Nation and Empire in the Early US

Abstract

The recent decline of American exceptionalism has coincided with a critical reassessment of the fundamental ideas and forces that shaped the culture and politics of the US in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas the idea of the nation, with its investment in the creation of a distinctly American identity and culture, organized the exceptionalist project, the role of empire, particularly in the guise of colonialism, has become the new focal point of a postor even anti-exceptionalist reinterpretation of the history and culture of the early US. In the case of scholarship grounded in the eighteenth century, the old story of a gradual but inexorable movement of the colonies away from Great Britain that culminates in the Revolution has been replaced with a narrative of Anglicization that essentially inverts the exceptionalist story. According to the Anglicization thesis, as the colonies developed economically and culturally over the course of the eighteenth century and became more entangled in Britain’s commercial empire, they also grew increasingly similar to the imperial metropolis. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, the exceptionalist insistence that the US was fundamentally anti-imperial has given way to a new “postnationalist” understanding of the racial politics and territorial goals of the US that situates its imperial ambitions at the center of the story. It would seem logical therefore that we ought to be able to construct a longer term narrative that flows smoothly from the Anglicization thesis’s account of the colonies’ relationship to the British Empire in the eighteenth century to the postnationalist American studies’ vision of the US as an incipient imperial power in the nineteenth century. Yet we cannot, because both Anglicization and postnationalist American studies cast the Revolution as a national moment. In essence, then, Anglicization describes a movement from empire to nation that mirrors the