Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
 

Volume VI, Number 2
 

Peter Wallace, "The Long Reformation: A Proposal for a New Interpretive Model"

Geoffrey Wawro, "The Masque of Command: Bad Generals and Their Impact"

AFRICA AND WORLD HISTORY: A FORUM
--Joseph C. Miller, "Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multi-Centric World History Needs Africa"
--Ricardo Duchesne, "The Way of Africa, 'The Way I Am,' And the Hermeneutic Circle"
--Patrick Manning, "Africa in World History and Historiography"
--William H. McNeill, "Comment on Miller" 
--David Northrup, "Finding Africa in World History" 
--Jonathan T. Reynolds, "The Borders of Africa and World History" 
--Michael Salman, "What Are World Histories?"
--Ajay Skaria, "Another World" 
--John K. Thornton, "Africa in a Multi-Centric World History: Beyond Witches and Warlords"
--Joseph C. Miller, "Multi-Centrism in History: How and Why Perspectives Matter" 

J. David Hoeveler, "The Colonial Colleges: Forging an American Political Culture"

Brian Donahue, "The Great Meadow: Sustainable Husbandry in Colonial Concord" 

Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor, "Comparison and History"
 
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Volume VI, Number 2

THE LONG EUROPEAN REFORMATION: A PROPOSAL FOR A NEW INTERPRETIVE MODEL
Peter Wallace

In the spring of 1776 the Catholic pastor for the small town of Munster in Upper Alsace, Antoine Maurer, petitioned his religious superior, the bishop of Basel, to order Maurer’s patron, the Benedictine abbot in Munster, for an increase in wages. Maurer served Munster and a half-dozen hamlets peppering the surrounding ridges. The petition listed the religious services which the priest performed to meet the spiritual needs of his flock. One duty was to bring the consecrated host, the viaticum, to sick and dying parishioners day or night in all weather. Maurer would ride a donkey while the churchwarden preceded him with an illuminated lantern and a hand bell. When they encountered someone on the road, the churchwarden rang the bell so that the mountain folk would kneel to honor the real presence of Christ as it passed. Maurer commented that, because it was a “new practice,” Lutherans needed to be told what it was about and that he had “not yet met a single one who has refused to [kneel] after having been instructed.”1 

Except for the presence of Lutherans, Maurer’s frustrations with his ecclesiastical superiors and his experiences with the mountain folk could easily have occurred in 1376. For centuries pastors and patrons had bickered over fees and obligations, while rural Christians relied on town-dwelling priests to provide religious instruction and spiritual services. Martin Luther and other 16th-century reformers had sought to shift the religious leadership’s focus away from fees and payments as part of a renewal of the medieval Church. More important, the reformers hoped to restore and clarify the core tenets of faith, which they would then make accessible to all Christians. Maurer’s experience, 260 years after Luther had posted his theses, suggests that the realization of a reformed Christianity was gradual and incomplete. Great distances still separated the vision of coherent pastoral blocks of indoctrinated Catholic or Lutheran subjects, harbored by spiritual and secular officials, and the reality of local conditions. Most students, when asked to describe some aspect of the European Reformation, recall dramatic events such as Luther’s obstinate self-defense at the Imperial Diet of Worms, Henry VIII’s quest for a divorce and a male heir, or the bloody repression in 1535 of the Anabaptists at Münster in Westphalia. Their stories begin with Luther’s “nailing” of ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg and end sometime in the 1550s with the religious peace of Augsburg or the Elizabethan Settlement. 2 This traditional model normally assumes that the late medieval Catholic church was institutionally corrupt, spiritually bankrupt, and theologically muddled until courageous reformers, such as Luther and later Calvin, offered morally grounded and theologically coherent visions of reformed religious practice, which promised to restore their followers to the pristine state of primitive Christianity. In this traditional account Protestants swept away the Church’s decadent “popish” structure and replaced it with a more disciplined ecclesiastical order. In preaching God’s word, the reformers aimed to root out the barely Christianized and superstitious practices of folk religions and pour the foundation for modern individualized and rational faith. 

Much of Reformation history has been written from the Protestant reformers’ perspective and has embraced this historical model, yet even sympathetic studies of the 16th-century Catholic Reformation have emphasized its distance from medieval faith and its role in instituting modern Catholicism. 3 Thus, whatever their own religious background, historians have taken the reformers at their word and viewed 15th-century Christianity as in need of reform, and from that perspective have emphasized the differences between post-Reformation religiosity and the practices of unreformed medieval Christians. In addition, the focus on the reformers themselves, including Catholic leaders, has resulted in closing the account of the Reformation with the confessional statements, conciliar decrees, parliamentary acts, or peace treaties that defined or sanctioned official religious movements. In this long-held historical model, the 16th-century Reformation ushers in modern Christianity. 

Recently, however, a vast and growing monographic literature has tested this model in local and regional archives, and the result is a much more complex religious landscape characterized by multifold trajectories of religious modernization. Scholars of the European Reformation have challenged the decadent image of late medieval Christianity, the ability of the reformers in all major churches to distance themselves from earlier patterns of belief, and the success of the reformers in indoctrinating their followers. In the light of these challenges, defining the European Reformation as a long-term process begun in the late Middle Ages and not finally resolved until the 18th century offers a means to incorporate these diverse monographic studies into a new interpretive model. What can be seen with such a wide-angle lens? 

The ecclesiastical infrastructure of the late medieval Church derived from a 9thcentury Carolingian base that was centralized by the 11th-century Gregorian reforms. Under this system the pope, as “head” of the Church, claimed spiritual authority over all of Christendom. Given the degree to which ecclesiastical institutions and personnel were integrated into lay governance and social hierarchies, papal claims generated political tensions from the moment they were first made. Christendom comprised thousands of parishes collected into hundreds of dioceses, so that every place and everyone had an ecclesiastical identity as a member of some religious corporation. Yet this coherent administrative landscape was racked with inconsistencies and anomalies. Monastic communities, nunneries, and mendicant preaching orders operated independently of the diocesan system. Thousands of parish churches could only claim partial parochial rights, while systems of lay patronage resulted in bishops having little or no authority over their diocesan clergy. The foundation of late medieval Christian spirituality also had earlier roots. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council had declared the centrality of the sacraments administered by a consecrated male clergy to personal salvation. Nevertheless, lay folk continually reworked religious expression to meet their own needs, discovering new saints and pilgrimage sites or accumulating blessed objects to protect their household from the evil eye. This late medieval “vulgarization” of faith, however, was not the sign of a decaying Church; rather, it was symptomatic of sincere popular religiosity and reflected the success of inculcating the religious values spelled out at the Fourth Lateran Council.4 

The demographic shock of the Black Death (1347–1351) exposed disparities of wealth among the clergy at a point in time when the papacy was unwilling to reform itself or the Church, culminating in the disastrous schism when two, then three popes demanded obedience. At the same time, lay rulers were beginning the long struggle to centralize territorial political power, and privileged ecclesiastical institutions whose officials owed some allegiance to Rome formed the most visible obstacles in that quest. The lengthy papal schism gave European rulers tremendous leverage over their territorial churches, and a series of concordats drawn up in the century after the Council of Constance (1414–17) confirmed the new balance of power between church and state as Christendom devolved into regional Catholic churches, each working through different programs of reform and renewal prior to the “Luther affair.” Even the heretical Hussites successfully defended their breakaway church with the assistance of the Bohemian nobility. Given linguistic barriers and the absence of printing, however, the Hussite reformation remained local and Czech. 

Luther’s initial call for reform of the Church resonated throughout the Holy Roman Empire, whose political leaders had not previously secured concordats. The support of princes and magistrates would quickly transform the Martinists into Protestants. Yet what made and continues to make Luther’s evangelical movement so central to historical accounts of the Reformation was his program for spiritual renewal. Justification by faith alone, achieved through the Word of God rather than participation in collective rituals, was a dramatically different approach to being Christian. Furthermore, the challenge to clerical spiritual power embedded in Luther’s claim that all believers were “priests” gave lay officials the spiritual authority to reform their regional churches and empowered the common folk to personalize their faith. The religious enthusiasm spawned by the possible meanings of Luther’s message produced an evangelical movement among men and women from all walks of life who, confident in their faith, refashioned themselves and attempted to reform society under godly law. The visibility of women and common folk within the early evangelical movement hinted at the depth of faith unleashed by Luther’s pamphlets and the revolutionary potential of Christian renewal on his terms, made manifest by the German Peasants’ Revolt (1524–26). With Luther’s approval political authorities soon crushed advocates of the “social Gospel” and silenced women. The Reformation “from below” had come to an end. Henceforth lay authorities would control the pace and direction of further reformation “from above.” Luther himself pulled back from the Christian freedom of his initial vision to restore the place of trained ministers and an institutional church. Nevertheless, Luther’s emphasis on the Word as the source of faith meant that it would be impossible for Catholic authorities to restore religious unity without force and, further, that the unfolding Protestant movement itself would be as diverse as scriptural interpretations warranted. 

By the 1560s versions of Lutheranism had become officially sanctioned in many Imperial states, in Scandinavia, and among Germanspeaking communities in Eastern Europe, but like Hus’s movement its appeal remained limited to Germanic speakers. A second Reformed Protestant movement, associated with the writings of Jean Calvin, was able to cross linguistic borders and attract adherents in Switzerland, France, the Low Countries, parts of the Empire, Scotland, England, and Eastern Europe with or without official support. In England the Elizabethan church, fully dependent on the will of the monarch acting through Parliament, did not recognize the authority of the pope, but it had yet to take on a unique confessional stamp. In addition there were scattered communities of Anabaptists, limited to regions like Moravia where local lords could promise tolerance. Catholicism itself had undergone renewal in the form of new religious orders and devotional practices and had developed an ecclesiastical reform program at the Council of Trent, which placed more responsibility and authority in the hands of the bishops. In recent scholarship these developments in the late 16th and early 17th century have been referred to as the “second Reformation.” Yet the political struggles, religious disputes, and reform initiatives of this period all have late medieval roots and early 16th-century antecedents. 

Though Europe’s leading confessions had separated from one another into distinct camps by the 1560s, proponents remained divided on numerous issues within each religious community.

Among England’s churchmen and within Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Catholicism, a new cadre of leaders, who had no direct contact with Christianity before Luther or Henry VIII, sought both to unify their established churches under a strict set of doctrinal guidelines and purge their communities of religious opponents and the unrighteous. Within confessionally mixed regions, such as France, the Netherlands, and eventually the Holy Roman Empire during the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), civil unrest triggered violence and religious warfare punctuated by atrocities that permanently solidified the barriers between confessions. In England differences over faith within the official church precipitated civil war and the public execution of the king. As a result of the Reformation, wars became ideological. Even in regions spared from wholesale bloodshed, persecution of religious minorities, moral deviants, and witches increased as sin became criminalized. Having cleansed their communities of Christians from other confessions, selfrighteous reformed elites further refined what it meant to be Calvinist, Catholic, or Lutheran and turned on dissenters within their own church. In the end, these efforts to force faith failed; and with a few notable exceptions, such as Louis XIV’s forced conversion or expulsion of the Calvinist Huguenots from France in 1685 and a similar assault against Protestants in the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1732, officially sanctioned violence ended by the 1660s. 

Though efforts to construct a godly society from above had borne little fruit, religious commitment and religiosity from below bloomed again in the century after Westphalia. New and revitalized forms of Catholic devotion spread throughout the countryside as communities appropriated official forms of religious expression for their own needs. Lutheran Pietism again exposed the potential for faith when direct contact with the Word made all believers “priests.” Milder forms of Arminian Calvinism flowered into numerous churches whose congregations experienced a great awakening. In an increasingly tolerant environment Mennonite Anabaptists could practice their faith unharmed, while dissenters developed new forms of religious expression that would inspire much of 19th-century Protestantism. All of these religious developments were fruits of the Reformation’s late harvest, helped along because European states had accumulated enough power so that they could reduce their ideological reliance on an official religion. At the same time, urban elites were drawn to a new faith in reason and a new passion for materialism that relegated traditional religion to superstition, which was best suited to keep the poor in line. It is at this point that the long European Reformation ended, and a new era began. The dynamic ideologies of Europe’s future, democracy, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and racism, would be secular ideologies grounded in worldly interests. 

Peter Wallace is Dewar Professor of History at Hartwick College. His most recent book is The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).

1 Archives de l’Ancien Evêché de Bâle, A 19b, Mappe 7, 902. 

2 For an example of the traditional model see Lewis W. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation 1517–1559 (Harper & Row, 1985). Even recent texts which are informed by the complex images emerging from the new literature, such as Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford University Press, 1991) and Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Oxford University Press, 1996), have only pushed their narrative to the latter half of the 16th century. 

3 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung?: Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” ARG 68 (1977): 226–252; and Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western Guilt Culture 13th–18th Centuries (St. Martin’s Press, 1990). Cf. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford University Press, 1985). 

4 R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
 

THE MASQUE OF COMMAND: BAD GENERALS AND THEIR IMPACT
Geoffrey Wawro

In the predawn hours of July 3, 1866, General Ludwig Benedek, the commander- in-chief of the Austrian North Army—240,000 well-armed troops— stamped about his headquarters (a room in the Gasthof der Stadt Prag) near Königgrätz dictating a letter to the emperor in Vienna. Historical spectators, aware that July 3 was the date of the climactic battle of Königgrätz, would have expected the Feldzeugmeister (lieutenant general) to be dictating a detailed battle plan for the eight infantry corps and five cavalry divisions that he had arrayed on the Bystrice River around Sadova. They would have expected similar exertions from General Alfred von Henikstein, the chief of the Austrian imperial general staff, who was busy scribbling in another room of the Gasthof. While three Prussian armies—245,000 men in all—slithered through the mud of an early summer downpour to attack the Austrian positions on the Bystrice, Benedek actually ignored them. Henikstein did too. 

The war, Benedek wrote the emperor, was going badly because Austria did not have enough railroads, did not have sufficient intelligence capabilities, was badly served by its halfhearted allies, and insufficiently funded by its parliament. Undoubtedly all true, but was this the moment to be raising such points? To the emperor’s demand that Henikstein return to Vienna for questioning by the military cabinet, Benedek replied: “it cuts me to the heart to see Baron Henikstein stripped naked in this way and indicted in the public eye.” Instead of Henikstein, Benedek offered the emperor the only man who was actually doing any work in headquarters, General Gideon Krismanic, who, at that very moment, was at his desk deploying the Austrian corps for what would shortly become known as the Battle of Königgrätz. “Krismanic,” not Henikstein, Benedek rather unkindly wrote, “is the real culprit in North Army’s debacle.” 

As the spatter of outpost fire spread along the Bystrice, where Prussian advance guards were colliding with Austrian sentries, General Henikstein began a letter to the emperor’s adjutant general, Franz Folliot- Crenneville. Surely the imperial general staff chief was arranging for a second line of defense to be prepared on the Danube. Wrong again: “I am in the tragic position of being held responsible before the whole world for errors and mishaps that are not my fault. I am the general staff chief in name alone! Will there really be a court martial? Will it be in Vienna? Could we not hold it in a provincial fortress instead? Will I be allowed to wear my uniform? Will I be discharged from the service?” Henikstein laid the letter aside, then took it up again and scrawled in the margin: “my pension?” 

Without direction from the top, the Austrian army began the battle that would prove crucial—crucially disastrous—for its fortunes as a European great power in the worst possible position. Massed in muddy, low-lying bivouacs between the Elbe and the Bystrice, the Austrians were easily flanked from either side and had no obvious line of retreat other than a sauve qui peut across the broad, fast-flowing Elbe. 

Until this point, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 had been Benedek’s to win or lose. He had brought more troops into battle than the Prussians and, based on the Middle Elbe, had shorter lines of supply and friendly fortresses in the vicinity: Josephstadt, Königgrätz, Theresienstadt, and Pardubice. Though the Prussians had a better rifle, the Austrians had better artillery and cavalry. Poised to win, the Austrians lost. Why? 

Historians have traditionally exonerated Benedek for the defeat and blamed others: Henikstein, Krismanic, reckless generals striving for the Maria Theresa Cross, the Prussian rifle, and so on. That traditional view originated with the Austrian army’s official history of the war, was then picked up by Heinrich Friedjung in his classic two-volume The Struggle for Supremacy in Germany, 1859–66 (first published in 1897), and then passed along to Gordon Craig, who wrote Königgrätz in 1964. 

Interestingly, none of those historians looked at personal factors in the Austrian defeat. Fixed on the mask of command—the public image crafted by famous generals and their partisans—they failed to consider the masque of command: the often shabby, burlesque reality of life in a military headquarters. From a distance, armed forces appear glamorous. Great generals, their warts and wrinkles removed by official portraiture, all too often pass into history as Great Men, rather than just men. Historians must guard against this tendency and roll it back. Documents are the best aid in this rollback. Memoirs help, but can be colored by intramural politics and envy. Documents—battle reports, war diaries, court martial records, headquarters memoranda—give an accurate, real-time picture of events and causation. 

What documents reveal about Benedek is striking. Far from a Great Man, he was a nervous, insecure, vain, and jealous officer. Personally brave and charismatic in the eyes of his enlisted men, he was a failure among his officers. Lacking confidence in his own abilities, he retreated into isolation and refused to hold councils of war, where he might be corrected or contradicted. Under pressure from Vienna, Benedek did convene a council of war just hours before Königgrätz, but refused to discuss military arrangements, confining the meeting to a discussion of campsites and water supplies. When General Leopold Edelsheim, whose light cavalry was already skirmishing with the Prussian advance, ventured the opinion that there would be a great battle the next day, Benedek replied: “And when did you become a prophet? You youngsters always have ideas.” That was the true expression of Benedek, but you will find that exchange in none of the old accounts of the war. You would have to explore the archives and read through the revelatory transcripts of Benedek’s post-war court of inquiry. 

Only the archives explain why Austria lost the battle of Königgrätz. Whereas the traditional accounts—Friedjung to Craig—treat Benedek as the victim of headstrong subordinates (Generals Mollinary, Festetics, and Thun) who disarranged his solid defensive front in their own quest for personal glory, the truth, revealed by the archives, is just the opposite. Secluded in his Gasthof, Benedek missed the first hours of battle altogether, then arrived on the “captain’s hill” at Chlum with no firm ideas on how to fight and win the battle. Although he had 240,000 men massed against just 135,000 Prussians for most of the day (the 110,000 troops of the Prussian Second Army would not arrive on the field until early evening), Benedek froze in place, forbidding the generals holding his flanks to envelop the rather small, exposed Prussian force opposite them. That was why the “insubordinate generals” traditionally blamed for the Austrian defeat launched their attacks. They did it not for glory, but to extricate themselves from muddy, low-lying campsites, gain the high ground above them, exploit the unsynchronized, tardy advance of Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke’s three armies, and win the battle. Ultimately Benedek pulled Mollinary and Thun back to the Bystrice, where they were predictably overrun in the late afternoon. Unable to blame his subordinates for that last disaster, Benedek then contrived another excuse perpetuated by careless historians: the “fog of Chlum.” The Prussian flanking columns had materialized out of a thick fog to surprise the Feldzeugmeister. Wrong again: the documents speak of a foggy morning and a sunny afternoon. 

An even more ribald masque than 1866 was played out in 1870–71. France’s supreme commander in the Franco-Prussian War, Marshal Achille Bazaine, had much in common with Ludwig Benedek. Both were prewar celebrities with glittering military records. Both failed miserably as army commanders. Posterity was less kind to Bazaine than Benedek, but chiefly for political, not historical reasons. During the siege of Metz (August to October 1870), when the Second Empire fell, Bazaine conspired against the Third Republic and in republican circles became a hated symbol of reaction. His actual military performance, as distinct from his political choices, was never thoroughly investigated and publicized. 

Marshal Bazaine’s behavior in 1870 was as bizarre as Benedek’s four years earlier. Entrusted with the supreme command in the days before the crucial battle of Gravelotte, Bazaine vegetated. Though his best officers advised him to put the French Army of the Rhine on the road back to Paris to escape the three Prussian pincers closing around Metz, Bazaine dawdled. Distracted by the presence of French Emperor Napoleon III in headquarters, he churlishly refused to initiate any moves until the emperor departed. Once the emperor left for Verdun, Bazaine still refused to move. In fact, he conceded an entire week in August 1870 to Moltke, which permitted the Prussian general staff chief to get across the Moselle and attack Bazaine at Mars-la-Tour. 

Like Benedek at Königgrätz, Bazaine fumbled away a promising position at Marsla- Tour, snatching almost impossible defeat from the jaws of certain victory. He had ten French divisions against two isolated Prussian divisions, but failed to beat them. Worse, he compounded the error by not retreating toward Paris after the battle. Instead he fell back toward Gravelotte and Metz. Nearly all of Bazaine’s officers were astounded; they were even more astounded by his comportment two days later at Gravelotte. Gravelotte was the crucial battle of the war. Having brought his entire force across the Moselle, Moltke wheeled into the French position above Metz with 200,000 men. Bazaine faced him from the heights between Gravelotte and St. Privat with 160,000 troops. But the French were concentrated and ready. The Prussians were staggering in from long, grueling marches to be fed haphazardly into battle. It was like Königgrätz all over again. Like Benedek on the Elbe, Bazaine on the Moselle made nothing of his many advantages. 

Crushed by the French defensive fire, the Prussians were vulnerable throughout the day to decisive counterattacks by the massed, rested French reserves. Begged by his generals to let fly, Bazaine sat on his hands. Indeed the marshal sat for most of the day far from the battle. He chose as his headquarters the telegraph office in the little fort of Plappeville. Sited in a dip behind the front line, it gave no view of the battlefield. Officers who huddled with Bazaine throughout the day noticed that he ignored the fight that was raging nearby, placidly sending telegrams to the emperor and empress in Paris. 

Working in the French army archive today you can piece together Marshal Bazaine’s battle of Gravelotte. It was an altogether different affair than that endured by his men. Between 5:30 and 8:20 PM, when the Prussians dealt the decisive blows along the crumbling, demoralized French front, Bazaine sat slumped in his chair at Plappeville trading telegrams with Napoleon III about provisioning arrangements at Verdun. As night fell and Marshal François Canrobert’s VI Corps screamed for reinforcements at St. Privat (and General Charles Bourbaki’s Guard Corps desperately appealed for authorization to march to the front), Bazaine ignored them to dictate the following message to the emperor: “I had no idea that there were such large stocks [of food and ammunition] at Verdun. I think that it will probably be best to leave only those things that I will need if ever I succeed in reaching the place.” Later Bazaine would poke his nose out of Plappeville to find thousands of disbanded French soldiers straggling down the roads to Metz. He would impassively join the flight, and surrender France’s last field army two months later. 

Battles are shaped by many factors: technology, training, raw numbers, morale, and planning. But material and intellectual advantages can be squandered by poor leadership. Call it the masque of command. If contemporaries and historians are deceived by the mask of command, they may mistake the true causes of defeat. This, in turn, muddies our analysis of armies, war, and great powers. 

Geoffrey Wawro is professor of Strategic Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. He is host and anchor of the History Channel program Hard Target and is the author of The Austro-Prussian War (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and The Franco-Prussian War (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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AFRICA AND WORLD HISTORY: A FORUM

THANKFULLY, HISTORIANS HAVE COME A LONG WAY from the late Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dismissive barb made in 1963: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europe in Africa.” Despite an avalanche of scholarship over the last four decades, however, questions remain about how adequately the history of Africa is being handled by and integrated into the field of world history and—as these pages suggest —into the discipline of history at the epistemological level. 

At the 2003 meeting of the African Studies Association, prominent Africanists along with a few invited world historians gathered to discuss the relationship of African and world historians. Opinions ranged from outright skepticism about the legitimacy of the enterprise of world history—suggesting that all too often world historians resort to clichés that homogenize and distort the rich diversity of the African past—to criticism of Africanists for failing to supply world historians with provisional generalizations gleaned from several decades of specialized scholarship. Beyond these concerns, however, lurked a more fundamental set of questions, articulated by Joseph C. Miller. Is it legitimate to interpret African history on the basis of modern, Western conceptual schemes and historiographical conventions? Moreover, how can we move toward more balanced trans-regional histories that interpret the Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Indian Ocean experiences as much from African premises as from familiar modern Western ones? Such questions contain assumptions and carry implications that challenge us to revisit how we conceptualize historical inquiry itself. 

Our forum on Africa in World History explores these matters. Miller provides the springboard for our conversation with his “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multi-Centric World History Needs Africa” which develops themes presented in his 1999 American Historical Association presidential address. Eight scholars representing a variety of perspectives respond, after which Miller offers concluding comments. 
 

BEYOND BLACKS, BONDAGE, AND BLAME: WHY A MULTI-CENTRIC WORLD HISTORY NEEDS AFRICA† 
Joseph C. Miller 

As Lauren Benton put it in a recent issue of this bulletin, “world history has not produced a significant volume of methodologically thoughtful discussions or theoretically influential studies.” As a historian, I have to agree. As an Africanist, I have long thought that the particular “peoples without history” whom I contemplate offer the extreme examples of the exclusion that conventional untheorized standards of world history impose— less and more implicitly—on most of the world. Most world historians—with respect but not apologies to my many friends who thus style themselves—seem also to mute, if not negate, central principles of history’s distinctive methodology. Those who adhere to a “civilizational” approach isolate the exceptional by relying on “continuity” and “origins” in ways that neglect history’s core emphasis on change arising from contingency and complexity. Those who isolate single “causes”—or even several “causes”—of change violate history’s distinctive reasoning from contexts, the particulars of time and place. 

It is not that world historians have not made gains: only that they have reached the limits of gains achievable within the framework of an essentially nationalist, particularist, exclusive, and progressive epistemology. In fact, Africans (like the vast majority of the world’s people) have had, and have, distinctive ways of thinking of themselves, and their world(s), as well about as the greater world they share with us. These are worth knowing, not just for their abstract value as human creations, but also for the very practical and revealing highlights that their alternatives cast on the modern Western imaginings that make up our reality . . . . 

† These thoughts emerge from many years of trying to engage undergraduates with true alterity, and from recent experience in trying to explain to respected colleagues what I as a historian, who happens to work on Africa, share with my counterparts who still find it hard to distinguish what I do from “anthropology.” 

Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He was editor of the Journal of African History from 1990–96 and served as the president of the American Historical Association in 1998. His Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Wisconsin, 1988) received several awards, including the African Studies Association’s Melville Herskovits Prize. He is currently working on a world history of slavery from the earliest human times through the 19th century and will hold a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for 2004–05. 

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Volume VI, Number 2

THE WAY OF AFRICA,“THE WAY I AM,” AND THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE 
Ricardo Duchesne

. . . . Had Miller been less dismissive of Western culture—“the hubris of individualism”— he might have been willing to consider that only by going through European culture can we learn about the distinctive ways of Africans themselves.5 He might have noted that alongside the infamous Cartesian outlook which seeks an unbiased, objective knowledge of the world by separating subject and object, being and thinking, there is a fascinating interpretative or hermeneutic tradition which may be traced back to Giovanni Vico (1668–1744) and Johann Herder (1744–1803) and the world of late 18th-century German scholarship. The effort to understand the Other was not initiated by African scholars. This hermeneutic tradition, embraced by the Romantic movement, was articulated as a new method of “higher criticism” by Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), who lectured on the philosophy of history and insisted on discovering the original spirit under the letter of a text. It was broadened by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that the task of the interpreter of cultural and linguistic Others was to understand the author better than he understood himself. But it was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) who firmly established it in the context of the so-called “explanation- understanding controversy” when he proposed that historical knowledge itself, by contrast to scientific explanations, is obtained hermeneutically through empathetic understanding by working backward through texts to arrive at the original experience of their authors. In the 20th century the interpretative tradition was expanded and radicalized by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Albert Schutz’s intersubjective world of meaning, Martin Heidegger’s concept of “being-able-to-be-in-the-world,” and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language game analysis. It was pushed beyond epistemological concerns about the proper (original) understanding of written documents or speech (which still retained the subject-object duality) toward the idea that all interpretation involves an encounter, a permanent tension between one’s own historical horizon and that of the Other. Hans Georg Gadamer’s main work, Truth and Method (1960), is particularly credited with the central innovation that understanding is a never-ending process in the form of a conversation between one’s own horizon and the horizon of others . . . .

Ricardo Duchesne is associate professor of historical sociology at the University of New Brunswick. His most recent publication is “Centres and Margins: The Fall of Universal History and the Rise of Multicultural World History,” in Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ed., Palgrave Advances in World Histories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

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AFRICA IN WORLD HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY 
Patrick Manning 

. . . . It has been something more than a generation’s time since African studies became an organized field of study. Those trained in the early stages of this academic venture are now reaching their full maturity and offering commentaries such as that of Miller. African studies began as an extension of humanistic and social science analysis to areas beyond the West. Africa was seen as the region most foreign to the West, and it was the last (along with Southeast Asia) to benefit from organized area-studies programs. One of the tragedies of Africanist scholarship is that scholars born and working in Africa, while they had a promising beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, found their work limited by political conflict, university closures, and Structural Adjustment Programs. While there has developed a cosmopolitan intellectual consensus among Africanist scholars, it remains the case that scholars of African birth are a clear minority (in contrast, for instance, with East Asianists), and most of the active African-born scholars are expatriates, working especially in North America. These limits on links between Africanist scholarship and contemporary African life cannot be beneficial for the scholarship. 

Over time, Africanists on the continent and abroad have developed a remarkable corpus of scholarship, so that African societies and their histories are now known and documented in far greater depth than a generation ago. Many and perhaps most Africanists remain devoted to the study of the continent alone, and have no scholarly interest in global affairs. Nevertheless, some Africanist scholars have become steadily more ready to articulate a view of the world, partly because of their intensive analysis of the continent, and partly through interaction with scholarship on other regions. In particular, a number of active thinkers in world history come from Africanist backgrounds . . . . 

Patrick Manning is professor of history and African-American Studies at Northeastern University. His most recent book is Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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COMMENT ON MILLER 
William H. McNeill 
 

“Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame” skillfully skewers longstanding caricatures of Africa’s part in world history and offers some arresting new thoughts about how involvement with the larger world provoked new social and political responses among Africans. But I am not convinced that Joseph Miller is justified in writing about “Africans” in general and across indefinite periods of time exhibiting the same responses. When did Africa enter world history, for example? Not, as he seems to say, in the 8th century. For Africa, as the cradle of humankind, once embraced all the human history there was. And when human groups began to occupy new environments in Asia, Europe, and beyond, Africans retained slender but uninterrupted connections with adjacent peoples as part of a worldwide human web. 

Later on, when contacts with Asians and Europeans became more pervasive and disruptive, which is what Miller is thinking of, surely it made a difference whether local Africans were foragers, pastoralists, or farmers. It made a difference, too, how firmly local communities were connected with those around them, i.e., what local webs of exchange and patterns of social differentiation had arisen and what sorts of local and individual skills had emerged.

By the time Asian and European influences became apparent and disruptive to older styles of life, most Africans were farmers, living in villages, and that was where a mounting stream of novelties impinged on their lives, some coming from afar, some generated nearby or within the village itself. That implies an infinite, or effectively infinite, local variety of experiences, seldom or never recorded. How, then, can historians hope to know what really happened among Africans in general and common folk in particular? . . . .

William H. McNeill is the Robert A. Milliken Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago.

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FINDING AFRICA IN WORLD HISTORY 
David Northrup 

Joseph Miller’s essay contains much to agree with, many points to ponder, and some bits to scratch one’s head about. One can enthusiastically endorse the central thesis that historians need to move beyond externally generated and Eurocentric perspectives that treat sub-Saharan Africans in terms of their skin color, their prominence in modern slavery, and the legacy of guilt that slavery and discrimination have left in the Western world. Getting Africa right can also help refine the larger framework of world history. 

While addressing his topic as an Africanist and as a world historian, Miller appears more comfortable in the former role. He criticizes world history for its lack of theoretical depth and originality, for outmoded “civilizational” and triumphalist Eurocentric approaches, and for not appreciating Africa on its own terms. World history is also praised for its potential to rise above such failings, but his essay is more inclined to emphasize what world historians should learn from historians of Africa than what Africanists might learn from world history. In my view, the situation is not one-sided. Some historians of Africa have also not broken free from conceptual limitations, and the best of recent world history scholarship is rather more advanced than the criticisms Miller repeats from Lauren Benton suggest . . . . 

David Northrup, a professor of history at Boston College, is president of the World History Association and author of Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2002).

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THE BORDERS OF AFRICAN AND WORLD HISTORY 
Jonathan T. Reynolds

. . . . One of the key issues that all who dare to do world history must struggle with is the question of human similarity and difference. “Lumpers” argue that all people are basically similar and can be understood using similar concepts and questions. “Splitters” see peoples in different times and places as basically incomparable. In arguing his point for understanding Africa, Joe Miller has placed himself firmly in the splitter camp. Indeed, despite the fact that he expresses his discontent with the “civilizational” approach to world history, he nonetheless argues for the distinctiveness of things African. As he states in his second paragraph: “Africans . . . have had, and have, distinctive ways of thinking of themselves and their world(s), as well as about the greater world they share with us.” On page three he returns to this theme, and identifies “Africa’s communal ethos” wherein “ . . . individuals ‘existed’ not because they could think, alone, for themselves . . . but rather because they affiliated themselves with consummate flexibility with others around them . . . . ” From this starting point Miller develops his perspectives on African political forms (“states”) and the African understanding of the slave trade. 

While I agree with much of what Miller has to say, I am nonetheless uncomfortable with the underlying characterization of Africans as “different.” Indeed, in trying to escape the European paradigm of world history, Miller has created a rather selective model of Africa that does not, to me, seem terribly representative of African diversity. Certainly there are plenty of cases where such issues as “legitimacy” were crucial both to African rulers and ruled. Are we really wrong to call the likes of ancient Aksum or Benin states? Perhaps Miller is uncomfortable with the likes of these (or for that matter ancient Egypt or Songhai) because they don’t fit his own model of African politics. Similarly, while many Africans may have understood the chaos engendered by the slave trade as witchcraft, many others saw the trade as an exchange of human capital for material capital. Certainly the populations of busy slave ports didn’t fear Europeans as outsiders. The appropriation of European identities by many African commercial families suggests just the sort of flexibility of identity that Miller stresses. But if identity is so flexible, then might not the ways in which the great variety of people known collectively as Africans constructed and understood their worlds be flexible, too? I am uneasy with any argument that reduces Africans (or any other continental or racial group) to “people who think like __________.” Perhaps Africa is itself large enough to be multi-centric . . . .

Jonathan T. Reynolds is an associate professor of history at Northern Kentucky University. Trained as a specialist in Islam and politics in West Africa, he recently has found himself transmogrified into a world historian. Along with Erik Gilbert of Arkansas State University, he is author of Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present (Prentice Hall, 2004). The two are currently collaborating on another text entitled Trading Tastes: Commodity and Culture to 1750.

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WHAT ARE WORLD HISTORIES? 
Michael Salman
 

. . . . Too often world history is just “Western” civilization (or a version of European history) partnered with the shadows of other places’ and peoples’ pasts. Other times it is only a history of the leading processes of modern history swamping over the rest of the world, such as capitalism, the emergence and spread of nationalism, and the dominance of the bureaucratic state. I concur with Miller’s call for a fuller inclusion of Africa in world history, just as I would for Southeast Asia. This must be an inclusion that highlights Africans as thinking, speaking, acting subjects who participate in history according to their particular conceptions of their changing contexts, rather than as passive objects swept into larger processes, or as actors whose logics and concepts are assumed to be universal and thus identical to everyone else’s. But let us ask the more fundamental questions: What constitutes world history? What makes a history a world history? 

One traditional answer is that world history is the history of processes and events that have a global impact or significance. This is what Hegel meant when he used the term “world historical,” although Hegel did not mean this in a literally global way because he thought the world was divided between peoples without history (Africans), those whom time had passed by (almost everyone else), and a lucky few (mainly in northwestern Europe) who were the vanguard of the unfolding of universal history. In Miller’s examples, we see a different sort of world history revolving around Africans’ incorporation into the expanding commercial world of early modern capitalism, primarily through the Atlantic Ocean trading system. What Miller introduces for historians not trained as Africanists is a set of narratives about how and why Africans became involved in this globalizing economy according to their own distinctive ideas about such relationships as rank, status, exchange, identity, authority, and power. It is a world history that does not assume that modern European notions explain everything, and yet it is a world history because it charts a process that is perceived to draw peoples into a globalized history —the history of the expansion of capitalism, its relationships, and its effects . . . .

Michael Salman is associate professor of history at UCLA. His most recent book is The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (University of California Press, 2001). 

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Volume VI, Number 2

ANOTHER WORLD 
Ajay Skaria

In his characteristically thought-provoking and wide-ranging essay, Joseph Miller has attempted nothing less than a reformulation of the terms on which world history is to be thought. He asks (if I may restate his argument): What is this “world” that world history is concerned with? Can another world be thought? 

As Miller’s essay suggests, this “world” is conventionally understood in terms of a movement from the particular or local to the general. As such, world history is concerned with those events that transcend the local to attain a wider or general significance. The conventional focus of world historians on state formation and diseases and germs that reshape continents is in keeping with this way of thinking about the world. Within this kind of world history, as Miller’s argument suggests, Africa can only be marked by a lack, by a failure to attain significance. 

I worry, however, that while he has very effectively pointed to the problems with the “world” as it is conventionally understood, he has not produced an effective or sufficient break with it. Here, I would like, first, to point out continuities in his essay with the older paradigm and, second, locate the precise ways in which Miller’s essay breaks with that paradigm . . . .

Ajay Skaria is associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wilderness in Western India (Oxford University Press, 1999).

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AFRICA IN A MULTI-CENTRIC WORLD HISTORY: BEYOND WITCHES AND WARLORDS
John K. Thornton 

. . . . Miller has warned us against seeing Africa as being too much like Europe and Asia. It is vital, he argues, to see Africans on their own terms, as measured by their own standards, which might not include states, monuments, or rulers. In order to achieve this African focus, Miller proposes that we reexamine what appear to be states in the coastal Atlantic area through the double imagery of warlords gathering followers while, at the same time, being limited by the discourse of witchcraft, for which there may be few comfortable European parallels. This radical reevaluation of African history, which breaks with a good deal of existing historiography, I find less satisfactory. In describing the founders of the early modern polities of Africa’s Atlantic coast as “warlords,” Miller presents them as ruthless gatherers of people and suggests that they were the cynical creators of impermanent polities. While certainly the founders of many of the states of coastal Africa might be described objectively as warlords, once the polity so founded passes a generation or so and gains institutional structure, the term is simply no longer applicable. None of the powerful states of the region—Benin, Asante, Dahomey, Kongo, or Matamba—can be described this way, for all possessed what we can easily see as the infrastructure of states: regularized taxation systems, judicial apparatuses, delineation of frontiers, systems of succession, delegation of authority, and chains of command. 

It is easy to underestimate the structural complexity of Africa while simultaneously overestimating the modernity of early modern Europe, the two errors compounding each other to create an artificially wide gulf between the two regions. If African state structures did not match ideal models of bureaucracies, neither did most other polities in the world, including those in early modern Europe, where orders were disobeyed, local enclaves of power held on against centralizing forces, taxes were avoided, and judicial decisions ignored. Distance, uncertainty of communication, and face-to-face connivances undermined the centralization of authority throughout the early modern world, and including Africa in the mix enriches, enlarges, and enhances our understanding of this phenomenon . . . .

John K. Thornton is professor of history at Boston University. His most recent book is Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (University College of London Press/Routledge, 1999). 
 
 

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Volume VI, Number 2

MULTI-CENTRISM IN HISTORY: HOW AND WHY PERSPECTIVES MATTER 
Joseph C. Miller

In my initial essay I limited myself to exploring implications of giving Africa a place of its own in thinking historically about the world. But by analogy my argument applies to anyplace round the globe. For that matter, one might extend the general argument to the multiplicity of voices within any of the places that historians study conventionally. I will use my few words here to try to elaborate the broader implications of the points that I phrased in terms of Africa’s particularities. I am well and happily aware—as Duchesne welcomes, but as Skaria and others worry—that in doing so I affirm my perspective as a historian rooted in the modern discipline of the Western academy. That’s how it is. We therefore might as well make the fact of perspective an opportunity rather than fret about it as a burden . . . .
 

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Volume VI, Number 2

THE COLONIAL COLLEGES: FORGING AN AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE 
J. David Hoeveler

Nine colleges existed in the British colonies of North America when the thirteen declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776. In New England, Puritans established Harvard in 1636 and Yale in 1701. The two others from that region, Rhode Island College (Brown) and Dartmouth College, sprang from the Great Awakening in 1765 and 1769, respectively. In the Middle Atlantic colonies, Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746 and Anglicans established King’s College (later Columbia) in 1754. Of the nine, only the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), 1755, had nonsectarian origins. A group from the Dutch Reformed Church started Queen’s College (Rutgers) in 1766. Anglican William and Mary, founded in 1693, alone represented the southern colonies. All were established by Christians with religious intentions (the exception, Philadelphia, came quickly under Anglican and Presbyterian domination), and all were Protestant. 

All led their students though a curriculum heavily concentrated in the ancient languages and history, with philosophy, science, and rhetoric also prominent. Closer inspection, however, finds that the colleges reflected the diversity within American colonial religion and the factional politics it produced. The colleges were born “political,” and their early intellectual histories both reflected and reinforced the religious politics of colonial America. 

Six of these institutions had Calvinist beginnings. Harvard was the school of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, operating within a decade of their arrival to New England in 1630. But by the end of the century Harvard had come under liberal religious influence, much of it Anglican, and, to the great disaffection of the orthodox Mathers and others, had selected John Leverett as president in 1707. By that time, in Connecticut, a party from the orthodox group had established Yale, located first in Saybrook, in 1701. It did so with Increase Mather’s blessing. But little was certain in the early collegiate history of this country. In 1722 a shocked New England learned that a group of Yale people, led by Samuel Johnson, had announced its intention to seek ordination in the hated Church of England. Johnson’s education in Anglicanism had proceeded from his reading of books—English religious writings, science, and literature—that had arrived at Yale in 1714. 

Establishing Princeton was the achievement of Calvinist Presbyterians. The College of New Jersey was the first to come from the religious movement known as the Great Awakening. That movement, in fact, served as a kind of political fault-line for all the colonial colleges. Harvard and Yale had both given the awakeners a rude reception, so now they sought a college of their own. Factionalism in the Dutch Reformed Church during the Great Awakening also led to the founding of Queen’s College in New Brunswick, New Jersey. 

Earlier, news of the new Presbyterian school at Princeton had spurred the New York legislature, with New York City and powerful Anglicans in the lead, to look for a college establishment of their own. King’s College resulted, but only after a war of words between Anglicans and their rivals in the city. The legislation that established King’s did not make it an Anglican college, so partisans had to work quickly to give it that identity. They did so when the socially influential Trinity Church bequeathed land to the new school. The trustees then named Samuel Johnson, by now colonial Anglicanism’s foremost apologist, as its first president. 

The Awakening would eventually yield four colonial colleges. In addition to Princeton and Queen’s, Calvinists founded Rhode Island College and Dartmouth. That superficial identity, however, belies an intense and ongoing religious politics. Many of the awakeners in New England became Baptists, having concluded, as did Isaac Backus, for example, that infant baptism had no scriptural foundations. The antipaedobaptists founded new churches, all the while facing discriminatory laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Baptists secured their collegiate foothold with the establishment of Rhode Island College. Separatist Congregationalists, who recognized no ecclesiastical establishment and looked back to the alleged purity of the independent churches in early New England, founded Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. 

The early institutional histories reflect the connections between college and state. The colleges owed their legal standing to their respective colonial governments or to the British Crown, which granted them their charters. Those connections surfaced more than occasionally in the early records of these schools. Thus the Massachusetts General Court in 1699 approved a new charter with a residency law designed to remove Increase Mather from the Harvard presidency. At William and Mary, James Blair, president of that college for no less than fifty years, established a record of hardball politics in Williamsburg that led to the removal of three Virginia governors. At Princeton, Presbyterians had to use their influence against a reluctant Anglican governor to secure their charter. At Yale, President Thomas Clap, determined to resist the incursions of the Awakeners in New Haven, went to the Connecticut legislature to get a law passed against itinerant ministers; some of them had recently captured the interest of Yale students. At the College of Philadelphia, Anglican provost William Smith effected a record of political intervention and intrigue unmatched by any of his collegiate peers. He never shied from taking on the Quaker oligarchy, repeatedly allying himself with the proprietary party in the complicated mix of Pennsylvania politics. Smith paid a price for his exploits. The Quakers put him in prison! A happier political alliance prevailed in the founding of Dartmouth. That story revolved around the unlikely match between the anti-establishment leader Eleazar Wheelock and the pinnacle of the New Hampshire political dynasty, the Anglican governor John Wentworth. 

The study of politics or political theory did not have a formal place in the college curriculums. Over the years, however, there developed at the colonial schools a kind of subsidiary curriculum outside the daily classroom instruction. It had three sources and immense influence. One source derived from books contributed by friends of the colleges. We see the effects most significantly at Yale, with the Jeremiah Dummer collection in 1714 and the George Berkeley donation, offered in 1733. At Harvard, tutors William Brattle and William Leverett, who began teaching in 1685, brought in books from England. These collections had a liberalizing effect. The English works challenged Puritan Calvinism, they brought students upto- date in modern science, and they likely exposed them to the English Whig political thinkers. 

Politics also figured heavily in another part of the “extracurriculum”: the student theses. The reading of theses by students at annual commencement exercises dates far back in Harvard’s history. By the middle of the 18th century this practice had assumed a marked political content. The theses asked, and answered, such questions as: “Is unlimited obedience to rulers taught by Christ and His Apostles?” (1729), “Is the Voice of the People the Voice of God?” (1733), “Is it Lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved?” (1743), and, a popular topic that reflects Hobbesian and certainly Lockean influence, “Does Civil Government Originate from Compact?” (1743, 1747, 1751, 1761, 1762). 

Third, at mid-century we find another interesting departure. Colonial students began to form their own societies, apparently seeking, in some cases, to take up current subjects outside their formal assignments. The Flat Hat Club appeared at William and Mary in 1750 and the Critonian and Linonian at Yale the same decade. Most famous were the two at Princeton: the American Whig and the Cliosophic, both established in 1765. These two organizations established an intense rivalry with satire and ad hominem aspersions abounding. James Madison at Princeton, a member and possibly a founder of the Whigs, at first pursued his love of literature and writing through his membership, but along the way a greater interest in politics emerged, and after Princeton it became his consuming focus. 

These clubs were still forming on the eve of the American Revolution. And in fact, the colonial college—all of them—became heavily caught up in that great event. What stands out thematically in this history is the appearance of nine patriotic schools, including even the two Anglican ones. Some fell easily into the American cause, others with some tension and difficulty. We note, however, that in 1760, on the news of King George II’s death, the six colleges then in existence all memorialized the departed monarch. Thirteen years later, American collegians wore homespun to signal their support of the American boycotts of British goods. At some schools, students formed their own militias, drilling on the college premises. And the war came to the colleges. Seven of the nine would have to suspend instruction as British or American troops took over their buildings. 

The contribution of the colleges to an emerging political culture in America, though, had already begun. The revolutionary years would continue it. Reference here is made to the political leaders that these schools produced. For them the collegiate experience laid foundations that expanded into patriot ideology and public service. A few examples will suggest how this was so. 

Samuel Adams came from a prosperous Boston family. He took his entrance examination at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1740, by reading passages from Tully and Virgil. For his M.A. degree he read Locke, Samuel Pufendorf, and James Harrington. This training does not suggest the fiery populist leader that Adams became for the Sons of Liberty, the simple republican known to history. But at Harvard, Adams witnessed and came to admire the religious Awakening. He praised its participants for their rejection of finery and their donning of the “somber dress” of the old Puritans. When Adams took up political journalism after his graduation, his earnest writing expressed his fears of material corruption in Britain and America, citing the historical example of Rome and its trajectory from moral republic to decadent empire. Adams, a familiar face in the Boston taverns, came to respect the common people and their common ways; he became known for his “genteel poverty.” Adams’s religious Puritanism and his classical education together forged the model of a “Christian Sparta” that he held up for his fellow colonialists. Many described Adams as the Cato of the American Revolution. 

Younger cousin John Adams entered Harvard with no intellectual interests at all. College changed him profoundly. He would cite as a special influence his studies with Harvard scientist John Winthrop IV, which led Adams in the direction of liberal Christianity. He may have rejected the Calvinism of some clergy he knew, but he came to appreciate the Puritans and their earlier struggles against the tyranny of monarchy and church in the Stuart era. Shifting from a possible career in the pulpit to one in law, Adams, with some Boston colleagues, formed the Sodalitas Club. Its members proposed to study law and oratory and met Thursday evenings to discuss a selected legal text from a list of classic works. Adams’s political ideas crystallized when the group examined feudal law. He presented his ideas to the club and then offered them to the world in his noted publication, his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, one of the major documents in the literature of the American Revolution. Harvard’s rational Christianity shone through in Adams’s harsh judgments of the “superstitions” that were the props of kingship and ecclesiastical oppression. Adams described the Protestant Reformation as an intellectual advance, to which his ancestral Puritans contributed. He also celebrated the Puritans for their fight against English tyranny. Adams also found instruction in ancient history, as his subsequent writings reveal. History, for him, was always a lesson book, informed by his classical education at Harvard. For every contemporary situation, it seemed, Adams could find an instructive analogy in ancient Greece and Rome.

Yale College made its connections to the Revolution through a different route. The neo-Calvinist movement known as the “New Divinity” was based in rural Connecticut, and its major advocates were Yale graduates. Samuel Hopkins, later a prominent clergyman in Newport, Rhode Island, and Joseph Bellamy, of Bethel, Connecticut, linked religion and politics in their preaching and writing. They shared with other Protestant leaders in America a conviction that not England alone but the colonies, too, had lapsed into the material comforts of empire (Hopkins strongly attacked the slave trade and the Americans’ connection to it) and stood sorely in need of a moral and spiritual recovery. Hopkins hoped that the Revolution would supply that need. Bellamy, in turn, associated liberal religion (Arminianism had always been a theological heresy at orthodox Yale) with high, fashionable living. By the middle of the 1770s Bellamy and others in the New Divinity party were urging Americans to swear off all British imports, the luxury and finery of a bloated empire, one that Bellamy judged “ripe for destruction.” 

Harvard and Yale’s Puritan roots explain much about their opposition to England in the Revolutionary era. Princeton College drew also on New England and Scotch-Irish foundations, and even before the arrival of John Witherspoon from Scotland in 1768 it had evidenced nationalist sentiments. Princeton outpaced all the colonial colleges in supplying leaders for the new nation, with James Madison being the most noteworthy. He reflects, through his education under Witherspoon, an evident connection to the Scottish Enlightenment. Witherspoon had brought with him to the College of New Jersey his own collection of Scottish works, including those of David Hume, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith. They directly influenced Madison’s part in reconstructing American political thought, contributing new ideas about republicanism in the large-state setting and the role of factions in that arena. Those ideas, of course, had their most succinct expression in Madison’s famous 10th Federalist essay. 

In the making of patriot colleges, the two Anglican schools supply the most surprising twists. One would expect William and Mary and King’s College to embody loyalist attachments to the British Crown. And indeed such feelings flourished among many at these institutions. At Williamsburg, however, a young Thomas Jefferson graduated and reinforced his college studies with lawyer George Wythe, reading Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Locke, Sidney, and Coke and deriving much of the intellectual ammunition for his revolutionary politics. James Madison (later Bishop Madison, and no relation to the above) supplies another striking example. At William and Mary in 1773 the young Anglican had become professor of science, immediately upon his graduation from the college. Madison’s speeches, beginning in his undergraduate years, reverberated with Whig notions, especially Locke’s. The William and Mary curriculum had created its own subversions of its loyalist identity. 

And King’s College, which had in President Myles Cooper an unabashed Loyalist, also contributed to the patriotic cause. Three King’s collegians–John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton–represented a group labeled the “Conservative Whigs” in New York politics. Hamilton had electrified New York City audiences with his powerful attacks on the British and in 1774 and 1775, barely more than twenty years old, he engaged the Loyalist Samuel Seabury in a remarkable pamphlet exchange that furnished some of the most interesting political literature of the day. Hamilton drew on the compact theory of government and insisted that oppressive British action had dissolved the American connection. He also drew on William Blackstone to advance a theory of natural law. 

College presidents by no means shunned the political arena, and often they charged into it with all their polemical weapons at hand. John Witherspoon at Princeton furnishes the fullest portrait of the activist president. In Princeton, he entertained travelers, such as John Adams and Richard Henry Lee, who were on their way to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Ultimately, he could not deny himself the opportunity to go there himself. Witherspoon became the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. After some hesitation, he brought revolutionary politics to the college campus. His pronunciation in “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men” stands as a major piece in the sermon literature of the American Revolution. Witherspoon, though, went even further. When New Jersey insurgents moved against Loyalist governor William Franklin, they hauled him before the New Jersey Provincial Council. Witherspoon served as grand inquisitor for the proceedings.

Harvard and Yale also provided revolutionary presidents. Samuel Langdon had arrived from his pulpit in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to his new office at Harvard in 1774. Just six weeks after the fighting at Lexington and Concord the next year he gave a sermon at Harvard, one thematically rich in its references to ancient Israel, the decay of the British Constitution, the oppression of the current regime in England, and, yes, America’s own sin. Langdon urged the need to recover a more strictly biblical Christianity. At Yale, graduate Ezra Stiles had moved over to a ministry in Newport, then to Portsmouth, and back to Yale as its president in 1778. He had already become the leader among other American ministers—Congregationalists and Presbyterians mostly—in their organizing efforts against appointment of an Anglican bishop to the colonies. Indeed, the first two meetings of this Plan of Union, in 1767 and 1768, took place on the Yale campus. There, in the late 1770s, Stiles cheered the American cause at every turn and detailed in his diary the dramatic events of the British advance onto New Haven in the summer of 1779. 

In the overall pattern, the older Puritan schools–Harvard and Yale–thus became readily patriotic. So too did the two New Jersey schools born of the religious Awakening–Princeton and Queen’s. The Baptist leaders at Rhode Island College, however, had mixed feelings. They saw only hypocrisy in the libertarian rhetoric of New Englanders who defended their rights against British tyranny all the while denying full equality to the Baptists in their midst. Rhode Island College president James Manning went to the second convention meeting in Philadelphia to win a resolution supporting the Baptists against New England’s Standing Order. He had no success. At Dartmouth, in turn, President Wheelock’s patriotic feelings confronted the political realities of his alliance with Anglican Governor Wentworth. He tried in vain to forge a reconciliation between patriots and English. His compromising efforts only aroused his critics, and he left office a heartsick man. 

Finally, at the College of Philadelphia, Provost William Smith, an Anglican, promised loyalty to the American cause but convinced few. Vice-Provost Francis Alison, Presbyterian, led the American cause, the coleader, with Stiles, in the anti-Anglican Plan of Union. This college ultimately furnished the fullest case of state intervention in the revolutionary years. The Supreme Executive Council, created by the new Pennsylvania constitution, turned on the college trustees, citing their expressions of British loyalty, and it named Smith specifically as one of fortyone offenders. In 1779, the radical party in the state, dominated by Presbyterians, reconfigured the college. Benjamin Franklin, whom Smith had earlier driven from the trustees, now returned and resumed his position at the college, renamed by the state legislature the University of Pennsylvania. 

The literature of the American Revolution, in the colleges and outside them, drew from many sources—Calvinism, the ancient classics, Whig ideology, the Scottish Enlightenment. But in its many expressions, that literature unfolded within the precise contexts of nine institutional histories. Therefore, no simple pattern prevailed. As with the thirteen colonies themselves, the colonial colleges forged an ostensible unity and shaped an American political culture. It was never an ideology and not a hegemony. Each college made its individual contribution to the pluralist American Mind.

J. David Hoeveler is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the American Colonial Colleges (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

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Volume VI, Number 2

THE GREAT MEADOW: SUSTAINABLE HUSBANDRY IN COLONIAL CONCORD 
Brian Donahue 

History has not been kind to New England farmers. Colonial husbandmen have long been cast as crude, extensive farmers: because land was plentiful and labor scarce, it is alleged, they depleted soil fertility and cleared new land rather than caring intensively for what they already had in cultivation. Beginning with the anonymous (and non- American) author of American Husbandry in 1775, gentlemen routinely accused these yeomen of mistreating livestock and wasting manure. 19th-century agricultural improvers condemned the plodding ways of their own forefathers. They followed the lead of Yale president Timothy Dwight, who famously wrote that “the principal defects in our husbandry, so far as I am able to judge, are a deficiency in the quantity of labor necessary to prepare the ground for seed, insufficient manuring, the want of a good rotation of crops, and slovenliness in cleaning the ground.”1 

Modern historians have mostly agreed. But interestingly, they have offered two diametrically opposed explanations for this slovenliness. Some claim that subsistence farmers lacked market incentives to improve. Others argue that the market imperative to commodify nature encouraged them to degrade the land. The first, neoclassical view was crystallized by Percy Bidwell in 1921 and has prevailed among economic historians to this day. Like Dwight, these scholars attribute inefficient use of land and labor to structural barriers. Once markets emerged in the second quarter of the 19th century (said Bidwell —Winifred Rothenberg pushed the transition back to the last quarter of the 18th century), New England agriculture began to show signs of improvement. But then, by the same remorseless logic, sank beneath competition from farms on better soils to the west.2 

Environmental historians, notably William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant, have proposed another explanation for exhaustive farming in colonial New England that runs counter to the progressive idea that greater market penetration led to improved use of land. In their view, the English colonists turned a Native land of ecological harmony based on usufruct into a privatized “world of fields and fences.” They have argued that the expanding market economy of the colonial Atlantic world drove the newcomers to commodify and exploit natural resources as rapidly as possible, rather than conserve them as the Indians had done— clearing forest, depleting wildlife, exhausting soils, eroding hillsides, fouling streams. Cronon had this occurring from the moment the English landed; Merchant had the exploitation worsening with the market revolution of the early 19th century. In any event, the degradation of land that was once seen as the mark of isolated subsistence farming is ascribed precisely to the market itself.3 

All of these historians have accepted that colonial New England husbandry was extensive and ultimately exhausting, although they fit that description into very different interpretive frameworks. But how do we know that colonial husbandry was like that—beyond taking Timothy Dwight and Arthur Young at their word? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that we don’t know it was like that. There isn’t much evidence for it. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how early New England towns like Concord could actually have been farmed extensively for the entire colonial period . . . . 

Brian Donahue is associate professor of American environmental studies at Brandeis University. He is also environmental historian of Harvard Forest, Harvard University. His most recent book is The Great Meadow: The Nature of Husbandry in Concord, Massachusetts (Yale University Press, 2004). 

1 Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York (Harvard University Press, 1969), 1: 76. The most likely author of American Husbandry was the English agricultural improver Arthur Young, who never set foot in America: see Harry J. Carman, ed., American Husbandry (Columbia University Press, 1939). 

2 Percy W. Bidwell, “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” American Historical Review 26 (1921); Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market- Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (University of Chicago Press, 1994). 

3 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill & Wang, 1983); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 

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Volume VI, Number 2

COMPARISON AND HISTORY 
Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor

Viewed from the long perspective of European history, studies that cross national boundaries are neither new nor necessarily revolutionary. While historical comparisons may be as ancient as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, it was the philosophes of the European Enlightenment who first set out to distinguish various areas of the world based upon customs, laws, and religions. If the 19th century saw the beginnings of national history to accompany nation-making projects, it also fed an unprecedented boom in comparisons, bolstered by the emerging disciplines of ethnology, anthropology, philology, and law. Even the systematic practice of comparative history, as pioneered by Marc Bloch, Henri Pirenne, and Otto Hintze in the era that followed the Great War, can now boast a venerable pedigree. 

What is new today is the pervasive skepticism about national history itself. In an era of globalization, we are told, the traditional “national” approach to history no longer suffices. Critics have registered a number of objections: the claims of empire are pressing; regions cannot be ignored; and the old exceptionalisms no longer persuade. To take the nation as the focal point, it has been argued, overly restricts the view. Enthroned in most subfields since at least the Second World War, national history, especially of Europe, seems increasingly under siege. To these challenges, historians have sought a solution in the realms of cross-national and comparative work. As conferences advertise for comparative panels and foundations solicit cross-national proposals, the virtues of venturing beyond national history are often extolled. 

But what is largely missing in this enthusiastic rush beyond the nation is any sense of how to tackle comparative and cross-national work . . . .

Deborah Cohen is associate professor of history at Brown University. She is the author of The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (University of California Press, 2001). Maura O’Connor is associate professor of British and European history at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (St. Martin’s/ Macmillan, 1998).

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