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Elaborations
Jack P. Greene
| THE nation-state is the final and most formidable bastion of the paradigm of power that dominated historical studies through the middle decades of the twentieth century. During the past two generations, historians and other social scientists and humanists have succeeded in problematizing the previously largely unexamined assumptions about the intrinsic importance of those regions, polities, cultures, peoples, and social entities that had shaped the modern world to their disproportionate advantages. Driven by the desire to recover the histories of neglected areas and peoples and fueled by the logic of the civil rights and feminist movements, scholars have largely succeeded in bringing the history of women, the enslaved, the exploited, and subaltern racial and ethnic groups as well as neglected areas of the globe into the mainstream of historical studies. In this effort they have dramatically expanded the scope of historical studies and significantly enriched historical understanding of human development. Equally important they have succeeded in exposing the self-serving character of the stories earlier generations constructed to celebrate the winners while neglecting the substantial contributions subordinate groups made to their victories.1 If this conceptual revolution had been confined to the academy, if, in the United States, it had not penetrated deeply into popular culture and school curricula, the National Endowment for the Humanities would not be spending so much of its budget on heritage studies and the Florida legislature would not have proscribed from the state school system all discussion of history as a construction. If the winners are not yet on the run, they are at least having to share the stage in a history that explores not just the benefits but the costs of modernity. |
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Yet neither this conceptual revolution in historical studies nor the growing interest in Atlantic and other large-scale histories has much affected the primacy of the nation-state as the principal focus of historical discourse. Even as developments such as the expansion of the European Union, the beginnings of devolution in several national states, and the failure of many postcolonial nations (themselves artifacts of colonialism) to achieve political or social coherence call into question the future of the nation-state as the ultimate form of political organization, most political historians continue to work within national contexts and contribute to national histories. With relation to the nature of the state and its collective public life, this focus on the national arena has greatly inhibited the sort of expansive decentering that has enriched economic, social, and cultural history. |
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The opening essay lays out a strategy by which, in the specific case of the early United States, this situation might be remedied. While students of state formation have been demonstrating the limited reach of national state authority in early modern composite states, historians of the colonial Americas have been busy showing the extent to which state building in early modern overseas empires was centered in the new societies and provinces that settlers were creating on the peripheries. In the analysis of the construction and operation of early modern empires, these parallel historiographies have shifted attention away from national or imperial officials and central policies to the role of the many new provincial polities as the principal venues for imperial expansion and the primary sites for the inscription of inherited cultures on new environments and the formation of new and distinctive corporate identities. In the process they have called attention to the extensive agency of the settlers, traders, and other bearers of European culture, to the extraordinary latitude that such people enjoyed in organizing and constructing those provincial polities, and to the extent to which they shaped them to their own designs and in their own interests, with scant regard for the interests of subordinate groups within or without their borders. Postcolonial insights, especially as scholars have applied them to settler colonies in the many works cited in Kariann Yokota's commentary and in the opening essay, also seem to be relevant because they emphasize the ubiquity of the colonial process as it extended into the period of national political independence and the centrality of settler power in the formation of new provinces and states, whether the new territories were wrested from indigenous peoples directly or from settlers representing other European cultures.2 |
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Political independence in the Americas and the formal adoption of republican or parliamentary government did not fundamentally change this expansive process, which is especially true in national states with large territorial claims and a federal form of organization. With specific reference to the United States, one could support this contention by citing the many state studies listed by Robin L. Einhorn.3 It is not that early national historians have neglected the states, but that it might make a significant difference in how such historians understand the American past if they look at the states not as creatures of the United States or new components of the unfolding American nation but as new societies and new polities of the same kind as the earlier colonies, in whose construction settler values were the primary shaping force. This shift in perspective would make it possible to talk about state formation in the United States as a part of a global phenomenon and to elucidate the incredible variety among the provincial republics that this expansive and settler-driven colonial process created. |
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Except in its narrowest localist variants, colonial history of whatever nationality has traditionally been comparative in orientation. It demands comparisons between colonies and their metropoles and invites comparisons among colonies in the same national spheres and among the large imperial entities. In recommending a colonial perspective to historians of the early United States, I did not intend to initiate a competition between colonial and early national historians. Rather, I had two other objectives. The first was to propose a strategy for escaping the self-contained parochialism that characterizes not just United States but virtually all national historiographies. The second was to lay out the rudiments of a perspective that might at once lead to a deeper appreciation of the continuities between the colonial and the national past and to the production of a history of U.S. expansion that was richer, closer to the experiences of the vast population of settlers and others involved in that process, and less encumbered by the demand that it be organized largely around a remote national government whose activities were less central to the lives of its citizens than were the governments of their several states. |
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To focus on the states is a formula for elaborating the diversity among them. In this project the material culture approach recommended by Yokota does not seem promising precisely because, as she remarks, it transcends "state or other provincial boundaries, forming instead around regional, national, or even Atlantic and transnational communities." This is the very approach that I am trying to complicate if not entirely subvert. As "a nexus for the formation of national identity," material culture is unsuitable for producing more refined histories of the entities that composed the nation and recovering their robust provincial identities.4 A better choice is a cultural approach that focuses on law as a site for the examination of state identities. Because legal cultures are bounded by state lines, such an approach opens up the possibility of achieving, through comparative study, a considerably more complex understanding of the rich variety of state identities within one of the most important new federal states to emerge during the nineteenth century. This approach seems to be particularly appropriate for the study of distinctions among the provincial units within federal states, and that sort of federal history would concentrate on specifying the particularities as well as the commonalities within a loosely structured federal state. Such an exercise not only, as Eliga H. Gould points out, reopens the larger question of home rule—the location and reach of effective authority—within the federal state but also supplies a new context for revisiting the question of who should rule at home within the several states. |
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This stress on the centrality of the states to early national American expansion and public life and the agency of settlers in the creation and operation of those states does not require scholars to neglect the well-known contributions of the national government, but it does put those contributions in a different light. To recognize the new state polities as, in many important respects, settler creations is to open up the possibility for considering the contributions of the national government to expansion as a response to state and settler desires. The slavery issue discussed by Adam Rothman offers a case in point. Though the national government acted in many ways to limit the spread of chattel slavery, the crucial point is that before the Civil War it did not interfere with slavery in any of those areas where most settlers wanted it and where it was economically viable. By problematizing the question of just how important the national government was in expansion, asking whether it was more or less important than the British metropolitan government had been during the colonial era or than national governments in other national culture areas and states, especially other federal states, historians can raise questions that can only be answered through comparative or transnational studies and thereby place the history of the states that comprised the United States in the "broader contexts of comparison" called for by David Armitage.5 |
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Michael Zuckerman is certainly correct to insist on "the idiosyncrasy of the new nation [the United States] and the distinctiveness of the regime its Founders devised." But the same can be said about all nations and all regimes, every one of which is a consciously unique product of its own historical situation. Europe's encounter with the larger world beginning in the early modern era produced many new settler polities that subsequently developed into federal states, not just in former British territories such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Kenya but in former Spanish territories such as Mexico, Peru, and Argentina and, preeminently, in formerly Portuguese territories such as Brazil, where historians have been busy during the past decade pursuing a research strategy comparable to the one recommended in the opening essay.6 Each of these new states took a distinctive path to decolonization and independence. Experience differed according to many interlocking variables, including geographic extent; the size, organization, and character of indigenous populations; the settler capacity for resistance to the metropolis; and the relative size and cultural power of earlier and later settler populations. But the processes are sufficiently similar to warrant comparisons and explorations of commonalities and differences. Indeed it would seem self-evident that various national exceptionalisms can only be fully exposed and understood through comparative study, which was the point in recommending a postcolonial perspective with its emphasis on colonialism's ubiquity to facilitate a deeper comparative understanding of these idiosyncrasies and of the rich variety of experiences that they encompassed. |
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That the opening essay can be read as lacking a "broader geographic perspective on American history in favor of a story that is largely bounded by republican-imperial expansion," "inherently parochial," and "uniquely" descriptive of "the dynamic of the thirteen rebellious British colonies" betrays its origins as a discussion paper for a session on the new colonial history at an annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in 2004.7 But the ambitions set out in the opening essay are anything but parochial. The principal objection to what currently passes for a broader geographic perspective is that, confined to places within the present national boundaries of the United States, it is not nearly broad enough, and, if the opening essay is not explicitly comparative, the interpretive scheme it proposes seems widely applicable across time and space to the experience of polity and empire building during the colonial and the national eras. It can be used to identify some general concepts that may be helpful in analyzing other settler polities established in the Americas and elsewhere during and after the early modern era. On the basis of this analysis, here are several testable propositions. |
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First, individual participants—traders, settlers, fighting men, and missionaries, sometimes organized into expeditions, trading companies, religious orders, or families—and not governments or bureaucratic officials were the primary agents in European expansion and the transformation of indigenous cultural and political spaces into Europeanized ones. |
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Second, the first generation of European occupants—the charter groups—largely determined the contours of economic, social, political, legal, and religious life in every new colony or province. |
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Third, these charter groups and their descendants, driven by a desire to maintain their connection to the metropolitan culture from which they emanated and to command the respect of that culture, exhibited a powerful mimetic impulse to transplant metropolitan culture to their new places of abode. |
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Fourth, in the process of transplantation, colonial groups found it necessary to reformulate, that is, to creolize, metropolitan culture to adapt it to local physical conditions and to emerging socioeconomic structures and patterns of land occupation and use and to make it accommodate and control populations of different cultural backgrounds. |
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Fifth, transplantation and creolization produced marked cultural variations over time and space and in response to changing historical conditions within spheres of European colonization. |
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Sixth, these variations—as well as similarities—can best be understood through a study of changing corporate identity. |
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Seventh, the most promising site for such studies is at the level of the colony or province, at which the collective experience of the inhabitants with landscape reorganization, polity construction, institution building, rule making, law enforcement, and social structuring primarily took place. |
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Eighth, these provincial units became the principal sites for the negotiation of the distribution of authority between the center and the peripheries of national empires. |
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Ninth, the remarkably durable cultural hearths formed in these provincial units often became powerful engines for geographic expansion into new provinces, which in turn resulted in the creation of new polities with their own peculiar corporate identities constructed in the same way as in older provinces. |
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Tenth, colonialism of the kind represented by the transformation of portions of the New World into at least partially Europeanized units did not end with the achievement of independence. |
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Eleventh, there were powerful continuities between prenational and postnational colonialism in terms of polity building and identity formation within polities. |
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Twelfth, after independence, as before, public life continued to center in the provinces, not in the nation. |
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Thirteenth, long after the casting off of imperial connections and the formation of national, often federal, governments, existing provincial identities continued to be the primary form of corporate identity. |
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Fourteenth, the construction of national histories has obscured the continuing importance of the province as a political collectivity and the weakness of national identity. |
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Fifteenth, an emphasis on national styles of colonial formation has obscured the commonalities in this process over time, space, and culture. |
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Whether these fifteen hypotheses, drawn principally out of the example of colonial British America, may be useful in organizing historical investigation in other cultural areas or later periods will depend on whether specialists in those areas find them appealing. But how can anyone resist an opportunity to subvert the parochial mentality implicit in the national state focus? |
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Jack P. Greene is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University.
Notes
1 Jack P. Greene, "Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World," in Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora, ed. Darlene Clark Hines and Jacqueline McLeod (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 319–42.
2 See Jack P. Greene, "The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (forthcoming).
3 Robin L. Einhorn, "The Nation Is Already There," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 278–80.
4 Kariann Yokota, "Postcolonialism and Material Culture in the Early United States," ibid., 266.
5 Adam Rothman, "Beware the Weak State," ibid., 273–74; David Armitage, "From Colonial History to Postcolonial History: A Turn Too Far?" ibid., 251.
6 Michael Zuckerman, "Exceptionalism after All; Or, The Perils of Postcolonialism," ibid., 260. For reference to Brazil, see the many essays in István Jancsó, ed., Brasil: Formação do Estado e da Nação (São Paulo, Brazil, 2003).
7 Rothman, WMQ 64: 271; Zuckerman, ibid., 260.
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