In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

— four — Colonial History and National History Reflections on a Continuing Problem For more than a century, the relationship between colonial history and national history has been a problematic one for professional historians of both eras. Since at least the 1890s, colonial historians have been acutely aware that the old-fashioned nineteenth-century conception of American history as the history of the United States and its antecedents is thoroughly anachronistic and insufficiently attentive to the larger contexts in which developments in America took place. Over the past generation, the thrust of historical studies has significantly enhanced this awareness. As Michael Warner has noted, a preoccupation “with the localism of early modern colonists, on the one hand, and the transatlantic contexts of empire and trade, on the other,” has meant that colonial scholars are now much less likely “to assume that colonial history had an inner propulsion towards modern nationalism.”¹ Yet, the same is This chapter had its origins in a paper entitled “Extending Colonial History: Some Remarks” for the session “The State of the Field: Colonial North America,” at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Boston, March 26, 2004. Soon thereafter, it was offered at the session “The State of the Field: Social and Economic Dimensions ,” at the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Forum on American History, Culture and Ideas in the Colonial and Founding Period, Washington, D.C., April 30, 2004. It was also given as a keynote address entitled “Refashioning the American Past: The Implications of the New Colonial History for Understanding the History of the American Nation,” Mid-American Conference on History, Lawrence, Kansas, September 23, 2005; and under the title “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” presented at a seminar at the Early Modern Studies Institute, The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, January 31, 2006, and at the symposium “The Higginbotham Affair,” in the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense and the Department of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, March 24, 2007. It is here republished with permission from “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64 (April 2007): 235–50. 1. Michael Warner, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America?” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 50. Greene, final pages 64 Greene, final pages 64 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM Colonial History and National History 65 hardly true for national historians, including many early Americanists who concentrate on the American Revolution and the creation of the American nation, many of whom continue to operate within the traditional conception, in which colonial histories are subordinate to national histories and are useful principally for the light they can shed upon emergent national institutions and cultures. But this subordination of the colonial to the national era parochializes and trivializes the history of periods before the adventitious rise of national states, and I have always thought that it exacted a huge price, from national, as well as colonial, histories. What I want to suggest in this brief chapter is that the time is right for colonialists to become more imperial by using what we have learned—and are learning—to suggest directions for a massive reshaping of what we call American history. My starting point will be with two bodies of theoretical literature that so far have not had wide impact on colonial historians: postcolonial theory and the new literature of state formation, specifically early modern state formation. Postcolonial is a term that over the last fifteen years has come to be “widely used to signify the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies that were formerly European colonies.”² Although postcolonial theory has been broadly influential among literary scholars, some of whom work in early modern colonial American contexts,³ colonial North American historians have neither used it extensively nor systematically tried to relate their findings to the large body of theoretical literature in postcolonial studies.4 This neglect may be explained by the early and almost exclusive fixation of postcolonial theorists upon non-settler colonialism. Emerging out of an impulse to challenge the universality of the colonialist perspective constructed to justify Western colonial schemes during the era of high imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postcolonial studies initially concentrated upon the colo2 . See the entry “post-colonialism/postcolonialism” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in...

Share