Cultures of Empire

Robert J. McMahon

In view of the ever-increasing specialization and volume of contemporary scholarship, one can only applaud any effort to break down the boundaries that tend to be drawn around separate disciplines. In this provocatively ambitious essay, Ann Laura Stoler manages to do exactly that. She zeroes in on key trends in the scholarly literatures on European and American empires, identifies hitherto unrecognized points of convergence and congruence within those distinct literatures, and suggests potentially fruitful comparative projects that might uncover additional common ground. That an anthropologist who specializes in European imperialism—a self-identified interloper—has accomplished so much, and more, in this wide-ranging article makes hers an unusually important and welcome intervention in American history.	1
My comments will concentrate on the utility of the insights Stoler offers, largely through the comparative lens that she deploys, for just one of the scholarly audiences her stimulating article addresses: students of United States foreign relations. There is much of value here for diplomatic historians, it bears emphasizing from the outset, especially if they accept Stoler's invitation to approach potential comparative projects with imagination and breadth of vision. By insisting upon the essential comparability of European and American experiences of empire, she joins a swelling chorus of U.S. historians who have been seeking to internationalize the study of American history. This intellectual ferment, abetted by the Organization of American Historians and well reflected in the pages of this journal, aspires to get a firmer handle on the distinctive and not-so-distinctive features of United States history by looking closely at how other states and societies responded to, and were shaped by, similar transnational processes. Slavery and the slave trade, emancipation, industrialization, immigration, the rise of organized labor, the emergence of movements for women's rights and other reforms, state development—each of those subjects has been enriched in recent years by scholars who have sought to place American developments within a broader, comparative frame of reference. So, too, has the study of U.S. imperialism, even if, as Stoler rightly notes, more extended and extensive conversations between students of the American empire and their Europeanist counterparts could redound to the benefit of both groups.	2
Stoler is echoing, in this regard, a call issued in the past by Robin Winks, Emily Rosenberg, John Lewis Gaddis, Edward P. Crapol, and others for closer attention to major elements of convergence and divergence in the histories of American and European imperialism.1 Regrettably, those pleas have gone largely unheeded, despite some obvious points of overlap in the respective historical experiences of colonizer and colonized in different imperial contexts—and despite similar conceptual breakthroughs in the separate scholarly domains of colonial and postcolonial studies, on the one hand, and North American history, on the other. That historians of the United States have paid insufficient attention to "the new currents of scholarship that have animated colonial studies over the last fifteen years" seems indisputable. Likewise, historians of colonialism have slighted the American empire; they have produced a rich theoretical and case-specific literature on their topic with scant reference to the internal and overseas colonial-imperial experiences of the United States. Stoler's central contentions—that "common strategies of rule" frequently obtain in different imperial-colonial contexts; that tensions of empire, especially within the realms of the intimate, invariably emerge in regimes of political domination; and that cross-historical comparison of such phenomena can yield valuable insights—thus carry important implications for students of the American empire, in both its formal and informal variants.2	. . .