Historians of the early modern Americas have always been open to the broader approach. Already by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, they had recognized and sought to subvert the tendency of emerging national histories to reduce the colonial past to little more than the prehistory of the independent nations that formed in the Americas after the mid-1770s. By insisting that colonial histories be contextualized, both as parts of the empires to which they belonged and as subsets of the greater process of European expansion, they called attention to the larger worlds in which early modern colonies took shape and to which they were intimately and immediately attached. Considering themselves what we might now call cosmopolitan contextualists, colonialists regarded those who tried to shoehorn colonial histories into the mold of the new states that were consequent to decolonization as parochial anachronists.
In this spirit, early modern colonialists have been at the forefront of the rush to adopt still larger perspectives over recent decades. Including the whole of the Atlantic basin—Europe, Africa, the Americas, and adjacent seas and islands—the Atlantic perspective, first articulated in the early 1970s and energetically pushed by fresh proselytes in the early 1990s, has been enthusiastically embraced by students of the colonial British world and has begun to gain considerable currency among scholars working in other areas of the early modern world that formed around the Atlantic. As a result, few early modern Americanists remain unconverted to the idea that developments throughout the Americas can be more fully understood when placed within the broader transatlantic, inter-atlantic, or intra-atlantic settings in which they occurred. One of the central attractions of this perspective has been the prospect that, by calling attention to social, economic, political, and cultural commonalities and interactions among areas that either were not connected by national allegiances or did not remain within the same national state system, it would help to break the hold of the national frameworks within which history traditionally has been written, frameworks that have operated not just to parochialize specific histories but also to obscure the larger patterns and processes within which the several societies around the Atlantic functioned and of which they were integral parts.1
Even more recently, a second, broad, and complementary movement toward a multicultural perspective has exhibited considerable vigor. Among early American historians within the United States, this perspective seems to have been the immediate consequence of a growing consciousness that some portions of the United States had a “prenational” history that was neither English nor exclusively indigenous. Like the Atlantic perspective, this consciousness is not exactly new. Herbert Bolton was an ardent exponent of this point of view more than three-quarters of a century ago,2 and his influence upon a few English colonialists—particularly Max Savelle, who produced one of the best and most widely used texts in colonial British American history—was by no means insignificant.3 But the proliferation of interest in the Spanish, French, and Russian origins of the United States among pre-United States historians is relatively recent and arises largely and logically out of two impulses in historical studies: an older impulse, deriving from the annalistes’ ambitious goal of constructing a histoire totale decentering elite white males, and a newer and more parochial impulse to give all cultures and regions space within the United States historical narrative. The latest manifestation of this multicultural, multiregional impulse has been the emergence of a demand for the creation of a continental history that would place the indigenous inhabitants at the center of the story and give as much attention to Spanish, French, and Russian colonies in the middle and western edges of the continent as to British provinces on the east coast.4
So far, I think it is fair to say that the recent interest of pre-United States historians in non-British areas has been largely confined to those regions that would subsequently become part of the United States. At least in its earliest stages, this development was a potential boon to those scholars who, having been marginalized in their own field of early modern Latin American history precisely because the areas upon which they worked—Florida, New Mexico, Texas, California, Louisiana—were no longer a part of Spanish or French America, now suddenly found a home in pre-United States history and a new and enthusiastic audience for their work.5 But it is also fair to say, I think, that the new multicultural interest in the non-British roots of United States civilization has not moved far beyond the borders of the present United States and has remained relatively unconcerned with the larger cultural worlds to which the areas of Spanish or French penetration were attached. Indeed, calls for a continental history often turn out to exclude significant portions of the North American continent to the south of the Rio Grande and to the north of the later boundary between Canada and the United States.6 As a result, the United States community of early American historians has continued to be largely uninformed about the extensive and rich historiography produced, especially over the last half century, on those larger Spanish and French cultural worlds. Incorporation into the national history of the United States has thus effectually disattached areas with non-British origins from the national cultural areas with which they were associated for lengthy periods of their early histories. Such decontextualization cannot be expected to produce comprehensive understandings of the histories of the areas that suffer it, much less to enrich them.
While the emergence of the Atlantic perspective has served to undermine traditional national frameworks, the multicultural turn has thus largely functioned to reinforce them. The central contention in these brief reflections is that this need not be the case, that the new interest in the non-English colonial histories of areas in the United States points logically in the direction of the desirability of a broad hemispheric perspective that, by promoting broad comparative analysis across both the South and North American hemispheres and their adjacent islands, might actually enhance the prospects for transcending national frameworks. Moreover, a hemispheric perspective also seems to offer better prospects for achieving one of the unfilled promises of the Atlantic perspective, the possibility of drawing comparisons. The developing field of Atlantic history has tended to concentrate on identifying and elaborating the connections that tied the Atlantic together, and, as J. H. Elliott remarked, will probably “always … remain a history framed more in terms of connections than of comparisons.”7
The primary obstacle to the development of a hemispheric perspective is, of course, the dense historiographies that, especially in recent decades, have emerged in the study of all areas of the Americas, historiographies that require enormous time and energy to master.8 In 1999, at a conference of historians primarily concerned with the history of those parts of colonial British America that became the United States, James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz, two of the most distinguished contributors to the literature on colonial Latin America and coauthors of an acclaimed synthesis, Early Latin America,9 endeavored to guide their audience into this wholly different and unusually rich terra incognita.10 Their remarks provide a foundation for the following speculations about the possible benefits of a broad hemispheric approach.
As both Lockhart and Schwartz made clear, the historiographies they represent stand in no need of intellectual colonization by pre-United States historians. Indeed, as Lockhart pointed out, pre-United States historians working on Spanish areas should not expect to make a significant contribution to this literature until they have mastered it. Devoted to the exposition of cultural complexes radically different from the British, with different laws, different if sometimes parallel institutions, and different social dynamics, those historiographies are based on sources unfamiliar to students of the British American world. The two presenters provided a powerful sense of how much there was to learn and how demanding such an enterprise might be. They made it clear that those who aspire to advance a more inclusive version of the pre-United States past would do well to hie it to one of those rare universities at which it is possible to study the histories of all the colonial Americas with equal seriousness.
Superficially and on a general level, there seem to be many similarities between the historiographies of early Latin American and colonial British American history. At least until comparatively recently, both have been source-driven and both have followed Lockhart’s well-known law of the conservation of the energy of historians: “always take the easiest, most synthetic source first.”11 In colonial British American history, the private narratives of settlement produced by such people as John Smith, William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Andrew White—the nearest equivalents to the Spanish chronicles of conquest—never acquired the historiographical importance of those chronicles, but both early American fields were dominated for many decades by studies based on official correspondence and metropolitan and provincial institutional records, an emphasis that grossly exaggerated the importance of the metropolis and provincial centers in the construction of colonies and empire. In pursuit of social history, both fields turned to legal records and notarial archives—or, in the British case, to probate records, deeds, and parish and church registers. The absence of notarial records in British America may have been responsible for what I perceive to have been a lag in the turn to social history among historians of the English-speaking world, who took a bit longer to devise ways to bring the methods of the annalistes to bear upon social history issues.
Between the earlier emphasis on institutional history and the advent of social history, historians of colonial British America used a rich cache of contemporaneously and locally generated and produced printed materials, including political tracts, political economy treatises, improvement literature, sermons, chorographies, civil and religious histories, natural histories, a variety of belletristic productions, and newspaper essays, as the foundations for an intellectual history stage that dominated colonial British American historiography for at least a generation in the wake of World War II and seems to have had no counterpart in early Latin American studies. Only during the last quarter-century have a few historians begun to use similar materials to explore the intellectual and cultural development of Hispanic America with a comparable level of detail and sophistication.12
Because British America, like the rest of the Americas outside greater Mexico and Peru, lacks the extensive indigenous language sources that scholars such as Lockhart and his students have exploited so brilliantly for the Nahuatl-speaking polities of central Mexico, it has, of course, missed the New Philology phase that has been so prominent in recent early modern Latin American studies. It has, however, participated fully in the eclecticism characteristic of much recent work on early Latin America: the rise of ethnohistory and the interest in indigenous peoples; the reexamination of African slavery; the focus on women’s history and gender definitions; the exploration of transatlantic intellectual connections in political, economic, social, educational, and religious life; the turn to cultural history and the emergence of creole or American cultural systems and identities; and perhaps even the development of a new interest in the history of secondary centers and peripheral areas in the Americas. In both colonial Latin American and British American studies, moreover, much of this recent work has relied less upon the use of new kinds of sources than upon revisiting and requestioning documents that have long been familiar to historians. Indeed, some of this work is driven not by sources, but by the absence of sources and by the theory that scholars have generated to help them fill the historical silences present in the records.
In view of the fact that early Latin American and colonial British American historians are part of the same general historical community, these similarities in historiographical development are hardly surprising. No matter how different their sources or the cultures they study, both sets of historians are equally subject to the same professional intellectual fashions that makes social history the darling of one generation and cultural history the central interest of the next. And the parallels could be extended to the historiographies of the fragmented early modern American enterprises of both the French and the Dutch.13
As one dips even casually into the historiographies of the early modern colonial Americas, however, one senses that the parallels and correspondences extend beyond historiography to substantive issues involving structures and processes. The first impression is one of extraordinary and fundamental difference. Iberian American polities were established a full century before those of the north Europeans—before the Protestant and Catholic Reformations had occurred, before the chivalric model had lost its appeal, and before the international market system was well developed. Within a generation of contact, moreover, the Spanish happened upon, conquered, and occupied the two areas with the greatest mineral wealth and the largest concentrations of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The post-Conquest societies that the Spanish constructed in New Spain and Peru were the New World’s great exceptions. Nowhere else was mineral wealth so readily accessible or native political and social development so complex. The presence of such numerous peoples required extensive adaptation on the part of the Spanish as well as of the indigenes. Although the Spanish used indigenous labor to work the mines, the ranches, and the agricultural settlements they established, they eventually negotiated the system of two republics—Spanish and Indian—that permitted the indigenes a degree of self-government under the Spanish Crown. At least in part because of the vast wealth they acquired through these conquests, the Spanish, moreover, were able to invest large sums of money and considerable manpower in evangelization. Through the mission system, combining civil and religious pacification, these efforts extended well beyond the sedentary indigenous empires of New Spain and Peru.
Encountering no similarly exploitable cultures, the Portuguese American settlements in Brazil exhibited quite different relationships with the indigenes, spent far fewer resources upon their evangelization, and established flourishing agricultural and cattle-raising societies before finding great mineral wealth a century and a half after their first effective settlement. In many respects, Spanish polities established in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries beyond the areas of highly developed indigenous states and great mineral wealth–in Central America, New Granada, Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, Río de la Plata—were, like Brazil, the products less of conquest than of settlement, and focused on agriculture and livestock.
Despite these differences, the various Iberian polities were profoundly similar. They shared an attachment to Roman Catholicism, and they were unusually inclusionary, even fusionist, in two senses: first, they incorporated indigenes and Africans into the legal and political systems they established, and second, they generated the extensive mixed populations that by the early nineteenth century could credibly claim to be the people of Brazil or Mexico.14 Established a full century later and also lacking mineral wealth and highly developed indigenous societies, the French colonies were similar to the Iberian colonies in their Catholicism, the extensiveness of their efforts at evangelization, their mixed-race populations, and the civil spaces those populations occupied.
In all these respects, the situation was far different in British and Dutch American polities established at roughly the same time as the French, after the Protestant Reformation, just as the new international trading system that would reach full flower in the early nineteenth century was taking off. Neither the Dutch nor the British encountered a densely populated indigenous empire or discovered any mines. They spent little energy and less funds on the evangelization of the indigenes, and they established polities that were—implicitly with regard to the indigenes and explicitly with regard to imported Africans and their descendants—much more exclusionary than those established by the Iberians. The mixed populations they generated, though not insignificant, were never numerous or powerful enough to appropriate the title of the people.
As the above sketch suggests, there can be little doubt that within the vast Iberian American world, colonial outcomes were determined less by cultural differences among Europeans than by physical differences, economic potentialities, and the nature and density of indigenous populations in occupied areas. Spaniards and Portuguese shared a common religion, albeit one more heterodox and independent of Rome than historians from Protestant countries used to assume. They also shared a civil law tradition with Roman origins and scrupulous written records. To instruct them in their forays in the Americas, they both had had extensive contact with non-Christian peoples: Moors in Iberia and North Africa, Guanches in the Canary Islands, and, for the Portuguese, peoples along the West coast of Africa and around the Indian Ocean. Notwithstanding these and other broad cultural similarities, however, the colonial process produced a wide variety of different kinds of political societies in the Iberian American world, differences not just between Spanish and Portuguese colonies but within the Spanish Empire and within Portuguese Brazil.
If we extend the field of comparison to include the polities established by northern Europeans in the West Indies and North America, however, we may discover that cultural differences were more important. Certainly, considerations of what sort of resource environment and indigenous societies were encountered, and what the economic potential of an area was, were paramount in determining the nature of the polities created in northern European as well as in Iberian America. But the fact that the British and Dutch were mainly Protestant peoples, that the English functioned within a common-law tradition and the Dutch within a similarly customary one, and that the British operated within a political culture that was explicitly consensual and participatory may also have been deeply differentiating. Not just the languages spoken, the books read, and the national or ethnic styles of deportment or transactions exhibited, but also the underlying religious and, even more profoundly, legal and political cultures may have distinguished British and Dutch polities in America from those that were Spanish, Portuguese, or French. A comparison between Portuguese and British America is revealing in this regard. Despite the facts that neither of them encountered great sedentary indigenous empires, and that both of them imported large amounts of African labor and developed staple agricultural economies filled with a combination of plantations and smaller settlements, Brazil and the British polities of the West Indies and North America, so similar on the surface, exhibited important divergences—for instance, in the relationship of the slave and free colored populations to the law—that have to be marked down largely to cultural differences.
As interesting as these differences may be, even a casual review of the burgeoning literatures on the early modern Americas strongly suggests that there were also some remarkable commonalities. The various colonizing powers were all mutual participants in the colonial process that transformed the Americas in the centuries after 1492. As European agents, often assisted by African or indigenous auxiliaries, their subjects took the initiative in reconstructing the social order throughout the Americas. They all established a number of new societies shaped by a combination of local conditions and immigrant efforts to replicate the cultures they had left behind, societies that both deviated from metropolitan norms and were unmistakable offshoots of the national cultures they represented. They all involved transfers of people—substantial transfers in the case of Spain, Portugal, and Britain—drawn by the opportunities that the Americas offered, and they all participated in an aggressive European reconstruction and renaming of American spaces and a massive exploitation and economic, social, and political reorganization of American peoples and resources. To one degree or another, they all conceived of the changes they wrought as the working out of a providential design and part of an extensive civilizing project, and used their own legal inheritances and forms of governance to impose their mastery over large parts of the Americas. They all unwittingly introduced pathogens that destroyed vast numbers among the indigenous populations and addressed their labor problems through a resort to unfree labor, including slavery. They all participated in a profound cultural transformation by which a galaxy of indigenous groups were reduced to far fewer tribes or nations.
Nor were these the only commonalities. With the exception of the Dutch, who lost their foothold in North America and their principal holdings in South America during the seventeenth century, they all experienced impressive expansion and economic and social development, including, in the eighteenth century, considerable economic acceleration and diversification, a process that over time led to the transformation of some areas from fringes of the European world into colonial centers and peripheries. They all produced a wide variety of provincial political societies, each with a distinctive legal system and collective identity to fit its changing peculiarities, experiences, and circumstances. Over time, they all experienced a significant transfer of political authority to the creoles or native-born Americans who presided over these societies, and mid-eighteenth-century wars led in the cases of both the Spanish and the British to metropolitan policies that challenged settler autonomy and ultimately provoked or contributed to reluctant settler revolts and the establishment of independent nations. The identification of these many general similarities provides the additional advantage of calling attention to the remarkable extent to which the secondary centers and peripheries in the New World and the settler, indigenous, and enslaved populations who inhabited them were active participants in the construction of early modern empires and of the broader Atlantic and hemispheric worlds of which they were all a part.15
Yet these casual contrasts and parallels only beg the question of why pre-United States historians should be interested in the experience of early modern Latin America and vice versa. If pre-United States historians need instruction as they endeavor to contribute to a more inclusive prenational history, what is in it for Latin Americanists or Québecois? Most historians seem to be quite content to let national boundaries channel their research interests. Surely, however, there is more at stake here than bringing neglected areas and experiences into one or another national narrative. At best, that objective is an extremely modest one, and it creates many intellectual problems. In the case of pre-United State historians, for instance, focusing only on the Spanish borderlands not only reinforces the power of the nation-state paradigm in United States historical studies but also leaves the core areas of the Spanish American enterprise out of the picture altogether. Much more interesting are the possible benefits that may accrue from the adoption of a much wider perspective encompassing the entire western hemisphere.
A hemispheric approach that has for its long-range objective the development of a comprehensive, comparative analysis across both South and North America and their adjacent islands, and oriented toward the analysis of the encounter between the Old Worlds of Europe, America, and Africa; the subsequent creation of many New Worlds in the Americas; and the ongoing development of those New Worlds has much to recommend it. Like the continental approach, it directs attention to both sides of that encounter: the invaded as well as the invaders. Unlike the continental approach as so far formulated, it avoids anachronism, not excluding contiguous and closely connected areas that happen to fall on the wrong side of a later national boundary. Furthermore, it encourages the contextualization of regions that during the colonial era formed part of the same national culture area. In all these ways, it offers an effective way to escape the distortions that subordination to the nation-state paradigm imposes upon colonial histories. Because it is infinitely broader than the continental approach, it also promises to yield the richest and most comprehensive understanding of the early modern Americas. In virtually every respect, a hemispheric perspective seems to be superior to a continental one.
A hemispheric perspective would complement an Atlantic perspective and in some respects be more effective, in that it keeps the focus on developments within American spaces rather than upon connections among them. A hemispheric perspective on the colonial process would identify the widest possible range of variations over time, place, and social type as those variations become evident, in the case of the settlers; in patterns of land occupation, relations with indigenous peoples, socioeconomic structures, forms of governance, and modes of religious and cultural life; and, in the case of the indigenous and the enslaved, in patterns of resistance, accommodation, amalgamation, or exclusion. To contextualize these and other subjects, a hemispheric approach, no less than an Atlantic approach, would need to be attentive to ongoing interactions between metropolis and provinces, between American provinces and the source cultures of their populations, and among and within the Americas. A hemispheric perspective thus promises to produce the fullest and most deeply contextualized understanding of the changing character of the early modern American world, as well as of the central elements in its formation. It has a greater capacity to generate comparative analysis and to free the study of the colonial era from the cage of national political boundaries.
Of course, this approach has deep historiographical roots. Bolton called for a hemispheric history in his 1933 presidential address,16 which generated a lively debate over whether the Americas had a common history17 and helped to inspire a collective project, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and spearheaded by the Mexican historian Silvio Zavala and other historians from Latin America, to produce a multivolume hemispheric history in three broad parts, respectively covering the indigenous, colonial, and national eras. Simultaneously published in 1962 in both a Spanish edition and an English abridgement by Max Savelle, Zavala’s The Colonial Period in the History of the New World, an insightful and extended discussion of the subjects to be covered in the second part of the project, was one of the initial fruits of this project, and remains perhaps the best single analysis of the issues inherent in a hemispheric approach and of the rich promise it holds for achieving an understanding of the full complexity of the colonial process in the early modern Americas. Only by investigating this process “in its totality,” Zavala observed, could historians “obtain a more complete knowledge of each of the colonizations and regions in particular,” with their many “similarities and diversities.” His complaint that the early modern American hemisphere had “not received sufficient comparative attention” explicitly held out the hope that the project in which he was involved would produce not just a general history of the Americas but a comparative one.18
This project was finally brought to fruition in 1987, with the publication of an eleven-volume history of the colonial era under the editorship of the Venezuelan historian Guillermo Morón.19 Each written by a specialist, the many chapters in these volumes provided authoritative accounts of their respective subjects as of the time they were written, but, as in the case of the multivolume histories now being produced for many areas by UNESCO,20 the specialist authors rarely spoke across chapters to one another. As a result, the volumes failed to deliver on the promise of comparative history, providing instead what might better be thought of as parallel histories, and it is difficult to see how any similar undertaking would be more successful in facilitating, much less achieving, a comparative hemispheric history of the early modern Americas. Moreover, the logistics and publication delays of such massive projects mean that many of the chapters will be out of date before they are published.
But a multivolume, multiauthor project is not the only approach to the pursuit of a hemispheric history. One alternative might be for some younger scholar with extensive language proficiency to write a volume following the broad outlines Zavala laid out in the early 1960s. Whether any individual scholar is likely to complete a project of this magnitude, however, is doubtful. Few historians will ever be better equipped to do so than J. H. Elliott, whose Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–183021 is a truly magnificent scholarly achievement. Demonstrating his extensive mastery over two rich and sophisticated historical literatures, this well-crafted synthesis provides a genuinely comparative history of the Spanish and British empires from the Columbian voyages during the closing decades of the fifteenth century through the independence era of 1770 to 1825. Elliott impressively accomplishes his objectives of transcending the atomization that has increasingly characterized colonial studies of the Americas and, through his comparisons, of throwing new light on the colonial process as it operated in the Americas. Whether his hefty volume will actually “help to shake historians out of their provincialisms” remains to be seen.22
Broad as his study is, however, Elliott makes no claim to comprehensiveness. As he acknowledges, he did not, by design, include the Portuguese, French, and Dutch empires, and he focused mainly on “the development of the settler societies and their relationship with their mother countries,” treating indigenous peoples and the African enslaved only insofar as they related to that development. As he also acknowledges, he was selective in his choice of which settler societies to cover in detail, focusing heavily on the prominent Spanish kingdoms of New Spain and Peru and the older and more populous British colonies in Virginia and New England. He thus neglects the Caribbean colonies and gives scant attention to the British middle and lower southern colonies or to the Spanish territories in Central America, New Granada, Venezuela, Chile, Río de la Plata, Florida, or the northern borderlands of New Spain, the last two of which he characterizes as the “orphans of Spain’s empire in America.” One can scarcely disagree with Elliot’s observation that “the number of colonizing powers … and the multiplicity of the societies they established in the Americas” make “a sustained comparison embracing the entire New World” a project “likely to defy the efforts of any individual historian.”23
A third alternative might involve a cooperative undertaking involving just a few devoted scholars, each of whom has mastered segments of the increasingly extensive literatures on each of the Americas: not only South and North, island and continental, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Russian, but also neo-African and indigenous America, as well as the populations, entities, and cultures that grew up and occupied the interstices between and within those worlds. The aim of such a project would be to produce not a comprehensive general history, but a systematic and authoritative comparative study of the early modern Americas, an analytic overview that would endeavor to identify the processual commonalities and the rich social and cultural variations throughout the hemisphere in the early modern era.24
The difficulties involved in all three of these strategies strongly suggest, however, that the ultimate goal of a hemispheric perspective should not be the production of a general history of the early modern Americas, nor even of a multiauthor comparative analysis. Since the 1960s, Atlantic history has not managed to generate such a volume. Like Atlantic history, American hemispheric history should rather pursue a more incremental and diffuse approach, one that emphasizes the production of well-researched synthetic studies and monographs with a comparative dimension or a comparative promise. Accessible to those with the necessary linguistic skills, the rich monographic literature produced since the 1950s provides a sturdy foundation on which to build synthetic studies of many aspects of the early modern transformation of the Americas. However, the wide scope of a hemispheric approach strongly suggests that collaborative enterprises, made more manageable by Web-based networking and circumventing the linguistic deficiencies of individual scholars, may be the most promising way forward. Moreover, such studies would not have to be comprehensive to be useful. They could treat as few as two national spheres. The range of topics that could be illuminated by such undertakings is virtually limitless, including, to list only a few, the changing indigenous experience with and response to European intrusions; settler adaptations of inherited Old World values, institutions, and customs to New World conditions; the development of viable provincial economies; the recruitment and organization of labor; patterns of ethnic interactions; relations between colonial provinces and their respective European metropolises; and the emergence of provincial identities throughout the new American political units. Of course, collaborative studies would not have to be limited to such broad questions. They might, perhaps with more effectiveness, focus on particular aspects of such subjects, such as family formation, gender relations, wealth differentiation, inheritance practices, and patterns of land or resource utilization.
But the tried-and-true method of producing new knowledge is through new research and the publication of monographs. Depending on the extent of their linguistic skills, scholars have at least three strategies available to them. First, those able to do research in more than one language can design studies of the same phenomenon in two or more similar or contrasting places in different cultural areas. Mariana Dantas’s carefully integrated study of urban laborers of African or biracial descent in the Brazilian town of Sabará in Minas Gerais and in Baltimore during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century is a model of this type of study.25 Second, teams of scholars with complemetary expertises can collaborate on comparative projects that transcend national and linguistic historiographical boundaries. Thus, Trevor Burnard, a specialist on the British West Indies, and John Garrigus, a student of the French Antilles, have jointly undertaken a comparative study of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, the two most prolific sugar regimes in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Third, colonial historians, especially those who study either the Spanish, Portuguese, British, or French American colonies, each of which extended over a broad range of societies formed in a great variety of physical spaces, have always been implicit, and occasionally even explicit, comparativists, and scholars can do important and useful comparative studies without moving out of a specific imperial region. Elizabeth Mancke’s rigorous comparison of the economic, community, and political development of two socioeconomically similar towns in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, and Cynthia Radding’s comparative study of the Sonora region of northwestern New Spain and the Chiquitos region of lowland Bolivia, two ecologically different Spanish frontier colonies, provide particularly good examples of this approach.26
Unfortunately, the pedagogical devices necessary to encourage new generations of colonialists to step outside nation-state paradigms and work within a hemispheric framework are not yet in place. Just as the proliferating interest in Atlantic history has led to the creation of programs to foster the study of that subject, however, we hope that the intellectual attractions of studying the internal histories of the new early modern American worlds may lead to the creation of similar programs to promote the analysis of those worlds and foster the intellectual interchange and comparative thinking necessary to enable scholars to cross traditional specialized fields.27 The creation of a center devoted to bringing together younger scholars and advanced doctoral students who were working in various areas of the colonial Americas to discuss their work and exchange ideas within a broad hemispheric framework would also be an effective device for advancing this perspective.28
Having embraced the broader Atlantic perspective in recent years, pre-United States historians may now be ready to embrace—as a counterbalance—a complementary hemispheric one. While the Atlanticists continue to pursue connections and interactivity, Hemispherists can concentrate on developing comparisons. With these two broad perspectives before them, early Spanish American, colonial Brazilian, colonial British, and colonial French historians may manage finally to escape—and transcend—the national frameworks that have long channeled their work and inhibited broad comparative analyses. Early modern colonial history would then become something more than the prehistory of the adventitious nation-states of the contemporary American world. In the process, knowledge of the transformation of the American hemisphere following the Columbian encounter, surely one of the grandest and darkest subjects in the unfolding history of the human race, would be enormously deepened and enriched.
1. See Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Jack P. Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 17–42; and David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 11–30.
2. Herbert E. Bolton, “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review 38 (1933): 448–474.
3. Max Savelle, The Foundations of American Civilization, a History of Colonial America (New York: Henry Holt, 1942).
4. Daniel H. Usner, Jr, “Borderlands,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 2003), pp. 408–424, provides an excellent recent historiographical guide.
5. See Amy Turner Bushnell, “Gates, Patterns, and Peripheries: The Field of Frontier Latin America,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 15–28.
6. A notable exception, Vickers, Companion to Colonial America, pp. 429–507, includes four chapters under the rubric “Comparisons” on the Caribbean, New Spain, New France, and Atlantic Canada, respectively by Verene Shepherd and Carleen Payne, Robert Ferry, Allan Greer, and Peter Pope.
7. J. H. Elliott, “Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in Armitage and Braddick, eds., British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, p. 237.
8. See the collection of articles reprinted in Amy Turner Bushnell, ed., Establishing Exceptionalisms: Historiography and the Colonial Americas (Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1995).
9. James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (New York Cambridge University Press, 1983).
10. James Lockhart, “Some Comments on Early Latin American Historiography,” and Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Recent Historiography of Early Modern Brazil in a Comparative Perspective,” both unpublished papers presented at the plenary session “Colonial America: Spanish and Portuguese Worlds,” Fifth Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of Texas at Austin (1999).
11. Lockhart, “Some Comments on Early Latin American Historiography,” p. 4.
12. Superb examples include D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Merxican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
13. Alan Greer, “Comparisons: New France,” in Vickers, ed., Companion to Colonial America, pp. 469–488, provides a full discussion for New France, though not for the French settlements in the Caribbean and the West Indies.
14. Schwartz, “Recent Historiography of Early Modern Brazil in a Comparative Perspective,” p. 26.
15. a. See Amy Turner Bushnell and Jack P. Greene, “Peripheries, Centers, and the Construction of Early American Empires: An Introduction,” in Daniels and Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires, pp. 1–14; Schwartz, “Recent Historiography of Early Modern Brazil in a Comparative Perspective.”
16. Bolton, “Epic of Greater America.”
17. Lewis Hanke, ed., Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton Theory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), collected much of this material.
18. Silvio Zavala, The Colonial Period in the History of the New World,, abridged by Max Savelle (Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano, 1962). The quotations are from p. x. A version of Zavala’s penetrating and thoughtful introduction appeared as “A General View of the Colonial History of the New World,” American Historical Review 66 (1961): 913–929.
19. Guillermo Morón, ed., Historia general de América: Período colonial, 11 vols. (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia de Venezuela, 1987).
20. For instance, The History of Humanity: Scientific and Cultural Development, 7 vols. (Paris: UNESCO, 1999).
21. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
22. Ibid., p. xvi.
23. Ibid., pp. xvi, xviii, 272.
24. This is precisely the sort of working group that James Lockhart, Stuart Schwartz, and I undertook to establish in the early 1990s at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California. A combination of budgetary shortfalls and my departure from the University of California at Irvine sabotaged that particular effort, but any attempt to put together and finance a group of specialists to produce a genuinely comparative history of the early modern Americas would face similar obstacles.
25. Mariana Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
26. Elizabeth Mancke, The Faultlines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories of the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
27. Earlier models for such a program include the Tropical History program that flourished at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s and early 1970s and the interdisciplinary Atlantic History and Culture program that functioned so successfully at Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s and 1980s. The former required, and the latter strongly encouraged, doctoral students not to work entirely or even mostly within a single national boundary, and the latter offered the opportunity for doctoral students in early modern colonial history to trade a possible expertise in the national era of the United States or Latin America for a knowledge of a parallel segment of the early modern colonial enterprise.
28. Perhaps the relatively new Center for New World Comparative Studies at the John Carter Brown Library, the world’s most extensive and comprehensive collection of published works on the Americas during the early modern period, will undertake to raise the funds necessary to enable it to play a catalytic role in the spread of the hemispheric approach.