Gordon Wood stoked a strong response from his fellow early American historians in 2015 when, in the pages of the Weekly Standard, he accused the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, publishers of the prestigious William and Mary Quarterly, of abandoning interest in the development of the United States. “A new generation of historians is no longer interested in how the United States came to be,” Wood argued. “That kind of narrative history of the nation, they say, is not only inherently triumphalist but has a teleological bias built into it.” Wood blamed the shift away from the nation on historians’ interest in such issues as race and gender: “The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation's past has had to turn to the history books written by nonacademics who have no PhDs and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.” Of the William and Mary Quarterly, Wood concluded, “without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.”Footnote 1
The responses came quickly. What particularly riled many scholars was Wood's dismissal of the histories of nonwhite non-male people.Footnote 2 The Quarterly’s editor, Joshua Piker, in a thoughtful response, rightly condemned Wood's “decontextualized enumeration of topics that are implicitly sneer-worthy.” But then Piker raised the more substantive difference between the Omohundro's perspective and Wood's. For Piker, early America was
an expansive place—and an inclusive one. The early American world stretched to Peru and Spain and beyond; it included speakers of dozens of languages and natives of innumerable polities. And the inhabitants of that world knew all of that. Wood uses the United States as an argument for limiting the horizons of early Americans and restricting their conversations in ways that do violence to their experiences and understandings. He turns the nation into a screen that allows us to see only certain places and a filter that permits us to hear only some voices. And then he asks how, given this subset of places and that limited number of voices, Wood's own United States came to be.
Piker identified the question facing the Quarterly and early American historians more broadly: is there a coherent field of early American historiography that can be contained or bounded by the emergence of the United States? Or do we learn more if we abandon boundaries set by the polity and national teleologies? Piker embraced Wood's accusation that the Quarterly was lost. Historians, he wrote, “should be striving to get lost, at least as Wood defines the term.”Footnote 3
To many observers, the disagreement between Wood and Piker reflected a continuation of the post-1960s culture wars. With his dismissal of histories of race and gender, Wood too framed his missive in these terms. But, I argue, the disagreement between Wood and Piker reflects something deeper. The issue is not whether early American historians study race, gender, sexuality, or the Founders, as a culture-wars analysis would suggest. It is also not about whether one is on the right or left. Instead of reflecting another round in the culture wars, the disagreement between Wood and Piker illuminates an epistemological gap between two distinct, coherent, and incompatible fields of historiography with roots in different historical contexts.Footnote 4
I use the term “field” in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of a bounded space of contention with shared rules and frameworks. Wood and many other scholars who share his critique if not his politics are part of a historiographical field defined by the polity. For scholars in the polity field, whether studying empires, tribes, nation-states, or city-states, and whether approaching the past through the lenses of politics, race, gender, or many others, the political broadly defined determines the significance for new historiographical work. But over the last three decades, a new field has emerged, and the Quarterly is its representative for early American history. As some early Americanists made the global turn, their language and their narratives comported with the needs of economic globalization. In this new historiographical field, freedom is defined as (a) the free exchange of goods and people across state boundaries (often via oceans or in borderlands where the polity's hold was insufficient) and (b) multicultural pluralism. As a growing number of historians of early America explore the forms of sovereignty most likely to sustain these freedoms, they are concluding that exchange and pluralism are best promoted through the exercise of plural, nondemocratic, and supranational forms of state power like the eighteenth-century British Empire. Today, a new narrative is emerging in which the inhabitants of British North America lost their freedom following the American Revolution's creation of a new democratic republic.Footnote 5
The aspiration of this article is to highlight the resonance between neoliberal globalization and new narratives offered by some scholars of early America, and the implications of these new narratives for how we understand democracy. This essay is therefore also a contribution to discussions about the globalization of historiography. I argue that the new neoliberal field of historiography, with its emphasis on exchange and pluralism and imperial forms of rule, marks a fundamental break with the past. My interpretation challenges historians who agree with Richard Drayton and David Motadel's contention that “global history, at its foundations, is not a new genre,” but a continuation of comparative and universal approaches to history dating back to the ancient world.Footnote 6 One need not deny that there have been earlier aspirations to suggest that today's scholarship reflects the particular form that globalization has taken since the 1970s.
The use of field theory also suggests that the shift in historiography does not reflect a Kuhnian paradigm change, as Piker implied. According to Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), scientists, working away in their fields, discover problems that cannot be resolved by the reigning theories. These problems slowly become so glaring that a new theory is required to explain them—resulting in a scientific revolution in which the paradigms of knowledge change. It is possible that this is what happened, and that early American historians kept confronting anomalies that could not be explained by national political narratives. And to some extent, of course, that is the case. Field theory suggests, however, that the ways these new facts (and old ones) have been narrated reflect not just a new paradigm but the reframing of history within a broader set of contexts and power relations external to historical investigation.Footnote 7
For two centuries the political has defined the basic categories of analysis and signification for historians. Whether studying the pre-national past or engaged in comparative or international work, and whether studying political history or the history of sexuality, most scholarship gained its significance from its contribution to the histories of polities.Footnote 8 The new neoliberal field, however, borrows language from and is compatible with the needs and aspirations of contemporary globalization. Whereas the polity field drew its categories of analysis and signification from the nation-state, the new field draws its categories and analysis—indeed its very vocabulary—from global capitalism. Exchange is its central motif; when it turns to human beings and government, it emphasizes movement across porous boundaries, rather than political and cultural solidarities.Footnote 9
CHANGING FIELDS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
In the 1993 English translation of his classic work The Field of Cultural Production, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the meaning and significance of works of art and literature—in this article, of historiography—depend on how authors stake out positions or make arguments within a broader “field” of play. A work's meaning, in other words, is not internal to the text but exists in relation to “the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader.” A field, to Bourdieu, is “the space of positions and the space of position-takings in which they are expressed.” Historiographical arguments take on meaning when scholars take positions (arguments) in relation to each other within a bounded sphere of signification (“the structured set of the manifestation of the social agents involved in the field”). The field is both a “field of forces” and a “field of struggles” as scholars interact with each other to gain influence or prestige. However, the field defines the “space of possibles” from which authors take their positions. To Bourdieu, fields ultimately reflect the deeper power relations of class society, but unlike reductive Marxian analyses, the “space of possibles” is not fully controlled by class relations. Instead, fields are sites of movement and play, but they are stacked. Fields of cultural production—such as historiography—are contained within a broader field of “power,” which itself is within a broader field of class relations. But the more participants in a field, the more autonomous—but never fully so—a field is from economic and political power.Footnote 10
Field theory can help, even if one does not accept Bourdieu's class theory, by illuminating the historical contexts that have shaped the meaning and significance, and also the kinds of narratives, available to historians. These contexts determine, but never fully, the questions historians can ask, the answers that they offer, and the importance assigned to competing interpretations. The significance of any particular historiographical work is therefore always in relation to other historiographical arguments. For the past two centuries, the underlying field of power that shaped historiography was the polity. It was the era of the rise and dominance of nation-states. Today's historical context is economic and cultural globalization, and with it the exchange of goods and peoples and the weakening of national borders and territorial forms of sovereignty. The resulting neoliberal cultural field of historiography reflects the dominant power relations of today and has provided opportunities to reimagine the stories that historians offer (the “space of possibles”) for the colonial, revolutionary, and early republic eras. We are seeing a shift from the history of the United States to, as Piker put it, a “vast” early America.
NEOLIBERAL FREEDOM AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF SOVEREIGNTY
Because this article argues for a resonance between the processes and language of neoliberal globalization today and recent historical narratives of early America, we must have a sense of the former before turning to the latter. Following World War II, European and American economists who came to call themselves neoliberals faced a problem: the end of European empires resulted in the rise of new states across the globe. Each new postcolonial state threatened to erect walls around the free flow of goods and capital. For such economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the end of empire threatened free markets by encouraging states to promote their own national development. The question they faced was how to reassert imperial forms of supranational control to check or “encase” (Quinn Slobodian's word) nations and democracies that might limit the movement of goods and capital (and even, for some, labor). Neoliberal economists were committed to developing supranational organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which was replaced by the World Trade Organization) to ensure that national democracies would not promote their own social welfare and economic or labor policies if doing so threatened global economic efficiency. The collective aspirations of citizens in newly independent states would be checked by international organizations which could impose rules and norms “to defend the world economy against democracy and nationalism,” especially but not exclusively in the global South.Footnote 11
Neoliberal globalization thus emerged to challenge and contain democracy and nationalism. It sought competing layers of sovereignty that weakened efforts of nation-states to impose territorial control over domestic life. Whereas the nation-state is dependent on, in geographer James Anderson's words, the “territorialization of politics,” today we are witnessing the fragmentation and pluralization of sovereignty. The link between territory and sovereignty is breaking down as supranational entities from the United Nations and the European Union to the IMF and the WTO exert greater influence over our social, political, and economic lives. Multinational corporations, because of their size and scope, have also imposed a form of transnational rule that rivals national governments. Globalization has made goods, capital, and people more mobile. Economic production today depends on global supply chains, and nation-states are hard pressed to compete with what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls the “global footlooseness of corporate capital.”Footnote 12
As supranational institutions exert new forms of rule, ideas of sovereignty are in flux, as they were in the eighteenth century. Globalization today is a historically contingent process, and nation-states remain dominant forces in the world, yet to some observers the breakdown of national territorial sovereignty appears not so much as something new, but as a return to the kinds and forms of rule that pre-dated the era of nation-states. To Anderson, contemporary globalization is producing “political forms reminiscent of late medieval Europe.” For much of European history, overlapping and competing layers of governance were normal. Only with the rise of nation-states did Europeans “experience territoriality, sovereignty, nationalism, and states as all tightly packaged together.” If nation-states territorialized politics, then “globalization and technological innovations are now rendering geographic space increasingly complex, variable, and relative.”Footnote 13
Whether through human rights conventions or trade agreements, democratic rule within nation-states is giving way to nondemocratic supranational institutions. Sassen agrees with Anderson that we are seeing the “unbundling of sovereignty as we have known it for many centuries.”Footnote 14 In fact, according to international-relations scholar Nicholas Onuf, scholars must admit “the declining intelligibility of the concept of sovereignty.” Nation-states were premised on the unity of territory, culture, and sovereignty, but today's world is not. And as we anticipate the future, Onuf urges us to look back to the world that existed before the nation-state. Our ideas of sovereignty could soon “decompose into the elements from which it fused centuries ago.”Footnote 15
As economic globalization restructures sovereignty, so it has had an impact on the terms and vocabulary of cultural and intellectual life. Indeed, some scholars argue that neoliberalism's true significance is not its celebration of free markets but “the subjection of non-market practices to market logic.”Footnote 16 In the field of culture—and historiography is not exempted—this has meant an increasing focus on fluidity and hybridity in form and content. Fredric Jameson argues that cultural producers' embrace of fragmentation and multiple perspectives reflected “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”Footnote 17 From a more direct Marxian perspective, David Harvey attributes the emergence of new cultural and intellectual vocabularies to changes in the “regime of accumulation” as the United States moved from “Fordism” to “flexible accumulation” in the decades following World War II. Especially after the economic crises of 1973, economists and capitalists alike promoted “flexible accumulation” and “flexibility and mobility” in both how and where goods were produced, but also in labor, where employers demanded “more flexible work regimes.”Footnote 18
In other words, there is a strong resonance between the needs of global capitalism and the terms and ideas being expressed in cutting-edge intellectual and cultural life. But one need not embrace Harvey's Marxian perspective to reach this conclusion. Indeed, it is possible that the causal agent is ideational—that ideas reshaped both capitalist practice and cultural and intellectual vocabularies. That is the argument Daniel Rodgers makes in Age of Fracture (2011). To Rodgers, the new cultural field—which he calls the age of fracture—emerged not because of changes in the means of production but rather by a “contagion of metaphors.”Footnote 19 Words and phrases that might have gained currency among economists slipped across borders to reshape the frames and language of other domains.Footnote 20 As Americans borrowed such words as “choice,” “flexibility,” and “mobility,” they reimagined self and society. On the right, a libertarian understanding emphasized not states and institutions but “countless acts of free, private consent.” From the left, society fragmented into groups defined by their own cultures and histories. The nation now appeared as a coercive, oppressive counterweight to freedom (re)defined not as civic participation in a collective polity but as diversity and intergroup economic and cultural exchange.Footnote 21 By the twenty-first century, “one heard less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice. The importance of economic institutions gave way to notions of flexible and instantly acting markets” and “identities became fluid and elective.”Footnote 22
Whether the causal arrows point from or to the means of production (or both), historians of early America have echoed the cultural logic of neoliberal globalization. They too emphasize diversity and intergroup exchange across territorial boundaries. And in their specific analyses of eighteenth-century British North America, they have reassessed the role of the British Empire as a supranational check on efforts by settler colonists and American revolutionaries to impose territorial sovereignty.
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
Contemporary observers compare the impact of neoliberal globalization on sovereignty with an earlier era before the rise of national territorial states. In turn, historians have sought recently to understand the emergence of territorial sovereignty out of that earlier era. Recent historians remind us, in Lisa Ford's words, that “sovereignty and jurisdiction have always been intertwined, but they have not always been territorial in nature.”Footnote 23 Charles S. Maier agrees. “Territory is the premise of state sovereignty,” he writes, but the connection that scholars assume between territory and jurisdiction is a modern one: “alternatives for political organization existed before territoriality and sovereignty became such obsessive preoccupations.” Feudal and religious claims over people were not territorial in nature, for example. Only in the seventeenth century, as sovereigns sought to create coherent states, did borders and membership come to matter. But not today. “Territoriality no longer assures whether a given political unit has jurisdiction and effective power to secure desired legal much less economic outcomes,” Maier concludes.Footnote 24
The modern global order, with its overlapping, fragmented, and competing layers of governing institutions, and with its porous territorial boundaries and plural communities and politics, looks much like the world that eighteenth-century historians of British North America are discovering. Indeed, the global present has opened up new lenses for historians to view the imperial past.Footnote 25 As David Armitage acknowledges, the history of empires “remained invisible so long as history was viewed through nation-shaped spectacles. They returned to view only when older experiences of space—more extensive, more fluid and less confined by territorial boundaries—again framed questions of the past.”Footnote 26 To historical sociologist Krishan Kumar, because the world we are heading into looks much like the early modern world that we have lost, students of empire may help us understand how regimes managed many of the challenges facing us today: multiculturalism, emigration and immigration, and economic globalization: “Empire, in sum, can be the prism through which to examine many of the pressing problems of the contemporary world . . . Wherever we turn we seem to encounter problems and situations for which there are precedents in the historic empires.”Footnote 27
Historians rightly seek to contextualize the present in narratives about the past. Historians also rightly find that the questions worth asking are shaped by the concerns of the present. But as historians put their findings into stories, those stories require what Hayden White called “emplotment.” Therefore historical narratives can be interpreted using some of the techniques employed to study other literary texts. This does not reduce history to literature, but instead recognizes the formal aspects of all narratives.Footnote 28 If older, Whiggish histories portrayed the American Revolution as “the opening act in a conflict between democracy and imperialism,” some early American historians today, whether by design or not, have flipped the story. Many new narratives offer a tragic plotline in which a world of cosmopolitan diversity and free exchange was overturned in 1776 by a modern democratic nation-state determined to achieve territorial control and cultural uniformity.Footnote 29 The Revolution was, in Kathleen DuVal's framing, “independence lost.”Footnote 30
Richard White's pathbreaking The Middle Ground (1991) may have been one of the first to offer this new narrative. He opened up a new world for scholars in which Native American and European encounters took place on neither group's terms and the meanings each assigned to their interactions were never fully available to the other. It was a pluralistic, fluid world of intercultural exchange across boundaries. Divided by language, culture, and purpose, “on the middle ground” of the Pays d'en Haute, “diverse peoples adjust their differences by what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunderstandings.” White focused on on-the-ground practices. His middle ground was always fragile and subject to conflict and violence, but it represented a moment and space in which neither Native Americans nor Europeans dominated. But, in White's narrative, everything changed with the Revolution. In a few pages, White argues that the new American nation-state eradicated this “complicated world that could be both dreamscape and landscape.” The middle ground “vanished” as “the Americans arrived and dictated.”Footnote 31 Daniel Richter offers a similar story in his 2001 book Facing East from Indian Country. For Native Americans, the imperial world was one of negotiation and accommodation. But again, this fluid world in motion gave way surprisingly quickly to the new United States’ ambitions: “the end of the imperial world that had made the coexistence of Indians and European colonials possible ushered in the beginning of a revolutionary era” defined by a new republic controlled by “the minority who were White, male, and free.”Footnote 32
In Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australasia, 1788–1836 (2010), Ford examines the shift from a world in which sovereignty was defined by the community to which one belonged to one in which it was determined by “territory and jurisdiction.” In the 1733 Treaty of Augusta, “settler jurisdiction was explicitly defined by British subjecthood rather than territory.” The imperial world recognized “plurality of jurisdiction,” allowing Britons to be responsible for their own, and Native Americans for theirs. Ford's deep archival research unearths a world defined by “the fluidity of sovereignty” in settler–Native American relations. Under the empire, and then after the Revolution, Native Americans, the British in London and then the new United States’ federal government, and Georgia shared authority over common space. Georgians found this “fluidity” untenable. As Native Americans sought to sustain “indigenous jurisdiction,” Georgians demanded a more uniform understanding of law in which sovereignty applied to everyone living within a territory. They wanted Native Americans’ land. The result was the end of “a century of (increasingly contentious) plural practice” as Georgians imposed “perfect settler sovereignty.”Footnote 33
These stories correct for histories that have ignored the implications of the Revolution for Native Americans or have downplayed Native American agency. Yet frameworks employed to understand Native Americans’ struggles with an expansive (indeed, some would argue, imperial) United States have migrated to narratives about the British Empire more generally. In some recent interpretations, freedom is secured not through citizenship in a democratic nation-state, but instead outside it, in the empires and borderlands where porous boundaries and distant or weak sovereign authority enabled exchange and sustained pluralism. Thus it has become “a standard trope,” Joshua Piker contends, that “empires were negotiated (not dictatorial), composite (not homogenous), and driven by innovations and events at the periphery (not the metropole).”Footnote 34 Empires today are understood not as a “structure of command,” but “as a set of fluid institutional and cultural practices.”Footnote 35 In contested spaces, as Jeffers Lennox writes about mid-eighteenth-century Nova Scotia, “in lieu of a sovereign power, there developed . . . a system of territorial checks and balances in the form of shared spaces that enabled these various groups [Native, French, British] to interact peacefully, resolve conflicts through negotiation, and maintain an acceptable division of geography during a period of contested dominium.”Footnote 36 This new perspective of empire, while cognizant of violence, rejects earlier accounts of empires that focused on their violence and denial of civic freedom (the standard story of the American, Haitian, and post-World War II anticolonial independence movements). Instead, as scholars turn their attention away from empire as a category to analyzing empire as a set of practices, they have discovered complexity, plurality, contradiction, and even fragility at the heart of imperial projects.Footnote 37 As DuVal writes, “imperial relationships were almost always personal.”Footnote 38 To these scholars, empires promote economic and cultural exchange precisely because they are supranational entities that lack the sovereignty of territorial states.
The issue is not about the facts that historians are uncovering, but how those facts are narrated. In the case of legal pluralism, Paul Halliday argues that even if it was a fact of imperial regimes, historians need not grant that fact normativity: “it is not the role of histories or their authors to adjudicate the moral claims of laws’ pluralities.”Footnote 39 Yet, because historical narratives require emplotment, they are implicitly or explicitly moral tales. Such narratives, in Allan Megill's words, are “intimately connected with the processes by which individuals and groups make sense of themselves—even define themselves.”Footnote 40 Thus we must ask not just what historians have found, but how they have turned their findings into stories.
In many newer narratives of the eighteenth-century British imperial world, pluralism, fragmentation, hybridity, and mobility are the coin of the realm. For Atlantic historians, Trevor Burnard writes, “discontinuities are welcomed, [and] multiplicities of places and perspectives are normative.”Footnote 41 In their introduction to a forum in Early American Studies, Jerusha Westbury and Anelise Hanson Shrout argue that while the eighteenth-century Atlantic world was hardly “free from political and social upheaval,” it offers us today an image of a world of “multiple and alternative forms of affiliation.” As people moved across the Atlantic littoral, they engaged in “a creative process” that produced “unique populations and ‘hybrid’ polities.”Footnote 42 To DuVal, in Independence Lost, the Revolution's significance lies in “the shift from multiple empires and powerful Indian nations to one dominant United States,” transforming “an eighteenth-century world with its diversity of polities, shifting networks of interdependence, and more inclusive (and often more hierarchical) definitions of belonging” to one defined by “the white male individual.”Footnote 43
In short, in much recent work, a new plot is clear: empire sustained and protected a fluid, mobile, diverse world with fragmented, competing layers of sovereignty and free exchange. That world was brought to a close by the American Revolution.
Although this article is concerned primarily with recent analyses of the eighteenth-century British Empire, some scholars have extended the same kinds of argument to empires more generally. If, in Lauren Benton's memorable words, empires composed “a fabric that was full of holes, stitched together out of pieces, a tangle of strings,” perhaps they offer more guidance for our diverse interconnected global future than more recent national pasts.Footnote 44 In her groundbreaking book Law and Colonial Cultures (2002), Benton argues that central colonial states, whether in New Spain or Bengal, emerged from, and as a result of, conflicts spurred by legal and ethnic pluralism. The result was that “routines for subordinating the law of ethnic and religious communities to state law replaced more fluid forms of legal pluralism.” The older pluralistic legal order, full of conflict as it was, represented “an ordered and contested multiculturalism,” but this gave way by the end of the nineteenth century to “state-dominated legal orders.” Benton hopes that by demonstrating central state authority as “historically recent and contingent,” the possibility will open up for “alternative legal authorities centered in ethnic subpolities or cross-border communities.” But, she warns, given that the central colonial state was itself an outgrowth of legal pluralism, efforts for a new plural order will require more than turning back the clock through “state unmaking.”Footnote 45
The case for unmaking is made more forcefully in Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's interpretive synthesis Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010). As the title suggests, the question is which kind of regime—empire or nation-state—is better suited for a diverse interconnected world. The authors argue that empires are too often seen as relics of the era before World War II, but imperial forms of rule are still part of the modern global order, in both old-fashioned ways and new ways (such as the European Union). In fact, “making state conform with nation is a recent phenomenon, neither fully carried out nor universally desired.” And recent efforts to make nations—such as in Yugoslavia and Rwanda—“led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.”Footnote 46
Empires might provide an alternative. The authors do not downplay imperial violence, but remain taken by the ability of empires to sustain diversity: “empires, of course, hardly represented a spontaneous embrace of diversity”; imperial orders also relied on “violence and day-to-day coercion.” But empires, unlike nation-states, had to figure out ways to rule “unlike populations.” A key difference between empires and nation-states is that empires demand “loyalty, not likeness.” Imperial rulers wanted peace and profit, and they demanded less of their subjects than does a democratic nation-state of its citizens. This is particularly relevant today, they conclude, because historically “unitary kingdoms, city-states, tribes, and nation-states were less able to respond as flexibly to a changing world.” But empires thrived in a fluid, diverse, global world much like ours today. Scholars might learn much from “the pragmatic, interactive, accommodating capacity of empires.” The nation-state seeks to dominate a territory politically and culturally—but the history of empires offers us lessons “about our own time.” “Sovereignty can be shared, layered, and transformed.” The conclusion is clear: “Empires, for better or worse, dealt directly with difference; nation-states had the idea—illusion perhaps—that difference could be overcome by the appeal of the national idea and of participation in state institutions, or negatively by exclusion, expulsion, and compulsory assimilation.”Footnote 47
In his detailed historical examination of modern empires, Kumar also concludes that
empires, in their historic forms, may have had their day; but it is not at all clear that the desirable alternative is today's system of two hundred or so nation-states all claiming sovereignty and all tending toward ethnic uniformity. That seems a recipe for unending conflict, both within and between states. Empires, for all their faults, show us another way, a way of managing diversity and differences that are now the inescapable fate of practically all so-called nation-states. That by itself seems sufficient grounds for continuing to study them, and to reflect on what they may be able to teach us.Footnote 48
For Benton, Burbank and Cooper, and Kumar, our current global order requires forms of rule that can sustain diversity and promote free exchange. Nation-states no longer serve us in a transnational world. Empires might provide a set of lessons and options. We might take the best from imperial histories, Burbank and Cooper assert, in order to imagine “new and different forms of layered and overlapping sovereignty.”Footnote 49 But many of these new narratives parallel, even if scholars do not intentionally endorse, the arguments made by advocates of neoliberal globalization to limit territorial sovereignty in the interest of free exchange; as Lennox concludes, in imperial situations where territorial sovereignty was weak, “shared spaces—areas where the three groups [Native, French, British] could interact for mutual benefit—provided outlets for the economic, political, and religious needs of Nova Scotia's varied populace.”Footnote 50
ALAN TAYLOR AMONG THE SHIFTING FIELDS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
Between his first and more recent books, Alan Taylor migrated from the polity field to the exchange field. A close analysis of his work thus provides a window into how the move from one field to another reframes historical narratives about the Revolution, sovereignty, and democracy. In his first book, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors (1990), Taylor provided a narrative of settlement on Maine's frontier. The core tension in the book was one that remains at the heart of the American political narrative—battles between large landholders (capital) and small farmers. Taylor portrayed small proprietors’ efforts to gain land and independence “a new, internal, and attenuated stage of the continuing American Revolution.” When the Liberty Men demanded economic justice, they challenged the hierarchies of the imperial world. Taylor told a story of ordinary white Americans’ claiming a right to be citizens. He picks up this story for upstate New York in his Pulitzer Prize-winning William Cooper's Town (1995). On New York's frontier, the Revolution's aftermath was “a more dynamic and competitive social order” in which genteel Federalists competed against “rural democrats.” Again the story is between elites who claimed a right to rule and Americans emboldened by the Revolution's egalitarian ideals.Footnote 51
The tension between elites and egalitarians is present, but muted, in American Colonies (2001), Taylor's contribution to the Penguin History of the United States. In American Colonies, Taylor critiques traditional narratives of colonial America for favoring English colonists at the expense of Native Americans, African Americans, and other Europeans. He argues that a diverse society needs a more pluralistic narrative based on multicultural “encounters.” As Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans made a new world with and against each other, “they defined an array of new identities as Americans.” In these “exchanges and composites . . . we find the true foundation for the diverse America of our time.”Footnote 52 Taylor hopes that his new pluralistic narrative will enable us to move beyond the national story altogether. In today's globally interconnected world in which we have experienced the “escalating integration of North America—by treaty, investment, trade, migration, travel, mass media, and environmental pollution” that have made “national boundaries more porous”—Taylor hopes his book will be “a half step toward a more global (and less national) sensibility.” In this new story of a diverse, porous imperial order, the Revolution's legacy is not a battle for equality against elite landholders, but instead “a vision of white liberty.” Yet Taylor retains an implicit anti-imperial bias: Americans “proved worthy heirs to the British as predominant colonizers of North America.”Footnote 53
Taylor's critical perspective upon empire slowly drops away. In The Divided Ground (2006), Taylor turns to the question how and why nation-states “define and control their peripheries.” Taking a borderlands perspective, Taylor describes a “porous” region that experienced “an invasion of settlers.” He urges readers to question the givenness of borders in a post-national era, especially given the “fluidity” of today's US–Mexico border.Footnote 54 By The Civil War of 1812 (2010), Taylor has emplotted a new story. Focusing on the area between Montreal and Detroit, The Civil War of 1812 also offers “a borderlands rather than a national history.” Before the War of 1812, Native Americans, British subjects, and Americans all competed for dominance in Upper Canada and New York, but they also cooperated in exchanges for trade and other purposes in a region with “blurred” borders. But, to Taylor, this all changed once the British and Americans imposed territorial jurisdiction and came to occupy “distinct nations.”Footnote 55 In short, from American Colonies forward, we see Taylor embracing a vision of freedom as exchange and diversity, all of which pre-dated and was threatened by American independence.
In his monumental 2016 American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804, Taylor struggles in one narrative to hold together the perspective of both the polity and the exchange fields. He brilliantly highlights the violence spurred by the Revolutionary war on land and on sea. Patriots, Britons, common people, Native Americans, enslaved people, and empires struggled to respond to a fast-changing situation. The conflicts that grounded Liberty Men and William Cooper's Town return, but they play a role subordinate to the dominant narrative in which the Revolution's claims to liberty are reduced to whiteness. Race united the American cause, not ideals. Because the British Empire sustained a fluid, multicultural world, challenging settlers who “counted on their British culture and white skins to justify superior privileges,” the Revolution was spurred by a crisis of whiteness: “if denied dominion over natives and Francophones, the colonists worried that they would become dependents ruled by Britain.”Footnote 56 The ideals of the Revolution and the democratic class politics that animated Taylor's early work float like ephemera over a deeper racial story.
Over the course of his work, then, Taylor's plotlines shifted from defining freedom as class solidarity and democratic politics in a new republic to the freedom of borderless economic and cultural exchange overseen by imperial managers. In American Revolutions, Taylor seeks to connect the two fields, but the stories are incompatible. His focus on pluralism and exchange leads him to conflate democratic rule with whiteness, which stands in contrast to the multicultural imperial world. In short, the language and plot offered in Taylor's more recent work echo the vocabulary and aspirations of contemporary neoliberal globalization. One cannot help but wonder, however, what this new narrative might mean for the political aspirations of the Liberty Men.
CONCLUSION: POLITY VERSUS EXCHANGE
In the debate between Wood and Piker over the direction of the William and Mary Quarterly, this article argues, we see not just another battle in the culture wars, but a gap between older and newer historiographic fields. The older field was defined by and gained its “space of possibles” from the polity. The political, broadly defined, established its parameters. The newer field, on the other hand, is defined by neoliberal globalization. The freedom of economic exchange provides its parameters. For the older paradigm, freedom emerged through the creation of a self-governing people with the establishment of the new American republic. Critical historians noted the imperfections and exclusions of the new republic, but they agreed that they were contributing to the history of the United States. The newer field, on the other hand, considers freedom less in terms of the emergence of a sovereign self-governing people than in terms of the free exchange of goods and peoples across sovereign boundaries and the maintenance of cultural pluralism.Footnote 57
The issue, to be clear, is not the topic of study; it is about narratives, plots, and the significance that historians assign to their work. Scholars in both fields bring attention to the Revolution's impact on diverse groups within and beyond the United States’ territorial boundaries. Scholars in both fields are concerned about empires and the United States in a global context. Far from being ignored, race, class, gender, and immigration status are examined within the polity field as sites of contention.Footnote 58 Similarly, scholars have underscored the ways in which the new American republic reinforced and expanded slavery.Footnote 59 Scholars within the polity field need not deny that the American Revolution contained both “emancipatory and exploitative impulses,” in Craig Yirush's words.Footnote 60
The weakening of the polity field reflects the pressure on nation-states under contemporary forms of globalization. Yet, as Samuel Moyn has recently admitted, embracing supranational regimes in the absence of strong nation-states is “not enough” if we also seek to empower citizens to promote economic equality and social welfare.Footnote 61 While it can be uncomfortable to advocate the importance of nation-states at a time when we are witnessing the spread of some of the darkest, most dangerous forms of ethnonationalism in the US and around the world, the challenge remains that democracies depend on citizens having a sense of themselves as a people.Footnote 62 There can be no public good without a public. Whether one celebrates or criticizes contemporary globalization, however, its impact on historiography can be found in the places historians look for their stories, the ways that those stories are told, and the lessons that are drawn from them. That, at least, is one way to make sense of what historians are discovering as they shift their focus from the polity to exchange in vast early America.
