{"id":1551,"date":"2020-09-13T09:17:04","date_gmt":"2020-09-13T14:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1551"},"modified":"2020-09-13T09:17:04","modified_gmt":"2020-09-13T14:17:04","slug":"how-to-read-the-new-histories-of-empire-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/how-to-read-the-new-histories-of-empire-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Read the New Histories of Empire, Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here, then, are seven points to keep in mind when reading the new histories of empire\u2014preliminary theses that any reader should be able to confirm by reading widely in the scholarship published since 1990 or so. The first three are implicit in what I\u2019ve already written:<\/p>\n

1) In the contemporary academy, defenses of empire are surprisingly common.[i]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

2) These often emerge from the corners of the university where you would least expect to find them\u2014from among ethnohistorians, for instance, or critical theorists.[ii]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

3) They are typically liberal or left-liberal in orientation.[iii]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The remaining four points will require a little more explanation.<\/p>\n

4) The new histories of empire are superficially pro-indigenous and so easily misread as hostile to empire<\/em>. This matter is perhaps best understood as involving a rhetorical technique. Many readers will find defenses of empire plausible only if these have been routed first through a defense of indigenous people. The initial task facing the new imperial historian is thus to show that empire brought benefits to non-Europeans or that it was in some meaningful way the latter\u2019s choice and co-creation\u2014that empire, indeed, was just one more version of indigenous society. The simplest way to do this will be for the historian to route his imperialism through a necessary mediation, by focusing our attention on some group of colonized people who for whatever reason elected to cooperate with the Europeans. One sides with empire by siding first with them. At the same time, arguments of this kind typically proceed by way of the negative, which is to say that their defense of one set of imperial practices announces itself as a critique of other empires. In practice, this requires little more of historians than that they identify to their own satisfaction which version of empire was best for indigenous people, hence that they posit a Good Imperialism alongside a Bad One, though if carefully written, even this simple A-B coding can masquerade for long stretches as an anti-imperialism. This antithesis, it must be noted, can work a few different ways: the early stages of empire vs. the late ones; the remote margins of an overseas territory vs. its oldest and most settled districts; weak imperial programs (indirect rule, soft power, treaty imperialism) vs. strong ones; national empire #1 vs. national empire #2, the French vs. the British, the British vs the Spanish, any of these vs. the Americans. White\u2019s arguments, for all their archivally generated detail, are, of course, iterable. Arguments he makes about the French can be transferred at will to any other group of Europeans. One important circle of historians, headed by Francis Jennings and Stephen Saunders Webb, have asked us to admire the British Empire for its determination to protect native peoples from Anglo-American encroachment. For much of the continent, Indian survival would have required more empire and not less. In such writing, the British and Indian alliance, as forged at Albany and points north, becomes the target of our trans-historical identification, and this cathexis yields a position that, though difficult to parse in the political categories of the early twenty-first century, is nonetheless fairly common among PhD-holding historians: anti-colonial, but pro-empire.[iv]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

5) The new histories of empire are Americanizing<\/em>. White\u2019s writing cultivates in the reader a disaffection towards American history. The Anglo-Americans are the ones who menace the middle ground and in the book\u2019s final act destroy it. They are the agents of ethnic and religious immoderation; the founders of some strange, new country without a middle; the designers of its impossible geometry\u2014a surface, vast and unbroken, that is nonetheless all perimeter<\/em>. And yet it is enough to blink once, and these two seemingly opposed terms\u2014America and the middle ground\u2014will start to merge. America, which we have been instructed to see as the middle ground\u2019s annihilator from the east, turns out instead to be its synonym and twin, a second name for the third term. That which is neither Indian nor European is. . . . To American Studies scholars, meanwhile, the notion of the middle ground is likely to suggest nothing so much as the chronotope of Hollywood Westerns and dime novels. Frontier stories, after all, have always rendered the US as the space in-between, carving their story-world into three vertical tiers: a Far West, wolfish and primordial; an effete and overcivilized East Coast; and a central zone, paradigmatically American because semi-civilized, on the understanding that semi-civilization is actually the preferred state. The task of the Western, as genre, is to consider how this last, easily understood as transitional and unstable, might nonetheless be maintained: how to be white, certainly, but not too white. Any backyard, toy-gun reenactment of the frontier myth\u2014any game, I mean, called cowboys and Indians\u2014is thus an abbreviation of what was always a more complicated narrative structure. The organizing principles of the Western are not two-term, in the manner beloved of structuralists and schoolboys, but three-term: cowboys and Indians and Easterners: dudes, greenhorns, English dandies, pedant-journalists, the shady agents of the railways. Frontier stories are to this extent always multiple and hard to summarize. Readings of Westerns inevitably yield paradox, since the master-story they tell while facing westwards will be contradicted by the master-story they tell while facing east. Stories about bringing civilization to the deserts and the badlands double as Rousseauvian parables about Europeans who regenerate themselves by exiting the metropolis. Your typical Western is at once a vernacular narrative about the coming of modernity and<\/em> a story about the return to nature, in which the Easterner becomes an American by stripping away finical layers of accreted custom and luxury. No doubt: It is the genre\u2019s anti-Indian animus that has allowed Westerns to function as so many parables of modernity into the twentieth century and beyond, re-tooling the form\u2019s older, agrarian republicanism by harnessing it to a fully commercial ideology. Settlers in Westerns look like yeomen but are inevitably the bearers of market society. The historical cowboy, after all, nonsensical icon of American independence, was a not-at-all-autonomous worker paid a wage to drive his boss\u2019s bovine commodity to market. Complexities abound, however. If the fictional cowboy is not simply a Lowell factory girl in disguise, then this is because the persistence, in the genre, of the East as a cursed space, even when Indians are the primary enemy, means the Western is always eager to draw distinctions among its pioneers. There are proper ways of living in a commercial society, visible only in the primal spaces of incipient modernization\u2014distinctively American ways, as opposed to European ones\u2014and these will still be roughly primitivist and republican, rather than bourgeois-Occidental. It is therefore misleading to describe literary cowboys and frontiersmen as the puppet-envoys of European society or as generically white. For they will count as American only if their whiteness has been modified and perhaps even compromised, if, that is, they have to some degree adopted Indian ways. White Indians were the stock figures of early American nationalism: Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo, sundry other rangers, scouts, and trappers, all of them figures of the middle ground. In the introduction to his book, Richard White tells the reader that he \u201cfound . . . much that surprised [him]\u201d while researching the volume, that, indeed, he \u201cfound his perspective on the period changing\u201d in some fundamental way. (xi) Anyone reading these words might well expect White to be expounding a new paradigm. How baffling, then, to realize that this \u201cnew Indian history\u201d (he uses the term on p. xi) is mostly a restatement of the old Western and frontier myths\u2014more baffling still to return to the book and find that its author has admitted as much on the first page: \u201cAmerican myth . . . retained the wider possibilities that historians have denied American history.\u201d (ix) In defiance of our accustomed sense that historians are among the great demystifiers, the fact-checkers of popular memory and dispellers of chauvinist legend, the new history of the West steps forward to validate the frontier myth, to renew the Leatherstocking fable by reassigning it to the French. The result is a book that just keeps repeating all the old claims about how the West was the true America, and about how this true America was eventually lost. The old West, White tells us, was the open space where \u201ca person could become someone else.\u201d (389) The book\u2019s lyrics are skeptical and anti-nationalist, but its tunes have all been borrowed from patriotic songs.[v]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> One monograph does not a pattern make. For other instances, see the discussions below of James Merrill and Doris Sommer. Subsequent footnotes will draw attention to scholarship on west Africa, South America, the Pacific, ancient Israel, and the multicontinental British Empire. The thrust of this scholarship is especially apparent in Nicholas Thomas\u2019s Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire<\/em> (Thomas 2010), whose jacket copy assures readers in its second sentence that the book will reveal to them the \u201cgain\u201d of empire\u2014imperial benefits and rewards\u2014and not just \u201closs,\u201d as well as empire\u2019s capacity for \u201cinvention.\u201d The book goes on to claim that most native people were more interested in \u201ccreative accommodation\u201d than in resistance and to demonstrate in indigenous societies a widespread \u201centhusiasm for things European and things British\u201d (3, 24).<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> A belated word on the essay\u2019s title: There was a vogue around 1990 for re-christening as \u201cnew\u201d various subfields in the study of European expansion: the new Western history, the new American studies, the new imperial history. The last is especially instructive: The \u201cnew imperial historians\u201d were credentialed, archivally adept historians who nonetheless avowed a disciplinarily unfashionable debt to critical theory and who to that extent gave priority to culture and discourse; who paid special attention to matters of gender, race, and ethnicity; who promised to write an imperial history without nostalgia; and who refused to take nations as given, but instead favored explanations in terms of \u201ccircuits\u201d or \u201cwebs\u201d or \u201cglobal interconnections.\u201d For the new imperial historians, Britain would no longer count as central, even in the British Empire. For a while, Antoinette Burton was pushing the term \u201ccritical imperial history.\u201d (See Part II of Burton\u2019s Empire in Question <\/em>(2011: 122ff.).) What has become clear over time, as the new histories of empire have aged out of their novelty, is that these putatively critical historians have tended to restate the claims of an older imperial historiography. \u201cNew\u201d and \u201ccritical\u201d histories of an empire without a British center dovetail with older and apologetic accounts of British imperial absentmindedness, lack of coordination, reliance on local elites, and, in general, the limits of British power in the colonies. Conversely, when the inheritors of the older imperial history step forward to refurbish their case, often in defiance of the new imperial historians, they nonetheless avail themselves of the tropes of \u201cnetworks\u201d and \u201cnative agency\u201d first touted by their rivals.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Thomas\u2019s way of defending empire is to call it \u201ccosmopolitan\u201d: \u201cThis book has emphasized the cosmopolitanism of the Pacific during the nineteenth century.\u201d (182) His second example of this mindset arrives in the book\u2019s opening pages, in the form of three men from an island near New Guinea who were abducted by the Spanish in the early 1500s\u2014forced onto a ship, made worldly by the European explorers who seized them; they are evidence of \u201ca particular cultural condition \u2026 that of cosmopolitanism,\u201d which the author seems to think of as to be affirmed even when involuntary. (3-4) The new histories of empire congratulate kidnap victims on the occasion of their expanded horizons. \u201cEmpire,\u201d Thomas ends up concluding, was \u201creplete with possibilities, marked out by travels, possible travels, and travels of the mind.\u201d (297) John Darwin, meanwhile, introduces two more devices to the liberal defense of empire: First, he considers dropping the term empire <\/em>itself. Darwin\u2019s first career retrospective is called The Empire Project <\/em>(2011), and the trick of that title is that it both uses the word empire <\/em>and offers to negate it. The British pursued the project of empire, which to that extent was less than a thing: a projective empire, aspirational, underway, incomplete, in some large part imagined. In the text itself, he often refers to \u201cthe British world-system\u201d or to \u201cBritish connections\u201d and at one point to \u201cthe Britannic association.\u201d (159) Second, then, and already apparent in those last two formulations, Darwin describes the British Empire in a strongly horizontalist idiom borrowed from network theory: The Empire was \u201ca large, loose, decentralized confederacy,\u201d a \u201cnetwork of alliances,\u201d \u201cnot a structure\u201d but a \u201cweb.\u201d (69, 97, 1) It falls to Henry Kamen (2002), then, in his work on the Spanish Empire, to combine Nicholas Thomas\u2019s bluntly imperial cosmopolitanism with Darwin\u2019s ontologically flattened non-empire. Kamen\u2019s distinctive tic is obsessively to negate the word conquest<\/em>: \u201cThere was, literally, no conquest of the islands.\u201d (65) \u201cCastilians of subsequent generations tended to assume that they had conquered Italy. There was no real basis for the belief.\u201d (65) \u201cWhen the Spaniards extended their energies to the lands beyond the ocean, they did not \u2026 conquer them.\u201d (95) \u201cThere was never in any real sense a \u2018conquest\u2019 of America, for the Spaniards never had the men or resources to conquer it.\u201d (121) \u201ccollaboration rather than \u2018conquest\u2019\u201d (122) The Spanish had \u201cnever been in a position to conquer any overseas territories or plant its banner anywhere\u201d (169) \u201cthe year 1573 marked a fundamental change of direction in royal policy that affected not only Europe but the whole empire. \u2026 conquest was no longer to be an objective.\u201d (187) \u201dThe possibility of \u2018conquest\u2019 did not arise, for there were never adequate Spanish men or weapons\u201d (254) The monarchy \u201cdefinitively banned further conquests in America\u201d (255) Kamen finally just puts scare quotes around the \u201cSpanish Empire\u201d on p. 153, convinced as he is that the political formation he is describing was neither Spanish nor an empire\u2014an empire \u201cin theory,\u201d but actually \u201ca complex international network\u201d \u201ca cosmopolitan network\u201d of multiethnic endeavor, a \u201cvast commercial enterprise\u201d with \u201cthe outward form of an empire,\u201d a spur to the ingenuity and energy of people other than the Spanish. (170, 289, 297)<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> See, for instance Jennings 1984, Webb 1995, Webb 2013. Ian Steele (2000: 384) begins his review of Oberg\u2019s Dominion and Civility <\/em>like so: \u201cThe likelihood that promoters of empire were more humanely inclined towards Amerindians than were their colonists may be another obvious truth finally returning from banishment by indiscriminate anti-imperialists.\u201d<\/p>\n

One especially notable variant of this position is visible in John Thornton\u2019s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World <\/em>(1992). The book\u2019s core argument, at least in its first half, is that West African elites were full and eager participants in the Atlantic slave trade. Before 1680 and perhaps thereafter, Europeans neither created nor even much transformed the workings of the region\u2019s already existing trade in captives. The most important thing to know about the market for slaves is that it was well-established, distinctively African, and big enough to accommodate the entry of the Europeans as just one more set of customers. That\u2019s the argument. Rhetorically, then, one of the book\u2019s most conspicuous features is its reliance on the terms Africa <\/em>and Africans<\/em>, as the title already indicates. It is not uncommon to find other historians remarking that race was a creation of the slave trade itself\u2014that sailors couldn\u2019t know themselves to be white <\/em>or European <\/em>until they arrived on the coast of Guinea, just as the Igbo and Yoruba couldn\u2019t know themselves to be black <\/em>or African<\/em>. (Among many other instances, see Rediker 2007: 261. But Thornton uses the terms European <\/em>and African <\/em>without comment, and the cunning of this move is that it allows a defense of Europeans to masquerade as a critique of Eurocentrism. Thornton says that his book is de-centering Europe, by asking that we hail the slave trade as an African accomplishment and a sign of the continent\u2019s strength. Submerging the difference between slave states and their quarry is the precondition to those claims, since it is plainly impossible to see the slave trade as announcing the strength of all Africans equally. Having declared European merchants marginal to the slave trade, Thornton is now able to say that \u201cEuropeans did not pillage Africa\u201d and that they introduced no \u201cmonopolistic distortions of trade.\u201d (53, 65) The critique of Eurocentrism is called upon to testify to English and Portuguese virtue. Other rhetorical choices follow on from there, all made possible by the dedifferentiated word African<\/em>: Thornton says repeatedly that the Atlantic slave trade was \u201cpeaceful\u201d and that it was \u201cvoluntary\u201d\u2014that such, indeed, were the unappreciated hallmarks of the trade: \u201cwe must accept that African participation in the slave trade was voluntary\u201d (124) The European relationship to West Africa was a matter of \u201cpeaceful regulated trade.\u201d (38) Thornton\u2019s book is improbable in at least one further respect\u2014a book that proclaims its allegiance to Braudelian world-systems history while arguing that the linking to the oceanic system of its chosen region changed that region in no important way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> On frontier stories and Westerns, see Slotkin 1973, 1985, 1992.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Here, then, are seven points to keep in mind when reading the new histories of empire\u2014preliminary theses that any reader should be able to confirm by reading widely in the scholarship published since 1990 or so. The first three … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23085,76,24270,24253],"class_list":["post-1551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-eighteenth-century","tag-empire","tag-history-and-historians","tag-native-america"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions\/1553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}