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Empire matters? The historiography of imperialism in early America, 1492–1830

2006; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2006.08.011

1873-541X

Trevor Burnard,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Abstract Scholarship on European imperialism in the Americas has become increasingly prominent in the historiography of early America after a long period when the subject was hardly discussed. Historians have come to see that local experience in the Americas needs to be placed in a wider, comparative Atlantic context. They have realised that what united most peoples’ experiences in the Americas was that they lived as colonial subjects within colonies that were part of imperial polities. This article examines recent writings on European empires in the Americas, relating imperial history to related developments in fields such as Atlantic history. It suggests that renewed attention to imperialism allows historians to discuss in a fruitful fashion the relationship between power and authority in the formation of colonial societies and draws attention to the continuing importance of metropolitan influence in the articulation of colonial identities. Keywords: ImperialismHistoriographyInheritanceExperienceSpanish AmericaBritish AmericaFrench AmericaAtlantic Notes 1 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Ed. Albert E. Stone. (New York, 1986). 2 Norman S. Grabo. “Crèvecoeur's American: Beginning the World Anew.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., XLVIII (1991) 160. 3 Christopher Iannini. “‘The Itinerant Man’: Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism.” WMQ, 3d Ser., LXI (2004) 202–203. 4 David Hume. “Of National Characters.” Essays. Moral, Political and Literary. (Oxford, 1963) 210. 5 Dennis D. Moore. Ed., More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecoeur. (Athens, Ga., 1995) 82–89. 6 Peter Hulme. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1787. (London, 1986) 4. 7 Crèvecoeur. Letters, 168. 8 Moore. More Letters, 86; Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 6 vols., trans. J.O. Justamond. (New York, 1969). 9 Iannini notes that we can only understand how the coherent narrative voice in The Letters suffers an irrevocable collapse by placing Crèvecoeur's dystopic vision of Charleston alongside his account of Jamaican corruption and profligacy, “`The Itinerant Man’,” 205, 207, 229, 231; Moore, More Letters, 106–113. 10 Ibid; Iannini, “The Itinerant Man.” For libertinage in the Caribbean, see Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC, 2005). For Ramsay, see Christopher Leslie Brown. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. (Chapel Hill, 2006), 243–253. 11 Herbert E. Bolton. “The Epic of Greater America.” American Historical Review 38: (1933) 448–474. 12 Bernard Bailyn. “The Challenge of Modern Historiography.” American Historical Review 87: (1982) 1–24. 13 Alison Games. “Atlantic History: definitions, challenges, and opportunities.” American Historical Review 111: (2006) ft.28. 14 David Eltis. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. (Cambridge, 2000); David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. (New York, 2006); Ida Altman and James Horn. Eds., ‘To Make America’: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1991); Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula. Eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2005). 15 David Armitage. “Three Concepts of Atlantic History.” in Armitage and Michael Braddick. Eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. (London, 2002) 15–18. 16 Games. “Atlantic History.” ft.41. Peter Coclanis faults Atlantic historians for overstressing unity and integration in “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History.” Journal of World History 13: (2002) 169–182. 17 That Africa's relation with Europe in the early modern period was not cast within the framework of imperialism means that we have to think differently about how to incorporate Africa and Africans into wider histories. A strength of Atlantic history, especially if oriented around Africa and Africans, is that it provides a better theoretical apparatus than imperial history whereby the role of Africans in creating the New World enterprises can be understood. Black slave labour was essential in creating and developing the Americas before large-scale European migration in the 1840s. David Eltis, “Free and Coerced Migrations From the Old World to the New,” in idem, Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, 2002). For a useful example of how Africa was transported to the Americas, see James H. Sweet. Recreating Africa: culture, kinship, and religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. (Chapel Hill, 2003). 18 Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole. Colonial British America: essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era. (Baltimore, 1984) 13–14. 19 J.H. Elliott. Spain and its World, 1500–1700. (New Haven, 1989). 20 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700. (Stanford, 2006). 21 Peter C. Mancall. Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession on an English America. (New Haven, 2007); Anthony Pagden. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–1800. (New Haven, 1995); Jeffrey Knapp. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. (Berkeley, 1992); Andrew Fitzmaurice. Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonization, 1500–1625. (Cambridge, 2003). 22 David Armitage. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. (Cambridge, 2000) 9–10; idem, “Literature and Empire,” in Nicholas Canny. Ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Origins of Empire. (Oxford, 1998) 113. 23 See, for example, the absence of colonies from Tim Harris’ magisterial political history of late Stuart Britain. Harris. Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdom 1660–1685. (London, 2005); idem, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720. (London, 2006). 24 Among a growing literature, see Kathleen Wilson. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785. (Cambridge, 1995); Linda Colley. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. (New Haven, 1992); Peter N. Miller. Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. (Cambridge, 1994); Pagden. Lords of Empire; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. (Stanford, 2001); Nancy F. Koehn. The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire. (Ithaca, NY, 1994); and David J. Weber. Bàrbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. (New Haven, 2005). For Hume, see Armitage. Ideological Origins, 180–181. 25 Niall Ferguson. Empire: The Rise and Fall of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. (New York, 2003); idem, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. (London and New York, 2004); Charles S. Maier. Among Empire: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors. (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 26 “NACBS Report on the State and Future of British Studies in North America,” http://www.nacbs.org/report.html; P.J. Marshall, “British History ‘New’ and ‘Old’,” http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Empire/index.html; Bernard Porter. Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World, (New Haven, 2006); Kathleen Wilson. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. (London, 2003); idem. Ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. (Cambridge, 2004). 27 Bernard Bailyn. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, (Cambridge, MA, 2005) 49: 59–110. 28 Jack P. Greene. “Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections On The Promise Of A Hemispheric Perspective.” History Compass 2: (2003), www.history-compass.com; idem, “Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Period: The British–American Experience,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy. Eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820. (New York, 2002) 267–282. 29 Davis, Inhuman Bondage. 30 David Ormrod. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770. (Cambridge, 2003). See also Pieter C. Emmer and Willem W. Klooster. “The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: Expansion without Empire.” Itinerario 2: (1999) 48–69 and Benjamin Schmidt. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. (New York, 2001). For the relative unimportance of the empire within the Dutch republic, see its cursory treatment in Jonathan Israel. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806. (Oxford, 1995). 31 Yves Bénot. La Révolution française et la fin des colonies. (Paris, 1987) 10: 205–217. But see James Pritchard. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730. (Cambridge, 2004); Pierre Pluchon. Histoire de la colonisation française. (Paris, 1991), Michel Morineau. “La vrai nature des chose et leur enchaînement entre la France et l’Europe (XVIIe–XIXe siècle).” Revue Française d’Historie d’Outre-Mer 84: (1997) 3–24; Paul Butel. Historie des Antilles Françaises (XVIIe–XXe siècles). (Paris, 2002); Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau. Les Négoces maritimes français XVIIe-XXe siècle. (Paris, 1997) and idem, Les traits négrières: Essai d`Historie Globale. (Paris, 2004). 32 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. Nature, Empire and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. (Stanford, 2006); Ralph Bauer and Jose Antonio Mazzotti. Eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. (Chapel Hill, 2007); Weber, Bàrbaros; Jeremy Adelman. Ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History. (New York and London, 1999); Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein. Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759—1789. (Baltimore, 2003); D.A. Brading. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy and the Liberal State, 1492–1867. (Cambridge, 1991); and Susan Castillo. Performing America: Colonial Encounters in New World Writing 1500–1786. (London, 2006). 33 Borderlands historians are a partial exception. See, for example, James F. Brooks. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. (Chapel Hill, 2002). A useful interpretative survey of borderlands history as “contested boundaries between colonial domains” is Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron. “From Borderlands to Borders: empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104: (1999) 814–841. 34 This consciousness that the shape of modern America doesn’t fit with traditional narratives is especially pronounced in early American literature. Ralph Bauer. “Notes on the Comparative Study of the Colonial Americas.” Early American Literature 38: (2004), 281–303. For a modern plea from an Iberianist for hemispheric histories of the Americas see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. “Some caveats about the ‘Atlantic’ paradigm.’ History Compass 1: (2002) http://www.history-compass.comwww.history-compass.com. 35 See, for example, the equation of French America with Louisiana, New France and Atlantic Canada in Daniel Vickers. A Companion to Colonial America. (Oxford, 2003). The best account of New France. Allan Greer's The People of New France. (Toronto, 1997), barely mentions the French West Indies. 36 J.H. Elliott. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830. (New Haven, 2006). 37 Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole. Eds., Colonial British America, 2–17. 38 Louis Hartz. The Founding of New Societies. (New York, 1964); Claudio Veliz. The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in British and Spanish America. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994). 39 Edward Long, History of Jamaica… (London, 1774; rept. 1974), 3 vols., II: 327. 40 Canvassed for Bolton but not for Elliott in Bauer. “Notes on the Comparative Study of the Americas,” 292–294. An economic evaluation of the effects of colonialism is Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff. “Colonialism, inequality, and long-run paths of development,” NBER Working Papers (2005) 11057. 41 See Elizabeth Mancke and John G. Reid. From Global Processes to Continental Strategies: The Emergence of British North America to 1783, in Philip Buckner. Ed., Canada and the British Empire. (Oxford and New York, forthcoming); Philip Lawson. The Imperial Challenge; Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution. (Montreal and Kingston, 1989), Philip A. Buckner and John G. Reid. Eds., The Atlantic Region to Confederation: A History. (Toronto, 1994); David Lambert. White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition. (Cambridge, 2005); Catherine Hall. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867. (Oxford, 2002); Andrew Jackson O'shaughnessy. An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. (Philadelphia, 2000); and Douglas J. Hamilton. Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820. (Manchester, 2005). 42 Luis Martínez-Fernández. Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878. (Athens, GA, 1994); Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. (Middletown, CT 1988); and Emilia Viotti da Costa. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories. (Chicago, 1985). 43 Adam Rothman. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. (Cambridge, MA, 2005); and Peter S. Onuf. Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. (Charlottesville, VA, 2000). 44 Benjamin Franklin. Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, etc. (Philadelphia, 1760). 45 Barbara L. Solow. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. (Cambridge, 1991) 1. 46 For the continuing entrepreneurialism of slave owners into the industrial age, see Richard Follett. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820–1860. (Baton Rouge, 2005). 47 Christopher L. Brown. “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., LXI (1999) 273–306. 48 Weber. Bárbaros; Eric Hinderaker. Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800. (Cambridge, 1997); Colin G. Calloway. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. (New York, 2006). 49 Fred Anderson. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America. (New York, 2000). 50 The best comparative work is Robin Blackburn. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. (London, 1988). The best work in English is John D. Garrigus. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. (New York, 2006) For the wider relevance of the Haitian Revolution, see David Patrick Geggus. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. (Bloomington, 2002); David Barry Gaspar and Geggus. Eds., A Turbulent Time; The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. (Bloomington, 1997); Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny. Eds., Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises, 1802: Aux origins d’Haiti. (Paris, 2003). For comparative works on the French and Spanish empires, see John Robert McNeill. Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763. (Chapel Hill, 1985) and Peggy K. Liss. Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826. (Baltimore, 1983). 51 Richard White. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. (Cambridge, 1991). For recent works that adopt a Middle Ground perspective, see Katherine DuVal. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. (Philadelphia, 2006); Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute. Eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830. (Chapel Hill, 1998) and Gilles Havard. Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715. (Paris, 2003). 52 But see Kenneth J. Banks. Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763. (Montreal, 2002) and Gordon Sayre. Les Sauvages Amèricains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Literature. (Chapel Hill, 1997). 53 R.R. Palmer. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959, 1964). For one example of a work in European history that sees the strong influence of the New World on the Old, see Alyssa Sepinwall. The Abbe Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005). 54 James McClellan III. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. (Baltimore, 1992); Londa Schiebinger. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. (Cambridge, MA, 2005). See also James Delbourgo. A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Richard Drayton. Nature's Government: Science. Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. (New Haven, 2000); Richard Grove. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. (Cambridge, 1995); John Gascoigne. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. (Cambridge, 1998); and Susan Scott Parrish. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. (Chapel Hill, 2006). 55 Joan Dayan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995). 56 Laurent Dubois. Avengers of the New World: the Story of the Haitian Revolution. (Cambridge, MA, 2004); idem, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. (Chapel Hill, 2005). 57 Dubois. Colony of Citizens, 2–4. 58 Dubois. Avengers of the New World, 301. 59 Eliga H. Gould. The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. (Chapel Hill, 2000); Stephen Conway. The British Isles and the War of American Independence. (Oxford, 2000). 60 The case for overlapping empires was made in Vincent T. Harlow. The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952–1964). An important analysis is Jack P. Greene. “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World.” in idem, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History. (Charlottesville, VA, 1994) 1–24. 61 Marshall. Making and Unmaking of Empires, 379. 62 Ibid, 270. 63 For the 17th century, see Stephen Saunders Webb. The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569–1681. (Chapel Hill, 1979). For the persistence of the language of settlers’ rights into the nineteenth century, see Alan Lester. “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire.” History Workshop Journal 54: (2002) 27–50. 64 Alan Lester. “Humanitarianism and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century,” in Norman Etherington. Ed., Missions and Empire. (Oxford, 2005); Alan Atkinson. The Europeans in Australia: A History, Volume One. (Melbourne, 1997); and Trevor Burnard. “Freedom, Migration and the Negative Example of the American Revolution: The Changing Status of Unfree Labor in the Second British Empire and the New American Republic,” in Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf. Eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World. (Baltimore, 2004). 65 Marshall. Making and Unmaking of Empires, 272. 66 H.V. Bowen. The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833. (Cambridge, 2006), ix, 1, 37. 67 Simon Schama. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. (London, 2005); Gary B. Nash. The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. (Cambridge, 2006). For a similar work that does not dwell on the historiographical implications of her findings, see Cassandra Pybus. Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. (Boston, 2006). 68 Brown. Moral Capital. For a work that places abolition within developing debates in the social sciences, see Seymour Drescher. The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation. (New York, 2002). 69 Brown. Moral Capital 26: 152–153. 70 For the contempt in which New England, in particular, was held, see Julie Flavell. “British Perceptions of New England and the Decision for a Coercive Colonial Policy. 1774 and 1775,” in Flavell and Stephen Conway. Eds., Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815. (Gainesville, Fla., 2004) 95–115. 71 Unites States nationalists also imagined Unites States national character against West Indian contamination. Sean X. Goudie. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. (Philadelphia, 2006). 72 Brown. Moral Capital, 156–161. 73 See, for example, David Eltis. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. (New York, 2000). 74 Liah Greenfeld. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Greene. “Negotiated Authorities,” 12–24; and Marshall. Making and Unmaking of Empires 57–85. 75 For an important article on the beliefs of English republicans see Jonathan Scott. “What were Commonwealth Principles?” Historical Journal 47:(2004) 591–613. See also Richard R. Beeman. The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America. (Philadelphia, 2004. For the continuing persistence of monarchical ideas in British North America, see Brendan McConville. The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America. (Chapel Hill, 2006). For a stimulating discussion of the relationship between commerce, empire, monarchy and republicanism see Istvan Hont. Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective. (Cambridge, MA, 2005) esp. 447–528.