Introduction: The Global Turn and Early American Studies

On a crisp afternoon in January 2016, a minivan full of early Americanists turned onto Park City, Utah's traffic-choked Main Street and into the flow of global history. From the late nineteenth century until the Great Depression, the street played host to thousands of miners, many of them immigrants from eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and China, whose labor pulled tons of silver ore from beneath the Wasatch Mountains into the world economy. After flirting with ghost-town status after World War II, Park City became a winter sports mecca in the 1960s, and Main Street's saloons were turned into cosmopolitan après-ski spots. Today the narrow thoroughfare is best known as the home of the Sundance International Film Festival, an event that brings upwards of $80,000,000 and crowds of globe-trotting tourists to Park City—and into whose opening festivities the early Americanists had unwittingly driven. As the minivan crept on, past the premiere of Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation, past various beautiful people (Adam Scott from Parks and Recreation proving a particular favorite), the fruits of globalization were on full and seductive display: prosperity, consumer bounty, and multicultural sociability ruled the day.

And then everything changed. As we write the introduction to these four essays, all of which the authors presented (after their inadvertent jaunt through Sundance) at a conference sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Seminar in Early American History, the foundations of modern globalism have come under attack. In June 2016 Great Britain voted itself out of the European Union, with the "leave" campaign leaning hard on antiglobalist rhetoric. Donald Trump won that November's presidential election in the United States by railing against free trade, immigration, the United Nations, and anything else that smacked of the global order that had, he claimed, saddled American workers—Rust Belt whites especially—with "poverty and heartache."¹ Like the thriving nationalist movements of continental Europe, these campaigns trafficked in strikingly xenophobic rhetoric and attracted and emboldened racial nationalists. Yet these British and American cases also fit into a long, complex genealogy of populist antiglobalism born of cultural and economic dislocation: a family tree whose branches stretch from Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines to post-Soviet Russia to revolutionary Iran.²

Where it all ends, no one knows. But in the age of Brexit and Trumpism, probing the history of global integration and its discontents suddenly seems more pressing than ever. Great shocks, after all, often produce great insights. Over the past two decades, for instance, the stark reality of anthropogenic climate change has driven scholars to reconsider the place of environmental transformations in early American history and literature.³ Perhaps, then, the recent hammer blows to the neoliberal world order can spur early Americanists to more—and more critical—engagement with what has come to be known as the "global turn."

Scholars began taking this turn in the heady 1990s, an age defined by the border-shattering collapse of the Soviet bloc, the market seeking of multinational corporations, and the early days of the World Wide Web. Marrying the expansive geographical frames of world history and subaltern literary studies to a series of unifying concepts—connection, cosmopolitanism, flows, and (especially) integration chief among them—they sought to dismantle national narratives by reconstructing a global past that, in many respects, seemed to foreground their global present. Like the more modest but closely related "Atlantic turn," the global turn found plenty of boosters, forcing even those scholars who clung to well-worn methodological paths to reckon at least with the rhetoric, if not the substance, of "planetarity."⁴

To be sure, the odd naysayer did crop up. In their rush to describe a "single system of connection," writes the historian Frederick Cooper, globalists too often neglected the "limits of the connecting mechanisms," allowing their "totalizing pretensions" to artificially flatten a global landscape pockmarked by a patchy distribution of power, resources, and intellectual capital.⁵ Such critiques, however, gained only so much purchase. With parochialism now a byword, the global turn promised not only relevance...