This useful volume collects essays written by some of the most perceptive political and intellectual historians of the early American republic working today, with most of the contributors summarizing or excerpting arguments they have set out at greater length in recently published monographs. Individually, the essays cover a wide range of issues, but each addresses, in its own way, what one of the editors describes as the “dialectical relationship” between the philosophical or legal category of citizenship and the institutional development of the state, from the colonial period to the Civil War (vii). Though they do not advance a single, consistent account of that relationship, or, indeed, work from shared definitions of these two key concepts, taken together the essays do offer an incisive and often inspiring outline of current research on a number of distinct fronts.

Holly Brewer and Eliga Gould's essays place the pre-Revolutionary practice of slavery in international religious and legal contexts respectively. Focussing on the political functions of Anglican rites in colonial Virginia, Brewer describes debates surrounding the baptism and religious education of slaves. She highlights slave-owners' resistance to reforms, proposed by John Locke amongst others, that they feared might entitle black Virginians to the rights of royal subjects, anticipating arguments over citizenship that would reappear after independence. Gould explains how slavery and the slave trade were defended in the colonies even as judicial decisions and evolving views of the law of nations were eradicating both in Britain and Europe more generally. Both essays undermine idealized images of the colonies as unusually egalitarian societies formed in happy isolation from European corruption. As Gould notes, the colonies' remoteness enabled and preserved peculiar hierarchies within these putatively exceptional democracies.

Chapters by Douglas Bradburn, David Hendrickson, Max Edling, John Brooke, and Brian Balogh all criticize or complicate traditional depictions of the early republic as a uniquely stateless society, suggesting in different ways that the federal government provided an indispensable frame for American politics well before the Civil War. Bradburn emphasizes advantages of the Constitution's relative silence on citizenship, arguing that by leaving the states free to craft distinctive regimes, American patriots managed to avoid the disruptions that other revolutionaries encountered in their efforts to impose uniform standards of citizenship on large, diverse polities. Brooke and Balogh describe strong continuities in institutional structures and political practices across the ruptures of the American Revolution and Civil War, with each emphasizing that the federal government has often worked through civil-society organizations to shape the nation's economic and political development while remaining “out of sight.” Edling, for his part, argues that though the Framers carefully limited the federal government's “internal” authority, they also created a powerful instrument for the conduct of foreign affairs, pointing to the conquest of the West as evidence of this supposedly weak state's capacity to undertake imperial expansion. Hendrickson, finally, provides a salutary reminder of the profound contingencies involved in America's political development, documenting persistent fears that sectional conflict and foreign entanglements would dissolve the union.

John Majewski and Paul Quigley's contributions reveal a Confederacy that, though founded in fervent opposition to one federal state's interference, allowed rather expansive authority to its own general government. Majewski discusses secessionists' visions of their economic future, finding surprising support for tariffs as a means of reducing dependence on northern manufacturers. Quigley emphasizes the complexity of confederate citizens' attachment to their state, describing institutions – particularly conscription – that simultaneously fortified nationalist sentiments and stimulated regionalist resistance.

All of the volume's essays adopt variants of the comparative and transnational approach to American history that has swept the field in recent decades, and they each suggest directions this current should take in the years to come. Particularly notable, in this regard, are a few of the authors' efforts to trace connections and draw contrasts within the western hemisphere rather than across the Atlantic world. Brewer stresses similarities between the religious and political institutions of colonial Virginia and Spanish America, raising questions about the relationship between church and state particular to colonial societies. Bradburn compares the citizenship regimes established by the United States and the first, failed Republic of Venezuela, offering a novel theory for the latter's internal instability after independence. Edling insists that the antebellum federal government, if it was weak by European standards, was strong enough to overcome the Republic of Mexico, a formidable foe undermined by the even weaker federal constitution that it adopted after its ill-fated emperor's abdication. Based, as they are, on sparse, secondary accounts of Spanish America, these comparisons cannot rise beyond the suggestive, but they indicate promising lines for future research. Both students and scholars should find much of value in this interesting volume.