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Appropriating a Continent: Geographical Categories, Scientific Metaphors, and the Construction of Nationalism in British North America and Mexico*
James D. Drake
Metropolitan State College of Denver
| In the late eighteenth century the entire American continent was under attack. The assault came from the pens of European intellectuals who argued that the American climate would adversely affect its inhabitants. In response, two Americans—Francisco Javier Clavigero of Mexico and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia—published spirited rebuttals with value not just as scientific tracts but also as documents revealing how differently Mexicans and Anglo-Americans thought of themselves. Clavigero's work presented a form of early Mexican nationalism. The scope of this nationalism was relatively provincial, and it hinged upon the peoples' specific ties to Mesoamerica's indigenous inhabitants. Jefferson's work, too, had nationalistic undertones, but it built upon the Anglo-American colonists' tradition of seeing themselves as a continental society. Accordingly, it offered a scientific argument that hinged upon a more expansive sense of collective identity and tied the fate of the United States to that of the continent as a whole. |
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Some might find it startling enough that two scientific rebuttals to the same body of thought could be so intimately entwined with political views and yet still take such starkly different paths. But even more remarkable is that Jefferson and earlier English colonists on the North American coast were the ones who perceived themselves as a continental society. After all, they occupied far less territory than New Spain. Seeds of this conceptualization appeared as early as the War of Jenkins' Ear, when the use of the terms "Americans" and "Europeans" to differentiate between the British colonists and those remaining in England started to gain common currency.1 When the war ended in 1742, however, the colonists still lived along a narrow strip of coast and in a series of nucleated sites rather than a continuum of settlements. Cultural and political differences among the northern, southern, and middle colonies would have only heightened the isolation of the various foci of settlement. Fragmented though they were along the lines of distance, economic interest, administrative tradition, and religion, Anglo-Americans' assumption of a continental identity flourished over time, to the point that they would eventually develop a Continental Congress, Continental Associations, and a Continental Army to address British tyranny. |
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Nowhere was the Anglo-American collective self-conception as a continent made clearer than in Thomas Paine's clarion call for American independence, Common Sense. There he noted "there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." Making his point he drew on an analogy from science: "In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverses the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems: England to Europe, America to itself." Paine had company in equating the British colonies with an entire continent, and even his most vocal critics tacitly accepted the equation.2 The continent label or metaphor, much like Common Sense itself, helped create a widespread vision of unity and independence among Anglo-Americans. It could remind ordinary people how they belonged to the primary planet, that nature was on their side. In appropriating the continent, Anglo-Americans turned traditional views of the colonial relationship on their head. In doing so they created a natural "we," an image and feeling of unity despite underlying ethnic, religious, and political diversity. |
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