The Nationalization of Nature

By: Richard White

Nature, too, has a history, and in the late twentieth century that environmental history seems transnational. The millennium closes with fears about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, the rise in human populations, the depletion of ocean fisheries, and the loss of biological diversity. None of these problems are national; all are, to varying extents, global. Global environmental events are retrospective as well as prospective. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, historians now argue, pandemics depopulated the Western Hemisphere, ecological invasions precipitated by European expansion began their long march across the world, and climatic change rearranged European agriculture.¹	1
But there is something incongruous about global perspectives on the environment: they are to a striking degree confined to the present, the future, and the pre-modern past. In considering the early modern and modern periods—the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and most of the twentieth—historians have de-emphasized the global and transnational and treated environmental issues as largely national. Particularly in the United States, where environmental history is strongest, national boundaries have largely determined studies of the depletion of resources, efforts at conservation and preservation, and ecological change.² Historians have often framed such studies below the scale of nation—as regional or local—but they have rarely framed them above it. Environmental histories, it seems, parallel the history of the state, even though it is hard to believe that nature itself does. When writing about eras of strong or rising states, environmental historians make their histories state-based. When writing about eras with few or weak states or those when the state seems to be in decline, historians write in other frames than that of the nation.	2
I raise this issue of the relationship between environmental history and national history to consider the place of national histories in an age when the future of the nation-state seems uncertain and when many critical problems seem global rather than national. In posing the issue within environmental history as one of transnational versus national studies in different periods, I seek to emphasize the anachronistic nature of history itself. I am using terms—national, global, environmental—that themselves have histories; they have taken on both existence and meaning over time. I am reading modern meanings back onto a world that did not originally contain them.³ I emphasize my use of such terms to stress both the complexity of the historian’s choice and the historian’s freedom. We constantly impose categories on the past that the people of the past neither knew nor used, even as we seek to reflect accurately how people in the past understood their world. We sometimes seem to live in the paradoxical hope that concepts we use to rearrange the past will help us to mold—to arrange—the future.	3
Problems of Scale
Global, transnational, national, and local are, among other things, matters of scale. And scale, as I am using it here, is largely a spatial category. Historians have often been notoriously inattentive to spatial issues. We may not, as Edward W. Soja accuses us of doing, write as if history took place on the head of a pin, but we do usually regard space as a simple container for the political, social, or cultural. Our space is the space of Christendom, Islam, the Roman Empire, European culture, or the United States; it is the space of New York, Chicago, or the South. Above all, once the nation emerges, our space is a national space or a subdivision of it, such as a region or a municipality. With relatively few exceptions—William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis being one—historians pay less attention than geographers to the social, as distinct from the strictly political, production of these spaces. We take them as givens.⁴	4
But space, as Henri Lefebvre, the French geographer, has framed it, is socially produced. Every society, every means of production, creates space. The boundedness of experience is one of the social facts of daily life, but until recently, American historians have often taken space for granted. They have historicized space only when considering the extension of formal boundaries or the drawing of legal racialized boundaries governing public spaces such as those prevalent during segregation in the South. This is changing. I think that somewhat haltingly a history of space is taking shape that draws inspiration from, complements, and will certainly challenge some of the efforts in geography.⁵	5
To give an idea of what Lefebvre means by space as a socially produced relationship, a mediation between things, and to see its relevance for history, we can look at Lefebvre’s example of a modern house and its street. These have an air of stability and immovability. They would seem to personify the resolutely local. But, writes Lefebvre,	6
[A] critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, stripping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs, and its thin non-load bearing walls, which are really glorified screens, and uncovering a very different picture. In the light of this imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on. Its image of immobility would then be replaced by an image of complex mobilities.⁶
The house becomes analogous to a machine manipulated by its inhabitants.
The same analysis could apply to the street or the city as a whole. As one moves from house to street to city, the scale predictably rises. What is more surprising, as relationships between things shift at each scale, the level of complexity does not necessarily do so. Organizational complexity is not simply a function of greater size as one goes from house to street to neighborhood to city because different spatial scales—some far greater than the city—have already interpenetrated the house itself and are necessary to explain it. Where does the water, the gas, the electricity come from? To understand the nexus of spatial relations produced in the house, it is necessary to understand regional, national, even global relationships because each interpenetrates the house.	7
In terms of environmental history, the production of everything that moves through and is consumed within the house has environmental consequences and natural as well as social causes.⁷ It may be impossible to study everything at once, but it is possible to recognize that a historical study, even on the level of a single house, presents the historian with choices of scale. Movements from one scale to another change the array of problems under examination. There are scales appropriate to problems—there are better and worse choices—but there are no absolutely right or wrong scales, no automatically dominant scale, per se. Each scale reveals some things while masking others. The social space of each scale focuses attention on a set of relationships between people and things.	8
Lefebvre’s example of a modern house is also, of course, an example situated in history. It is not some absolute truth about the nature of houses. The scales revealed by a modern house are not true of all houses at all times. A seventeenth-century house in Dedham, Massachusetts, a sixteenth-century Wichita lodge, or a nineteenth-century slave cabin would not show the same intersection of scales, but neither would any of them be purely local.	9
What Lefebvre allows is a sense of dynamic space, partially natural and partially social; spaces are not segregated but instead interpenetrate without fading off into a fuzzy heterogeneity. There are still recognizable houses, streets, and cities, just as there are recognizable regions, nations, and worlds. But it is impossible to look at one scale without encountering others. Lefebvre points the way to a history that does not have to choose between the local, regional, national, and transnational but can establish shifting relationships between them.	10
It is, however, not just space that is socially produced; the very ability to formulate the scales of an environmental issue, either historically or in the present, is a social product. The current focus on global scale, for example, is not just the result of a correspondence between actual global environmental problems and scholarly efforts that correctly recognize them as such. Problems occurring across the globe do not automatically produce global studies. It is just as possible to detect contemporary environmental problems that affect the entire globe on a local, regional, or national level and study them only on that level. Without a social infrastructure—an international scientific community, incredibly sensitive measuring instruments, computer modeling, an international popular media willing and able both to reduce complicated problems to simple slogans and then to repeat them across the globe, and the ability of humans to move information and themselves quickly around the planet—global warming or the loss of biodiversity, to cite only two examples, would neither be recognized as global problems nor have the same potential for spurring historical change.⁸	11
Our contemporary environmental globalism is a matter of contemporary technology, consciousness, and whole new biological categories (such as biodiversity, ancient forests, and rain forests) as much as real environmental phenomena. As in Lefebvre’s house, it is virtually impossible to disentangle the social and the natural here. As in his modern house, there are interlocking scales, and those scales are socially and historically produced.	12
National and Global: Comparative Histories and Transnational Histories
My argument so far is at once a backhanded defense of the national and a critique of the nation’s dominance in histories of the modern era. History as a discipline is the child of the nation-state. Since the nation-state took the stage in the early modern era—or rather once the nation-state became the stage, historians have almost automatically used it as the preferred scale for their work.⁹	13
The dominance of the national in modern histories is both less and more than it seems. Push it a little and its strength appears illusory; push it still more and its strength is all too real. Modern history, it is quite true, has often not literally been national history: it has often been local or regional history. But local and regional histories are frequently national histories in disguise. They often become national by having certain localities or regions stand for the nation. In this metonymic history, for instance, textbooks have often treated the history of one section of the United States, the Northeast, as if it stood for the entire country.¹⁰ Similarly, the experience of one portion of the population—usually middle-class white males—becomes shorthand for the national experience.	14
Regional and local studies became national by being metonymic—representative of a larger whole—but they are also national when they take the opposite tack. Authors of some studies have sought to claim that their localities or regions were important variants on a dominant national experience. In either case, their standard of comparison remains the nation in which the region or community is located. In the United States virtually all such studies seek to say something about an “American experience.”	15
The national in too many histories does not, to use Lefebvre’s terms, really interpenetrate the local or regional; it does not even superimpose itself over them; it just dominates them. The history of the nation has involved the subordination of any entity operating at a smaller scale. But this has not proved the most intellectually profitable way to understand these relationships.	16
Correcting the excesses of the national should not involve recapitulating these mistakes on a new scale, the global. To return to the example of environmental history, the global has emerged as a real and important space. The social creation of a scientific and media infrastructure capable of detecting, constructing, and publicizing phenomena as global and the spread of global markets are both signs of its creation and importance. But to allow the global to erase other social spaces and scales, as the national did before it, would be a serious mistake. The sense that goods, capital, labor, and ideas move increasingly freely through global—or at least transnational—markets is one of the great, and uncritically accepted, assumptions of the late twentieth century. And since leading environmental historians have come to regard the market and capitalism with their relentless commodification of nature as the great engine for modern environmental change, a globalization of the market points toward the global as an appropriate scale for at least recent environmental history.¹¹ Global has become the scale du jour. National is increasingly passé.	17
Yet if one scale inevitably interpenetrates others, if new scales can arise and superimpose themselves on others without erasing what was already there, then it is perhaps prudent to forbear calling for a replacement of the national with the global. It is better to think of scales best suited to problems and the intersection of numerous scales.	18
Instead of presenting a menu, however, most arguments over scale become binary choices. In discussions of American history, the question of scale has often been transmuted into a debate about the centrality of national history. Broadly speaking, there have emerged two basic approaches to adopting a scale larger than the nation in American history: the comparative and the transnational. Advocates of a supranational scale have confronted two questions that bear on attempts to study environmental history across national borders. Should a history that moves beyond national boundaries be primarily a comparative history of nation-states? Do national comparisons involving the United States necessarily end up buttressing American exceptionalism?¹²	19
George M. Fredrickson has championed the comparative approach. He has offered the most compelling arguments for the centrality of the nation-state in any cross-national comparative work. He does not think that comparative national histories involving the United States necessarily end up as a form of American exceptionalism. Echoing a position taken by Michael McGerr, he claims that critics have conflated discussion of the real differences between nations with exceptionalism. Nations and national identities, Fredrickson argues, “have become potent forces—probably the most salient sources of modern authority and consciousness.”¹³ They not only cannot be ignored, they are central to any practical comparative history. And comparisons between them will yield differences as well as similarities.	20
In discussing how to compare nation-states, Fredrickson is of only limited help. He is critical of Theda Skocpol’s “macrocausal analysis,” which compares countries by looking at their major social, economic, and political features and isolating discrete variables. But he is also critical of studies that focus on culture, arguing that they lead to a “radical nominalism” in which each nation has a unique trajectory and meaningful comparison is impossible. He argues that approaches “that take seriously both cultural and structural factors and that (without deterministic preconceptions) probe their interactions” can avoid exceptionalist traps.¹⁴ Although his approach is hard to disagree with, it offers little guidance about how any actual comparison might proceed.	21
The best articulated counterposition is Ian Tyrrell’s idea of transnational history. Tyrrell argues that certain problems and historical developments demand a unit of analysis other than the nation-state. He offers several examples: (1) regional studies and studies of transnational systems, (2) environmental histories of changes that have little to do with national borders, and (3) studies of organizations, movements, and ideologies that are not confined by national borders.¹⁵ When attacked for obliterating all national difference in the name of a crusade against exceptionalism and for ignoring the centrality of nation-states, Tyrrell insists that he has no desire to eliminate studies of difference or comparative studies of nation-states. He just wants to make comparative history move beyond an “exclusive concern with differences between nation states.” And, as he adds in his essay in this issue, the seeds of a transnational history, in the sense of an American national history that contributes to a larger general synthesis, have long existed within the historiography of the United States.¹⁶	22
There is, however, relatively little scholarship on North America that fits either Fredrickson’s or Tyrrell’s criteria (after all, this dearth helped spark their articles). Only colonialists have begun routinely to think of historical problems in terms larger than the state or the state and its colonies. Where once French colonization was pertinent largely to historians of Canada and colonial historians in the United States looked largely at the thirteen colonies that later formed the United States, now larger and larger units have begun to emerge. British North America, for example, includes settlements in the Caribbean and Canada. And there is, above all, the Atlantic world: a “notional entity,” as J. H. Elliott puts it, framed by later historians rather than the people who actually lived in it.¹⁷	23
Studies of this Atlantic world provide the best example of what North American transnational histories might in practice look like. Much of this work is very good, indeed, superb. By breaking out of an older framework in which scholars examined colonial Mexico only for its relation to modern Mexico, this new scholarship allows the question of colonial identities to take on a much broader and more interesting aspect. Different peoples of the Atlantic world eventually proclaimed different colonial or national identities, but this does not mean that there were no common factors shaping those identities. The edited collection Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World examines this process. By comparing the development of early colonial identities in this Atlantic world—and the hopes of colonists for the societies they wished to create—this work highlights commonalities and differences that cannot be understood simply as differences between discrete colonies. For example, Franciscans in Mexico and Puritans in New England, with their vision of a “city on a hill,” might have more in common than the Puritans had in common with fellow English colonists on the Chesapeake Bay. In his conceptions of his place in society and of a proper social order, a Virginia planter might have been closer to a Mexican hidalgo than he was to an artisan in his own colony.¹⁸	24
Numerous studies within this Atlantic world are broadly comparative in Tyrrell’s sense. There are studies not only of identity but also of slavery, migration, contact, and imperialism itself. Many of these works are, however, edited volumes that allow individual scholars to retain their specialized cakes and eat them too by participating in a broadly comparative endeavor. Thus slave labor systems appear throughout the Atlantic world and can be studied and compared on a continental scale.¹⁹	25
It is significant that this promising start for a continental focus examines mainly the prenational period of North America. Whether in the Atlantic world of historians or a North American world of historical geographers, comparison and a broad examination of development seem easier in studying periods before the emergence of Mexico, Canada, and the United States as nations. Once they emerge, the literature becomes largely a literature of nation-states. After the colonial period, the Atlantic world ceases to be even a notional entity for most American historians.	26
Scale in Environmental History
If historical understanding depends on finding appropriate scales, even on creating notional entities such as the Atlantic world or the Pacific Rim, then the first step should be trying at least to recognize the variety of scales within which an issue can be framed. Ian Tyrrell properly points to environmental history as a field in which the national is of a scope insufficient to the problems under consideration. He regards environmental history as providing a particularly good opportunity for transnational history, and he has provided a fine example of it in his recent book on Californian and Australian environmental reform, True Gardens of the Gods. And although environmental history is still written largely as national history, there is much about the natural environment that is not particularly national, as both current environmental issues and recent scholarly work, particularly the work of Alfred Crosby, emphasize.²⁰	27
Since so many of our concerns about the limits of national histories arise from our current sense of the limits of the state and the porosity of national borders, I broach the issue of scales in environmental history with frankly presentist examples. Their appropriate scales are an open and confusing question. My examples are from Pacific Northwest newspapers of July 1997, but they could be easily duplicated in any section of the country at any time of the year. In late July there were numerous broadly environmental stories in the national edition of the New York Times and in the Seattle Times. Brazil opened forest reserves in the Amazon region to commercial loggers in an attempt to combat illegal logging. There were stories on Hurricane Danny drenching Alabama, flooding in central Europe, a new antipollution device in automobile gas tanks, and the decline of Yellowstone National Park’s bison herd.²¹ And, finally, there were two stories on salmon. The first, covered by both the New York Times and the Seattle Times, was the “salmon war” highlighted by the blockade of the Alaskan ferry Malaspina at Prince Rupert, British Columbia, by Canadian fishers angry at overfishing by Americans. The second story, reported only in the local section of the Seattle Times, concerned a hundred thousand Atlantic salmon, an entirely different species from Pacific salmon, that escaped from a fish farm on Puget Sound.²² Although all of the stories had histories, the press reported them with little temporal depth. They suddenly appeared and just as suddenly vanished. What would become the biggest environmental story of the year, El Niño, did not put in an appearance at all.	28
The New York Times placed some of the stories in its national section and others in its international section. National seems to have meant a story that affected only the United States or some part of the United States; international meant that it concerned countries outside the United States but might also concern the United States. But such classifications are often arbitrary. The New York Times presented the Brazilian rain forest story as international, but the rain forest was, and is, no stranger to American domestic and environmental politics. The Seattle Times framed the escaped Atlantic salmon story as local, but it was unlikely that all the fish would stay confined to Puget Sound or to United States territorial waters. The “salmon wars” were, by contrast, in the international section.	29
The environmental issues of July 1997 all operated on multiple scales, including the national. On one level, Atlantic salmon, Pacific salmon, and rain forests have no nationality, but on another level, they were subject to all kinds of national claims. In the Pacific Northwest, the salmon wars were about who got to catch “American” and “Canadian” salmon. The nationality of the fish was based on their natal stream, even though they lived most of their lives in international waters and were often caught in the national waters of another country.	30
Atlantic salmon, Pacific salmon, and rain forests were also international in the sense that they occurred across national boundaries. But a scale such as international gives them a false commonality. Biologically, they had little to do with each other, except perhaps in responding to some larger oceanic and atmospheric effects such as El Niño, which did not appear until later that summer. They were international in the sense that they could be lumped together as pieces in a set of global problems whose very definitions depended on rather recent human abstractions—the oceanic fishery, the rain forest, biodiversity—as well as the older human habit of dividing the world by national boundaries.²³	31
The issues were international, too, because many international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) interested in global problems have made such issues their raison d’être. The politics of human rights and their articulation and agitation by private organizations, which Kenneth Cmiel writes about in this issue, have their parallel in environmental politics.²⁴ NGOs routinely speak for the rain forest or biodiversity. Among the sources consulted on the Brazilian rain forest story was “Gustavo Fonseca, vice president for Brazil of Conservation International, a Washington-based environmental group.”²⁵ That an international NGO is based in the capital of the world’s most powerful nation-state adds yet a further degree of complexity.	32
These issues could instead be understood on local or regional scales. The opening line in a Seattle Times story on salmon read, “The U.S.-Canada salmon tiff, having gurgled in Northwest waters for years, is expanding into national and international politics.” It quoted Lee Alverson, “a Seattle consultant on salmon,” as saying, “Nobody is going to solve this dispute until it moves beyond local and provincial politics.”²⁶ In the story the regional “Northwest” and the local places that figured in the dispute were compared to the national and international, but in this particular usage, the regional was itself international: Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska.	33
The local was just as complicated. Newspaper stories tried to present “local” people as resolutely local: “Caroline’s Bed and Breakfast [is] a small tidy house about a half-mile from the ferry terminal” on Prince Rupert Island. But even bed-and-breakfasts refused to remain local. Judy Warren, who owned another bed-and-breakfast on the island and whose husband was a fisherman, denounced the Americans for “stealing our fish.” But many of her customers were, as it turns out, Americans who hoped the controversy was not hurting her business. According to Warren, the Americans told her, “‘It’s the governments, not the people.’ They [the Americans] were really lovely. It almost made me cry.”²⁷ Since this was the final line of the story, the reference to lovely people and intransigent governments might leave the reader imagining that the root of the problem was vast, nationally owned fleets (manned presumably by foreigners or robots) vacuuming the seas. At each level of the story, intersecting scales become apparent. Even the Canadian fisherman who burned the American flag during the fishing protest turned out to have dual Canadian/American citizenship. The problem is not bad journalism; the problem is that the controversy operates on a series of scales that, as Lefebvre has indicated, intersect and superimpose themselves one atop another.	34
The unsuccessful political efforts to settle the ongoing issue have involved a similar intersection of scales. Once framed as a matter of international law in which a Canadian/United States treaty was the item under dispute, the scale should have been international in the sense of relations between two nation-states. To settle it, the United States named William Ruckelshaus as envoy to try to move stalled negotiations. Ruckelshaus, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, seemed to move the issue beyond the regional and local. He was, according to Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, an official with clout. Ruckelshaus, who had moved to Seattle the previous year “to head a venture-capital company” could, however, have been just as logically presented as a regional figure.²⁸ In any case, Ruckelshaus was unable to remove the issues from local or regional politics.	35
By the end of summer Prime Minister Glen Clark of British Columbia was suing American fishermen in Alaskan courts, to the dismay of officials of Canada’s national government. The American negotiating position was complicated by treaty obligations to Indian tribes who threatened any settlement that would compromise their fishing rights.	36
On top of all this, a global climatic event altered the fisheries themselves. Peru’s winter of 1997 produced an unprecedented El Niño effect, or warming of the Pacific Ocean. The effects were global. Because of El Niño, Danny was the only major Atlantic hurricane of the season. Marlin were caught for the first time off the coast of Washington. In the Northwest, El Niño allowed warm-water predators of salmon unusual access to young salmon. El Niño usually means drought, small snowpacks, and low river levels—harmful to spawning salmon.	37
Given this convergence of factors in a single summer, it is very hard to think of a single scale upon which an environmental history of declining salmon runs could be written. A purely national history would miss salient points, but any history that did not include the national would miss a central crisis that revolved around “American” fish and “Canadian” fish.	38
The same problems arise when writing environmental histories of larger processes of which the salmon wars are but an episode. There are numerous stories that cannot be told without a national framework, but neither can they be told solely within a national framework.	39
In the summer of 1997 I took a trip with Canadian geographers up the Fraser River, the last major undammed river with relatively healthy wild salmon runs in the heavily populated portion of the Pacific Northwest. The Fraser is often paired with the Columbia River to contrast a healthy Canadian river to a sick American river. There is a connection, but it is far more complicated than a simple national comparison. In a sense the Fraser can remain undammed because the Columbia is dammed. Power-sharing agreements on an international river—the Columbia—have allowed the Canadians to keep the Fraser undammed with little controversy.	40
Environmental history, precisely because it can easily be imagined on a series of scales, and precisely because no single scale can be sufficient for understanding the many problems under examination, offers a model for avoiding simple binary choices in scale between the national and the global. If American history has for too long been rather insular and inward looking, the solution is not to dissolve the national in pursuit of the global or transnational. This is politically unwise because national history will not disappear, and if academics abdicate, others will be all too glad to write national histories that will make the worst academic exercises in American exceptionalism pale by comparison. But it is also intellectually unwise because the real choice is not finding the single historical scale that reflects the world in which we now live, but instead understanding the multiple scales upon which, as Donna R. Gabaccia argues in her essay, lives have been lived and how such scales have merged and intersected.²⁹	41
Notes Richard White is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University.He would like to thank David Thelen for what was an extraordinary opportunity to think more broadly about national histories and an extraordinary group of colleagues with whom to discuss these issues. He would also like to thank his present and former graduate students, particularly Jay Taylor, who influenced this article in numerous ways.Readers may contact White at [email protected].¹ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986), 133-308; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), 199-274; John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore, 1977).² The use of a national scale is as common among ecologists as among historians. See, for example, Gordon G. Whitney, From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plain: A History of Environmental Change in Temperate North America from 1500 to the Present (New York, 1994). Despite the title, the book covers two sections of the United States, the Northeast and the Midwest.³ When I call early modern environmental histories transnational, I am implicitly asserting the ultimate centrality of the state, something that was not true during the early modern era itself. It is impossible to have many literal transnational histories of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries because nation-states then covered only a small portion of the globe.⁴ Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York, 1989), 4-5, 11-16; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991).⁵ Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), esp. 28-31; Soja, Postmodern Geographies; David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).⁶ Lefebvre, Production of Space, 93.⁷ As useful as Lefebvre’s ideas are for historians, there is an aspect of them particularly troubling for environmental historians. Scale involves space, and space is a relation between things, but there seems little place for nature within Lefebvre’s conception of space. Without nature, there is no environmental history. Lefebvre makes space so thoroughly a human production that nature gradually disappears: nature is dying and awaits only “ultimate voidance.” At times he reduces nature to an impossibly independent abstraction separate from human beings, human bodies, and their works that can, by definition, only die once social production begins. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 31, 82-83.⁸ Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 1-10, 25.⁹ For an argument that French traditions were reworked in the nineteenth century to forge a connection with the modern state, see Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (3 vols., New York, 1996-1998), II, xii.¹⁰ The best discussion of the relation between the national and the local in public memory and history is John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992), 14-77. Richard White, “‘Far West. See also frontier’: The ‘New Western History,’ Textbooks, and the U.S. History Survey Course,” AHA Perspectives, 30 (Sept. 1992), 1-12.¹¹ See, for example, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979), 3-8; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 19-20, 75-79, 165-70.¹² George M. Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History,” Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 587-604; Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031-55; Raymond Grew, “The Comparative Weakness of American History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 16 (Summer 1985), 87-101. See also Michael McGerr, “The Price of the ‘New Transnational History,'” American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1056-67.¹³ Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability,” 590.¹⁴ Ibid., 598-600.¹⁵ Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism,” 1038-53.¹⁶ McGerr, “Price of the ‘New Transnational History'”; “Ian Tyrrell Responds,” American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1068-72; Ian Tyrrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1015-44.¹⁷ See, for example, Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991). J. H. Elliott, “Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, 1987), 3.¹⁸ Elliott, “Introduction,” 3-6.¹⁹ Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997); Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993); Bailyn and Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm.²⁰ Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (Berkeley, 1999); Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, 1972).²¹ New York Times, July 21, 1997, pp. A3, A8, A10; ibid., July 22, 1997, p. A3; Seattle Times, July 24, 1997, p.A1.²² New York Times, July 22, 1997, p. A6; Seattle Times, July 21, 1997, pp. A1, B1.²³ On rain forests, see Candace Slater, “Amazonia as Edenic Narrative,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1996), 114-31. On biodiversity, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” ibid., 81-82.²⁴ Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1231-50.²⁵ New York Times, July 21, 1997, p. A3.²⁶ Seattle Times, July 24, 1997, p. A1.²⁷ Ibid., p. A21.²⁸ Ibid., pp. A1, A21.²⁹ Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1115-34.

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