Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

Introduction

Introduction People in the United States must understand world history. So argues Emma Willard , nineteenth-­century U.S. writer and educator, in her 1857 world history textbook , Universal History in Perspective: “Universal history, as a science, is . . . at this moment, particularly important to the citizens of our republic.” According to Willard, the urgent importance of world his­tori­cal knowledge for U.S. Ameri­ cans springs from the fact that the United States’ future is precarious and uncertain . She writes that “[i]f, as we believe, they are wrong, who teach that it is the inevitable destiny of our repub­ lic to fall into anarchy and thence pass to despotism ; no less do they err, who treat with levity every suggestion that such is our danger.” Given this danger, the past “might teach our posterity what we as good citizens must desire them to know—the virtues which exalt nations, and the vices which destroy them—that so they may practise the one, and avoid the other.” As Willard wrote earlier, in an 1849 textbook, the U.S. republic, “if it stands, must remain by avoiding the rocks, upon which all former republics have foundered. History must make them known.”1 I argue in this book that a series of popu­ lar nineteenth-­ century U.S. repre­ sen­ tationsofworldhistoryembodythephilosophythatWillardarticulateshere. Texts by James Fenimore Cooper, William Hickling Prescott, John Lothrop ­Motley, Wash­ing­tonIrving,andHenryWadsworthLongfellowre-­createpivotalmoments in the histories of Venice, Peru, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Ojib­way, in what I call “narratives of imperial eclipse.” These stories depict the surpassing of a great civilization by an emerging power: for example, Incan Peru being conquered by Spain, the Ojibway ceding dominance to the French, and Venice being replaced by New York as a global commercial force. Narratives of imperial eclipse all share certain key features. They capture moments in world history when the trajectories of two great states, one on the rise and one in decline, intersected. They work against the monumental conceptual backdrop of the rise and fall of empires, but they humanize this monumental pattern by representing the declining empire in detail, giving the reader an opportu- 2 / Introduction nity to become familiar with and invested in its culture, not immune to the pathos of its status as a now-­ lost world. Two elements of imperial eclipse narratives are particularly important in facilitating readers’ engrossment into the world of the declining empire: their length and their incorporation of substantial his­ tori­ cal research. These texts provide sustained depictions, generally multiple volumes in length, that give the reader time to become absorbed in the culture being represented and affected when it is threatened by eclipse from an outside force. The authors of these narratives furthermore used considerable his­tori­cal research—of­ tenorigi­nal,archivalresearch—toinformtheirdepictions,whichaddsrealismand depth to their representations of empires in decline, and helps to facilitate reader engrossment into the imperial lost worlds.2 Extensivecontemplationofeclipsedempiresbecomesaspringboardfornationalist self-­scrutiny when the present starts to resemble the past. In the case of each eclipsed empire, as represented by the authors examined in this book, the eclipse by an outside force had been preceded and in fact enabled by the internal weakening of the waning empire, plagued by po­ liti­ cal, economic, or social problems. These international histories thereby became a source of intranational concern for their authors, once they began to recognize parallels between internal problems faced by the fallen empires and corresponding problems within the United States of the nineteenth century. These parallels are sometimes acknowledged in the text itself and sometimes addressed only in other writings by the author (or even in reviews of the book, in the case of John Lothrop Motley). Precisely because the narratives attribute the empires’ downfall to some extent to these problems, the appearance in U.S. society of social and po­ liti­ cal malfunctions also experienced by the Venetians, Peruvians, Spanish, Dutch, and Ojibway caused these authors justifiable concern. This book does not present a comprehensive survey of all nineteenth-­ century world history writing, or even all imperial eclipse narratives; the richness of this body of writing deserves much additional inquiry, to which I hope this study will be a contribution. Nonetheless, the texts that I discuss do constitute a coherent intellectual set because they present a reasonably complete picture of imperial decline in the early modern period, when great states declined in rapid succession. In the early modern era, each empire that eclipsed another seemed doomed to be quickly eclipsed...