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192 Gregory H. Nobles of which the American Revolution was only a part, puts before us not only a larger ensemble of actors but also broader notions of some fundamental issues, including independence and the very meaning of liberty. Within this expanded view of the larger period of conflict, the American victory in the Revolution clearly put the United States into the mix as a new imperial player. This self-celebratory “empire of liberty” also became an empire of property—and an empire in which the acquisition of land depended on a selective sense of liberty and a restrictive sense of race. From the first years of its existence, the United States began to chart a path of territorial growth that relied on an increasingly clear racial agenda, promoting the extension of slavery for African Americans and the exclusion, even ethnic cleansing, of Native Americans. Facing ahead into the nineteenth century from the end of the eighteenth, Daniel Richter offers a useful last word on the results of the Revolution: “It would take more than fifty years for White Americans to win, and Indian Americans to lose, their respective wars for independence, for events on the battlefield, in the conference hall, and on the treaty ground to recast eastern North America conclusively as a White rather than Indian country.”140 IV. Reconsidering Class in the American Revolution 9. The Roots and Resurgence of Class Analysis To talk about “White Americans” as the winning side raises another question about historical perspective, this one largely internal to white society itself. The near-monolithic identity implicit in the term might well make sense when we consider, as Native Americans and African Americans no doubt did, aggressive assertions of racial solidarity on the part of EuroAmericans , but it begins to break apart when we explore the conflicted relations among those white Americans themselves. If we see them as they saw each other, they seem anything but unified. Throughout the extended era of the Revolution—that is, essentially the second half of the eighteenth century—the history of Euro-American society reveals important patterns of underlying tension and recurring conflict, none more widespread and more far-reaching than that defined by class. To talk about class conflict in the Revolutionary era, however, takes us immediately into an area of scholarly conflict in the modern era, in which 140 Richter, Facing East, 191. Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution 193 the nature, extent, and even existence of class consciousness in early America have been dissected, debated, and even denied. Class analysis had an especially difficult history in the middle of the twentieth century, when the reluctance of many American historians to talk in terms of class became common in the academic culture of the Cold War. Part of the reason had to do with a longstanding pragmatic tradition in American historical writing , which tended to value empiricism over theory, but it also reflected the larger political climate of the postwar era, which celebrated social consensus and American exceptionalism as an alternative to class conflict and socialism. The reigning historical orthodoxy reinforced an image of early America as an essentially classless, socially harmonious society, in which internal conflict was portrayed as muted and the notion of class consciousness all but meaningless.141 Yet it was not simply the culture or outcome of the Cold War that put class analysis on uncertain scholarly footing. Class, no less than capitalism, can be a much-contested term, and the very notion of class does not by any means assume a uniform understanding of, much less a scholarly prescription for, the importance of class analysis. Some scholars who do take class seriously as a category of analysis nonetheless remain reluctant to talk explicitly about class for an era that precedes the rise of industrial capitalism . Others have come to criticize class from an altogether different perspective , questioning it as a culturally skewed category that could obscure other equally important divisions in society. Historians of gender and race have often been critical of the existing studies of class because of the overemphasis on the experience of white, working-class men. Some have borrowed from postmodernist literary theory to challenge the significance of verbal contests about class, portraying them as a set of “discursive encounters ” between different groups of white men: in that sense, so the argument goes, the language of class says more about the uses of language than about the true depth of class inequality.142 In general, given...

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