Contested Spaces of Early America

Chapter 1. The Shapes of Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century

PART I  Spaces and Power This page intentionally left blank chapter 1  The Shapes of Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century Pekka Hämäläinen In 1948, Carl Bridenbaugh, the director of the Institute of Early American History, reported that his field was in crisis. The history of colonial America, he lamented, had been eclipsed by the attention-grabbing Revolutionary era, and nonspecialists thought that almost all of colonial history had already been written. Today, more than sixty years later, the field faces a different kind of challenge. If in Bridenbaugh’s time there did not seem to be enough history for the field to endure, today there seems to be too much of it. The history of colonial America has been nudged out of its Anglocentric trenches and extended deep into the nineteenth century under the rubric of early American history.1 Anchored in multiple historiographies and spatial coordinates, today’s scholarship produces so much new history that we do not quite know where to put it all. And so we have broken it into pieces and sprinkled the pieces around: first on the Atlantic, then on indigenous America, and now on borderlands and the Pacific. In doing so, we might be pushing the field into yet another impasse. By tracing early America to its varied global origins and slicing it up for analytical purposes, historians are atomizing their subject. If the long-dominant Atlantic paradigm integrated early America into multidirectional transoceanic networks, the current stretching of early America across the continent has coincided with what might be called a localist turn in the field. Historians have moved early American history beyond British America not 32 Pekka Hämäläinen so much with broad strokes than with countless, tightly focused monographs that have illuminated nearly every obscured corner of the continent. Wonderfully space- and time-specific, these works have abandoned the pointed teleology of the Anglocentric master story for a patchwork of localized narratives and microworlds—some of them colonial, some of them Native, some something in between. This is an intellectual overhaul of vast proportions—a continent that was but half-illuminated is now filled with detail and texture—but it has come with a price. With the increased specialization, something has been lost: a sense of the whole, a sense of connections among peoples, places, and periods. In the early twenty-first century, it seems impossible to talk about ‘‘early American history,’’ at least in the singular. Viewed through the local lens, North America seems little more than a fictional unit of analysis, an artificial container for countless small stories and center points that have little in common beyond basic geographical proximity.2 The early America that now dominates academic histories is nuanced and inclusive, but it is also blurred and curiously one-dimensional. Like a pointillist painting observed close-up, it overwhelms: dots stretch out to all directions, but they do not seem to blend together into shapes. We know that the dots were linked—every homeland was also a borderland, a zone of contestation and intermixing—but that awareness only heightens our sense of disorientation. A ‘‘mosaic [of] a hundred different colours ,’’ ‘‘a kaleidoscopic array of people migrating and merging in dizzying profusion,’’ a ‘‘mixed and mixed-up world where frontier cultures coincided as well as collided’’: early America as it is viewed today is a protean medley of animated pieces, each arresting in its own light, all unique in a vaguely similar way. The persistent recycling of stock elements—microcontingencies, face-to-face encounters, small group agency—has built a paradox in the heart of early American history. Individual works may celebrate the particularity of different places, but as a collective they impart a conspicuous sense of déjà vu. And the irony runs deeper still. Local and continental approaches to early American history are two sides of the same historiographical coin, but increasingly they seem to be at cross-purposes. Together, they have allowed historians to reclaim a larger continental setting from the shadows of Anglo- and Atlantic-centered histories, but the localist turn might lead them to lose it once again, this time to overwhelming specificity. If older paradigms glossed over larger continental developments, localism is splintering and hiding them from plain sight.3 Shapes of Power 33 This fragmentation of early American history reflects...