Perspectives on American History

Jack P. Green@’!,

Should the West Indies be included in courses on early Ameri- can and United States history? These are the two separate, if related, questions posed by Alison Games’s plea for a reorientation in the teaching of these courses. Similar kinds of questions have been paramount in a larger and increasingly intense debate within the American historical establishment over what ought to constitute “American”; that is (following our traditional and parochial defini- tion of that term), pre-United States and United States history. This debate has arisen out of two sources. First is the worldwide movement among professional historians over the past generation toward a broader approach to the past, an approach that considers both genders, all ages, all social and ethnic groups, all regions, and all forms of human experience. Second is the related and increasingly powerful emphasis upon the cultural diversity of the popula- tions and regions of the United States. Among historians of the United States, these two developments have together generated a widespread conviction that Americans need a more inclusive national history that takes such diversity into account. What is principally at issue at the moment is what form this history should take. The position that seems to be emerging as the dominant one is that American history ought to be the history of all the peoples who have occupied the geographical area that became the United States. These include not just the Europeans and their descendants who settled the thirteen English colonies on the eastern seaboard, but also the many nat,ive groups of Amerindians on the North American continent and Hawaiians in Hawaii who had long occupied their areas before the Europeans arrived. Such an approach also includes the large numbers of Africans and their descendants, the vast majority of whom before 1865 worked as legally voiceless slaves; as well as other Europeans and their descendants-the Spanish in Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California; the French in the St. Lawrence and Mississippi river valleys; the Dutch and Swedes in the Hudson and Delaware river valleys, and the Rus-

Jack P. Greene is professor of humanities, The Johns Hopkins University, Bal- timore. 180 Indiana Magazine of History sians on the west coast-who initially occupied or settled areas that eventually would be incorporated into the English seaboard colonies or the United States; and the vast numbers of Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans who have immigrated to the United States during the last two centuries. There is much to be said on behalf of this national state perspective. In particular, in contrast to older approaches, it focuses attention upon not just the English but the British, European, African, Amerindian, and Asian roots of American culture. The broader perspective requires historians at last to try to analyze sys- tematically the complex process by which American culture became the product of an intricate and still continuing process of negotia- tion among groups from related European cultures and from radi- cally different non-western cultures. For those historians who are mainly interested in the question of how we have gotten to where we are, and who are principally concerned with understanding the national experience or with creating a national past, this perspective may be sufficient. For those historians who resist the conception of history as the history of national states and cultures or who regard themselves as students of other entities, however, the national state perspective appears to be limiting, anachronistic, and only slightly less parochial than the history it is replacing.

Historians of Amerindians provide one important example. The history of aboriginal America, America before the intensive pene- tration of Europeans and Africans, simply cannot be contained within contemporary national boundaries. Like medieval and early modern Europe and Africa in the same period, aboriginal America consisted of a large number and an enormously complex array of shifting political and cultural entities that, in contrast to Europe and Africa, were spread over not one but two huge continents and many adjacent islands. Each of these entities occupied a particular area with cultural orientations and forms of economic, social, and political organizations that were, at least to some extent, peculiar to it. The histories of those who always lived entirely within the boundaries of a single contemporary national state presumably can be told within the parameters of the national history of that state, but the histories of those many groups who were so inconsiderate of later geopolitical developments as to occupy areas on both sides of a subsequent boundary between states cannot. Though the histories of such groups are indivisible, the national state perspective can, if it remains true to the logic that underlies it, exclude from the history of a state any segments of those groups that remained in or fled to areas that never became part of that state. If such artificial and anachronistic divisions of the histories of particular Amerindian groups make no sense from the perspective Perspectives on Ainericaii History 181 of Amerindian historians, the focus, characteristic of the national state perspective, on only those Amerindians who lived within the boundaries of those states greatly inhibits understanding of the richness and diversity of Amerindian cultures. To mention only one of the most striking examples, many different types of Amerindian societies existed within the area that became the United States, from relatively sedentary agricultural or marine societies to nomadic hunting and gathering societies with various forms and levels of political organization appropriate to the ways they sus- tained themselves. But there were no complex and sophisticated imperial states of the sort that existed in central Mexico and the Andes. Obviously, a comprehension of the full variety and range of the history of aboriginal America requires its practitioners to ignore modern national boundaries and to look comparatively at societies throughout the Americas. Historians writing from a national perspective may use the work of Amerindian historians to encourage an appreciation of those societies that have resided in the area of the United States and to provide the descendants ofthose Amerindian groups who survived their encounters with Europeans a sense of their place in and continuing relevance to the national experience of the country. These are laudable goals in themselves that enable historians to rewrite the history of the country from the point of view of the con- quered as well as the conquerors, to conceive of it not only in the traditional sense of how the West was won but also (in the catchy course title used by Amy Turner Bushnell for her course in Amerindian history) of' how the East was lost. Quite apart from its relationship to the history of the United States, however, Amerindi- an history has an integrity-and a perspective-of its own, one that demands consideration of Amerindian groups in relation to each other as well as to the European and African invaders who began to intrude upon their world in the late fifteenth century. Amerindian history can best be written from not a national but a continental or, preferably, hemispheric perspective.

Similar kinds of observations can be made about the pre- national state histories of the activities of European settlers and their descendants in the Americas. During the three-and-a-half centuries following Columbus's initial encounter with America in 1492, several emerging European national states, principally Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, England, and France, managed to establish, initially almost always through the activities of indi- vidual nationals with little state investment, their political and cultural hegemony over almost the whole of the Americas. Even in the many places where Europeans and their descendants never predominated numerically, this hegemony was always, in important but varying degrees, manifest in the reconfiguration of American 182 Indiana Magazine of History social landscapes along European lines and the emergence of Euro- pean-style polities replete with European legal systems and institutions. Both separately and as a whole the histories of the several European Americas can be, like the history of aborigmal America, thoroughly understood only in terms of contemporary frames of reference and comparison. In the case of colonial English or (after the union of Scotland and England in 1707) British America, the contemporary frame of reference included more than the thirteen colonies that the English established along the North American coast and that subsequently formed the United States. By the 1760s, on the eve of the American Revolution, colonial British America was a vast entity that stretched from Barbados in the eastern Caribbean to Hudson Bay in the north, from the western Atlantic colony of Bermuda in the east to the eastern bank of the Mississippi river in the west. At the time of the Declaration of Inde- pendence in 1776, colonial British America consisted of thirty-one colonies: the thirteen revolting colonies; eleven colonies in the West Indies (Barbados, Antigua, St. Christopher, Montserrat, Nevis, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Tobago, St. Vincent, Grenada, and Dominica); two Atlantic island colonies (Bermuda and the Bahamas); two colonies on the southeastern coast of North America (East and West Florida); and three colonies to the North of New England (Nova Scotia, Canada, and St. John, now Prince Edward Island). In addition colonial British America included several long- established social entities that were in the process of becoming colonies: permanent fishing settlements in Newfoundland; fur trading posts in Hudson Bay and in the Great Lakes and Ohio and Mississippi river basins; and log-cutting settlements in Belize on the coast of Central America. In turn British America was part of an even larger British imperial world that included not just the home kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Wales but the kingdom- colony of Ireland, slave trading factories on the West African coast, and spice-trading enclaves in India. Historians have found it convenient to construct the history of colonial British America in terms of several distinctive regions, each composed of two or more colonies and defined by the nature of the ecological zones they occupied, the kinds of socioeconomic activities the inhabitants developed to sustain themselves, and the sociocultural landscapes and demographic regimes they established in pursuit of those activities. Each of these regions-the Chesa- peake, New England, the West Indies, the Middle Colonies, the Lower South, and the Atlantic island colonies-was peculiar. Each region drew large numbers of immigrants from Britain, but only in New England did English people constitute an overwhelming majority of the population. People of African descent, present in significant numbers throughout colonial British America, were a majority in the Atlantic islands and a vast majority in the West Indies and the coastal areas of the Lower South. Staple agriculture and slave labor were prominent in the economies of most of the colonies from the Chesapeake southward, while mixed farming. with family labor predominated in those of the Middle colonies and New England. Notwithstanding these important differences, all of the regions formed part of the large cultural complex that we now call colonial British America. Each colony in this complex was constitutionally connected to Great Britain, and inhabitants of all the colonies WCIY: subjects of the British crown. In form and substance the political institutions of each colony were British, and the vast majority of the free governing population-mombers of families who were not slaves and whose male members were entitled to participate in political life and enjoyed the benefit of existing laws-was British, with strong claims to a British identity as people who lived in liber- ty under a parliamentary government of laws to which the free inhabitants had given their consent. Proud to be the heirs of British political traditions. they debated public issues in terms of British political ideologies, made and enforced laws in a British style, and lived under a legal system that, whatever peculiarities had developed in response to local conditions, was distinctively British. Like Britons in the home islands, they wel*e overwhelmingly Protestant in religion. Reinforcing thcsc powerful political and cultural tics were equally strong economic links. Most colonies looked to Britain as a major market-often the on/.y overseas market-for their products and as the principal source for the goods and skills they needed to build societies in the New World. Within this expanded British world, trade goods, information, correspondence, and people flowed freely and extensively back and forth across the At.lantic and through the intercolonial trading and communications networks that increasingly bound the colonies to ctach other as well as to Britain. Of the many parts of the vast cultural complex of colonial British America, the British political and commercial establishment most valued the plantation colonies in the Chesapeake, the Lower South, and, most especially, the West Indies. Both because of their proximity to Spain's wealthy American empire and because the Caribbean was the scene of the most intense economic and naval competition among the British, French, and Spanish throughout the colonial era, British officials regarded the West Indian colonies as the most strategically significant of' the Ameri- can colonies. Equally important, in t,erms of'thctir economic worth to Britain, the West Indian colonies also enjoyed pride of place. Bar- bados, earliest of the sugar colonies, and Jamaica, largest of the British sugar colonies, were the most valued colonics in thc eigh- 184 Indiana Magazine of History teenth century. For the North American colonies, these and other West Indian colonies were the source of sugar and molasses for a growing distilling industry and a substantial market for fish, ani- mals, cereal, lumber, and some manufactured products. A vigorous exchange in such products, in slaves, in the free population, and in information closely linked the continental colonies and the West Indies. Colonial Spanish America was even more extensive and cultur- ally far richer and more complex than colonial British America. Its principal centers were in New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, each of which had long been a viceroyalty with several territorial audien- cias under its jurisdiction. Other less important areas were orga- nized into captaincy generals. Within these various political entities, Spaniards and their creole (American-born) descendants used Indian or imported African labor in mining, ranching, and agricultural activities that supported elaborate societies and yield- ed extensive riches that were sent to Spain. In one form or another, colonial Spanish America reached from the eastern Caribbean to the Pacific and from the southernmost point of South America north to Florida and New Mexico in the sixteenth century and to Upper California in the late eighteenth century. Other European powers also presided over similar, if less extensive, cultural complexes. Colonial French America included the rich sugar colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Domingue and, before 1763, the continental colonies of Acadia, Canada, Illinois, and Louisiana. Colonial Portuguese America was confined to South America but consisted of several large donatary captaincies or colonies in Brazil. During the seventeenth century, colonial Dutch America was composed of colonies in Brazil, Suri- nam, New Netherlands, and several West Indian islands. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, it was confined to a few Caribbean settlements, Surinam on the mainland and Curacao and several smaller islands. These several colonial European Americas were in no sense self-contained worlds. Among adjacent island colonies and along international borders between continental colonies, economic interaction was constant and commercial and religious rivalry common. At these points of interaction-between, for instance, Spanish Florida and British Carolina and Georgia, French Canada and British New England and New York, or Spanish New Granada and English Jamaica-neighboring political entities directly interacted with one another. Their exchanges revolved around competition for Amerindian goods, souls, and allegiance; struggles over territory; disputes over runaway slaves; and clandestine trading. In these interactions, the histories of these several colonial European Amer- icas came together to form part of a larger story of conflict and competition over America. Perspectives on American History 185

At the same time, however, the histories of such colonies must be understood principally in terms of their relationship not to adjacent colonies belonging to another European America but to the specific European America of which they formed a part and to which they were, in the deepest cultural sense, intimately tied. To be fully comprehended within its contemporary context the history of any segment of these European Americas thus must be placed within a framework provided by the full range of experiences within the national cultural complex to which it belonged. A history of any one of these European Americas that does not include the histories of each of its many component parts is incom- plete. For that reason, a full appreciation of the history of colonial British America cannot fail to include histories of the West Indian colonies. They represent an important part of that history, and not only because London authorities thought of them as the strategically and economically most significant part of the British colonial world but also, and most importantly, because their cxperiences were an integral part of the history of that world and represented a major variation within it. This broad pan-British perspective on colonial British America is scarcely a new one. During the first half of the century, Charles M. Andrews and Leonard W. Labaree emphasized the unities between those British colonies in America that became part of the United States and those that did not. They wrote about colonial political and constitutional developments as if the histories of the West Indian and continental colonies in those areas were inter- changeable-as they were.‘ In the early 1940s, Max Savelle published an excellent textbook, The Foundations of American Civilization: A History of Colonial America (New York, 1942) that devoted as many chapters-three-to the West Indies as it did to Virginia.? During the last decade, general works on the colonial economy by John J. McCusker and Russell Menard and on colonial constitutional and social development’ have given major attention to the West Indies. Yet the broader perspective represented by such works and now advocated by Professor Games has never been the predominant one. Parallel to these works has been a vastly larger corpus of liter-

1 See, for instance, Charles M. Andrews. The Colonial Background of the Amer- ican Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1924), and Leonard Woods Labaree, Royal C;oci- ernment in America (New Haven, Conn., 19301. 2 Subsequent revisers of Savelle’s text, Robert Middlekauf in 1964 and Ilarold D. Wax in 1973, continued Savelle’s emphasis. :I John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, Tho I.:conomy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985);Jack 1’. Greenc, Peripheries and Center: Con- stitutional Deuelopment in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the 1Jnit- ed States, 1607-1 788 (Athens, Ga., 1986);Grcene, Pursuits ofHappinrss: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation ofAmerican Cul- ture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988). 186; Indiana Magazine of Hi.st0r.y ature, the focus of which was evident in the titles. Thus, in 1922 Evarts B. Greene entitled his colonial history text The Foundations of Amc~r~icanNationality, and in 1938 Curtis P. Nettels called his Tho Roots ofAmerican Civilization. A perusal of these texts quickly told the reader that the term Americcln did not include West Indi- ans, Bermudians, or Nova Scotians. Indeed, no author of any of the many “colonial” history texts published since World War I1 has fol- lowed Savelle’s example and given more than passing attention to the West Indies.’ When in the early 1980s J. R. Pole and I endeav- ored to persuade the other fourteen contributors to Colonial British America to include the West Indies in their discussions of the prob- lems we had assigned them, only two, Richard B. Sheridan and Richard S. Dunn, devoted significant space to the West Indian colonies, and only about a third made any mention of them at all..’ A more recent collection included an essay on the West Indies as part of the “Cultural Margins of the First British Empire.”“ Among most historians of the subject, colonial British America has thus remained largely the history of the minority of British colonies that revolted in 1776. Colonial history is nothing more than the prehistory of the United States. Within this prevailing conception, the history of the West Indies and of other non-revolting colonies is at best peripheral. By taking such an approach, historians are differentiating between separate parts of the same history merely because those parts did not wind up-or so far have not wound up-as part of the same national state. In doing so they condemn themselves to produce a history of colonial British Ameri- ca that is at once partial, parochial, and anachronistic. Current efforts to make United States history more inclusive and multicultural by employing an expanded conception of the colonial past that takes in not only the thirteen British colonies but also the Spanish and French colonies in areas that later became the United States’ enable historians to bring in Spanish Florida, New Mexico, and California and French Illinois and Louisiana without challenging the principal traditional criteria for inclusion: whether or not an area eventually became part of the United States. This

I To cite only four examples from ii wholc shelf of such texts in my library. (‘Iarence \’~rStceg. The. Formr/t/rc Yvnrs, 1607-1 76.7 (New York. 19641; David Hnwkc~,T/ic Co/onrn/ E.ypo.ic.)icc, 1 Indianapolis, 1966,; R. C. Simmons, The, Arirc,ricxn C’o/o\iit,s: Frorit Scttl(~ntc’ritto Ziitl~,l.’eritlf,ric.c.(New York, 1976);and Richard Middle- tori. ~,‘~ou/cI/Autrrrc~it A his tor.^. 1607-1 760 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). -, ?Jack P. Greene and .J. R. Pole. eds.. Colonid British Auterrtr~t Essnys /ti th(, ,Vc.(c Histo/:\ of’thc~Eor1.v A4otlo.n Err/ ~Haltimore,19841. Of course. Dunn and Sheri- dan havc written hrge books on aspcbcts of the West Indian colonial history.

‘7 Italics added. Michael Craton, “Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in thr Uritish \Vcsst Indics.” in Bernard Hailyn and Philip D. Morgan. cds., Strong:c~rsccrth- rri //I(, Rvnlrir: C’ulturril A4nrgitt.s o/’the First British Entpirc, 1 Chapel Hill, N.C.. 19911.314-62. 7 SPCJanies A. Hijiya. “Why the West Is Lost,” Wr//ro)rt nit(/ Mur:v QunrtcJr/s. 3rd set’.. I,I (April. 1994). 276-92. Pc~rspectiveson American History 187 approach promises to produce a colonial history that may be less parochial but is certainly no less anachronistic than one that focused exclusively on the history of the thirteen revolting British colonies. This new colonial history violently wrenches the histories of these non-British colonies out of their contemporary contexts as parts of colonial Spanish or French America and shoehorns them into an uneasy association with colonies with which during the colonial era they either (as was the case with Florida, Louisiana, and Illinois) had small common heritage and a mostly antagonistic relationship or (as in the case of New Mexico, Texas, and Califor- nia) had no relationship at all. The cultural, economic, and admin- istrative ties of Spanish New Mexico, Texas, and California ran not east to the British colonies but south to New Spain. Those of Span- ish Florida ran not north to the British colonies but east to Spain, south to Spanish Caribbean settlements, and southwest to New Spain. Those of Illinois ran northeast to French Canada or south to Louisiana, and those of Louisiana ran north to Illinois or east through the French Caribbean colonies to France. A serious history of these outposts of Spanish and French colonies cannot stop at the future borders of the United States but has to treat them for what they were during most of their colonial eras: extensions or peripheries of the much larger Spanish and French American worlds that constituted their contemporary frame of reference and to which they belonged. This is a major enterprise that can best be approached as an exercise not in national state history but in comparative colonial history. My own advocacy of such a history goes back a long way: to my study of colonial Latin American and Brazilian history as a graduate student, my teaching of comparative colonial history at Western Reserve University in the early 1960s, and my unsuccess- ful efforts, in collaboration with my colleague Charles Gibson, to form an institute for the comparative study of the colonial histories of the Americas in association with the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in the mid-1960s. My growing conviction that such a history could only be written from a broad transatlantic perspective that comprehended European and African as well as American developments informed the Atlantic History and Culture Program that my colleagues and I created at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1970s. For more than a quarter century, this program has encouraged graduate students to take a broad comparative Atlantic approach to the histories not just of early modern American colonies but of societies and polities throughout the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the present. But this approach is not typical of graduate programs in early, much less in later, American history, and, for that reason alone, I 188 Indiana Magazine of History am skeptical that Professor Games will get very far with her proposal to substitute a course with a broad Atlantic focus for the present United States survey with its national state perspective. Befbre that proposal could succeed, historians who teach that survey would have to undergo a massive conversion involving a funda- mental reconception of the history American students ought to be taught. Still imprisoned within a national state conception of the past, multiculturalists are unlikely to stimulate such a sweeping change. With regard to the sort of reorientation of colonial history courses Professor Games advocates, I am somewhat more sanguine. As more historians of early modern British, Spanish, French, Por- tuguese, and Dutch America come to understand that the integrity of their subjects requires them to move beyond a conception of colonial history as nothing more than a prelude to national history, more colonial history courses may come to resemble those taught by Professor Games and her mentor, Richard Dunn, and by some of my former students and me. Additionally, the William and Mary Quar- terly, the principal journal for colonial history in the United States, may rise farther above the national state and parochial implica- tions of its subtitle as “A Magazine of Early American History and Culture”; textbooks for colonial history courses may become more inclusive; and more comparative colonial or even early modern Atlantic history courses may appear in college and university cata- logues. Only if and when these developments take place will the West Indian colonies once again hold the central place they occupied throughout the long history of colonial British America during the early modern era.