Nation and Empire in the Early US

The recent decline of American exceptionalism has coincided with a critical reassessment of the fundamental ideas and forces that shaped the culture and politics of the US in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas the idea of the nation, with its investment in the creation of a distinctly American identity and culture, organized the exceptionalist project, the role of empire, particularly in the guise of colonialism, has become the new focal point of a postor even anti-exceptionalist reinterpretation of the history and culture of the early US. In the case of scholarship grounded in the eighteenth century, the old story of a gradual but inexorable movement of the colonies away from Great Britain that culminates in the Revolution has been replaced with a narrative of Anglicization that essentially inverts the exceptionalist story. According to the Anglicization thesis, as the colonies developed economically and culturally over the course of the eighteenth century and became more entangled in Britain's commercial empire, they also grew increasingly similar to the imperial metropolis. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, the exceptionalist insistence that the US was fundamentally anti-imperial has given way to a new "postnationalist" understanding of the racial politics and territorial goals of the US that situates its imperial ambitions at the center of the story.

It would seem logical therefore that we ought to be able to construct a longer term narrative that flows smoothly from the Anglicization thesis's account of the colonies' relationship to the British Empire in the eighteenth century to the postnationalist American studies' vision of the US as an incipient imperial power in the nineteenth century. Yet we cannot, because both Anglicization and postnationalist American studies cast the Revolution as a national moment. In essence, then, Anglicization describes a movement from empire to nation that mirrors the postnationalist trajectory of nation to empire. Put together, these two accounts produce a narrative in which the American colonies move from an imperial colonial moment to a nationalist phase and then return to a new imperial mode. Rather than becoming the channel through which a new metanarrative of the way empire shaped the US flows, the Revolution becomes a bottleneck interrupting the imperial story.¹

In recent years, we have seen a spate of exciting new postnationalist-inflected books about the early US that trace the roots of American imperialism to the Revolution and colonial period. One of the most striking features of these studies, by scholars such as Ed White, David Kazanjian, and Andy Doolen, is that although they foreground the role of imperialism in the early US, they also reinscribe the primacy of a national narrative, especially at the domestic level.² In a sense these works suggest a dialectical relationship between nation and empire in which nation and empire represent two poles in an ongoing narrative that culminates with the victory of imperialism in the nineteenth century. In this often compelling narrative, nationalism and imperialism coexist, but they necessarily represent competing and antithetical forces. This dichotomy is the byproduct of a definition of empire that equates it with colonialism. I argue that during the Revolution and early republic empire referred to a model of nationality that included but was not reducible to a set of colonialist (or imperialist) policies. Empire, that is, would come to define the structural relationship between the states and the principles that would govern the operations of the federal government, as much as it did the colonialist policies that the new American government would implement.

Although early Americans may have understood nation and empire to exist in tension with one another, in the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution they constructed a state designed to integrate the two. As J. G. A. Pocock has shown, one of the central questions for republican theorists from Machiavelli to the late eighteenth century was precisely the matter of the viability of a republican empire.³ Pocock's account of the links between American constitutional rhetoric and the traditions of republican political thought has had a profound impact on theories of the American Revolution, but his discussion of the...