Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early America ed. by Patrick Griffin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early Americaed. by Patrick Griffin Cameron B. Strang Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early America. Edited by Patrick Griffin. Early American Histories. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. [x], 269. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-3988-9.) Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early Americaclearly fulfills its two main purposes: adding to a growing body of work that explores continuities across the Revolutionary era and honoring the career of historian T. H. Breen. Like Breen's own scholarship (which is summarized in an afterword by Joyce E. Chaplin), the chapters range from the early colonial era to the decades after independence. These essays analyze "[t]he relationship between sovereignty—the stuff of empire—and how people manage it" in colonial America, Britain, the French Atlantic, and the imperial United States (p. 11). As Patrick Griffin discusses in his introduction, the Revolutionary era has usually been broken into two periods, each with its own set of historiographical debates. On the one hand, the thirteen years between 1763 and 1776 have generated countless efforts to understand how colonists' pride in being British at the end of the Seven Years' War could have so quickly morphed into a new American identity. The eleven years between 1776 and 1787, on the other hand, have inspired historians to regard 1787 as a "litmus test" for determining the extent to which the Constitution realized the Revolution's most radical aspects (p. 3). Instead of seeing 1776 as either an end or a beginning, Griffin suggests approaching the years between 1763 and 1787 as "the 'imperial-revolutionary' moment," a period when some colonists came to believe that British imperialism had failed and, by fighting to replace British rule with a minimal government, brought about "a near-anarchic state" that only stabilized after the Constitution ordered the United States into a new empire (pp. 19, 20). In other words, empire-imposed order bookended social revolution. Breen offers his own thoughts about "What time was the American Revolution?" in the conclusion (p. 233). More emphatically than Griffin, Breen situates the years between 1760 and 1773 "as a general crisis of imperial rule throughout the Atlantic World" (p. 234). He contends that agitation in Boston was pretty typical of how imperial subjects protested unfair treatment, but Parliament's overreaction to the Tea Party (and not the party itself) pushed this quotidian kind of resistance into a more general mobilization. Breen also posits that the experience of war—not ideology—led many white men to the revolutionary conclusion that they were each other's equals; moreover, he argues that most Americans were brightly optimistic during the years before [End Page 976]the Constitution, despite historians' penchant for taking "elite fears of looming anarchy" at face value (p. 242). Far from undermining the volume as a whole, the subtle but important differences in how Griffin and Breen reenvision Revolutionary time ensure that this collection can encourage further debate rather than attempt to impose definitive answers, a worthy achievement for any volume on something as thoroughly studied as the Revolution. The chapters themselves cover a wide array of subjects, including political economy, military fortifications, and (in Seth Cotlar's fascinating essay on antiquarian John Fanning Watson) nostalgia. Three chapters may be of particular interest to readers of this journal. Owen Stanwood examines attempts to establish wineries in the South from sixteenth-century Florida to eighteenth-century Virginia. Imperial visionaries and Huguenot experts persisted in experimenting with wine because it seemed to offer a path toward a "more virtuous empire" (p. 51). Viniculture, which required German and French laborers, would make slavery less central to colonial society and even ease tensions between colonists and British officials by creating ample work for white colonists as producers of raw materials and, therefore, ensuring that they ceased undermining mercantilism by striving to become manufacturers. Patricia Cleary explores allegations of sexual misconduct against white women in colonial St. Louis. French and Spanish officials cataloged white women's sexual transgressions, especially adultery, but were surprisingly tolerant of these scandals. Cleary argues that this benign neglect stemmed from a mixture of officials...