Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s

Abstract

Although tightly focused on a short time span of just a decade, this provocative collection of essays makes bold and refreshingly innovative claims about the historical nature of sovereignty, the nation-state, and modern political identity in North America. Readers of HAHR will be familiar with the calls to include Mexico and Latin America in a continental and hemispheric framework for the historiography of the Age of Revolution and state formation. However, this volume refocuses on the political crises, civil wars (or lack thereof in Canada), and new social contracts emerging in the 1860s by reconfiguring perspectives away from the Atlantic and toward the interior and Pacific landscapes that dominated the North American continent. As the dean of nineteenth-century US history, Steven Hahn, writes in the collection's first essay, “an ‘inside out’ and ‘southside north’ perspective may also allow us to see . . . patterns of development most important to nineteenth-century American capitalism” (p. 33).Perhaps more than those for other edited volumes of essays, the introduction for Remaking North American Sovereignty also takes on the weighty theoretical and historical questions: What is sovereignty? What is the state? What is the nation? Frank Towers importantly presents his working definitions of these concepts, which are more familiarly debated in scholarship on the Age of Revolution and less so in scholarship on the mid to late nineteenth century. This volume, then, asks “how . . . did new understandings of national identity and new definitions of citizenship come to pass in the 1860s and 70s, and in what ways did these transformations . . . cross political boundaries?” (p. 13). The introduction alone gives much food for thought about adopting a more capacious temporal and spatial understanding of modern state formation.The editors neatly divide the book into three sections, titled “Making Nations,” “Indigenous Polities,” and “The Complications of the Market.” Part 1 includes work by scholars Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijangos y González, and Robert Bonner. Collectively, these essays tackle this seminal decade “from the inside out,” exploring the overlapping influences and synchronous actions of Mexican, Canadian, and US national consolidation projects amid civil wars, regional conflict, and, in the case of Canada's Confederation, efforts to maintain ties to the “mother country.” As Mijangos y González importantly points out, these “parallel trajectories. . . . responded to global trends and above all to regional dynamics that explain the simultaneous nature” of national consolidation (p. 75).Containing the work of Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante, part 2 focuses on Indigenous states. These authors build on recent efforts by scholars of Native North America to insert into the existing, teleological national histories of Canada, Mexico, and the US Native polities the powerful Great Plains nations, who “imagined territory as a permeable space with porous borders that permitted mobility, and as a source of resources to be appropriated” (p. 153). Highlighting the dynamic political and economic forces emanating out of the vast interior plains, these essays seek to elevate Indigenous actions and calculations to the diplomatic level, thus answering a call made most forcefully by historian Brian DeLay.Focusing on the expansion of capitalism and its role in modern state formation, the final section includes prominent scholars who have pioneered on this topic: Christopher Clark, Mary P. Ryan, and Benjamin H. Johnson. Each essay focuses closely on the ways that the local conditions on the ground—whether the “family farms” identified by Clark, the local municipalities such as San Francisco detailed by Ryan, or the borderland communities of northwest Mexico analyzed by Johnson—shifted in response to the momentous progress of political and economic consolidation (p. 195).The other refreshing aspect of this volume is its provocative conclusion (not always included in such edited works) prodding the reader to fully embrace a continental perspective both spatially and temporally. Indeed, one can push this further (as some have) to take a more hemispheric perspective, revealing the tug of Latin America on its Northern neighbors. Returning to Steven Hahn is instructive: “looking further to the inside and the south, we may even see that it was in the great Mexican Revolution—mostly ignored by scholars of the United States—that the long nineteenth century first gave way to the twentieth” (p. 33).