In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews in American History 30.3 (2002) 504-516



[Access article in PDF]

More Means Different:
Quantifying American Exceptionalism

Eric Rauchway


Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson. The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xii + 301 pp. Tables, notes, and index. $55.00.
Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. xii + 343 pp. Tables, notes, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

Historians of the United States have been accusing each other of parochialism for at least forty-five years. 1 Lately we have turned our wish to be free of local blinders into a positive desire to acquire global vision: in the last decade, the Journal of American History has devoted four issues entirely to transnational concerns. 2 This effort comprises what, a decade ago, JAH editor David Thelen called the "internationalization of American history," and it signifies, as one of his contributors put it, an effort to move "beyond [American] exceptionalism." 3 By contrast, as world historian Michael Adas recently noted, "other than to lament the myopia and provincialism of their American audiences," world and comparative historians have had little to say about the United States. 4

At some level of consciousness, historians all know the reasons for both trends. The United States would not be what it now is without the migration of capital, labor, ideas, and cultures from overseas: therefore we need to know world history to understand American history. At the same time, because the U.S. has received disproportionately more money and more migrants than any other country it occupies a unique place in the world's recent history—which makes it troublesome fodder for global comparisons. The great question for everyone who wants to move beyond exceptionalism is whether it made any difference to American political or cultural development that the U.S. should have had more exposure to international capital and labor: does more mean different? Jeffrey G. Williamson and his co-authors Timothy J. Hatton and Kevin H. O'Rourke have in two volumes of cliometric synthesis [End Page 504] shown that it does, and furthermore that the difference made to American history was especially significant in the years when exceptionalism was supposed to be on the wane—the era around the turn of the century, which begot the process of industrialization that one historian calls "the Europeanization of America." 5

The study of modern U.S. history began during this era too, in an effort to answer the question of whether more meant different. It was the preoccupation of Henry Adams, who framed his History of the United States as a test of the Jeffersonian proposition that "physical and moral advancement" should automatically keep pace, so that a plenitude of well-fed citizens would lead, for the first time in the world's history, to a better-governed republic. Adams doubted it. 6 As he meditated in his contemporaneously written Democracy, "What gave peculiar sanctity to numbers?" More meant merely more, while Adams's character yearned for difference, and "never had been able . . . to accept the Brobdingnagian doctrine that he who made two blades of grass grow where only one grew deserved better of mankind. . . . Why will not somebody grow to be a tree and cast a shadow?" Adams's argument would have cheered today's anti-exceptionalists. The U.S. differed from its forebears in degree, not kind. 7 But a generation later, Charles and Mary Beard framed The Rise of American Civilization as a retort to Adams. More, they believed, had indeed meant different. Unlike other historical metropoles, the U.S. had developed an "invulnerable faith in democracy" as a result of its riches, because system and circumstance spread those riches generously and relatively widely. 8

Although the Beards conducted an explicitly comparative and transnational analysis, situating their story of American power within the story of a global history that was "repeating old patterns" of class conflict and social development, their argument attracted the antipathy of anti...

pdf

Share