Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 by Wil Verhoeven (review)

The introduction of America into the European consciousness inspired utopian thinking in those who held the New World in their imagination. Christopher Columbus, writing about what he had encountered in the Caribbean upon his return to Spain in 1493, constructed a utopian narrative to frame discovery for his readers and set up a potential return voyage. Thomas More, writing several decades later, set his Utopia (1516) within the space of a fictional American island, using it as a vehicle to contemplate the problems and solutions of governance in sixteenth-century England. For Columbus, More, and countless other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers and writers, America was a redemptive place where Old World political, religious, and social ills could be transformed and perfected. From Cortes’s mythical conquest and subjugation of the Mexica to John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s arguments for women’s rights in New Spain, utopian thinking was prolific in America as well as Europe. Yet for all the optimism of these writers, practical matters often trumped lofty goals; indeed, the reforms they dreamed of would only come decades, if not centuries, later.

With the beginnings of group consciousness in eighteenth-century American colonies, the idea of American utopia began to transform in the minds of Europeans, who started to view America as being degenerative in nature. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra demonstrates in How to Write the History of the New World (2001), a fierce debate raged between the European chroniclers and those who sought to counter their claims. The scholarly conversation then taking place over the quality of the American landscape documents how Spanish American thinkers used the debate to shape the development of their own Enlightenment ideas and the formation of New World Creole identity. In countering the dystopian perambulations of European thinkers, Spanish American historians found themselves in a utopia of their own creation. Wil Verhoeven, in Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802, finds a similar situation in the remembrance of the American Revolution in Britain at the close of the eighteenth century.

Verhoeven, professor of American culture and cultural theory at the University of Groningen, has studied the Revolutionary British Atlantic over the past several decades, with a focus on political and print culture in the public sphere. In Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, he uses the vast explosion in British print culture at the end of the eighteenth century to evaluate the French Revolution’s lasting impact on the British political landscape. Influenced by the work of Jack P. Greene (to whom Verhoeven dedicates the text) and Bernard Bailyn (one cannot miss the stylistic comparisons to The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [1967] while strolling through the pages), the book is an intellectual history that utilizes printed texts to survey a cultural milieu of the period. Verhoeven argues that in order to understand the debate over the French Revolution in Britain, we must recognize “the abiding role of the American Revolution in that debate” (3). The American Revolution represented a defining moment in British history, and it was still fresh in the minds of political thinkers and writers in the decades after the Peace of Paris. America was depicted during this period as a utopian landscape in which the future of British reform would be discussed. “America,” as Verhoeven demonstrates, “became a pivotal site of contestation where supporters of the ‘new philosophy’ and detractors of Jacobinism met in discursive battle over Britain’s cultural capital—in effect, staging in America’s imagined backwoods a British version of the French Revolution, which the increasingly repressive political climate prevented from taking place in England’s green and pleasant land” (11). Ultimately, Verhoeven’s ideas are both novel and complex in telling the story of British engagement with the American Revolution during the furor of the French Revolution.

In chapter 1, “The War of Systems...