The Significance of the 'Global Turn' for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation-Building

Abstract

Many of us who have studied early American history for some time are acutely aware that we have witnessed a 180-degree in the field. During the late 1970s and 1980s, when some of us were coming of age as historians, social history was in its heyday. The town or community study was regarded as the ideal form of analysis. Book after book and article after article stressed the relative isolation of early Americans. If persistent localism characterized Massachusetts towns in the seventeenth century, communal stability and local autonomy still remained the norm throughout the eighteenth century. In colonial Virginia, most residents, it was said, seldom journeyed more than a few miles from the place where they were born, had little contact with people from distant regions, and received little information about elite ideas or far-off events. Even into the first decades of the nineteenth century, as geographic mobility increased and urban areas grew in size, most Americans were said to live in places dominated by face-to-face interactions and personal relationships.1What a difference a couple of decades makes. By the 1980s and 1990s, historians had begun to look well beyond local as the basic unit of study. When they examined early America, what caught their attention was not the inhabitants' remoteness and isolation but their extensive connections and contacts with the larger world. Using this lens, historians who study the early American republic began to emphasize the importance of imagined communities and public spheres that linked people who were geographically distant from one another. Print culture circulated ideas, technology diminished isolation, the market economy created trading relationships, and shared rituals forged an expanded sense of community. These connections meant that even across vast expanses individuals could share a common political ideology, support the same movements for social change, or express a shared sense of American identity and nationalism.2At the same time, historians Jack P. Greene and Bernard Bailyn, among others, were promoting an even more capacious sense of the field. Taking their cue from Fernand Braudel's magisterial study of the Mediterranean and R. R. Palmer's brilliant Age of Democratic Revolution, they urged early American historians to broaden their research to include all the countries, regions, and areas that border the Atlantic Ocean. For historians of the early American republic, this approach produced a significant broadening of their geographic scope of inquiry. Instead of focusing solely on events within the borders of United States, or what became the United States in 1776, research in the field now encompasses everything from the African slave trade and the growth of trans-Atlantic abolitionism; to the many-faceted connections between the French, Haitian, and American Revolutions; to the role of European powers and indigeneous peoples in the borderlands of North America. Hemispheric history, which examines connections and comparisons between events in Latin America and the early United States, has also received greater attention.3Now the turn has arrived. At least since the 1990s, the growth of transnational corporations, the emergence of the Internet, the increasing importance of global exchanges of capital, and the expansion in international terrorism have made globalization a ubiquitous concept in both the popular and scholarly literature. Hoping to bring the past into conversation with the present, historians have sought to address the historical origins, antecedents, and development of this phenomenon. Long before the twentieth century, it is clear, ideas were in circulation; goods and capital flowed around the world; animals, plants, and germs constantly moved between and among societies. National boundaries were not fixed, but were fluid and permeable. Individuals living in the past were not parochial residents of a face-to-face society but cosmopolitan adventurers or citizens of the world. …