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From Periphery ToCenter In EarlyAmericanHistoriography James Sidbury2022 год

From Periphery To Center In Early American Historiography
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Аннотация: From Periphery To Center In Early American Historiography James Sidbury (bio) When Richard S. Dunn published Sugar and Slaves in 1972, the study of Anglo America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was very different. During the 1950s, the William and Mary Quarterly, the flagship journal for the study of British-colonial American history, published roughly twenty-eight articles or substantial notes on colonial New England. It devoted two to the Caribbean. During the 1960s the number of significant pieces addressing Caribbean history grew to seven, but there were fully fifty on colonial New England. By comparison, during the 2010s, the Quarterly published thirty significant studies of the Caribbean, as compared to eighteen on colonial New England. Sugar and Slaves was instrumental in effecting this change, but its influence did not appear immediately. The 1970s saw eight Caribbean articles in the Quarterly, the 1980s eight more, and the 1990s only eleven. It was not until the first decade of the 2000s, when nineteen-and-a-half essays on the Caribbean were published, that the reconceptualization of the British colonial world that Richard Dunn had done so much to initiate made an indelible imprint on the field's most prominent journal.1 The lag reflects a couple of different things. On the most obvious level, historical scholarship has a long gestation period. It takes time for an influential book to be read by and begin to affect the research projects of undergraduate [End Page 21] students, and even longer for those undergraduates to go to graduate school and longer still before they begin publishing. But the lag also reflects a less obvious and counter-intuitive effect of the power and influence of Sugar and Slaves. As Carla Gardina Pestana noted in a 2012 review of three "New Histories of the Early Caribbean," Dunn's book was long assumed to tell us "all we needed to know about the early Caribbean."2 His careful reconstruction of the social history of the seventeenth-century planter class includes clear narratives of the colonial occupation of the different islands. It also traces the political factions and struggles that emerged among the islands' elite planters as they became incredibly wealthy by forcing enslaved Africans to grow and process sugar. The book is beautifully written and thus fun to read, a standard not always met by other examples of the New Social History. Sugar and Slaves has long been required reading in graduate seminars throughout the United States, and it immediately created a scholarly consensus about the previously underappreciated importance of the Caribbean to Britain's American colonial project. Everyone who read it agreed that more work needed to be done, but it may have been too easy to be satisfied with how much Dunn had already accomplished. Many (by which I mean me, but I don't think I was alone) found themselves calling in asides at academic conferences for new studies of the Caribbean, and then returning to their work on British societies on the North American mainland. Dunn had already told us so much. Such was the standing of Sugar and Slaves by the early 2000s. Its ascendance in a historiography unaccustomed to paying attention to the West Indies probably benefitted from Dunn's background. He did not begin his career working on the Caribbean. His first book had been squarely within the mainstream of early American history at the time—a study not only of early New England, but of the Winthrop family no less. He followed that with a book on Europe's Wars of Religion, which appeared as a volume in the highly visible Norton History of Modern Europe.3 Sugar and Slaves was not the work of an outsider storming the New England-centered establishment; it was produced by a fully vetted member of that establishment teaching at an Ivy League university. There is no way to know how much that contributed to the immediate acceptance of the book's then slightly heretical claim for the centrality of the West Indies—perhaps the clarity of the argument and the unimpeachable depth of Dunn's research would have won the day on their own. But his scholarly pedigree didn't hurt...
Год издания: 2022
Авторы: James Sidbury
Издательство: Johns Hopkins University Press
Источник: Eighteenth-Century Studies
Ключевые слова: Caribbean history, culture, and politics, Cuban History and Society
Другие ссылки: Eighteenth-Century Studies (HTML)
Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (PDF)
Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (HTML)