The Promise of Empire

March/April 2005 · Historically Speaking 23 The Promise of Empire Edward G. Gray I would like to focus on the first of the three disjunctions" Pauline Maier describes in her provocative essay: that between colonial and Revolutionary historiographies . She is entirely correct, it seems to me, in noting that disjunction. She is also right in suggesting that the disjunction is much more than a chronological or narrowly thematic one: it rests on a longstanding methodological divide between social historians and historians of the institutions of government . The former are engaged by the longue durée ofthe colonial era; the latter, by the histoire événementielle of the comparatively brief Revolutionary era. My own sense, though, is that far from growing more pronounced, this disjunction seems to be weakening. That's the good news. The bad news, from Maier's perspective , is that this weakening does not involve a return to the history of government. That is, to my knowledge, most young historians continue to avoid questions about the origins of the Constitution or the political thought ofthe founders or the power of the Continental Congress. Similarly, there has been very little recent work on the apparatus ofcolonial government —whether the New England towns or the colonial assemblies. Exactly why historians have lost interest in the history ofgoverning institutions is obviously connected to contemporary debates about exactly what it is we mean by politics. And among academic historians, the answer has hedged toward a capacious definition in which politics happens in the bedroom, in the coffee house, on the street, on ships at sea, and at the geographical fringes ofEuropean dominion. This trend has seemed to me driven less by any coherent agenda than by momentum (scholars have never gotten jobs by ignoring academic fashions) and an appetite for novelty. Of course, one historian's appetite for the new is another's exhaustion with the old. My sense is that the current fascination with narrative —much of which falls under the rubric microhistory or, as Robert Darnton recently dubbed one sub-genre, "incident analysis"— comes not so much from some conscious postmodern nihilism as it does from a general exhaustion with over-argued academic writing.1 While we may lament the trend-driven habits of the academy, it seems to me some recent developments have much to offer those of us who have been frustrated by the disjunction between work in the colonial and Revolutionary periods. Put differently, these developments promise to alter the historical landscape so that questions about the creation of the United States can no longer be divorced from important questions about the colonies. At the center of these developments has been the resurrection of empire as an explanatory device. The idea that events in the colonial and Revolutionary periods need to be understood in terms of the larger structures of the British Empire is not at all new; nor is there anything new about the idea that something called "empire" has long-term relevance in American history. What is relatively new is the notion that empire and all that it implied in the 18th century—the imperial bureaucracy, commercial networks, a distinct form of subjecthood, hierarchical legal and political regimes, etc.—allows us to view the whole disjointed 1 8th-century American past as a single, unified field of historical investigation . It should be said that "empire," as opposed to "the" or "an" empire, signifies, in addition to a kind of institution, a set of ideas and inclinations. It is akin to an "ism" such as imperialism, although it carries far fewer negative connotations. The usage seems to be British in origin, and parallels our own "democracy." For Americans the latter is much more than a political order. It is a social disposition, an aesthetic, a philosophy, a collective identity, a form of material wellbeing , and so on. One need not trundle out Kipling or that one time Briton, Benjamin Franklin (who wrote in an English newspaper in 1759 that New Englanders could scarcely be more British, given "their constant intercourse with England, by ships arriving almost every week from the capítol, their respect for the mother country, and admiration of every thing that is British...