Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World. Edited by Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf. Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World. (Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2005. Pp. X, 38L $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-7912-4.)
This review was originally published in the Journal of Southern History 73, no. 3 (Aug. 07), 683-685.
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Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World
Edited by Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
The editors of Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World had a bold vision: to explore the influence of events and ideas from elsewhere in the British Empire on political developments in the thirteen mainland colonies and to trace the effect of the American Revolution on the wider Atlantic world. As the dust jacket points out, in Empire and Nation leading historians were to reconsider that upheaval as a transnational event, with many sources and momentous implications for Ireland, Africa, the West Indies, Canada, and Great Britain itself. In the end, the essays individually provide much food for thought, but despite a vigorous introduction that attempts to bring all under a coherent Atlantic umbrella, the collection falls a little short of this admirable goal.
The book is divided into three sections, with the first intended to situate the origins of the revolution, very broadly defined, in the British Atlantic world. In this endeavor, Eliga H. Gould succeeds most admirably with a bold reassessment of British imperial policy following the Seven Years' War. Much of the rest of this first section, however, quickly moves away from exploring the roots of the rebellion toward more traditional studies of how Americans sought to define their new nation. Noting colonists' acknowledgment of the importance of the empire to their former security, for example, David C. Hendrickson argues that the federal union resulted from new efforts to constitute the United States as a federation of equal, sovereign states that would ensure peace rather than perpetual European-like conflicts between them. Yet as Hendrickson and Don Higginbotham both argue, divisions between and within the colonies compelled many American state makers to establish a much stronger and more centralized government than anyone might have envisioned in 1776 to maintain that peace. Richard Alan Ryerson in an essay on John Adams's political thinking and Ellen Holmes Pearson in an essay on the republicanization of the common law both demonstrate the inherently conservative nature of the founders' efforts.
If in highlighting the influence of the British political heritage on the formation of the new nation the first section challenges an older idea of American exceptionalism, the second section implicitly resurrects it with an inward-looking focus on society, politics, and culture in the new nation. Here, Mary M. Schweitzer offers a revealing view of the debate over the ratification of the Constitution as one shaped by local custom and experience, while Steven Sarson makes a persuasive case that the Revolution failed to alter the fundamental structure of economy and society in the Chesapeake and in fact could be said to have created greater social and economic inequalities. While such insights provide a salutary reminder that local customs and provincial concerns could be as important as Atlantic influences in shaping the new nation, essays by Marc Harris on the development of voluntary associations, by Melvin Yazawa on political rhetoric, and by Robert M. Calhoon on primitive Christianity and the public sphere in the early republic all leave the reader wondering whether a more expansive Atlantic framework might have proved illuminating. Perhaps this is too much to ask from already insightful essays, but their inclusion in this volume compels further questions about the kinds of transatlantic connections and influences that Maurice J. Brie uncovered in his study of new Catholic Irish immigrants and radical politics in Philadelphia. Brie concludes that the local political divisions that developed in the city reflected not only party-building efforts in the union but also the inescapable political struggles that wracked the Atlantic world more generally.
The most explicitly Atlantic essays are those in the third section that move readers away from the thirteen colonies and the new nation. These included Keith Mason on the American loyalist diaspora around the British Atlantic world, James Sidbury on the necessity of early black abolitionists to appropriate racialized identities in order to make liberationist claims, Edward L. Cox on the impact of the American and Haitian Revolutions on Caribbean slavery, and Trevor Burnard on freedom and migration in the post Revolutionary world. Significantly, these essays help put American developments into much wider context, again challenging claims of exceptionalism. Mason, for example, convincingly demonstrates the continued claims to British liberty by loyalist emigres as they resumed the same pursuits of happiness that had defined their lives in the old colonies in new and diverse locations such as Canada, the West Indies, and Sierra Leone. Moreover, both Cox and Bumard point out that enslaved Africans were better off in the British empire, as the American Revolution only served to entrench slavery. In an expansive and bold survey that helps tie the first and second British empires more closely together, Bumard compares post-Revolutionary America with imperial developments around the world. Ironically, through the imposition of more centralized and authoritarian forms of imperial governance, Britain was much more able to circumscribe the freedom of white settlers to oppress and enslave dependent peoples than was the new United States.
Ultimately, despite these promising transnational interventions, the Atlantic makes only an occasional appearance in this collection, often only incidentally, and is rarely systematically used as a framework, subject, or tool of analysis. Perhaps this is testimony to the still ill-defined parameters of Atlantic history, but the editors might have been more explicit about why these particular papers were brought together in this collection. These caveats aside, the essays in this collection are in tums stimulating, provocative, and enlightening. They represent some of the best new work on the political history of the American Revolution and highlight some promising new directions in Atlantic history.