Almost from its inception early American literary studies has been grounded in an interdisciplinary approach that insistently situates its major (and minor) figures in cultural context. Given that most published writing in British North America did not take the form of belles-lettres, early americanists have dedicated their attention to texts other fields have often considered subliterary. Instead of “literature,” early American studies has largely focused on religion and politics, and many of the key figures in its narrative have been celebrated for contributions other than aesthetic ones. In this regard, we might say that by necessity early American literary studies was ahead of the cultural studies curve.Footnote ¹ The field's longstanding dedication to a model of inquiry that much resembled the new cultural studies, albeit without the theoretical commitments that inform it, put early American literature in a good position to thrive when cultural studies became the dominant approach to literary analysis across most periods. At the same time, the rise of cultural studies (along with the end of the Cold War) accelerated the demise of the exceptionalist thesis that the United States and its people (sometimes even before thirteen of the British colonies in North America became the United States of America) represent a distinct and unique case in the history of the world. Under exceptionalism the origins of a distinctly American “high” culture were dated not to the Revolution, but to the middle of the nineteenth century. Long marginalized by the narrative of the American renaissance, scholars in early American literature availed themselves of this opportunity to advance the legitimacy of their field. Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, early americanists' attempts to establish the relevance of the literature of the early United States has often taken the form of an effort to build a canon of “great writers” who might serve an analogous function to what figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville had supplied for the thesis of the American renaissance.Footnote ² In other words, the need to legitimize the field by identifying literary heroes accelerated precisely at the moment when many in its adjacent field, dubbed the American renaissance to signal the (belated) arrival of a pantheon of great writers, were engaged in a project of dismantling or altering the established hierarchy of literary and subliterary that had dominated nineteenth-century American studies for so long.Footnote ³

In spite of early efforts to promote women novelists such as Hannah Webster Foster and Susanna Rowson, the figure who has begun to emerge most consistently as the ostensible literary giant of the early United States is Charles Brockden Brown.Footnote ⁴ Over the past decade early American studies has witnessed an explosion of interest in Brown and his novels. The fascination with Brown's works and career has produced a number of new editions of his novels, an epic online publication project, and countless articles and book chapters. No surprise then that Brown has been cast along similar lines to Melville: an enigmatic figure who stands as both representative and exception to his era. If the production of a literary hero on the scale of Herman Melville or Walt Whitman has the advantage of endowing early American literary and cultural studies with visibility outside the disciplinary confines of its period, it also has the disadvantage of participating in the manufacture of a literary mythology most contemporary critics would disavow: the artist as transcendent romantic genius. It seems to me symptomatic of this particular moment in the development of the field, therefore, that Brown plays a major role in each of the books under consideration here.

To varying degrees Baker, Kafer, and Waterman are forced to negotiate the ambiguous terrain of an early American literary and cultural studies that seeks to reconcile a cultural studies methodology with an aspiration to canonicity. To be sure, all three engage Brown in terms of his relation to the society and culture of the late eighteenth-century United States. They seek, in other words, to replace the American renaissance as the moment of origins in American literary and cultural history, but to do so in the mode of a model of criticism that grounds writing and literature in the cultural currents of the time in which they were produced. Even so, Brown's role in each of these studies and his ubiquity in recent scholarship on the early United States suggest that he serves as something more than an especially powerful lens for such analysis. Conversely, I am fascinated by the way each proposes a very different account not only of the questions that motivated Brown to write novels and that he then sought to explore in his fictions, but also of the world Brown inhabited. Those differences make thinking about these books together both rewarding and vexing. The issue, as I see it, is not that these books produce different interpretations of Brown and his novels—that is a sign of a rich and vibrant field. Instead, the problem lies in the difficulty of reconciling these readings and placing the several versions of Brown and the Anglo-American eighteenth century they present in dialogue with one another. This difficulty is also the consequence, in large measure, of the demise of American exceptionalism, which has left the study of eighteenth-century British North America and of the American Revolution without a center.

Whatever we may think of the merits of the exceptionalist thesis, for the better part of the last century it organized the field and set the agenda for scholarship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American studies. Exceptionalists promoted the idea that American society and culture fundamentally differed from any other place in the world and thus created a unique context within which the institutions of democracy and liberal capitalism could flourish.Footnote ⁵ Many of us have reveled in the demise of exceptionalism, but it might be useful to consider what has been lost, not so much in terms of the argument of the exceptionalist thesis, as the synthetic function it provided. As synthesis American exceptionalism supplied coherence to the field such that studies by scholars working in different areas, periods, disciplines, or subjects could readily be placed in dialogue. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that we should indulge feelings of nostalgia for exceptionalism. On the contrary, its demise was long overdue.

Opening up the field of early American literature to a new set of questions has breathed fresh air into the period. In the last decade we have witnessed an explosion of new hypotheses about the politics, literature, and culture of the early United States. Baker, Kafer, and Waterman's books have appeared in the midst of a deluge of new studies of the era published in the last five years, studies that have won a number of major prizes in both literature and history. On the other hand, scholarship on the period has become increasingly specialized, with various scholars claiming that their account of a particular question represents the central issue of the day. In part this is to be applauded: it makes for ambitious books that vie for a claim to establish the intellectual center of the period. However, it also has produced a series of disparate studies that can often be difficult to connect. To the extent that this dislocation in the field manifests itself in the divergent readings of Brown and his world presented in the three studies under review here, I also want to use this opportunity to consider at the conclusion of this review the possibility that a new synthesis might prove useful to the future development of the field.

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Jennifer Baker's Securing the Commonwealth offers a provocative and surprisingly persuasive hypothesis: eighteenth-century American writers from a wide range of “social and intellectual circles imagined new modes of financial speculation and indebtedness as a means to build American communities and foster social cohesion” (2). Unfolding chronologically, Baker organizes her book into three sections, each of which is structured around a comparison of two representative figures: Cotton Mather and Ebenezer Cooke, Benjamin Franklin and Royall Tyler, and Charles Brocken Brown and Judith Sargent Murray. With the exception of the Chesapeake satirist Cooke, these are relatively well-established canonical figures in early American studies, which calls attention both to the currency of the ideas Baker traces in her study and to the degree to which her study is invested in a narrative of cultural origins. One suspects Baker has chosen these figures precisely because of their canonicity. That these figures are invested in a narrative of speculation and indebtedness cements that narrative's place at the center of an emerging Anglo-American tradition of economic thought that culminates in the Revolution. Although Baker does not produce a historical narrative of cause and effect that leads to the Revolution, the arc of her book takes her from the Puritan Mather to the post-Revolutionary Murray. Through these comparisons Baker demonstrates how “public debt figures as a varied resource for fledgling colonies, a tool for national independence, and a catalyst for sympathetic social interaction in the new nation” (2).

A well-calibrated mix of intellectual history and close textual analysis, Securing the Commonwealth proposes that texts such as Mather's Life of Phips, Franklin's Autobiography, and Brown's Arthur Mervyn are best understood in light of the major financial theories and anxieties of the time. Her book thus both traces the development of ideas about debt and speculation in the economic debates of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world, and reads these writers as participants in such debates, although their participation mostly takes the form not of direct debate and discussion, but rather of literary allegory and metaphor. In essence, Baker argues that these writers explored the social and cultural ramifications of the changing financial ideas that were developing in response to transformations in the society and economy of the Anglo-American eighteenth century. For example, in her chapter on Brown's Arthur Mervyn Baker argues that “the novel . . . uses illness as a fictional device to make a dramatic statement about the potentially toxic effects of burgeoning commerce on the city's moral fiber” (120). Paradoxically, corruption serves to strengthen social bonds because, Baker argues, “it encourages a process by which readers and auditors of narratives come to sympathize with others” (120). In its broad outline the pattern of this chapter is representative of the book's approach to each of the cases it takes up. In each instance, initial skepticism about the strain that an increasingly commercial world places on social relations is resolved through a better understanding of the invisible social connections enforced by the commercial logic of the new imperial economy. In this respect, we might say that Baker's book focuses as much on the psychology of the financial theories of the eighteenth century as it does on the purely economic aspects of those theories. How those economic ideas imagine relations of interdependency, human agency, and human motivation is consistently the focal point of Baker's analysis.

Although Baker argues for the centrality of economic concerns to notions of sociability, community, and intellectual exchange in this period of American history, her work is emphatically not Marxist. Instead, economic thought is treated as a part of intellectual history. One salutary effect of this approach is that when her writers translate economic thinking into meditations on social relations, Baker does not turn them into pre- or proto-Marxists, whose texts then offer an account of the way that material conditions shape the social or intellectual landscape of the eighteenth century. Property, labor, class, and/or capital, for example, are not categories or ideas of any real interest to Securing the Commonwealth. Instead, Baker's study explores these writers' and thinkers' ideas about debt and speculation “on their own terms” rather than in relation to the larger class dynamics of the time (3). As Baker suggests, this has the advantage of “taking seriously their attempts to see a social dimension in an increasingly modern economy” (3). But it comes at a cost. So much of what Baker explores in her book forms a central part of Marxist literary and cultural critique (I think in particular of Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, for example), that her study at times feels like it misses a great opportunity to engage in a productive dialogue with a major body of theoretical work on the intersection of economics and cultural production. Addressing such ideas would have helped suggest narrative links to the nineteenth century and situated Securing the Commonwealth more clearly in relation to the newly vital body of work on the intersection of literature and the marketplace in early America.

On the whole, Securing the Commonwealth, with its insightful account of the ways that economic thinking figures in major literary works of the era, offers a cogent and eye-opening narrative of a long-overlooked dimension of eighteenth-century Anglo-American intellectual history. At its best, Baker's study produces a series of original readings of texts as varied as Cooke's Sotweed Factor and Sotweed Redivivus, Murray's The Gleaner, and, of course, Brown's Arthur Mervyn. Baker's book, I should also note, is the one that pays the least attention to Brown's writing. Brown plays a much more prominent role in Bryan Waterman's remarkable study of the Friendly Club of New York, Republic of Intellect. In his book, Waterman undertakes what might best be described as a thick description of the intellectual and social dynamics of this “small association of men” dedicated to pursuing, disseminating, and producing the latest cultural and philosophical thinking. Centered on the long-overlooked Elihu Hubbard Smith, the club brought together an important group of early United States thinkers that included writers (Charles Brockden Brown and William Dunlap), doctors (Samuel Latham Mitchill and Edward Miller), and lawyers (William Johnson and James Kent). As the guiding force behind the club's efforts Elihu Hubbard Smith may play the central role in Republic of Intellect, but time and again Brown's novels provide the key examples of the club's theories put into practice. Over the course of several chapters, Waterman leverages his readings of Smith's diary to produce fresh and persuasive interpretations of Wieland, Alcuin, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn. The intellectual play between Smith and Brown drives the first half of the book and produces many of its most powerful insights. In the process, it soon becomes apparent that as much as Brown's novels, Smith's diary constitutes the great literary work under investigation in the study.

When they came together to form the Friendly Club, thanks largely to Smith's efforts, most of these figures were on the cusp of distinguished and influential careers in their respective fields. Republic of Intellect argues that their participation and fellowship in the Friendly Club played a major role in their intellectual formation, and especially in the development of what we might call their strategies of engagement in the public sphere of the early United States. If the Friendly Club constitutes the key site of analysis for Waterman's study, his book's thesis revolves as much around the club's influence on the long-term development of American culture as it does around the crucial theorization of ideas of friendship that shaped much of its intellectual work. In fact, my principal quibble with the book is that I find its claims to the importance of the Friendly Club of New York to the emergence of a distinct American culture to be somewhat overstated. I will not dwell on this concern, because the book has so much to offer and produces such a fascinating account of late eighteenth-century American cultural life that I am more than happy to forgive the hubris of such tendentious claims. In fact, I take these claims to be symptomatic of the very problem in the field I began to point to earlier: the difficulty of producing a narrative of cultural origins based on a cultural-studies model in the aftermath of the decline of exceptionalism.

Ironically, Waterman's assertions regarding the long-term influence of the club, which cannot help but elicit the specter of the Transcendentalists, raise more questions than they offer answers. For example, is it really a good idea to build a narrative of the early republic on the same foundations that propelled the model of the American renaissance? The emphasis on New England that made Transcendentalism emblematic of the American experience has been shown to be a distortion of the diversity of cultural production in the United States in the nineteenth century; why would we want to set up New York in a parallel role for the early republic? This last question seems especially pertinent when we consider Brown's Philadelphia origins. In truth, Republic of Intellect does not need the Friendly Club of New York to compete for influence with New England's Transcendentalists (an analogy that is never overtly stated but seems to loom over the book) to make a meaningful contribution to the study of early US culture. Instead, Waterman might have done better to emphasize how the Friendly Club represents an important iteration of a structure that would repeat itself on many occasions on American soil, whether in Franklin's Junto, which preceded Smith's group, or in the circle of Transcendentalists that developed around Emerson in the 1830s. In each of these cases intellectual ferment is a distinctly social practice. Waterman's anatomization of the specifics of this particular club's conscious attempt to think about the links between friendship and intellectual work is a large part of what makes Republic of Intellect such a compelling book.

Thematically, Waterman's analysis of the way ideas of friendship shaped the club's members and their thinking resembles Baker's exploration of the way debt and speculation shaped her writers' texts. Friendship comes to refer to a model of social engagement that provides not only for the dissemination of knowledge but, more importantly, for serious intellectual debate across political, gender, philosophical, and social barriers: “Ideally, any tensions that may have arisen from the diversity of religious, moral, and political opinion would be counteracted by the friendly bonds that provided the rationale for gathering in the first place” (12). Put more broadly, Waterman employs terms such as “civic fraternity” and “the cultural politics of association” to capture the way friendship works in his study (9, 12). Over the course of Republic of Intellect Waterman uses Smith's diary to explore the way ideas about friendship shaped, first, relations between the club members and, second, the cultural politics of various club members. For example, Chapter 3 focuses on how William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's respective theories of gender relations and feminism, as well as their turbulent personal relationship, influenced the club's discussions about the possibilities of friendship between men and women and the implications of such radical thinking for American democracy. After tracing the club members' responses to Godwin and Wollstonecraft, Waterman concludes the chapter with readings of two of Brown's novels, Alcuin and Ormond, which reflect both Brown's interest in Godwin and the club's discussions of friendship across the genders.

Waterman has divided his study into two halves, with the first half organized principally around Smith's diary, and the second half dedicated to more extended readings of various key members of the club and their efforts to generate a national politics and culture. Without the central gravitational force of Smith's diary to shape and link these later chapters, the second half does not quite gel as cohesively as the first does. While the readings of James Kent and William Dunlap's efforts to shape American culture are persuasive and insightful, they do not speak to an ongoing dialogue in the same way the chapters of the first section did. Waterman compensates for the absence of such a unifying narrative in the second part of his study with a concluding tour-de-force reading of Brown's Arthur Mervyn, in which the novel is rendered as an allegory about professional authority and the power of “clearheaded observation.” This interpretation of the novel pulls together the major threads Waterman had developed over the course of the book. Whereas in the first section of Republic of Intellect the narrative tended to move from Smith to Brown, in this reading of Arthur Mervyn, which serves as the culmination of the book's thesis, the narrative moves from Brown back to Smith. Once again, it turns out, Brown's friendship with Smith provides the crucial inspiration for Brown's philosophical speculations in the novel form.

The inspiration for Brown's novels, specifically his Gothic novels, forms the substance of Peter Kafer's psycho-biography, which, it should be noted, only follows Brown's life through the end of his career as a Gothic novelist. Unlike Waterman, who identifies the central themes and questions of Brown's novels with contemporary intellectual and political debates, Kafer traces Brown's Gothic imaginations to the traumas of his childhood and the theology and history of Quakerism. Consequently, in Kafer's version of Charles Brockden Brown we encounter a strange and disturbed individual who, in classic psychoanalytic tradition, is to a large degree trapped in a past he can never escape. It is striking to contrast this Brown with the meticulous and controlled version of Brown that emerges from Waterman's book, where we encounter Brown as a writer who carefully plots his novels to explore complex ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic questions. In spite of the marked differences between these accounts of Brown and the ostensible project of his fictions, Kafer's and Waterman's respective studies focus on many of the same moments in Brown's career. Kafer, for example, dedicates significant attention to Brown's participation in the Friendly Club. He also considers, much as Waterman does, the way Brown responded to the controversies over Godwin's work, Godwin's relationship with Wollstonecraft, and the fears in the United States about the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy. For Kafer, however, all of these moments become opportunities for Brown to sort through his personal history, particularly his Quakerism and his relationship with his father.

Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution begins its story in earnest, after a brief introduction arguing for the persistence of the Gothic in American literature, with the story of Brown's father's career. It focuses specifically on the first few days of September 1777, when Elijah Brown and a number of other (more prominent) Quaker merchants and leaders suspected of loyalist sympathies were arrested by patriot authorities and banished to Virginia. This episode serves as the foundation for Kafer's reading of Brown's career and novels. The young Charles was only six at the time, but Kafer implies, more than directly asserts, that these events led to his career as a novelist. The chapter ends, for example, with what proves to be a representative paragraph:

Although he never explicitly asserts the claim as such, how Brown got from 117 South Second Street to gothic novelist is the question that shapes Kafer's inquiry. The answer in most cases, however, is not contingent on filling in the blank of the years in between the day Elijah Brown was taken and the day Charles Brockden Brown decided to become a novelist. Instead, Kafer insists that these facts led, seemingly inevitably, to a career as a writer of fictions.

In many ways this paragraph speaks to both the strengths and limitations of Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution. On the one hand, it situates Brown in a very particular historical context: in the city of Philadelphia, on a specific street with significant class, religious, and political implications. Kafer is also a skilled researcher who has unearthed a large body of evidence about Brown and his family's history, evidence that he exploits to great effect in his interpretation of Brown's life and novels. On the other hand, leaving aside the methodological matter of the way psycho-biographical accounts such as this one privilege the trauma of childhood over any later development in an individual's intellectual career, this paragraph implies connections rather than arguing them. It presents a series of facts but does not explicitly address causes and effects.

When he turns to the contents of Brown's gothic fictions, Kafer's readings tend to focus on the historical sources of various aspects of the texts. Those historical contexts are not always specific to Brown's immediate family, but Kafer almost always finds significant links between the historical events in question and Brown's family or religious history. For example, he connects Wieland to early Quaker pietism, Arthur Mervyn and Alcuin to Godwin's thought, and Edgar Huntly to the Forks Delawares and the Nottingham Quakers. In most cases, however, these historical contexts operate in similar fashion to the paragraph I cited above: they establish a series of associations rather than building an explicit analysis. Nevertheless, Kafer's claims about the ways Brown's biography may have manifested itself in his fictions are often revealing. The account of Brown's family's Quaker history and the theological tenets of Quakerism are especially provocative. In recent years, and this is largely true of Baker and Waterman's readings, the emphasis on Brown's ambitions as a professional writer and his relationship with the literature of sympathy and sentimentality has obscured the way religious themes often occupy a central role in his novels. Kafer argues persuasively that the visionary aspects of Quakerism formed a crucial foundation for Brown's gothic imagination. Throughout the course of his study Kafer productively returns to the image of the Quaker visionary as a central figure that reappears throughout Brown's oeuvre. To this reader, Brown's abiding interest in revisiting his Quaker religious heritage, especially its more mystical dimensions, is the most interesting and important contribution of Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution.

Kafer's biography reminds us of how very specific Waterman's readings of Brown can be. By focusing on the way the debates in the Friendly Club might have shaped Brown's work as a novelist, Waterman's readings, brilliant and persuasive as they are, often isolate Brown from a larger historical and biographical context. Reading Republic of Intellect, for example, it is all too easy to forget that Brown spent most of his life in the Quaker city. In some ways this critique risks being unfair to Waterman, because his book is ostensibly about the Friendly Club and not about Brown per se. However, Brown becomes such an important figure in the argument of Republic of Intellect, and Waterman makes such bold claims for the role Smith and the Friendly Club played in Brown's intellectual development, that one wonders how he might address questions about the relationship between Brown's life in Philadelphia and his career in New York. One of the most striking parallels between Waterman and Kafer's respective books is the extent to which each calls our attention to exactly how small the world of the early United States was. In both of these studies we see close interactions between the intellectual, political, and social worlds of Philadelphia, New York, Connecticut, and Boston. Kafer, for example, traces a fascinating long-term tension, which he almost turns into a family rivalry, between the Adamses and the Browns. Most of the members of the Friendly Club, including Smith, were not natives of New York City and maintained strong connections to the communities they had left behind.

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For students of Brown the main question raised by these three books might center on the question of his career after the novels. Beyond the study of Brown, however, what does it mean that the key link between these three books is Charles Brockden Brown, until recently a relatively obscure novelist and magazine editor from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Put slightly differently, how do we build a conversation between Baker, Kafer, and Waterman's respective accounts of eighteenth-century America that is not centered on Brown? Under the aegis of the exceptionalist paradigm, the narrative of American distinctiveness often provided the grounds for such conversations. Under the current paradigm of cultural studies, synthesis is rightly viewed with skepticism. The irony, however, is that without synthesis the most obvious and compelling source of commonality becomes the author. Is this then the paradox of cultural studies? Scholars are liberated from the idea of a unitary culture, which fragmentation enables them to produce exciting particularistic accounts of various contending forces in the culture, but in the process the glue that holds the field together is supplied by a series of “major” authors whose works become the key sites of the culture. Filling the vacuum created by the absence of an organizing narrative for the period, the author, albeit no longer cast as a genius who stands above her culture, returns now as the figure who unifies the study of that culture. This version of the author is no less inimical to the aims and assumptions of cultural studies than is the prospect of synthesis. The advantage of synthesis would be that it provides a foundation for building conversations across disciplinary and methodological divides and could alleviate this feeling of dislocation and fragmentation in the field. American exceptionalism may have worn out its welcome, but it may be time to reconsider the value of synthesis. To that end, I would like to propose what I see as one developing paradigm that may begin to provide the foundation for future conversations in the field.

Over the last decade and a half theories of the public sphere, print culture, and sympathy have often formed the core concerns of the field and in many ways all three of these books fit into versions of those narratives. But none of those narratives has succeeded in establishing itself as the center of the field, largely because each has seemed symptomatic of broader cultural changes—such as the increased mobility across social and geographic spaces—rather than fully generative of those transformations. At the same time, the idea that eighteenth-century British North America and the early United States are best understood in a transatlantic context has gained increasing force. More recently, the transatlantic argument appears to be reshaping itself into an emerging thesis that places empire and the imperial context of American social, economic, and cultural development at the center of the narrative of the Anglo-American eighteenth century. By empire I do not simply mean the expansionist, colonizing imperialism that has been emphasized in scholarship inspired by postcolonial theory, but rather the entire administrative, imaginative, social, economic, and political model within which those imperial ventures took place. Imperialism is just one dimension of a much broader set of ideas and phenomena generated by the rise of modern empires in eighteenth-century Europe. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries empire also referred to the commercial, intellectual, scientific, and social networks of exchange that linked the various peoples living in different parts of the British Empire. I would like to suggest that this growing interest in empire might provide the structure within which many of the strands of thought that currently concern scholars of the period can be synthesized.

When the print culture thesis was first applied to colonial America, in the form of Michael Warner's The Letters of the Republic, it was grafted onto a national narrative.Footnote ⁶ In Warner's account the development of the republican print public sphere represents a crucial step towards American nationhood. Linking the public sphere to nation-formation, Warner's thesis obscures Jürgen Habermas's influential longer-term metahistorical narrative, which identifies the rise of the print public sphere with the expansion of the British Empire.Footnote ⁷ The connection between empire and print lies at the root of Habermas's original formulation of the theory of the public sphere in Structural Transformation, which had provided the theoretical model for Warner's study. Habermas argues that thanks to an increasing economic dependence on overseas trade, the British imperial economy required more and better communication with its colonial holdings. Print, in the form of early newspapers and trade journals, provided the solution to this problem, and thus began the development of the public sphere. Part of the logic, then, behind the emergence of the print public sphere stems from the need to develop alternative forms of reliable converse in an expanding commercial world where face-to-face dealings were becoming increasingly rare.

In the case of British North America, as colonial Americans stretched themselves across the eastern part of the continent and formed communities of like-minded individuals along religious, economic, or other shared interests, the sense of dislocation created by these growing distances only increased. Print may have provided a mechanism for disseminating news and information, but sympathy, first theorized by Adam Smith in 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, conceptualized the basis (what today we would call the psychology) upon which such long-distance relationships could be maintained. No accident, then, that Smith would go on to publish The Wealth of Nations, which considers the nature of economic relations in an imperial economy.Footnote ⁸ Evidence suggests, in fact, that although he did not publish Wealth until almost twenty years later, he had already begun to work on some of the key ideas for it around the time he published Moral Sentiments.Footnote ⁹ Both works, that is, are shaped by an interest in imagining and celebrating the mechanisms that hold the newly emergent imperial world together. This was a world, of course, ruled by Britain and it behooved the British to figure out how to maintain power and maximize control over social and economic relations within their empire.

Not only do theories about print culture, the public sphere, and the cult of sympathy fit neatly into such a narrative of empire, but so too do a number of recent studies of the Atlantic world focused on (1) the rise of a new consumer culture, (2) the role natural history and science played in shaping cultural and political values, (3) the development of new literacies designed to address a culture in transition, and (4) the complex dynamics of race and ethnicity in the Americas. In the case of the three books under review here, we might emphasize how Baker's account of the metaphorics of debt cannot but be grounded in the challenges posed by an expanding imperial economy—problems which Baker explores to great effect in her book. It could even be argued that Baker's study presents us with a colonial American counterpart to Smith. That is, she shows us how over the course of the eighteenth century a number of Anglo-American figures wrestled with many of the same questions that Smith addressed in his works. In the same vein, the concerns about the nature of friendship, moral observation, and community that occupied so much of the attention of the members of the Friendly Club of New York—and which Waterman ties most explicitly to the public sphere and the culture of sympathy—are not so distant from Baker's account of eighteenth-century Anglo-American understandings of the relationship between economic debt and community.

Both Baker and Waterman, that is, are interested in exploring strategies early Americans employed to imagine what kinds of structures might bind them to one another in a world that seemed to be pulling them apart: the basis upon which various intellectuals and writers imagined Americans to form a community. Baker understands these problems to be endemic to a rapidly expanding British imperial culture that was, whether intentionally or not, encouraging Britons to disperse across the American continent. As British-Americans spread out across the North American continent they found they had to invent new ways to imagine their relationships with one another (political, social, economic, aesthetic, and otherwise) that were not contingent upon the old face-to-face models of community. The disruption of community, on the other hand, forms the central theme of Kafer's analysis of Brown's life and novels. In each of these studies, then, one of the guiding premises is a belief that eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans experienced a world characterized by strong feelings of dislocation and alienation rather than an organic sense of oneness.

Thus one of the major questions shared by these books, more implied than explicitly stated, is how these early Americans tried to develop theories that would enable them to build relations of trust in spite of deep and often warranted suspicions about one another. As Baker's study in particular makes clear, this sense of an increasingly fragmented world was not unique to Americans. Instead, Americans had inherited it from the British Empire. The alienation and disorientation they experienced was a by-product of commercial empire, which of course was also the model upon which the newly independent Americans built their government.Footnote ¹⁰ Consequently, those feelings of dislocation would not disappear with independence. On the contrary, as Kafer's biography of Brown suggests, the violence of the war traumatized many Americans and only increased their suspicions of one another. If, as Waterman's study suggests, early nationalists such as the members of the Friendly Club would seek to build narratives of American community, they would also be pulled apart by the energies of empire. This phenomenon can be seen vividly in the case of the Friendly Club, which not only owed its existence in no small measure to New York's growing role in the American commercial economy, but also whose members were often passing through New York on their way from and to other parts of the United States. Perhaps the centrifugal force of empire is precisely what made friendship such an attractive metaphor: like Smith's theory of sympathy, it could stretch across great time and space and still produce a feeling of commonality and mutual interest. Alas, the inadequacy of friendship to the project of empire—dramatized first in the failure of the Articles of Confederation, and even more spectacularly in the Civil War—accentuates the limits to the bonds that tie Americans to one another.