Reviews of Books

Revolution! What Revolution?

Michael Zuckerman

This is a bulky, bulgy book. It is more than 700 oversized, double-columned pages long. It has ninety essays by seventy-nine contributors, many of them preeminent authorities on their subjects. It has some maps and a splendid chronology of the century from 1688 to 1791.	1
It is not the sort of book I would ever ask to review. It is not even the sort of book I was keen to review when asked. It is a daunting thing to digest, distill, and discuss.	2
Still, once I had agreed to try, I saw in the endeavor an intriguing prospect. The dawn of the new millennium seemed an auspicious time for an encompassing reconnaissance of recent scholarship of the Revolution. A collection such as this one might allow an assessment of the contemporary state of the art.	3
Alas. This is not the collection I anticipated. More than three quarters of the essays are carried over intact from the encyclopedia of the Revolution that Greene and Pole edited for Blackwell a decade ago. And the Companion in its entirety is not even a canvass, let alone a synthesis, of current thinking on early America. On the contrary, it is an oddly retrograde work. It does little more than gesture toward the energies that have informed recent writing and the issues that have preoccupied recent writers.	4
Consider Michael Meranze's recapitulation of a number of those preoccupations in Laboratories of Virtue (1996): the emergence of the public sphere, the spread of consumer society, the importance of gentility, the elaboration of sensibility. None of them are formative for this Companion, and only one has any place at all in the editors' conception of the collection. The public sphere gets a paragraph in one essay and a couple of sentences in another. Consumption, gentility, and sensibility do not even appear in the index.	5
Race and gender do appear. But they appear little and, as often as not, in a kind of quarantine. A hundred pages pass, more than once, without reference to a single female, as though the world of the Revolution were entirely male. Dozens of pages pass, more than once, without reference to a single Amerindian or African American, as though that world were wholly white. And when women, natives, and blacks do enter the discussion, they do so in their designated places, in the essays explicitly devoted to them. Race and gender rarely infuse or even inflect the other essays. For that matter, race rarely enters the essays on gender or gender the essays on race.	6
This is, in short, a collection that could almost have been assembled half a century ago. Its absorbing emphasis is on elite males and their military, political, constitutional, and diplomatic concerns. Its interest in the social and cultural context and consequences of those concerns is, at best, modest.	. . .