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Roundtable
Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem
Jack P. Greene
| FOR more than a century, the relationship between colonial history and national history has been problematic for professional historians of both eras. Since at least the 1890s, colonial historians have been acutely aware that the old-fashioned nineteenth-century conception of American history as the history of the United States and its antecedents is thoroughly anachronistic and insufficiently attentive to the larger contexts in which developments in America took place. During the past generation, the thrust of historical studies has significantly enhanced this awareness. As Michael Warner has noted, a preoccupation "with the localism of early modern colonists, on one hand, and the transatlantic contexts of empire and trade, on the other," has meant that colonial scholars are now much less likely "to assume that colonial history had an inner propulsion toward modern nationalism."1 Yet the same is hardly true for national historians, including those early Americanists who concentrate on the American Revolution and the creation of the American nation, many of whom continue to operate within the traditional view that colonial histories are subordinate to national histories and are useful principally for the light they shed on emergent national institutions and cultures. But this subordination of the colonial to the national era parochializes and trivializes the history of periods before the adventitious rise of national states, which has exacted a huge price from national as well as colonial histories. This brief essay suggests that the time is right for colonialists to become more imperial by using what historians have learned and are learning to suggest directions for a massive reshaping of what scholars call American history. |
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Two bodies of theoretical literature, postcolonial theory and the new literature of state formation, specifically early modern state formation, neither of which has so far had a wide effect on colonial historians, can serve as a starting point. |
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During the last fifteen years, the term postcolonial has come to be "widely used to signify the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies that were formerly European colonies." Though postcolonial theory has been broadly influential among literary scholars, some of whom work in early modern colonial American contexts, colonial North American historians have neither extensively used it nor systematically tried to relate their findings to the large body of theoretical literature in postcolonial studies. This neglect may be explained by the early and almost exclusive fixation of postcolonial theorists on nonsettler colonialism. Emerging out of an impulse to challenge the universality of the colonialist perspective constructed to justify western colonial schemes during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century era of high imperialism, postcolonial studies initially concentrated on the colonial process in the heavily peopled worlds of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. With the few exceptions of Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Rhodesia, colonies in this era were colonies of exploitation, occupation, or domination, in which the central objective was to mobilize land and labor to produce profitable raw materials for export. The colonizers were relatively small and transient cadres of managers, bureaucrats, merchants, and soldiers whose principal functions were to maintain order and to facilitate resource extraction by outside businesses, and few if any Europeans settled on the land or took up permanent residence. Largely ignoring settler colonies of the sort that developed throughout the Americas in the early modern era and in Oceania and parts of Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the earliest iterations of postcolonial theory tended to suggest that colonialism, as anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has complained, either was "peculiarly modern—and hence did not exist, for example, in the period of the conquest of America—or that ... the logic" behind it was "equally applicable in that case, and in others." The result, as literary scholar Peter Hulme notes in one of the first works to apply postcolonial insights to the early modern Americas, has been that "the relevance of postcolonial theory to America is ... not yet well established."2 |
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During the last decade, a few postcolonial scholars have sought to move beyond this concentration on "'conventional' colonies." Intending to illustrate the extraordinary "diversity of colonialism" and the wide "range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures, over many different centuries," these analysts have called for a consideration of the place of settler societies within an enlarged history of colonialism that stretches back to the fifteenth-century beginnings of European overseas expansion. Defining settler societies "as societies in which Europeans have settled, where their descendants have remained politically dominant over indigenous peoples, and where a heterogeneous society has developed," these studies have taken pains to make two general points. First they have emphasized the distinctiveness of settler colonies, identifying a number of features they did not share with exploitation colonies. These distinctions included the extent, relative gender balance, and permanence of the settler population; the extensive transplantation of European institutions as well as cultural and social forms; the wide latitude enjoyed by settlers in shaping economic, social, and political structures; the ambiguous status of settlers as both colonizers, in relationship to indigenous peoples, and colonized, in relationship to the metropole to which they were attached; the emergence of provincial polities that became "cores of neo-European nation-building"; and the production in those polities of historical constructs justifying settler activities that were subsequently "absorbed within the political and legal-juridical institutions, 'myths of origin' and national metaphors" of the states that grew out of them. In further contrast to exploitation colonies, most settler colonies, with the major exception of Algeria, did not couple independence with decolonization. Far from being "primarily fought by people who were colonized against the people who had colonized them," most movements for independence and separation in settler colonies "were in fact settler rebellions" that left settlers in full control and the situation of the colonized unchanged.3 |
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Notwithstanding the many distinctive features of settler colonialism, the second major point made by scholars seeking to include settler colonies within the broader history of colonialism is that they meet the principal criteria that define modern colonialism. To one degree or another, they exhibited a willingness "to make 'peripheral' societies subservient to the 'metropolises,'" they involved "a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported)" group and "foreign invaders," and they practiced "varying levels of physical and cultural genocide, alienation of indigenous land, disruption of indigenous societies, economies and governance, and movements of indigenous resistance." Indeed because the polities in settler colonies were "little more than ... instrument[s] of the settlers," they represented, in the judgment of Jürgen Osterhammel, "the most violent form of European expansion." Land hunger, indifference to indigenous land titles, and insensitivity to the lives of indigenous peoples and imported slaves, in his view, "create[d] an explosive propensity for violence" and, as other postcolonial writers have underlined, a legacy of racial subordination that was largely unrestrained by imperial supervision and continued unabated into the postcolonial era. In the case of the United States, Dolores Janiewski has remarked, "from the time of the American Revolution to the end of the 'Indian wars' in the 1880s, one Native-American nation after another found its territory invaded by the expansionist republic that had established its independence in a treaty that ignored the claims of the indigenous inhabitants."4 |
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But these scattered efforts to add settler colonialism to the range of concerns covered by postcolonial studies have not so far had much of an influence on postcolonial scholarship. For instance only one of twenty-nine articles in an important compilation of postcolonial studies published in 2000 treats settler colonialism, and it focuses on nineteenth- century settler colonies. However little postcolonial scholars have looked at settler colonies in the New World, the potential relevance of this evolving body of theory for students of all areas of the early modern Americas is obvious and, in combination with other developments, the emerging discourse of postcolonialism has subtly yet profoundly affected the way historians think about the concepts of colonial or, to use the postmodern idiom, colonialism. Emphasizing the systematic subjugation of some peoples to others in the colonial process, postcolonial scholars have underlined the ubiquity of colonialism in the modern world system. No longer can scholars think of colonial as something exclusively prenational. Rather historians now must recognize that this process has been fundamental to early modern and later state building and that it continued long after the initial formation of national states.5 |
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Students of the colonial Americas scarcely need to be told about colonization's deleterious effects on the colonized because this reconception of colonial and colonialism has coincided with a dramatic thrust toward the production of a fuller and more inclusive history. Inspired by the demands for an histoire totale articulated by Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and other members of the Annales School in France as early as the 1920s as well as by post–World War II social and political changes, historians of colonial British America have been at the forefront of the effort, emerging in the 1960s and still going strong, to recover the histories of those peoples—Amerindians, Africans, and people of mixed race—whose stories had largely been neglected in the construction of grand narratives of the development of colonial British America and the emergence of the American nation. As these histories revealed and focused attention on the degree to which colonization had exacted a high toll on the cultures, landrights, and numbers of indigenous peoples in the Americas and on the centrality of black slavery to the colonizing process, the forefathers and -mothers whom previous generations of historians had admired for carving out settlements and creating viable socioeconomic and political systems in the wilderness lost more than a little of their luster. This expanding body of work supplies abundant evidence that the expropriation of lands, the destruction of cultures, and the subjugation and exploitation of peoples emphasized by postcolonial scholars applied to early modern settler colonies as well as to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century extractive colonies.6 Nor did this colonial process end with the formation of national entities in the Americas. In the United States and Canada, to take two examples, it actually intensified with the colonization of vast new areas of the continent as swarms of settlers brought new areas under their hegemony, pushing out or confining to unwanted catchment areas thousands of indigenous peoples and in the United States, wherever it was legally possible and profitable, making extensive use of enslaved African Americans in doing so. From this broad postcolonial perspective, it seems, the national story merely represented an extension of the colonial story. |
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By problematizing and historicizing the rise of national states during the early modern era and later, literature on state formation furnishes a complementary perspective to the work of postcolonial scholars.7 Among other things it has shown how varied this process was from one state to another, how frequently it involved the coalescence or amalgamation of many kingdoms or other types of polities, how often and to what extent those entities were able to retain high levels of local peculiarities and self-government, and how powerful local magnates and other possessing populations remained even in the face of the centralizing tendencies inherent in state building. Studies of state formation have also shown how long it took to forge national as opposed to provincial identities and how much the authority of emerging national states depended on more or less continuous negotiation with their constituent polities. |
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This literature strongly suggests that not only early modern states but also early modern empires were loose and coalescing entities. Historians used to think of empires as authoritative polities in which authority and power emanated from the center, but from the new perspective supplied by state formation studies scholars can begin to appreciate that most of the agency in the construction of the new polities that constituted early modern empires rested in the hands of the colonizers or settlers themselves. They settled and reconstructed the new spaces they occupied, creating the economic and household structures that enabled them to live in those spaces, and their agents, in the form of representatives and magistrates, largely fashioned the laws and governance that enabled them to regulate social and economic interactions and to govern the acquisition and circulation of property in land, slaves, and material goods. Yet settlers were not entirely free agents in this process. They saw themselves as agents of the European polities to which they were attached, and because they strongly desired to retain their connection to their parent state, the polities they created in America had to negotiate their authority with the metropole. Even more important, settlers were restricted by their deep attachment to their metropolitan legal and cultural inheritance. In the English colonies, this attachment meant they were reproducing variants of the common law cultures they had left behind. Varying from one political entity to another according to local custom, this legal inheritance gave settlers enormous flexibility in adapting the law to local conditions while marking them as resolutely, even militantly, English.8 |
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In constructing polities for themselves, settlers in every English colony were engaged in state building, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, each colony had developed a distinctive, functional, and authoritative polity with its own peculiar system of laws and its own particular constitution, a settled structure of leadership, a broad popular base among the free segments of society, a well-articulated sense of corporate identity, and an astonishing amount of autonomy in all internal provincial matters.9 Combined with the scarcity of fiscal and coercive resources for imperial management in Britain, these developments inevitably meant that authority in the early modern British Empire would be distributed between the center and the peripheries, that the empire's central direction would be minimal, that metropolitan authority in the colonies would be consensual and heavily dependent on provincial opinion, and that effective power in distant colonial polities would be firmly situated in provincial and local governments. Despite some casual and desultory administration from London, the early modern British Empire was thus a loose association of largely self-governing polities. The self-made, possessing settler classes of these polities acknowledged metropolitan authority not because it was imposed on them but because it incorporated them into a larger system of national identity that guaranteed their Englishness, their inheritance in the form of English legal and constitutional traditions, and their continuing control over the polities they helped to create and maintain over several generations. |
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The new metropolitan measures undertaken in the wake of the Seven Years' War signaled an intention to change the British Empire from the loose federal polity it had long been into a more unitary polity with authority fixed more clearly at the center. Such measures directly challenged the colonies' autonomy over their local affairs and, by subjecting the colonies to legislation and other directives to which the settler populations had not given their consent, called into question settler claims to a British identity and their rights as Britons to enjoy Britain's traditional liberties. Unsurprisingly, those measures elicited a powerful defense of the local corporate rights of the colonies. In the first instance, then, colonial resistance constituted a settler revolt against measures that challenged settler control over local affairs and denied settler claims to a British identity. |
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The driving concern within the colonies that participated in this resistance movement was to preserve the principle of consent in relation to all matters involving taxation and internal governance. The adoption of a republican form of government and the formation of a national union were unintended consequences of their efforts to achieve this objective. Once they had declared independence from the monarchy of Great Britain, formal republican government was simply their only viable option, and a union was an obvious necessity if they were to have any chance of success against the most powerful military and naval establishment in the Western world at that time. As they transformed themselves from colonies to states, however, their integrity as separate polities with full authority over their internal affairs was never in doubt. |
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David C. Hendrickson has decried the tendency of modern historians "to exaggerate the significance of the national idea in the era of revolution and constitution building." Assuming the "hegemonic status" of that idea, "most historians," he notes, "have treated 'the new nation' born in 1776 as a kind of fixed and unchallengeable essence." He complains that "the customary way of writing about the era sees a structure of identities that has made loyalty to 'the nation' primary." As Hendrickson makes clear, however, this strategy does considerable violence to the facts of the case. "At the beginning, in 1776," he writes, "Americans constituted not a body politic but an association of bodies politic" that was "far from constituting a unified nation." Though the "terms of the colonial dispute with the mother country had made each colony hostile to central control and intoxicated with the idea of their sovereignty," the "liberty they wished to preserve was not simply individual liberty, though that was recognized by nearly all as a fundamental political value, but the 'liberty of states,'" and "the colonies launched their experiment less as one people than as free and independent states, with all the rights and powers thereunto pertaining." If the demands of war and a common enemy helped create a rudimentary sense of nationalism, nevertheless the experience of the war, Hendrickson argues, "also confirmed the distinctive interests and deep-rooted particularism of the several states." Throughout the war and confederation eras, the "multiplicity of loyalties to and identities with particular colonies and states" was one of "the most potent factors in explaining the trajectory of American politics" at the national level.10 |
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In this situation it is scarcely surprising that the union (one cannot yet call it a country) founded during the Revolution should be little more than a league of states, that Congress should have such enormous difficulties in mobilizing an effective war effort, or that the states should resist efforts to extend the taxing power to the national government. Nor is it surprising that the centrifugal tendencies within the United States should emerge so strongly after the war's immediate objective—independence of the several states—had been established, or even that the state governments, bowing as their colonial predecessors had always done to the demands of their constituents, should put the interests of the states and their free inhabitants above those of the nation as a whole. |
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The architects of the constitutional settlement of 1787–88, which represented one logical culmination of the American Revolution, were principally nationalizers who feared that the union's fissiparous tendencies under the Articles of Confederation would lead to disunion and the evaporation of the military and diplomatic achievements of the long and expensive American War of Independence. Hendrickson describes that settlement as a "peace pact" designed to head off conflict among the states. As Max M. Edling has shown in his effort to apply state formation theory to the analysis of the settlement, it was also an exercise in state building that would supply the national government with the same control over finances, defense, and trade enjoyed by all contemporary national states in Europe.11 The framers and implementers of the 1787 Constitution certainly intended to give vastly more energy to the national government. Yet, as Edling also shows, their success was always predicated on an overwhelming consensus about the importance of keeping authority over internal matters—which at the end of the eighteenth century and for long thereafter included most matters—in state government hands. Not even the most radical nationalizers among the framers wanted to dispense with the states or saw the Constitution as an instrument to do so. Almost all saw the states as the proper venue for most governance in the United States. They made no effort to deprive the states of taxing power or to prevent them from exercising virtually total authority over their internal affairs, albeit the states now had to operate within new guidelines with respect to money emissions and contractual obligations. This division of authority into external and internal spheres was precisely the one they had in 1776 revolted to maintain. |
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Notwithstanding the framers' decision to bypass the states and go directly to the people in the adoption of the Constitution, the state legislatures were intimately involved in the entire process. They selected the delegates who went to Philadelphia in 1787. The Continental Convention sent its work to Congress, certainly a creature of the states, who in turn sent it on to the state legislatures, each of which authorized the calling of a state convention to ratify it. That the sovereign people in these state conventions gave their consent to the new Constitution and signified their approval of vesting some powers in a national government as citizens of particular states acting in state-ratifying conventions is important. There was no national ratifying convention to adopt the new Constitution. |
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Once the new national government was up and running, moreover, it rarely transgressed or showed any inclination to set further limits on the power of the states. The Senate continued to represent the states. The national government used its taxing power in limited ways, raising money principally by imposts and excises of the sort imposed by the metropolitan government during the long years of empire. What one of the writers of The Federalist Papers called "feudal baronies" in the states remained intact, and state courts continued to hand down almost all judicial decisions issued in the United States.12 In pointed contrast to French revolutionaries, the American national government made no effort to interfere with the integrity of the states or to adopt a uniform code of laws. Every state continued to operate within its own peculiar legal and judicial system. Surely, the important point about the tenth amendment is that it left the line between national and state authority to be negotiated and renegotiated. |
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How much energy the national government was able to muster during the 1790s is open to question. Whenever the legislature endeavored to expand national power or the executive displayed too much pretension, they encountered enormous opposition even when, as with Alexander Hamilton's financial program, they were successful. Some of this opposition was on republican grounds, yet some of it also reflected the widespread preference for a system of governance in which most authority lay with the individual states. The national government, even at the height of its power in the early 1790s, remained distant, small, and unobtrusive, and the experience of most United States residents with governance continued to be at the state and local levels. The 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson, who emphasized limiting the scope of national authority, offers strong testimony to the contention that the constitutional settlement worked out in the late 1780s and 1790s was less a national than a federal settlement, in which national and state governments, each operating within its respective sphere, would be powerful. If there was a broadly shared original intent in this era, it was to create for the United States a federal polity that was neither completely state centered nor national. As for the national judiciary, it did little for the next century and a half. |
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As Edling emphasizes, the limited centralization of authority in the national government meant that "no powerful centralized state developed in America after the ratification of the Constitution" and that "the states continued to be the most important element in the federal structure." For the next seventy years, the United States remained "only a small national state" that used its fiscal and military powers sparingly and "never captured the hearts and minds of its citizens." As a result, Edling concludes, "popular identification with the nation never challenged loyalty to state and sectional identity." As international law scholar James Brown Scott remarked in 1918, the "delegates in Federal Convention did not merge the States in a union, but formed a union of the States."13 |
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Perhaps because they have only the most general unifying narrative with which to work before the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution, historians of colonial British America have always focused intently on the local or the provincial. Even when they have invented general events, such as the Great Awakening, on which to hang their stories, they have insisted on the integrity of local and provincial developments and the significance of local distinctions. The combined implications of postcolonial and state formation studies powerfully suggest that this localist perspective should be extended into the national era. Such an exercise may begin with an analysis of expansion, which historians have long appreciated as one of the most important developments during the first half of the national era. |
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The postcolonial perspective suggests that the character of expansion did not change much after the creation of the United States and that national expansion merely represented an extension of colonial expansion with a weak American state, instead of a weak British state, presiding over it. Indeed it may even be misleading to use the term national just because it occurred during the national era. Such usage suggests that the nation qua nation was the important actor in the story, but that only begs the questions that postcolonial theory opens up: did the colonial process operate much differently in the United States than it had during the previous two centuries in the British Empire? Did the accelerating spread of settlement derive from some new postrevolutionary rage to republicanize the North American continent or to extend the so-called imagined national community of the new United States? Was post-1776 expansion different in character from that which had gone before? Or was it largely an extension of a well-entrenched colonizing process, the chief elements of which had been thoroughly worked out during the century and a half before the Revolution? |
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Certainly, the continuities between pre- and postrevolutionary expansion are impressive and more extensive than historians of the national experience generally appreciate. After 1776 as before, settlers (including speculators, investors, merchants, and others who hoped to tap into or profit from the markets opened up by new settlements), not governments, demonstrated the most agency in Indian clearance and settlement. They poured into new territories, took the lead in driving out the indigenous populations, introduced slavery wherever legally and economically feasible, aggressively demanded the establishment of the systems of law and governance with which they were familiar, and constructed polities that were every bit as distinctive, one from another, as the early colonies. To be sure the American national government, itself the creature of the many partially amalgamating original polities, supplied more help in the colonizing process than the British state had done, and colonization after 1790 increasingly carried with it new overtones of an American national destiny. Just as early colonizers and their immediate descendants had spoken of their achievements as contributions to the profit, strength, and greater glory of the British Empire in its struggle against what they thought of as the despotic and Catholic French or Spanish foes, post-1776 settlers no doubt saw themselves as agents for enhancing the territory and might of the American Republic. Yet the spread of settlement probably had more to do with the needs, desires, and self-understandings of individual settlers and promoters than with national goals such as manifest destiny. Such goals may have given added meaning to their activities, but most settlers seem to have been driven less by nation-building impulses than by land hunger, profit seeking, and eagerness to exploit new resources. These same motives had driven settlement and colony formation during the colonial era and, like their predecessors, postrevolutionary settlers principally acted as agents not for the state but for themselves. So strong was the desire for land and hegemony over it that expansion scarcely needed a national component to make it go. What could have been more thoroughly colonial than the extension of aggressive colonizing into new lands claimed by treaty or purchased by the new national state? |
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Similarly, like their colonial-era counterparts, national-era settlers operated immediately within local and provincial contexts, now called territories or states, and deeply engaged themselves in the community building and polity formation that would supply them with the British legal protections that, notwithstanding their new republican status, continued to constitute an important part of their legal and political heritage. Just as in the original states that formed the union of 1787, in the new states the establishment of settler hegemony over each territory shifted "power and ownership from the original inhabitants to the settlers and the governments they established."14 At the same time, the new states imported the colonial system of racial subordination even where slavery was prohibited by national law. |
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Settlers in new states constructed after 1776, like their colonial predecessors, exhibited massive heedlessness about the lives and rights of those who did not share their culture or look like them, and they used the same already deeply internalized ideology to justify their dispossession of indigenous peoples. To the extent that they had any qualms about what they were doing to local indigenous peoples and to Africans, settlers justified their behavior in terms of the story they constructed to explain the larger meaning of their lives. According to that story, which was the same throughout the English and many other parts of the newly colonized Americas and in national as well as in colonial America, they were engaged in a noble enterprise: bringing improperly exploited territories into a cultivated state, rendering their resources productive, and reorganizing the wilderness into settled and bounded spaces where property and labor could be acquired and secured by local political and judicial institutions designed to achieve these ends. They were constructing outposts of Western civility and thereby contributing to the grand project of civilizing a vast New World. |
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This enabling and ennobling story furnished the rationale for the wholesale expansion of settlement throughout the colonial era as settlers rushed to establish new political units to bring law and governance wherever they went. The spread of settlement thus represented an astonishing spread of culture as frontiers rapidly became backcountries and backcountries quickly developed into settled territories. Just as their forefathers had done with each new colony, settlers turned each new state into a settler republic that did their bidding. In every way they replicated the behavior of their predecessors in earlier generations. Even as the new national state, like the British Empire before it, laid out broad guidelines for them to follow, settlers enjoyed enormous flexibility in constructing polities that would reflect their interests, protect their rights and property, and fit their own designs to the nature of the territory they occupied. As the new states like the original ones over time constructed a distinctive corporate identity appropriate to their geographic situation, the nature of their economy and social system, and the collective experiences of the inhabitants, they took their places as equal members of the American national union with equally pervasive and independent control over their internal affairs and equal protection for their own social and political peculiarities. What sorts of social systems the states developed, what sorts of laws they lived by, were largely a matter of local option. |
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During the past three or four decades, historical scholarship has moved decisively to reverse the traditional neglect of women, children, Amerindians, African Americans, people of mixed race, ethnic minorities, and socioeconomic subaltern groups in American history but has done relatively little to redress what may arguably be an even more distorting omission: the neglect of the states as the arenas in which most governance, most public life, and the domestic life of most Americans were principally centered. In the construction of the American past, what Hendrickson calls "the national idea" has ruled and continues to rule virtually without challenge.15 The combination of insights from postcolonial and state formation studies opens up the possibility for a fundamentally different approach, one built on a recognition of the profound continuities between the colonial and national segments of the American past. |
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This approach would involve a massive extension of the colonial perspective into the national era: a colonization, as it were, of American national history. This perspective would begin with the recognition that Kentucky, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, California, Oregon, and all the other post-1776 states were the products of an ongoing colonizing process. It would conceive of these new states less as the creatures of the United States than as settler colonies not dissimilar from the colonies that became the original states. And it would reconceptualize and stress state history, acknowledging that the new states, like the original colonies, were the sites in which the real work of settlement and polity building was mostly done, that settlers had extraordinary agency and wide latitude in the process, and that collective and individual aspirations were realized or disappointed through the creation and operation of local legal structures. |
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This approach has the potential to reshape scholars' understanding of American history. It would raise state and provincial history to the same level as national history. It would acknowledge that, at least in territorial expansion and state construction, the transformative power of the American Revolution was far weaker than many students of the Revolution have acknowledged. It would focus attention on the important questions of how, when, and why the states were subordinated to the national project and state history came to be considered peripheral or inferior to rather than central to the American story. This reshaping could produce a much more complicated and interesting history that would focus on not only the few collective activities of Americans at a national level but also developments within an astonishing variety of distinctive and largely self-governing polities and their relationships to the weak federal state. Instead of the nationally focused, textbook-driven history of today, it may produce a genuinely federal history. Such a history would recognize the states' centrality during the first century of the American Republic; make clear that the sum of the parts is far greater and infinitely richer than the whole; acknowledge that even with (perhaps even because of) its formal republican structure, the American state, no less than early modern states, was a tenuous amalgam of diverse parts, each of which enjoyed a vast amount of self-government and largely pursued its own course as locals defined it; and present the American experience, like the colonial experience before it, as principally a collection of local experiences played out in a variety of similar but distinctive polities. |
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How precisely to produce such a history, one in which the many historical arenas represented by the states would be given their just due, will have to be left to those who have vastly more knowledge about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One key entry point for testing this line of argument could be through governance and law. What legal structures were created and by whom? How did people in these new societies create authority and use it to shape the societies and cultures they wanted to create? When they encountered already functioning systems of (European-style) law in polities with long histories of attachment to different national cultures and legal systems, what did they do?16 What were the nature and variations among the collective local identities formed through the process of living in the same polity under the same distinctive local laws? What did it mean for people to have parallel state and national collective identities? These are just a few of the hard and therefore deeply engaging questions that may come to the fore if scholars began to give the states more weight in the construction of a more inclusive national history. In this enterprise early Americanists will have to take the lead because they are the only ones who have looked closely, if by no means closely enough yet, at the beginning of the story and the only ones with the perspective to appreciate the powerful continuities between the colonial and national eras. |
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Jack P. Greene is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University.
Notes
1 Michael Warner, "What's Colonial about Colonial America?" in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 50.
2 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London, 1998), 186–92 ("widely used," 186); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 49 ("peculiarly modern"); Peter Hulme, "Postcolonial Theory and Early America: An Approach from the Caribbean," in St. George, Possible Pasts, 33–48 ("the relevance," 35). Though Edward W. Said's text is the foundation for postcolonial studies, Said did not use the term postcolonial (Said, Orientalism [London, 1978]). One of its earliest uses is by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York, 1990). Robert J. C. Young offers a detailed and thoughtful history of the development of postcolonial studies (Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction [Malden, Mass., 2001]). An early and still one of the most thoughtfully and contextually grounded examples of the use of postcolonial theory by a student of the early Americas is Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London, 1986). A notable exception to the neglect of postcolonial theory by early Americanists is Robert Blair St. George's edited volume in which several of the essays, including St. George's introduction, make explicit use of postcolonial theory (St. George, Possible Pasts).
3 Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, "Introduction: Beyond Dichotomies—Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class in Settler Societies," in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, ed. Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis (London, 1995), 1–38 ("'conventional' colonies," 2; "as societies," 3; "absorbed," 8); Young, Postcolonialism, 17 ("diversity of colonialism"), 79 ("settler rebellions"); Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans. Shelley L. Frisch, 2d ed. (Princeton, N.J., 2005), 7 ("cores"); Hulme, "Postcolonial Theory and Early America," 37 ("primarily fought"). Among the most extensive efforts to apply postcolonial theory to settler colonies are Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, Unsettling Settler Societies, a collection of essays covering aspects of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Algeria, and Israel; the first six chapters of Young, Postcolonialism; Osterhammel, Colonialism, a brief and thoughtful introduction to the complex history of modern colonialism that was first published in 1995 and first translated into English in 1997. Barbara Fuchs has persuasively suggested that the processes associated with colonialism were at work throughout the late Middle Ages and early modern era within Europe. She refers to the study of these processes within Europe and then their expansion overseas as "imperium studies" (Fuchs, "Imperium Studies: Theorizing Early Modern Expansion," in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren [New York, 2003], 71–90).
4 Osterhammel, Colonialism, 15–16 ("'peripheral' societies," 15), 42 ("most violent form"), 75 ("little more"); Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, "Introduction," 7 ("varying levels"); Dolores Janiewski, "Gendering, Racializing and Classifying Settler Colonization in the United States, 1590–1990," in Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, Unsettling Settler Societies, 141 ("from the time"). On the construction of national myths, see also Young, Postcolonialism, 20.
5 Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson, "Settler Colonies," in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden, Mass., 2000), 360–76. For earlier European manifestations of state building, see Fuchs, "Imperium Studies," 71–90.
6 Excellent brief analyses of the findings of this literature may be found in James H. Merrell, "Indian History during the English Colonial Era," in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Malden, Mass., 2003), 118–37; Philip D. Morgan, "African Americans," ibid., 138–71.
7 The foundational texts in early modern state formation theory are Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London, 1991). See also the important article by J. H. Elliott, "A Europe of Composite Monarchies," Past and Present, no. 137 (November 1992): 48–71.
8 The application of state formation theory to all early modern American empires is treated at greater length in Jack P. Greene, "Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World," in Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 1–24. For a case study of the British Empire, see Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986). See also Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York, 2002). On the adaptation of English law, see Greene, "'By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them': Law and Identity in Colonial British America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 247–60.
9 Alexander B. Haskell is the first to interpret the history of any colonial British American polity in terms of state-formation theory (Haskell, "'The Affections of the People': Ideology and the Politics of State Building in Colonial Virginia, 1607–1754" [Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2004]).
10 David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), ix, xii, 26–27, 35, 257–58, 297.
11 Ibid., xi; Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York, 2003).
12 J. R. Pole, ed., The Federalist (Indianapolis, Ind., 2005), 90.
13 Edling, Revolution in Favor of Government, 223–24, 227–29; James Brown Scott, in Hendrickson, Peace Pact, 285.
14 Janiewski, "Gendering, Racializing and Classifying Settler Colonization," 132, 136 (quotation).
15 Hendrickson, Peace Pact, ix.
16 See the excellent works by George Dargo, Jefferson's Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Stuart Banner, Legal Systems in Conflict: Property and Sovereignty in Missouri, 1750–1860 (Norman, Okla., 2000). See also Jack P. Greene, "The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas," Early American Studies (forthcoming).
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