Entangled Atlantic Histories: A Response from the Anglo-American Periphery

Do imperial peripheries matter? If so, to whom do they matter, and in what ways? Is their relationship to other areas of historical analysis unchanging—especially to the centers with which they are usually paired—or does that relationship vary according to time and place? Although it hardly seems necessary to ask such questions today, the role of the periphery would appear to be anything but settled from the comments of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra in last June's AHR Forum, “Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World.” In his comments, Professor Cañizares-Esguerra endorses the general case for entangled history. Linking the histories of the early modern Spanish and British Atlantic worlds, he writes, “demonstrates the futility of studying historical phenomena that were transatlantic, hemispheric, and transnational within the limits of national narratives.” Yet Professor Cañizares-Esguerra also contends that historians would be better served by “an alternative version of ‘entangled histories,’” one that treats “interactions at the margins” of the two Atlantic communities as “limited” and that insists on the priority of the “core.”1 Although I am interested to hear what else he has to say, such a contention strikes me as problematic with respect to Britain and Ireland, and it seems out of place in colonial Anglo-America, where, apart from Britain, there was no such thing as a core.

Twenty-five years ago, many—if not most—British and Anglo-American historians might have concurred in giving priority to the center. In scholarship on England, Scotland, and Wales, such tendencies were so pronounced that John Pocock memorably called the entire field of British history an “unknown subject,” writing that “most of what passes by that name is English history and makes little pretense of being anything else.”2 Not to be outdone, historians of colonial Anglo-America often appeared to believe that in New England, their subject also had a core. Although the rediscovery of Virginia was already under way, scholarship on the English settler societies that did not lie between the Hudson and Kennebec rivers was uneven and thin, and historians preoccupied with the British colonies that would become the United States paid almost no attention to the West Indies, home to the largest African population in British America and to the hemisphere's wealthiest and most thoroughly Anglicized white creoles.3 As for the so-called Spanish borderlands of California, Texas, and Florida, they were conspicuous mainly by their absence—further proof, as Professor Cañizares-Esguerra writes, that imperial peripheries were apparently not the best place “to explore deeper levels of interaction.”4

Given the prevalence of such observations in his remarks, it is perhaps not surprising that Professor Cañizares-Esguerra objects to a model of entangled history that stresses the importance of the periphery. By contrast, I find it hard to envision a model for which the periphery would not be central. Drawing on the insights of Atlantic history, the so-called new British imperial history, and the postcolonial turn in Anglo-American history, I assume that entangled histories are likely to be influential insofar as they acknowledge (1) that the history of imperial centers is inextricably linked with the history of their colonial peripheries; (2) that it is often at the margins where imperial nations most fully enact their histories and identities; (3) that such peripheries are rarely the uncontested domain of the nations and national historiographies that claim them; and (4) that it is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to separate the entangled (and entangling) histories of colonial peripheries from the metropolitan histories of which they are an integral part. Having written on the British dimensions of the American Revolution, I would certainly not wish to displace the metropole from such histories; nor would I deny the importance of figures such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Locke, whose ideas about property and sovereignty play an important role in my own thinking.5 But if there is one point on which historians of the English-speaking Atlantic generally agree—and there are many on which we do not—it is that the metropolitan capacity for shaping events on the periphery was never as great as historians once believed, and that the exercise of power at the center was intertwined in deep and profound ways with the exercise of power at the margins.6

If Professor Cañizares-Esguerra's rendition of entangled histories seems to be at odds with the current literature, it also apparently ignores the fact that at no point before the American Revolution did the British colonies that became the United States possess a region, city, or province that could be described as an Anglo-American core. Although Boston served as a kind of metropole to Puritans elsewhere in New England, even Perry Miller regarded John Winthrop's “Citty upon a Hill” as a provincial statement of cosmic self-importance, one that—until A Model of Christian Charity was published in full in 1838—remained largely unknown.7 In the search for what he calls “quintessentially ‘American’ narratives,” Professor Cañizares-Esguerra apparently takes a different view, writing in Puritan Conquistadors, the book upon which his comments are largely based, that “the Puritans planted the seeds of the future doctrine of America's Manifest Destiny,” and elevating Winthrop's speech to the same status as Shakespeare's Tempest and Milton's Paradise Lost.8 Not so long ago, these might have seemed like unexceptional claims. Today, scholars working within what Charles Cohen refers to as the “post-Puritan paradigm” would balk at attributing such grand, proto-national intentions to the Puritans themselves, and there is a general caution about making chronologically tenuous connections with figures such as John Louis O'Sullivan, the New York journalist who coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in 1845.9 As historians have come to terms with this reassessment, New England has resumed its place as the subject of pathbreaking scholarship, and Puritanism remains a fruitful subject for historians interested in translocal phenomena such as the Anglo-Spanish demonology that Professor Cañizares-Esguerra so ably treats in his own work.10 But that history is the history of a distinctive, unusually well-documented region and religion, not a microcosm of colonial Anglo-America, let alone a prototype for the national history of the United States.

If this insight holds for New England's once-dominant place in U.S. history, it is no less true of the rest of British America. Asked to name the region whose history most fully embodied trends prevalent elsewhere in the English-speaking Atlantic, many Anglo-American historians would lean toward the Chesapeake, albeit with the same caveat against treating any region as the “core” of an emergent nation.11 Like Massachusetts, Virginia came to serve as a regional center for settlers in Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian west, and it was home to four of the first five presidents of the United States. Along with Barbados, Virginia was also, notoriously, the crucible of Anglo-American slavery during the late seventeenth century, and it was the site of the first sustained contact between English settlers and Indians. Even at the height of the post-1801 “Virginia Dynasty” of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, however, the Old Dominion was but one of several loci of power within the decentralized American Republic. Despite the emergence of a strong central government in Philadelphia during the 1790s, historians have begun paying closer attention to the federal, multi-centered structure of public life in the early republic, recasting the union itself as an international system of competitive, potentially hostile states—each entangled in various ways with the empires of Britain, France, and Spain—and the Constitution of 1787 as a “peace pact” in the tradition of Westphalia and Utrecht. Fragmented by the centrifugal forces of politics, religion, ethnicity, geography, and culture, the early American Republic was many things, but a centralized nation-state on the European model was one thing that it was not.12

A core-based model of entangled history suffers from the additional problem of tending to marginalize those areas where the dominance of white settlers and officials was least assured and to ignore the racially diverse groups that populated them. Within Britain's Atlantic empire no less than Spain's, native peoples living beyond the centers of European settlement retained significantly more autonomy and control over their own affairs than geographically integrated but subordinate communities such as New England's “praying Indians.”13 Along the edges of the British Empire and the American Republic, the same autonomy often characterized Africans and African Americans, whether enslaved, free, or “half-free.”14 For this reason, the peripheries of the Spanish and English-speaking Atlantic empires produced a disproportionate number of non-European intermediaries and go-betweens, some of whom wielded influence that reached to the highest levels of national power. In the case of the Creek mestizo Alexander McGillivray, whose story I mention in my article, it makes sense to think of him as the denizen of a contested and entangled borderland because that is what he was.15 But McGillivray was equally at home in the salons of New Orleans, Charleston, and New York. On meeting the Indian leader while he was negotiating the Creek-American Treaty of New York in 1790, Abigail Adams, wife of the vice-president, wrote that McGillivray “dresses in our fashion [and] speaks English like a native”: “I should never suspect him to be of that Nation.”16

Nor was McGillivray unusual in this cultural ambidexterity and ability to shape events far beyond the borderlands where he lived. On the basis of nearly two decades of careful scholarship on native America, British and Anglo-American historians alike have learned to cast their interpretive gaze “east from Indian country” instead of looking exclusively west (and south) from Europe and the eastern seaboard of North America.17 One consequence has been a much greater appreciation of the extent to which the periphery in British America and the early United States was the center. For evidence of this reorientation, consider the changing image of the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson. Born to a recently widowed immigrant from Ulster in South Carolina's backcountry in 1767, and orphaned by the time he was fourteen, Jackson long exemplified the democratizing potential that the American Revolution held for even humble white citizens of the United States.18 Yet no modern account of Jacksonian America would be complete without mentioning that Jackson was first and foremost an Indian fighter, that he owed his meteoric rise during the 1810s and 1820s to his defense of what had once been Spanish New Orleans and the conquest of Spanish Florida, and that his legacy as president included expelling most of Spain's one-time Indian allies from this newly bounded territory so that Anglo-American planters could appropriate the land for slave-based agriculture.19 In Jackson's life and career, periphery and center merge inexorably (if not quite seamlessly). The “Tennessee caudillo”—in the apt words of Sean Wilentz—succeeded in capturing the presidency because of his status as a hero of the Spanish borderlands, not in spite of it.20 To discuss the entangled history of one part without giving proper weight to the entangled history of the other is to convey, at most, half of the story.

For all these reasons, I remain unconvinced by Professor Cañizares-Esguerra's suggestion that entangled histories should be primarily about interactions at the core. Indeed, it would appear from what he says that scholars writing such histories should limit their investigations to entanglements with other centers. If so, Atlantic history risks losing sight of the asymmetry that, to my mind, is one of the key differences between entangled history and comparative and transnational histories.21 The brief example of a core-based entangled history that Professor Cañizares-Esguerra offers in his comments is instructive. Although the influencing and borrowing in his discussion of early-seventeenth-century Christian “typologies” in the Spanish and English empires can be understood as a kind of entangled history, the underlying dynamic is one of Anglo-Spanish equivalence and comparability. From the relative security of Christ's College, Cambridge, the biblical scholar Joseph Mede reads the histories of José de Acosta, Gregorio García, and Juan de Torquemada and applies their location of Satan's kingdom in Mexico “to the entire continent” of North America. Puritans in Massachusetts, for whom America is the New Jerusalem, greet the results of this appropriation with “dismay.” However, there is nothing in this account to suggest that Mede shared their discomfort. Instead, Mede's willingness to borrow from and expand on the writings of three Catholic theologians appears to have come from a position of self-confidence and equality.22 With minor adjustments, the interaction that Professor Cañizares-Esguerra describes could just as easily run in the opposite direction, with a Spanish scholar at Salamanca borrowing from an English history of Virginia.

Stuart England, however, was anything but comparable to Habsburg Spain. Although Joseph Mede undoubtedly would have liked to think of them as equivalent, he was born two years before the Spanish Armada, came of age during the Spanish-inspired gunpowder plot that nearly killed James I, and died (in 1638) amid fears that Spain and Austria were on the verge of reestablishing Rome's hegemony over the Protestant churches of Germany and the Netherlands. In the minds of many English Protestants, there was a very real threat that England itself might become the province of a Habsburg “universal monarchy,” and Mede had every reason to believe that Virginia and New England were in danger of suffering the same fate.23 Although England was increasingly capable of acting as a core to its own periphery in Scotland, Ireland, and America, it was also potentially the subordinate kingdom (or periphery) of a Spanish core, literal as well as figurative. This, I would argue, is the basis on which England's metropolitan history becomes truly entangled with Spain's. Because Spain was the first European power to expand into the Americas, its history was bound to be “normative” for those that followed, as Professor Cañizares-Esguerra correctly notes.24 But Spain was also dominant to the point of being a virtual hegemon, in Europe no less than in the Indies. Despite the undeniable threat that British Protestantism posed to Spanish Catholicism, a theologian in Spain had the ability to unsettle a Puritan at Cambridge in ways that Mede could not (yet) hope to reciprocate. Even if we think of the periphery as the core's external opposite, there were times when England was itself a periphery.

This is not to deny the historical significance of imperial centers; nor is it to discount the existence of important differences between entanglements at the center and entanglements on the periphery. To a greater degree than is sometimes realized, Britain's expansion depended on a highly developed sense of the extra-European Atlantic as a place distinct from Europe, one with its own laws and customs, its own diseases and weather, its own plants and animals, and its own sexual mores and racial hierarchies. In part, these boundaries served to insulate metropolitan society from unwelcome “exotic” practices and commodities, as in the “culturally produced” ignorance with which the Barbados peacock flower became a staple of British gardens while its history as an Afro-Caribbean abortifacient remained largely unknown.25 No less important, the core's distinctiveness was also a device for keeping (or attempting to keep) European entanglements on the periphery from entangling the center. Thus the British insisted on regarding the outer Atlantic as a legal and political zone “beyond the line” where British settlers and indigenous allies were free to wage war on Britain's European rivals, regardless of whether Britain was at war with those same rivals in Europe. For much of the early modern period, British officials took a conspicuously hands-off approach toward Anglo-American seamen who engaged in acts of piracy against other European nations, toward colonial settlers who occupied land claimed by other nations, and toward merchants who smuggled in violation of other nations' ordinances. Often—though by no means always—the “other nation” in these encounters was Spain, with America's perceived remoteness enabling Britain to challenge Spain's preeminence in the extra-European world without being held accountable for its actions in Europe.26

Yet even as the British sought to keep such entanglements from engulfing the center, the most striking feature of the boundaries that demarcated Britain's imperial periphery from its metropolitan core was their permeability and instability. In the British Atlantic empire no less than the early United States, the margins of empire continued to intrude, and nowhere more so than in entanglements with Spain. Although historians of the British Atlantic have come to think of France as Britain's main eighteenth-century rival, the global struggle that dominated the period from the Glorious Revolution to the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat was equally a contest over the fate of Spain and its American empire. At times—notably during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713)—Spain appeared to be in danger of becoming an appendage of France, but as the wealthiest, most populous, and most territorially extensive of the European American empires, the Bourbon monarchy was still a worthy opponent in its own right. Try as they might to confine their Spanish differences to America, the British repeatedly found themselves embroiled with Spain in Europe. Indeed, it would not be much of a stretch to say that the global cataclysm that was the Seven Years' War—the first true world war in European history—had its origins not in George Washington's ill-fated encounter with an Iroquois sachem and a French surveyor at the Forks of the Ohio in 1754, but in the Anglo-Spanish war of 1739 and Britain's growing assertiveness and refusal to accept Spain's lordship in the borderlands and border seas of America.27 If we think of the American and French revolutions as aftershocks of this globalization of peripheral differences, the more significant results included the partial disintegration of Britain's Atlantic empire in 1776 and the near-total dissolution of Spain's two generations later.

As I noted in the article with which this exchange began, one of the problems with comparative history is a tendency to assume comparability between subjects that are not in fact comparable.28 Clearly, the relationship between center and periphery is an especially important area where historians need to be careful. Although a core-based model of entangled history strikes me as unlikely to gain acceptance within the larger field of Atlantic history, there may be reasons internal to the scholarship on early modern Spain and Spanish America to explain why Professor Cañizares-Esguerra finds the history of borderlands to be so limiting.29 Perhaps when viewed from the colonial centers of Mexico and Peru, the borderlands of Spain's American empire still appear to be as peripheral to him as they once were to Anglo-American historians.30 From the standpoint of the current literature on Anglo-America and the English-speaking Atlantic, however, peripheries were anything but marginal, whether the peripheries in question were the Spanish borderlands studied by Herbert Eugene Bolton and his successors, or Virginia, New England, and the Caribbean.31 Insofar as the early United States had a cultural, political, or economic center, it was at most a center in the making. In important respects, the center of the American Republic was still in Britain and the British Empire, and this Anglo-American periphery remained entangled in deep and unsettling ways with the legacy of Spain's own American lordship. If only because memories of empire usually outlive the reality, these entanglements would persist for much of the nineteenth century (if not beyond), even as the underpinnings of Spain's empire began to crumble and eventually disappear. To a greater extent than some might care to admit, the legacy is with us still.

1

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 787.

2

J. G. A. Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (April 1982): 311.

3

For the limits of New England–centrism and the need to broaden the focus of colonial Anglo-American scholarship, see especially Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988).

4

Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories,” 789.

5

Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 771–772, 782–783. On Britain and the Revolution, see Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Gould, “A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 476–489.

6

The work of the sociologist Edward Shils has been especially influential in this rethinking: Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975). For the pervasiveness of the move toward the periphery, see Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga., 1987); Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), especially the editors' introduction; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); Linda Colley, Captives (New York, 2002); Joyce E. Chaplin, “Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History,” Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1431–1455; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003); P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005).

7

Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956; repr., New York, 1964), 11–14; John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, written on board the Arabella … (Boston, 1838).

8

Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories,” 787, 799; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, Calif., 2006), 80.

9

Charles L. Cohen, “The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, no. 4 (1997): 704. On the dominance of Puritan New England in Anglo-American religious history generally (and the need to shift the focus elsewhere), see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). For the wider influence that the Puritans were once believed to have had on American thought, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn., 1975); Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., 1978). For a more balanced assessment, see Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

10

Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors; Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories,” 789–796. On satanic conspiracies in New England as part of a more general phenomenon, see also David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History (Princeton, N.J., 2006).

11

Greene, Pursuits of Happiness.

12

David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence, Kan., 2003). Political entanglements with Britain and France play a prominent role in Stanley M. Elkins and Eric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York, 1993). On entanglements with Spain, see especially James E. Lewis, The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998). See also Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, Va., 2000).

13

James H. Merrell, “‘The Customes of Our Country’: Indians and Colonists in Early America,” in Bailyn and Morgan, Strangers within the Realm, 117–165; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford, 1985).

14

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 52–53.

15

Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds,” 778–779, 782.

16

Abigail Adams to Mary Adams, August 8, 1790, quoted in Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge, 1999), 75.

17

Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

18

See, for example, Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991).

19

For the literature, see Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds,” 782–784 (esp. notes 83–87).

20

Sean Wilentz, “The Original Outsider,” New Republic 206, no. 25 (1992): 36.

21

Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds,” 766–767, 784–786.

22

Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories,” 796–798.

23

Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989); Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1996).

24

Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories,” 799.

25

Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 3–5.

26

Eliga H. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 3 (2003): 471–510.

27

Paul Mapp, “The Spanish Empire and the Seven Years' War,” A Round Table Discussion of Fred Anderson's Crucible of War, Common-place 1, no. 1 (2000), http://www.common-place.org. On Washington and the Iroquois origins of the Seven Years' War, see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000).

28

Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds,” 766–767, 785–786.

29

Cañizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories,” 789, 799.

30

This seems to be the point of his discussion of the limits of borderland history in Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, 216–220.

31

For Bolton and his legacy, see the brief discussion in Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds,” 767–768, and the literature cited there in n. 12.

Eliga H. Gould is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.

I would like to thank Amy Turner Bushnell, David Frankfurter, Nicoletta Gullace, and Julia Rodriguez for their comments and suggestions.

© American Historical Association 2007