The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent ed. by Andrew Shankman (review)

The Routledge Worlds series usually focuses on major civilizations and epochs, such as the Egyptian world, the Elizabethan age, or regions that scholars have used to understand transnational connections (such as the Atlantic world). Andrew Shankman of Rutgers University, the editor of this volume, states that it “explores the efforts of Europeans, Indians, and those of African descent to coexist in North America and then in the land claimed or sought by the United States” (p. 1). However, the eighteen essays here are not just surveys about the era of the American Revolution; they have been organized around the theme of conflict over land and labor in North America. Indeed, this volume is the only one in the series so far with a subtitle. Shankman wants us to consider the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War “as one discrete period, even as the era of the first American Republic” (p. 19). Thus the volume seeks to break up the neat periodization of pre–Civil War U.S. history.

To portray the significance of land and labor as a unifying theme, this volume begins with an examination of their roots in colonial and Revolutionary America. The first section, “Origins of the Revolutionary American Republic,” with essays by Zara Anishanslin, “Producing Empire: The British Empire in Theory and Practice,” Trevor Burnard, “Slavery and the Causes of the American Revolution in Plantation British America,” and Christina Snyder, “Native Nations in the Age of Revolution,” highlights how issues related to land and labor began well before the Revolution, with Native Americans and enslaved Africans bearing the brunt of British imperialism in America. The Revolution, then, was less revolutionary than has been supposed. Trevor Burnard, however, strikes one discordant note concerning the overall theme by stating that while slave labor was an important issue, “[t]he causes for Revolution remain . . . constitutional rather than derived from racial, class, or sectional conflicts” (p. 56).

The next section examines “The Quest for Continental Control,” with essays by Kathleen DuVal, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Allan Kulikoff, Max M. Edling, Peter S. Onuf, James Alexander (Alec) Dun, Alan Taylor, and Nicole Eustace, showing that the removal of the British and the establishment of the American republic did not solve problems related to land and labor but instead exacerbated them. For those researching the South, the essays by DuVal, Kulikoff, Onuf, Dun, and Taylor are the most interesting. They clearly indicate that southern interests coincided with national interests in, as Dun puts it, “an Age of Disruption, 1770–1808,” but simultaneously sowed the seeds for future disunion (p. 218). There was an immediate disconnect between the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of American growth, as Native Americans were driven off their land and replaced by whites with their black slaves.

The final section explores “The Emergence of a Continental Hegemon,” focusing on how the growing self-confidence of the United States about territorial expansion placed the country on the international stage. Essays by J. M. Opal and Reeve Huston explain the ideologies informing land policy, but John Craig Hammond’s use of a quotation by Abraham Lincoln describing the expansion of slavery as “The High-Road to a Slave Empire” aptly characterizes the whole section. Hammond and Matthew Karp, in his essay “The World the Slaveholders Craved: Proslavery Internationalism in the 1850s,” both break the tradition of examining the expansion of American slavery in a national context. Hammond finds a lot of continuity in the expansion of the institution from the colonial era through the antebellum era and argues that although “[t]he independence of the United States and the American Revolution” were “crucial moments of change” in the “saga of slavery’s growth,” they were still “simply moments” in a much larger story (p. 363). Karp shows that in desiring an empire...