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u 1 In the introduction of his contemporary history of the United States, the Annals of Europe and America (1807–10), Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) considers the idea of America’s manifest selfdetermination as nonsense. Because America principally depends on international trade, its “destiny . . . is intimately connected with the situation and transactions of European nations.”1 As the demand for American goods was determined by shortages resulting from the convulsions of war among foreign peoples, the country was shaped by the wake of antagonistic global forces since the conditions of modern trade and navigation “have the wonder power of annihilating . . . space itself.” Because “two maritime and trading nations encounter and interfere [sic] with each other in every corner of the globe that is accessible by water,” the combative encounters of this pair of dominant actors in the world market affect America, even if these skirmishes occur halfway around the earth.2 The two superpowers referred to here are “undoubtedly France and Great Britain,” and the history of their conflict is “the history of Europe, and, in some measure, of the world.”3 Understanding America as fundamentally conditioned by turbulence within a globalized arena of political economy, Brown consequently insists that his current moment belongs to a long eighteenth century that extends beyond the 1700s in either direction. Even in the early nineteenth century, America remains shaped by a trajectory that Brown sees beginning in 1688 when France intervened in the fractional disputes surrounding Britain’s dispossession of the Stuarts during the Glorious Revolution. The first segment of this phase ends with the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), which amplified 1. Charles Brockden Brown, “Annals of Europe and America, for 1806–7,” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science, ed. Charles Brockden Brown, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1807), 1–79, 3. 2. Ibid., 3–4. 3. Ibid., 4. method and misperception: the paradigm problem of the early american novel Franco-British tensions beyond Europe and projected them throughout the world. American modern history breaks from its past only in 1793, with the period’s second inflection point, marked by the rise of French offensive expansion after nearly a century of having to defend its domestic and imperial territory against British incursions. Although Brown would not live to experience its arrival, he would probably have understood Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 and England’s consequent Victorian-era hegemony as the periodizing conclusion to this long passage of time. While Brown sees the “quarrel . . . between Great Britain and her colonies in 1776” as a “favourable opportunity to France for reducing the formidable power of her rival,” the War for Independence is a minor point in a larger series of tactical sallies for position between the European powers, one less significant for Americans than the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), which resulted in the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade.4 Discounting the noteworthiness of domestic independence and constitutionalism, Brown argues that America belongs to a global history not of its own making, given its incorporation into what the historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein calls a world-system of capitalist trade.5 The world-system is a constellation defined by the hierarchizing competition among bourgeois-dominated nation-states for profit through the exploitation of human and natural resources and business cycles of economic expansion and contraction. Throughout the Annals, Brown insistently describes seemingly personal acts, social experiences, and cultural expression as shaped by the worldly conflict over trade, which becomes enacted through the medium of bellicose states and mediated by declarations that use the language of moral value to disguise and justify the desire for commodified ones. In Brown’s account, the year 1793 ought to serve as the focus of the early period of American studies as it marks the start of the last segment of the Franco-Britishdefined phase of the modern world-system and an internal transition that prepares the onset of another. Would such a perspective help answer why the longer fiction of the early American novel sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s only to fall into a long decline after 1800 until its resuscitation in the 1820s? Lillie Deming Loshe’s bibliography of early American fiction illustrates the trend. With only a handful of nonimported titles 2 u the culture and commerce of the early american novel 4. Ibid., 5. 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in...

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