were uncultivated, unclaimed, and sparsely populated or altogether uninhabited. The demographic catastrophes that afflicted virtually all of the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and later the original populations of Oceania as well⁴⁴ ) also undermined sustained resistance on the part of the pre-contact populations and contributed significantly to the debasement of their cultures and modes of social organization. 25

     In North America, as in the other temperate lands in equally isolated Oceania where Europeans were able to establish settlement colonies, the lethal impact of invasive epidemic diseases was mirrored in the broader biosystem by the growing dominance of imported, domesticated livestock and feral animals, such as the European brown rat and a wide variety of birds, as well as plants, ranging from grain staple cultivars to weeds.⁴⁵ Over time, a number of key technological advantages that the Iron Age Europeans enjoyed over the Stone Age peoples of the Americas and those found throughout Oceania, as well as the Khoikhoi and San in southwestern Africa, but not the Bantu-speaking peoples like the Sotho encountered later and further east,⁴⁶ also proved critical to the ascendancy of ever-expanding settler enclaves over pre-contact societies. In each case, broken indigenous communities were either subordinated to various settler groups or driven further into the interior, where they often came into conflict with other authochonous societies. In the early stages of settlement, the pre-contact populations of North America were larger and better organized than those encountered in some of the other neo-Europes, such as Australia, or in the arid regions occupied by the Khoikhoi and San on the southern African frontier. But they were sparse in comparison with the Maori on the north island of New Zealand or the Amerindian peoples in the agricultural heartlands of Mesoamerica and the Andes highlands further south. 26

     The beaten and vulnerable remnants of the Indian societies along the Atlantic littoral were the first non-European peoples whom the agents of the city on the hill sought to remake in accordance with their understandings of Christian teachings and standards of civilized life. With its decidedly religious emphasis, this early Anglo-American settler version of the civilizing mission bore striking resemblances to similar projects in contemporary Spanish America, Portuguese Africa and Asia, and French Canada, as well as later proselytizing efforts in Hawaii, South Africa, and Oceania. But most of the Anglo-American civilizers had a good deal less tolerance for the local cultures than their French or Portuguese, and on the whole even their Spanish, counterparts. Whether missionary efforts were successful or not, in none of these contact zones did religious conversion begin to offset the disintegration of indigenous cultures and the dispossession of the pre-contact peoples that dominated the first decades of colonization. If anything, these processes would accelerate as missionaries and other settler colonizers pushed farther and farther into the interior of the Americas, southern Africa, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific. 27

     However lopsided conversion made cross-cultural exchanges in what Richard White has usefully characterized as the "middle ground"⁴⁷ that developed in the contact zones in the neo-Europes, it opened up the possibility of an institutionalized approach to relations between European settlers and the Indians, Maoris, or the Khoikhoi. The outcomes of this process on the Atlantic coast were by no means exceptional. But conversion provided the first opportunity, however feeble, for the Anglo-American settlers to disseminate their beliefs, material culture, and modes of social organization to alien, non-European societies. Rather than slowing or reversing the collapse of Indian culture, the educational and resettlement projects directed by John Eliot and his disciples in New England, which were by far the most ambitious attempted in the English colonies, were designed to wean those Indians who were persuaded to cooperate from savage ways that the settlers believed could only result in their eventual extinction. As their name suggests, the "praying towns" established by Eliot and his coworkers in the mid-seventeenth century were oriented toward converting the heathen Indians to Christianity. But the resettlement schemes and their elaborate educational agendas also aimed at a broader acculturation of Indian peoples to what the English believed to be more civilized societal norms—their own. The inhabitants of the towns were to be transformed into sedentary farmers, builders of houses, schools, and barns, and adepts at the craft skills and marketing acumen that were so highly valued in English and other settler societies.⁴⁸ In sum, in New England as in other contact zones involving previously isolated peoples, conversion and European education contributed significantly to the further erosion of indigenous cultures. But it was never clear in the case of the English colonies on the Atlantic coast (or for that matter in any of the neo-Europes) how fully the indigenous peoples who remade themselves in accordance with Anglo-American standards could be integrated into the citizenry that occupied the city on the hill. 28

The centrality of frontier expansion in the first three centuries of American history has perhaps made it inevitable that it would come to serve as "the wellspring of . . . much exceptionalist thinking in the U.S. case."⁴⁹ In this regard, Frederick Jackson Turner's seminal, and subsequently highly contested, survey of the influence of the frontier on the course of U.S. history represented the culmination of ideas and assessments that had been broached, albeit in a much more fragmented manner, for centuries. But Turner's vision of the frontier as the source of the exceptional quality of the American character, and what he believed to be the unprecedented success of the American experiment in democracy more broadly, set the agenda that has preoccupied most of the historians who have written on the subject in the past century. Their testing of Turner's eloquently, but rather vaguely, enunciated hypotheses has resulted in protracted debates and a vast literature on the frontier's impact on U.S. history as well as a considerably more meager number of rather abbreviated efforts to apply Turner's ideas to frontiers elsewhere.⁵⁰ Ironically, the earliest of these comparisons, written from the 1940s through the 1960s, focused heavily on the exceptionalist claims that Turner made for American history, which he argued could be traced to the sequential advance of the frontier westward. Historians of Canada, Australia, and tsarist Russia sought to determine whether or not frontier expansion nurtured individualism, democracy, and high rates of mobility in the societies that were the subjects of their own specialized research.⁵¹ 29

     In the same decades as Turner's influence on frontier scholarship outside the United States was peaking, historians such as Owen Lattimore and William H. McNeill, both of whom had a decidedly more cross-cultural orientation than Turner or those who sought to test his theories, proposed rather different versions of the frontier dynamic in East and Central Asian and East European history respectively.⁵² In part because they did not directly address Turner's arguments, but mainly because they dealt with very different types of frontier interactions, neither Lattimore's nor McNeill's writings had much effect on those who continued to write about the American frontier. But the alternative ways in which each of these historians conceived frontier history, and their detailed explorations of its critical effects on Eurasian history over several centuries, opened up possibilities for a discourse on frontiers that was more genuinely transcultural and more global in its perspectives than Turner's nationally focused, exceptionalist formulations. In the last couple of decades, research on the frontier has not only been quite deliberately extended beyond the issues and patterns stressed by Turner, it has led to detailed comparisons that do not necessarily feature U.S. case examples.⁵³ These alternative approaches and much of the more recent specialized research on non-American frontier societies suggest that the fixation on issues of American exceptionalism that informed so much of the debate over the past century between the Turnerians and their critics was misplaced. 30

     In some cases, both recent and earlier comparative research reveal that some of Turner's relatively neglected ideas about frontier history encapsulate themes that could be productively explored through rigorous comparisons with other areas. They might also be integrated into studies of the nature and impact of moving land frontiers in early modern and modern world history more generally. But it is vital that Turner's insights be incorporated into these broader approaches rather than serving as the basis of a revised, American-centered agenda similar to that which dominated so much of the early comparative research on frontiers. Cross-cultural and world perspectives are in turn likely to force further rethinking of American exceptionalism and lead to new understandings of the nature and impact of frontier expansion in U.S. history. Even though a full survey of these possibilities is beyond the scope of this essay, I would like to suggest some of the ways in which patterns of frontier expansion—including both those suggested by Turner and raised in the debates his work has generated and those identified by historians of areas other than the United States—can be integrated into larger frames of comparative and world history analysis. 31

     One thing that comparative and global perspectives make apparent is that Turner's use of the term "frontier" encompassed a number of related but rather different phenomena, each of which has been emphasized to varying degrees by other scholars writing on different time periods and locales. The focus of his argument was a sequence of advancing European settler occupations of very large areas, which he considered so lightly settled by Amerindian peoples that they could be seen as "free land"—unclaimed, scantily occupied, and non-productive. At times, and a good deal less clearly delineated, Turner's frontiers are borderlands, peripheral areas on "the hither edge of free land" and settlement. Although he again has little to say about the historical dynamics involved, his border zones are regions contested among different cultures. Other references suggest that frontiers are synonymous with "wilderness" areas, sparsely populated reservoirs of raw materials that urbanized metropoles (in his case, the expansive U.S. republic) can exploit to grow wealthy and powerful.⁵⁴ 32

     Although the land in question has rarely been free in Turner's sense of the term, his emphasis on advancing settler occupation and his more vague references to disputed borderlands between different cultural zones have served to fix our attention on a number of core processes in world history. The borderlands approach that Herbert Bolton pioneered decades ago (in part as a counter to Turner's emphasis on moving frontiers) has grown in recent decades into a dynamic subfield of historical enquiry. As David Thelen has argued, it provides one of the more promising ways of rethinking American history in genuinely comparative ways, both with regard to cross-cultural interactions and in terms of the borderland processes occurring within the United States that have increasingly foregrounded the multi-cultural dimensions of American society that had long been marginalized in national-centered and great man–centric historical narratives.⁵⁵ And even though Anglo-Saxon settler and American national expansion have been the focus of much of the borderlands research undertaken thus far, the conceptual apparatus can readily be transferred to frontier areas beyond North America.⁵⁶ Whatever the case examples deployed, the analytical complexities and logistical demands of the research required on converging cultures suggest that borderlands history is more likely to yield—at least in the short term—regional, rather than global, perspectives. But contextualizing the American frontier experience in a transnational or regional frame of reference has also provided the basis to challenge or set aside the exceptionalist assumptions and proclivities that have so long dominated the work of even those who have questioned Turner's thesis in fundamental ways. And the possibility of linking regional work on different borderlands sites in broader comparisons, which is superbly illustrated in a recent essay by Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron,⁵⁷ means that insights and patterns can be distilled that will ultimately inform our understandings of broader global trends and phenomena. 33

     As Owen Lattimore stressed decades ago, the dynamics of advance and contestation in frontier areas have for millennia been tempered by environmental conditions that constricted or favored different types of human adaptation, and shaped the cycles of interaction and conflict between hunting and gathering, pastoral and agricultural, peoples.⁵⁸ Seen in this larger time frame, the sequence of moving frontiers that Turner plots in American history—and that was also occurring in varying combinations and roughly contemporaneously in other neo-Europes in North and South America, southern Africa, and Oceania—had long been a major vehicle for the spread of human populations as well as the dissemination of different modes of human ecological adaptation. As in the neo-Europes, frontier expansion in earlier times and different locales also resulted in the transfer of technology and other forms of material culture, promoted the spread of domesticated plants, animals, and diseases, and involved the proselytization of religious systems, the extension of commercial networks, and often unintended shifts in plant and animal wildlife. 34

     It is important to remember that in addition to the dominant role these processes played in the history of all of the neo-Europes, they were also occurring in the early modern era and the first decades of industrialization in the Central Asia pastoral zone between the Ottoman, Chinese, and Russian empires, in east, central, and south Africa, over much of South and Southeast Asia, and in the Persian, Arab, and Berber cultural zones to the west. But in contrast to the settler frontiers in the Americas, Oceania, and southern Africa, which were the outgrowth of unprecedented overseas extensions of European polities and cultures into what had hitherto been relatively isolated areas from a global perspective, frontier expansion over much of the Old World ecumene represented continuations of cross-cultural contests and interactions that had been occurring for centuries. These categorical distinctions between the moving frontiers in the neo-Europes and those in the Old World ecumene often made for very different outcomes in everything from epidemiology and settlement patterns to the fate of indigenous peoples and the extent of environmental transformation. As the foregoing suggests, in a longer-term, global perspective, frontier expansion in the United States was by no means exceptional. Rather, it represented one example of a distinct variation on a more general pattern of population movement that has recurred over much of the globe throughout human history. 35

     Comparative and world history analytical frameworks also make it clear that the American frontier, like its contemporary counterparts in the other neo-Europes and those across the Old World ecumene, was not a single entity but a composite of several types of overland expansion.⁵⁹ In varying combinations, frontier history in European settlement colonies overseas, as well as in eastern Russia and other parts of the Old World ecumene, was made up of combinations of territorial advances that were centered, depending on time and place, on agricultural, pastoral, trading, mining, or forestry enterprises. The mix, phasing, and relative importance of each of these types of frontier expansion varied considerably in different national and regional contexts. Although the agricultural component dominated U.S. frontier expansion for nearly three centuries, it was proportionately less prominent in other European settlement colonies. Particularly in the early phases of frontier expansion in Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, for example, pastoralism—cattle raising on the pampas, sheep farming on the South Island and in the outback, and both on the Karroos—were the most pervasive sources of the frontier's influence on national development.⁶⁰ In South Africa, mining frontiers, first diamond and then gold, dominated the colony's history as a whole from the last decades of the nineteenth century to a far greater extent than was the case in other settler areas, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Mining frontiers played major roles at certain points in time and on a longer-term basis in specific frontier locales in these other neo-Europes, but in terms of overall influence on national development they were dwarfed by pastoral and agricultural frontier expansion.⁶¹ Although forest frontiers have had significant economic, if much less important social, effects on expansive societies in North America and Russia, nowhere has their impact been as pronounced as in Brazil, whose history has been and continues to be shaped in major ways by frontier advances centered on the clearance and exploitation of its vast rain forests. And even though mining, pastoral, and especially agricultural frontiers of the plantation variety were also critical to colonial and national development, deforestation and lumbering figured more prominently in each of these other types of settler advance in Brazil than in any of the neo-Europes or Russia.⁶² 36

     Even rather general comparisons between frontier regions also reveal significant differences in the ways in which the different types of territorial advance they share unfolded historically. Large-scale increases in the amount of land devoted to sedentary agriculture, to take the most obvious example, have played significant roles in the process of frontier expansion in virtually all of the regions of the world where this has occurred in the last three or four centuries. But the agents of agrarian expansion and the systems of land tenure under which they operate have varied widely between one frontier society and the next, and often between different regions and time periods within the larger and more extended versions of territorial advance. In South Africa, subsistence farmers and ranchers predominated on the agrarian frontier as it moved into the Karroos further and further from the limited markets at the Cape; in Argentina, large landholders, employing large numbers of migrant laborers and sharecroppers, pioneered extensive farming on the pampas; while the government-sponsored, homesteading schemes in Canada and the United States were intended to enable the emergence of yeoman farmers oriented to production for continental and overseas markets.⁶³ And as John Weaver's ongoing comparative research has amply demonstrated,⁶⁴ the patterns of occupation, justifications for seizure, regulation of property rights, and contests between government bureaucracies and frontier settlers varied considerably in each of the neo-Europes, despite the British origins of so many of them. 37

     Comparison of the variations on patterns of expansion across agrarian frontiers compels reassessments of some of the most cherished tenets of American exceptionalism. New Zealand historians have argued, for example, that the settler society that emerged from the expansion of sheep raising and squatter farming in the mid-nineteenth century was, if anything, more egalitarian and independent-minded than that of the American West. And rather than a zone where tsarist oppression reigned supreme, Siberia was perceived by serfs and free peasants alike as a frontier of relative freedom and considerable opportunity. At the same time, recent research has shown that railroad magnates and large landlords rather than idealized yeoman farmers may have reaped the greatest profits from homesteading schemes and the abundance of "free" land in the American West.⁶⁵ 38

     Even the shibboleth of Manifest Destiny proves not to have been unique to those who championed frontier expansion in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Contemporary advocates of Australia unification, for example, predicted that the colony would eventually be transformed into a mighty continent-spanning nation that would inherit the global mission of the British Empire. And one of the most outspoken of them deplored France's annexation of Tahiti as "an impudent interference with Australia's mission of civilization in the Pacific Ocean."⁶⁶ The teleological version of Manifest Destiny as the unfolding of a larger divine plan was more than matched by the Afrikaners' conviction that they were God's anointed people, whose frontier advances represented the reclamation of the promised land from its savage inhabitants.⁶⁷ And throughout the nineteenth century, tsarist policymakers and Slavophile intellectuals viewed Russia's "great historical mission" in the resource-rich expanses of Siberia and the Far East as essential to preserving Russia's standing as one of the great powers of Europe and fulfilling its ambition to become a global power, rivaling Great Britain. In the last half of the twentieth century, Russia, like the United States, relied heavily on the raw materials and manpower that it had drawn for centuries from its far-flung frontiers to sustain its superpower status.⁶⁸ 39

Although different in important respects, particularly duration and scale, the often fierce resistance on the part of the indigenous peoples to frontier expansion in what was to become the United States had striking parallels in most of the neo-Europes as well as throughout the Afro-Eurasian ecumene. As in the American West, substantial and well-organized indigenous societies repeatedly resorted to open warfare in order to contest the advance of settler invaders in frontier societies from New Zealand and Central Asia to South Africa and Canada. The legendary war parties of the Indians on the Plains and in the borderlands of North America were matched by the prowess, and at times considerable success in battle, of the Zulus and other Bantu-speaking peoples in southern Africa, the Maoris of New Zealand, and the Cossacks and Mongols on the Central Asian steppes. But, however stunning such isolated victories as Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn and the Zulu destruction of a British expeditionary force at Isandhlwana might have been, from the eighteenth century at the latest, violent resistance on the part of indigenous peoples to advancing frontiers was everywhere futile in the long run. Whether the beleaguered societies consisted of small bands of hunter-gatherers in the Australian outback or the Karroos east of Capetown, were defended by skilled horsemen, such as those of the North American prairies and the inner Asian steppes, or relied on superbly drilled foot soldiers such as those of the Zulu impis, all were ultimately subdued and subordinated by the expansive settler societies that sustained the moving frontiers that threatened to deprive them of their lands and destroy their ways of life. This shared outcome not only provides intriguing possibilities for comparative research on indigenous warfare and frontier conflict, it suggests important transregional themes in the ethno-cultural history of frontiers as well as larger global processes that were exemplified by recurring outcomes in each, quite distinctive, frontier locale.⁶⁹ 40

     Since the neolithic era, town-dwelling and agrarian peoples have written the histories of, classified, and often even supplied the very names of pastoral, hunting and gathering, and shifting cultivating societies, whose more sparsely populated lands came to be regarded as frontiers that bounded and offered the promise of expansion for more highly concentrated, sedentary populations. The labels that ancient chroniclers applied to the peoples associated with frontier areas were usually far from flattering. The Greeks and Chinese, for example, lumped them together as barbarians, or those who did not speak civilized languages or possess refined cultures like their own. The highly urbanized peoples of the Mesoamerican agrarian heartlands dismissed the bands of hunters and gatherers who drifted in from the north as chichimecs, or dog peoples. The names that the Romans and other settled Mediterranean peoples gave to nomadic invaders, such as the Vandals and Huns, came to be synonymous with wanton destruction and mass slaughter. And in the Abbasid age, the urbane Muslims of Persia and the Fertile Crescent dismissed Turkic and Mongol conquerors as uncouth infidels. From the early centuries of European expansion, unflattering designations—such as barbarian, primitive, and savage—for peoples contacted in incipient frontier regions overseas were increasingly abstracted for purposes of classification and worked into hierarchies that were thought to reflect levels of moral virtue and cultural achievement.⁷⁰ By the end of the eighteenth century, these divisions of humankind were widely thought to have been verified by scientific investigation. And when deployed in the following century in hegemonic, often racially charged, European discourses on the fate of pastoral or hunting and gathering peoples in frontier regions around the world, terms like primitive and savage, and even native and aboriginal, came to signify sorry pasts and tragic futures that would ultimately end with their cultural, and perhaps biological, extinction. 41

     Much of what nineteenth-century Americans thought, said, and wrote about the Indians of the American frontiers was shared, often with remarkably little variation, with the settler societies of the other neo-Europes, which were just as deeply committed to subduing their own indigenous peoples. Although the phrasing might differ, the "banjo bards" of frontier expansion in all of these areas justified settler occupation and the consequent dispossession of pre-contact peoples with strikingly similar appeals to the need to "open up" and render productive rich lands and critical resources that had long gone to waste. In all cases, this deplorable state of underdevelopment was traced to the low level of societal and cultural development of the indigenes. And in view of the relatively sparse, and rapidly declining, numbers of the indigenous populations in most areas, advocates of frontier expansion reasoned that there was more than enough land and resources to go around. In line with what was widely accepted as scientific thinking, expansionists argued that the "aboriginal" societies encountered on the frontiers provided superb examples of the phenomenon of recapitulation, or the survival of peoples and societies whose material culture and customs were similar or identical to those of ancient or Stone Age peoples. Recapitulation was but one aspect of highly compressed evolutionist vision of frontier history that is the diachronic centerpiece of Turner's thesis.⁷¹ But his celebration of the successive transformations of the West from a hunter-gathering and pastoral to an agrarian and modern, urban industrial society was standard fare in the writing of the advocates of frontier expansion in all of the neo-Europes. And like Turner, they, too, tended to see what they regarded as primitive indigenous cultures as obstacles to, rather than potential participants in, this process of social improvement and cultural uplift. But in Turner's rendition of frontier dynamics, the Indians had an additional role that, insofar as I am aware, was not a component of the expansionist ideologies of the Australians, New Zealanders, or Argentines. The Indians' resistance and counterexample played critical roles in shaping the idealized, rugged, and autonomous American, which Turner saw as one of the key outcomes of the frontier experience. 42

     By the late nineteenth century, many of the proponents of frontier expansion in all of the neo-Europes embraced the social evolutionist assumption, based largely on misreadings of the writings of Charles Darwin and at least implicit in Turner's thesis, that, as one Australian governor put it, "the natural progress of the aboriginal race[s was] towards extinction."⁷² And some, perhaps most, expansionists shared the view of the Reverend Frederic Farrar that this fate was deserved because such savage societies had failed to progress, to advance to civilized levels. "They have not," Farrar wrote in the 1860s, "added one iota to the knowledge, the arts, the sciences, the manufactures, the morals of the world."⁷³ 43

     Social evolutionist predictions of the imminent disappearance of the often more populous pastoral or hunting and gathering societies of the Old World ecumene were rarely cited by Russian, Chinese, or Ottoman advocates of frontier expansion. In contrast to the United States and the other neo-Europes, in the nineteenth century cultural rather than racial differences continued to be stressed by both sides in these confrontations. But as was the case in European settlement colonies, the scribes of the invading sedentary societies, who wrote the histories of these contests, also justified the conquest and displacement of the indigenes with formulaic complaints concerning fertile lands going to waste and rhetorical pronouncements regarding the necessity of civilizing primitive or barbaric peoples. And once political control had been established in Siberia or Central Asia, distinctive, but in many respects familiar, civilizing rhetorics were directed at the indigenous peoples.⁷⁴ 44

     Whatever the policies pursued by the settler invaders or however resilient indigenous cultures proved to be, nineteenth-century frontier expansion in both the neo-Europes and the steppe lands and savannahs of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene represented the end game of a process that was clearly under way by the seventeenth century, and was to prove a watershed in global history. In fact, this process, the eclipse of pastoral societies by their sedentary neighbors, was arguably one of the defining features of the early modern era. In the preceding millennia, pastoral peoples, who tended to be highly mobile and adept at warfare, more than held their own against their far more populous, sedentary neighbors. And periodically, mounted nomads, such as the Arabs, Mongols, and Turks, had conquered and ruled, in some cases for centuries, agrarian societies that bordered on their homelands along the fringes of the desert and in the steppes. But from the sixteenth century onward, innovations in fortification, highly disciplined infantry forces wielding more and more sophisticated firearms, and especially the deployment of field artillery gave urbanized, sedentary agricultural societies decisive advantages over pastoral peoples in warfare and the concentration of political power.⁷⁵ The spread of industrialization in the nineteenth century, and the railways and machine guns it generated, vastly accelerated this process and left the peoples of frontier areas beyond the zones of agrarian settlement and urban concentration even more vulnerable to subjugation, dispossession, and marginalization. The moving frontiers that extended this process across the American West were therefore significant and in some ways distinctive, but by no means exceptional, expressions of these watershed transformations in the history of humankind. 45

Beyond the identification in the history of the United States, as well as the societies to which it has been compared, of questions worth asking and underlying patterns deserving exploration, a broader contextualization of the American experience in world history is indispensable to understanding the nation's rise to global power. Not surprisingly, America's emergence as a global hegemon has led to ever-increasing insistence on its historic role as the model of progressive development for all of humankind, on the city on the hill as "a story and by-word through the world" side of the paradox of exceptionalism. The proliferation of overseas interventions and American initiatives to transform foreign cultures and social systems that the commitment to a universalized, transglobal mission has justified, if not inspired, makes unpacking exceptionalist rhetoric all the more critical. And one of the most effective ways to engage in that vital enterprise is to integrate fully the history of the United States into a larger global narrative. Whether one is concerned with frontier expansion, industrialization, overseas colonization, or America's critical roles in the spread of the capitalist world system, global perspectives on these multifaceted processes are essential to any attempt to understand the motives, responses, and actions of those who actually participated in them. Intercontinental migrations supplied the manpower, North American frontier regions and overseas areas contributed much of the resource base (including investment capital until the last half of the nineteenth century), and foreign rivals—political, military, commercial, and ecclesiastical—often provided the impetus for the ever-increasing importance of cross-cultural exchanges in the history of the United States. 46

     By the last half of the twentieth century, transnational exchanges had become so routinized and pervasive that they impinged on virtually all aspects of American life, hence literally globalizing contemporary U.S. history. As early as the oil crisis of 1973, it was clear to all who were willing to see that what had been long been presumed to be American corporations had in fact metamorphosed into international conglomerates with bottom-line priorities that often had little to do with the national interest. New waves of immigration—more likely in post-1960s decades to flow from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia rather than Europe—have complicated and increased the ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States to the point where the majority status of peoples of European descent is challenged, or has already been eclipsed, in the fastest-growing and most dynamic areas of the country. The resources this polyglot population consumes, the products it produces, and the environmental consequences of both are now calibrated in terms of international capital flows and market exchanges as well as ecological agendas that are premised on visions of the earth as a single entity. 47

     Except in times of major international crises, it is unlikely that most Americans give much thought to world events in their day-to-day lives, even though those lives are permeated with consumer products, from basketball shoes to DVD players, manufactured in once "exotic" regions like the Pacific Rim or Central America. But from the Gulf War through a series of costly overseas interventions such as those in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, international conflicts, which the press now routinely proclaim vital to the national interest, have more and more preoccupied a populace apparently resigned to paying the considerable costs—in taxes if not casualties—of America's self-appointed role as policeman of yet another new world order. The steep rise in interventionism from the late 1930s required America's executive guardians of ambitious and highly contested global dispensations to devote significantly higher portions of their personal energies and political capital to foreign affairs than was the case through most of the nation's earlier history. During World War II and the Cold War decades, this shift in leadership priorities was more obvious than it has been after the collapse of Soviet command communism. But it is striking that world events both made and unmade the first post–Cold War president, George Bush, who engineered a pyrrhic victory in the Persian Gulf only to be defeated in large part because he came to be perceived as a leader who had neglected domestic affairs. And overseas crises and foreign relations increasingly became the preoccupation of the last president of the twentieth century, Bill Clinton, whose major successes in enacting domestic programs was largely confined to those inextricably bound up in broader projects to advance globalization, such as NAFTA and GATT. 48

     In view of the relatively isolated and peripheral position of colonial America until the late eighteenth century, and arguably the United States for much of the nineteenth, world historians might well be justified in minimizing their importance to global development in the early modern era and the first decades of the industrial age. Other than to lament the myopia and provincialism of their American audience, prominent post–World War II scholars, such as William H. McNeill, Marshall Hodgson, J. H. Parry, and Eric Wolf, whose pioneering cross-cultural writings and prescriptions for the study of world history revitalized a moribund field, made little use of U.S. case examples and only rarely commented on American variations on larger global themes.⁷⁶ Foreign area specialists—who abounded in the early decades of the Cold War, when government, university, and foundation funding made possible the proliferation of language programs and multidisciplinary centers—were even more determined than the pioneers of the new world history to promote the study of other peoples' societies and cultures. And in pursuit of these new perspectives, they often quite consciously neglected related developments in the United States or American influences on their areas of expertise. In many instances, they did so out of the conviction that the American impact had already been excessively studied and its importance consistently overstated. Similar reasoning also helps to account for the scant coverage given to American case examples in college history courses with comparative and global dimensions in this formulative period.⁷⁷ 49

     In the 1960s and 1970s, the growing influence within the historical profession of comparative approaches that very often included major U.S. case examples prompted many world historians and area specialists to reassess their often deliberate marginalization of America's impact on the broader historical experience of humankind. It was soon apparent that distinctive, but by no means exceptional, American versions of transcultural and intercontinental historical processes, such as settler colonialism, frontier expansion, slavery, racism, segregation, immigration, industrialization, and imperialism, were simply too integral to world history to be neglected or ignored. U.S. variants on common global themes were also too important in terms of their scale, complexity, and international impact to be left out of broader cross-cultural narratives. Meaningfully integrating American history into global narratives and comparative analyses also countered the tendency for the writings and courses of area specialists and world historians to be ghettoized, confined in their appeal to relatively small numbers of readers and students. But above all, the traumatic descent during the 1960s into the Vietnam quagmire underscored the deficiencies and dangers of conceiving the world history of the early modern and modern eras without a meaningful U.S. component. It also led to the realization that without serious inquiry into the history of the societies in the areas into which the Americans increasingly intruded and the larger global systems in which they came to play dominant roles, we cannot begin to understand the political, military, economic, and cultural impact on the rest of the world of America's emergence in the twentieth century to the precarious status of global hegemon. 50

Michael Adas is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His teaching and research have been devoted to the comparative history of European and American colonialism. His more recent publications have focused on the technological dimensions of colonial domination and reaction, and include Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1989). The themes and issues explored in this essay were suggested by Adas's foray into the rich historiography on cross-cultural interactions in several phases of U.S. development for his forthcoming book Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission.

Notes

At various stages in the writing of this essay, I have refined, and at times reworked, my arguments in response to the questions and critiques of the participants in a panel on U.S. and global history at the 1999 convention of the Organization of American Historians; a conference on the writing of world history sponsored by the German Historical Institute, London, March 2000; a plenary session on world history at the nineteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo, August 2000; a workshop sponsored by the Japan Center for Area Studies, Tokyo, and a seminar at Seikei University, January 2001. Useful suggestions for revision were made by several anonymous referees, and Michael Grossberg and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who shepherded the essay through several versions. I am especially indebted to Karen Balcolm and Ray Ashare for their research assistance and insightful comments, and to Ramachandra Guha, Fumiko Nishizaki, Jane Adas, Matt Guterl, and above all David Engerman for their careful readings and suggestions for revision.
¹ Winthrop's expectations were conveyed to his Puritan followers in a lay sermon delivered on their arrival in the New World. See "A Model of Christian Charity," in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, eds., The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge, 1985), 71–74.
² Quoted passage from Serge Ricard, "The Exceptionalist Syndrome in U.S. Continental and Overseas Expansionism," in David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen, eds., Reflections on American Exceptionalism (Kiel, 1994), 73. Some decades earlier, in her work Les mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine (Paris, 1976), 90–98, Elise Marienstras provided numerous examples of these opposing visions but did not explicitly address their paradoxical juxtaposition.
³ Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American–East Asian Relations (New York, 1967).
⁴ William Appleman Williams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1776–1976 (New York, 1976), 27 (his italics). In a recent overview of American foreign relations, Walter A. McDougall explores these tensions, particularly in the early history of the United States. But he does not link them directly to the contradictions in American exceptionalist thinking. See Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston, 1997).
⁵ Mary Nolan, "Against Exceptionalisms," AHR 102 (June 1997): 773.
⁶ Peter N. Carroll, Puritans and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York, 1967), 13–14, 37–38; and Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996), 14.
⁷ On these connections, see especially Joyce Appleby, "Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism," Journal of American History 79 (1992): 419–21.
⁸ The basic tenets of progressivist exceptionalism, which peaked in historical circles in the 1950s and early 1960s, were perhaps the most fully explicated in David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, 1954); and Daniel J. Boorstin's three-volume, essentialist portrait of The Americans (New York, 1958–73).
⁹ Appleby, "Recovering America's Historic Diversity," 424.
¹⁰ The most wide-ranging treatment of these responses to the American Indians can be found in Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore, 1953). For China, see Peter Buck, American Science and Modern China, 1876–1936 (London, 1980); and for Japan, Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations throughout History (New York, 1997). Recent reactions to Muslim "fundamentalism" range from Samuel Huntington's strident prognostications in "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22–49; to the more muted strictures in Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together and What This Means for Democracy (New York, 1992).
¹¹ The concept of cultural erasure is explored by Priscilla Wald in her provocative essay "Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation," in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C., 1993), 59–84. See also Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian (New York, 1978), 137, 150; and William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (New Haven, Conn., 1984), 51, 63–64, 70–71, 143, 151. Current research, such as that undertaken by Anne Keary at the University of California, Berkeley, reveals that some missionary groups were committed to the serious study of Indian languages (as had Roger Williams at an early stage of the colonization process). But, as a substantial body of historical literature has demonstrated, Indians were generally discouraged (or forbidden) from using their own languages in mission or government schools and were required to communicate with the settler population in English. I am grateful to David Engerman for drawing my attention to Keary's work.
¹² Michael Adas, "Improving on the Civilizing Mission? Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines," Itinerario 22 (1998): 44–66; Howard Gillette, "The Military Occupation of Cuba, 1899–1902: Workshop for American Progressivism," American Quarterly 25 (1973): 410–25; Dean Tipps, "Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective," Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973): 199–226.
¹³ For a fuller consideration of these factors, see Raymond Grew, "The Comparative Weakness of American History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1985): 87–101.
¹⁴ As long as the American side of this interaction was privileged, an imperative underscored by Carlton Hayes's reproach in the mid-1940s that few who specialized in U.S. history shared his view that the American experience was best studied in the context of a broadly defined, expansive European civilization. See Hayes, "The American Frontier—Frontier of What?" AHR 51 (1946): 199–216.
¹⁵ For overviews that focus on different eras in U.S. development, see Appleby, "Recovering America's Historic Diversity," 419–31; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York, 1976); and Daniel T. Rodgers, "Exceptionalism," in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, N.J., 1998): 21–40.
¹⁶ For a superb exploration of these issues, despite conclusions that may prove unsettling for comparativists and globalists, see Michael Kammen, "The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration," American Quarterly 45 (1993): 1–43. Daniel T. Rodgers's recent essay "Exceptionalism" covers some of the same ground as Kammen but in interesting and often original ways.
¹⁷ For an early and thorough critique of these connections, see Laurence Veysey, "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered," American Quarterly 31 (1979): 455–77.
¹⁸ The apt phrasing is Carl Degler's. See "Comparative History: An Essay Review," Journal of Southern History 34 (1968): 426.
¹⁹ William H. McNeill, "A Defense of World History," in McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986), 82–95.
²⁰ Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," AHR 96 (October 1991): 1032–39.
²¹ Grew, "Comparative Weakness," 99.
²² See, for examples, George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford, 1981); and Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (Oxford, 1995); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis., 1969); Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986); Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999); and Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986).
²³ This oversight is shared by leading comparativists, such as Carl Degler and George Fredrickson, whose periodic reflections on the state of the comparative subfield make little mention of work that does not make significant use of U.S., or at the very least European, case examples. See Degler, "Comparative History"; and Carl N. Degler, "In Pursuit of American History," AHR 92 (February 1987): 1–12; Fredrickson, "Comparative History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 457–73; and "From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History," Journal of American History 82 (1995): 587–604.
²⁴ Grew, "Comparative Weakness," 87.
²⁵ Among the more influential of this very substantial body of works are Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (Oxford, 1993); Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, Edmund Burke III, ed. (New York, 1993); and The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974); Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, 1989); William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York, 1986); Peter N. Stearns, European Society in Upheaval: Social History since 1800 (London, 1967); Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York, 1978); Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969); and Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. edn. (London, 1991); Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (London, 1979); and most recently Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000); and Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000).
²⁶ Even a partial survey of the works in each of these subfields would require an extensive essay in itself. But to gain a sense of the influence of comparative studies on U.S. historiography, one might reflect on the impact in the postwar decades of the seminal, if highly controversial, writings of Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins, and try to imagine the state of such critical fields as slavery, racism, and frontier settlement without the comparative contributions of Carl Degler, David Brion Davis, Eugene Genovese, George Fredrickson, John Cell, Philip Curtin, Sidney Mintz, Orlando Patterson, Jack Greene, Herbert Klein, John Thornton, Philip Morgan, Peter Kolchin, and Richard White.
²⁷ Bloch's case "Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européenes" was first made in 1928 in Oslo, as a paper at the Sixth International Congress of Historical Sciences. My citations are from the English translation by J. E. Anderson, "A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies," in Marc Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (New York, 1969), 44–81.
²⁸ For an insightful critique of the limitations of Bloch's comparative vision that is centered on these issues, see William H. Sewell, Jr., "Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History," History and Theory 6 (1967): 208–18.
²⁹ A distinction that Allen Dawley insisted on well over a decade ago. See "Farewell to 'American Exceptionalism,'" in Jean Heffer and Jeanine Rovet, eds., Why Is There No Socialism in the United States (Paris, 1988), 311–15. For a more recent stress on the importance of these semantic distinctions for American historiography more broadly, see Kammen, "Problem of American Exceptionalism," 15, 24, 32.
³⁰ Here, the works of Seymour Martin Lipset provide perhaps the most notable counterexample. But despite a proclivity for rhetorical flourishes, he, too, has stressed the differences that comparison can reveal. See, for example, his recent essay on "American Exceptionalism Reaffirmed," in Byron E. Shafer, ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford, 1991), 1–45.
³¹ Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism," 1034–38; and Akira Iriye, "The Internationalization of History," AHR 94 (February 1989): 3–5.
³² Iriye, "Internationalization of History," 9.
³³ Several decades ago, Laurence Veysey perceptively drew attention to the correspondence between exceptionalist generalizations concerning national character and a unified narrative of American history that was all but monopolized by white males. See "Autonomy of American History Reconsidered," 457–58.
³⁴ A trend that was emphasized by Joyce Appleby in her presidential address to the Organization of American Historians. See "Recovering America's Historic Diversity," 426–31.
³⁵ A composite reckoning of the different migrant flows is included in the introduction to "To Make America": European Emigration in the Early Modern Period, Ida Altman and James Horn, eds. (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 3–6. The volume of official and non-official migration to the Americas has been skillfully interpolated by Magnus Morner. See "Spanish Migration to the New World prior to 1810: A Report on the State of the Research," First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, Fredi Chiappelli, ed., 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1976), 2: 737–82. I am grateful to John Kicza, whose recent paper for the 1999 AHA Annual Meeting directed me to these key sources on comparative population flows. For estimates of English migrant streams in the early centuries of colonization, see Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986). Decades ago, William Woodruff estimated that there were 160,000 Spanish in the Americas by 1574 and 25,000 Portuguese in Brazil alone. See The Impact of Western Man: A Study of Europe's Role in the World Economy, 1750–1960 (New York, 1967), 73. See also Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York, 1966), 116–19; and C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York, 1969).
³⁶ For a well-focused comparison of Dutch settlement in southern Africa with the American colonies, see Fredrickson, White Supremacy, chap. 1; for the French in Canada, see Marcel Trudel, The Beginnings of New France, 1524–1663, Patricia Claxton, trans. (Toronto, 1973); and for patterns of Spanish migration and settlement in the Americas, Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish Society in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge, 1983), chap. 4.
³⁷ Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period," AHR 87 (December 1982): 1262–89.
³⁸ For samples of hyperbolic estimates of the productive potential of the newly colonized areas, see the accounts of Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590; rpt. edn., New York, 1972); Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (1609; rpt. edn., London, 1970); and the essays and numerous travel accounts published by Richard Hakluyt. On the harsh realities that frustrated many of these dreams, see Kupperman, "Puzzle of the American Climate."
³⁹ See esp. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
⁴⁰ Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), chaps. 2, 3, 6; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–164