PART ONE
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATIONS
Chapter One
The Status of Comparative History (1980)
Surveying recent comparative work by American historians is not an easy task; for there is no firm agreement on what comparative history is or how it should be done.[1]
Some discussions of the nature of comparative history that present varying definitions and approaches are Fritz Redlich, "Toward a Comparative Historiography: Background and Problems," Kyklos 11 (1958), 362-389; William H. Sewell, "Mare Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History," History and Theory 6 (1967), 208-218; Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York, 1969), 250-269; C. Vann Woodward, "The Comparability of American History," in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. Woodward (New York, 1968), 3-17; Carl Degler, "Comparative History: An Essay Review," Journal of Southern History 34 (1968), 425-430; and Maurice Mandelbaum, "Some Forms and Uses of Comparative History," unpublished paper delivered at the Convention of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, 1978.
All history that aims at explanation or interpretation involves some type of explicit or implicit comparison, but to isolate "comparative history" as a special trend within the profession requires a reasonably precise and restrictive definition. One can, first of all, distinguish comparative history from history that uses the "comparative method" in a relatively brief or casual fashion, more as a heuristic device than as a sustained method or approach. The limited use of a generalized "comparative perspective" or exotic analogy as a way of shedding additional light on some phenomenon in a single nation or society is not comparative history in the full sense.[2]This approach is employed in many of the essays in Woodward, ed., Comparative Approach.
Neither is the type of study—so important in the "new social history"—that closely examines a particular community or social action in terms of conceptual schemes or categories that are applicable to the study of similar entities in other contexts.[3]A large proportion of the articles in the excellent journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (1958-) are actually of this nature.
If "microcosmic" studies with comparative implications are ruled out, so are "macrocosmic" works that attempt to describe international developments of some kind without a prime concern for analyzing and comparing the variable responses of particular societies.[4]Much work in comparative sociology can thus be excluded. A search for uniformities that can be described only on a very abstract plane clearly inhibits a detailed comparison involving the kinds of variables that historians normally stress.
What remains is a relatively small but significant body of scholarship that has as its main objective the systematic comparison of some process or institution in two or more societies that are not usually conjoined within one of the traditional geographical areas of historical
specialization.[5]
Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), constitutes a major methodological contribution to comparative historical analysis. But the fact that its comparisons are limited to closely related Western European societies places it outside the scope of this essay.
It is only in work of this sort that comparison per se is consistently at the core of the enterprise. In other types of history sometimes described as comparative, the main concern is placing some local phenomenon in a broader geographical context, revealing the general trends prevailing in a given region or throughout the world, tracing some idea or influence across national or cultural boundaries, or describing a particular case in terms that may lend themselves to comparison.The object of comparative history in the strict sense is clearly a dual one: it can be valuable as a way of illuminating the special features or particularities of the individual societies being examined—each may look different in light of the other or others—and also useful in enlarging our theoretical understanding of the kinds of institutions or processes being compared, thereby making a contribution to the development of social-scientific theories and generalizations. But the practitioners of comparative history may differ on the priority that they assign to these two aims. Those in the humanistic "historicist" tradition will normally give preference to the former, while those who consider history as nothing more than contemporary social science applied to the past will tend to favor the latter.[6]
For a defense of the "historicist" approach to comparative history, see Redlich, "Toward a Comparative Historiography." A historian who defends the social-scientific mode is Lee Benson. See especially Benson's proposal for a comparative approach to the causes of the American Civil War based on "typologies, analytic models, theories of internal war" in Toward the Scientific Study of History: Selected Essays (Philadelphia, 1972), 309-326.
To some extent, although not consistently, this difference of priorities follows disciplinary lines. It is impossible to discuss comparative history without recognizing the contribution of historically oriented sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and economists. But their work tends to differ from that of those who are squarely in the historical profession by its greater concern for generating and testing theories or models that are either of potentially universal application or at least readily transferable to a number of social situations other than those being directly examined.Unfortunately, the body of work that qualifies as comparative history in the strict sense is characterized both by its relative sparseness and by its fragmentation. Comparative history does not really exist yet as an established field within history or even as a well-defined method of studying history. Unlike "the new social history" or even psychohistory, it does not possess a self-conscious community of inquirers who are aware of each other's work and build on it or react critically to it. Most of those who do comparative history do not define themselves as comparative historians in any general or inclusive sense. Those interested in the comparison of one kind of institution or process often seem unaware of the cross-cultural work being done on other kinds of phenomena. Scholars working on particular topics in
the comparative history of certain traditionally juxtaposed areas, such as the United States and Latin America, often make no reference to relevant work being done on other parts of the world.
Because of the sparseness and fragmentation of comparative studies, it is difficult to describe general trends over such a relatively short period as a decade. To gain a coherent view, it is necessary to consider works published in the 1960s as well as the 1970s and view them in relation to special lines or traditions of comparative inquiry. To grasp one important tendency, it is useful to go back to 1966, a year that saw the publication of two unusually ambitious studies in comparative history—C.E. Black's Dynamics of Modernization[7]
The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York, 1966).
and Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy .[8]Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966).
These two books provided competing paradigms for doing comparative history in the grand manner, which is nothing less than an attempt to compare the essential dynamics of entire societies. Black's work was rooted in modernization theory, which, according to him, described "the process by which historically evolved institutions are adapted to the rapidly changing functions that reflect the unprecedented increase in man's knowledge, permitting control over his environment, that accompanied the industrial revolution."[9]Black, Dynamics of Modernization, 7.
In this initial study, he looked at the process worldwide, and, concentrating on the political dimension, identified seven distinct patterns of "political modernization." Black has remained a dedicated promoter and practitioner of "comparative modernization" studies.[10]See Cyril E. Black, ed., Comparative Modernization: A Reader (New York, 1976). This collection contains some essays on the comparative history of modernization. Particularly notable is "Education and Modernization in Japan and England," by Marius B. Jansen and Laurence Stone (214-237), originally published in Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (1967), 208-232.
In 1975 he collaborated with seven other authors, three of whom were fellow historians, to produce The Modernization of Japan and Russia , a magisterial product of integrated team scholarship which combined richness of historical detail with a consistent theoretical framework.[11]Cyril E. Black et al., The Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative Study (New York, 1975).
The work was genuinely interdisciplinary—the other contributors were two economists and two sociologists—and relentlessly comparative; at no time is the reader so absorbed in one society that he is unaware of the other. It is the most successful example to date of the social-scientific approach to comparative history and suggests that the wave of the future for this kind of work may well be joint efforts by historians and comparative sociologists or economists.Moore's Social Origins provided a quite different model. It was also concerned with "modernization" as a comparable process occurring throughout the world, but the important variable for Moore was the role of social classes, especially the peasantry, and not the interrelation of state formation, cultural traditions, and technological development
that is central for Black and his collaborators. In comparing the agrarian sources of modernity in England, France, the United States, China, Japan, and India, Moore distinguished three different paths to the modern world: one leads to capitalist democracy by way of bourgeois revolution, a second to fascism ("revolution from above"), and a third to communism through the revolutionary mobilization of the peasantry. Moore's neo-Marxian class analysis offered a clear alternative to the conventional modernization paradigm as a theoretical scheme for comparing the transition from preindustrial to industrial society in various parts of the world. No other work comparable to his in scope and incisiveness has appeared, but in the same neo-Marxian vein were Eric R. Wolf's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century[12]
New York, 1969. Wolf describes and compares agrarian uprisings in Mexico, Russia, China, Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba.
and Immanuel Wallerstein's Modern World-System . Strictly speaking, however, Wallerstein's influential study was not comparative at all, because its frame of reference was a single "European world-economy" that had its origins in the sixteenth century. But its distinction between "core," "semi-peripheral," "peripheral," and "external" areas and its discussion of the kinds of processes that occur in each offered a provocative set of hypotheses to guide the work of comparative historians with a Marxian orientation.[13]The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974). An essay that applies some of the insights of Moore and Wallerstein to the comparative study of revolutions is Theda Skocpol, "France, Russia, and China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18 (1976), 175-210.
Most of the comparative history that has been done by Americans since the 1960s has not had the grand scope and commitment to a single overarching theory that characterizes the work of Black, Moore, and Wallerstein. It has been concerned less with the dynamics of entire societies than with the role and character of particular ideas, institutions, modes of social and political action, or environmental challenges in a small number of national settings, most often only two. It has tended to be eclectic, ad hoc, or casual in its use of social theory and usually retains as its main purpose the better comprehension of particular societies or groups of related societies rather than the discovery of universal laws of social development or the driving forces of world history. Hence it is closer than the work of the "grand manner" comparativists to the conventional tendency of historians to look for particularity, complexity, and ambiguity. Yet the very act of comparison requires categories that are comparable and some presuppositions about what is constant and predictable in human motivation or behavior. Without such assumptions, one could write parallel histories but not comparative ones. Hence comparative historians with more modest ambitions than Black, Moore, and Wallerstein are inevitably driven to a kind of "middle range" social theorizing that is generally
more defensible when it is made explicit. Some of the questions that comparativists have difficulty evading are the extent to which people in comparable circumstances are impelled by "idealist" or "materialist" motives; the appropriateness of such concepts as class, caste, race, ethnic group, and status group to describe particular forms of social stratification; and the cross-cultural meaning of such terms as equality, democracy, fascism, racism, and capitalism. One of the great values of comparative history is that it forces such issues to the forefront of consciousness and demands that they be resolved in some fashion that is neither parochial not culture-bound.
It must be conceded, however, that the usual impulse that has led Americans to do comparative history has not been so much a desire for cosmopolitan detachment or conceptual clarity as the hope that they can learn something new about American history by comparing some aspect of it with an analogous phenomenon in another society. The subjects of comparative historical study which have aroused the greatest interest and stimulated the most work in the United States are clearly those that arise from a sense that some central feature of the American experience has an obvious parallel elsewhere. The fact that other societies have arisen out of a process of settlement and geographic expansion has spawned comparative colonization and frontier studies; the existence elsewhere in the Americas of black servitude has led to a substantial outpouring of comparative work on slavery and race relations; and, most recently, the awareness that the struggle for women's rights and equality with men has not been unique to the United States has resulted in the first signs of a comparative historiography of women and sex roles. An efficient way to sum up the most characteristic manifestations of comparative history in the United States is to deal with each of these subareas individually before taking note of a small amount of work that deals with other subjects and suggests additional comparative possibilities.
The comparative study of colonization and frontier expansion derives from a post—World War II reaction against dominant traditions in American historiography which viewed the United States in isolation from the rest of the world and asserted a uniqueness that was never verified—as any claim to uniqueness must be—by a sustained use of the comparative method. Fredrick Jackson Turner's celebrated hypothesis that "the American way of life," and more specifically its legacy of democracy and individualism, resulted from the frontier experience and not from the transplantation of European culture and ideologies was
reexamined in a cross-cultural perspective. Frontier historians and historical geographers have produced a literature, mostly in the form of articles or essays, juxtaposing the westward movement in the United States with frontier expansion in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil; some have looked even farther afield and examined Roman, medieval European, Russian, and Chinese frontiers in light of the Turner thesis.[14]
See especially Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, eds., The Frontier in Perspective (Madison, Wis., 1957); Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier (New York, 1968); and David Harry Miller and Jerome O. Steffen, eds., The Frontier: Comparative Studies (Norman, Okla., 1977). Actually most of the essays published or reprinted in these collections are not directly comparative but deal exclusively with individual frontiers. Important exceptions are A. L. Burt, "If Turner Had Looked at Canada, Australia, and New Zealand When He Wrote about the West" (Wyman and Kroeber, 59-77); Marvin W. Mikesell, "Comparative Studies in Frontier History" (Hofstadter and Lipset, 152-171); and David Henry Miller and William W. Savage, Jr., "Ethnic Stereotypes and the Frontier: A Comparative Study of Roman and American Experiences" (Miller and Steffen, 109-137).
What has emerged is a distinct impression that frontier expansions have varied so greatly in their causes and consequences that it is questionable whether one can speak of "the frontier" as a distinctive historical process with predictable results. In 1968, however, Ray Allen Billington attempted to resurrect a neo-Turnerian claim for American uniqueness by arguing that many of the differences between frontiers can be accounted for by varying physical conditions. The American frontier differed from all others in its consequences, he asserted, because nowhere else was "the physical environment conducive to exploitation by propertyless individuals and the invading pioneers equipped by tradition to capitalize fully on that environment."[15]Billington, "The Frontier," in Comparative Approach, ed., Woodward, 77.
This cross-cultural testing of the Turner thesis has led to some suggestive comparative insights about the effect of physical environments and preexisting institutions or values on the establishment of new settler communities, but it has not resulted in book-length studies of historiographic significance. A major reason for this lack of development beyond the essay has been a widespread tendency among American historians in general to repudiate Turner's thesis that the frontier had a decisive effect on American society, politics, or "national character." In 1968, Seymour Martin Lipset concluded after a brief review of comparative frontier studies that doubt had been cast on Turner's contention that "the frontier experience was the main determinant of American egalitarianism." What happened on other frontiers pointed to the importance in the American case of "values derived from the revolutionary political origins and the Calvinist work ethos."[16]
Lipset, "The Turner Thesis in Comparative Perspective: An Introduction," in Turner, ed., Hofstadter and Lipset, 12.
As frontier history moved to the periphery of American historiography, the impulse to do comparative frontier studies waned. But the recent vogue of American Indian history and a tendency to redefine the frontier as "an intergroup situation"[17]Jack D. Forbes, "Frontiers in American History and the Role of the Frontier Historian," Ethnohistory 16 (1968), 207.
(Turner and his followers had conceived of the frontier as "open land" and had grossly neglected the Native American side of the process) has inspired renewed interest in comparative frontier history as a way of making sense of the interactions of the white settlers and indigenous peoples in a variety of contexts, especially the North American, South African, and Latin American.[18]See chapter 2.
A serious attempt has also been made to develop a comparative perspective on European settlement in North America and elsewhere based on premises radically different from those of the frontier school. In The Founding of New Societies (1964) Louis Hartz sought to substitute a kind of cultural and ideological determinism for Turner's environmentalism to explain why the United States had become a unique kind of "liberal" society.[19]
Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York, 1964), with contributions by Kenneth D. McRae, Richard M. Morse, Richard N. Rosecrance, and Leonard M. Thompson.
Collaborating with specialists on the history of settlement in Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia, Hartz further developed the thesis, anticipated in his Liberal Tradition in America ,[20]Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955).
that European colonists and the societies they founded were shaped less by frontier processes and experiences than by their European antecedents. He argued that each settler society represented a particular "fragment" of an evolving European civilization, the nature of which was predetermined by the mindset and social background of the original colonists. Since each "new society" contained at the outset only one element of a European dialectic that included "feudalism," "liberalism," and "radicalism," it lost "the impetus for change that the whole provides."[21]Hartz, Founding of New Societies, 3.
Latin American civilization, therefore, represented an immobilized feudalism, the United States an ossified liberalism, and Australia an atrophied form of the proletarian radicalism of the early industrial revolution. The grand schema that Hartz set out in his introduction and in his essay on the United States was only partly sustained by the other contributors. Although they made an effort to remain within the framework that he had laid down, they were not entirely successful, suggesting that the scheme may have been too rigid and deterministic to do justice to complex historical situations. Although the "fragment" theory provoked considerable discussion for a time, it did not in fact become a guiding paradigm for subsequent comparative history.The ideas and actions of colonizers nevertheless remain viable subjects for comparative study. James Lang's Conquest and Commerce juxtaposed and contrasted the political structures and economies of the colonial systems or empires established by Spain and England in the New World from the beginnings of settlement until the end of the eighteenth century.[22]
Lang, Conquest and Commerce: Spain and England in the Americas (New York, 1975).
After giving a detailed portrait of each pattern, Lang concluded with a comparison that threw into sharp relief the major differences accounting for the divergent outcomes of simultaneous efforts at imperial reorganization in the late eighteenth century. By focusing on the view from the metropole rather than on the internal development of colonial societies, he provided a useful perspective for understandingthe degree to which politically dependent "frontier" societies were in fact influenced or manipulated by outside or metropolitan forces.
The most highly developed subject of comparative historical study in the United States is the character and consequences of a single institution that developed initially within the colonial systems treated by Lang—Afro-American slavery. More than the study of frontiers or "the founding of new societies," comparative work on slavery and race relations has resulted in a substantial body of literature that has developed its own set of issues and stimulated an ongoing debate. Among the reasons that comparative history "took off" in this field rather than others are (1) the assumption that slavery as a concept is relatively easy to define, at least when compared with 'frontier"; (2) the great public preoccupation in the 1960s and early 1970s with the race issue in the United States; and (3) the stimulus of a well-formulated thesis about the differences between slaves societies and their legacies in Anglo and Iberian America around which the discussion could revolve. The Tannenbaum-Elkins thesis, developed in the 1940s and 1950s, postulated a Latin American pattern of mild slavery and "open" race relations that was ascribed mainly to the persistence and enforcement of Catholic-hierarchical traditions. This pattern was contrasted with that in British America, where, it was argued, Protestantism, capitalistic individualism, and a high degree of local autonomy for slaveholders resulted in a peculiarly harsh and closed system of servitude that left behind it a heritage of blatant discrimination against all those of African ancestry.[23]
See Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946); and Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959).
Herbert S. Klein's Slavery in the Americas attempted to confirm this basic view of differences between the two patterns through a detailed comparison of slavery in Cuba and Virginia.[24]Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Cuba and Virginia (Chicago, 1967).
David Brion Davis presented the first really substantial challenge to the Tannenbaum-Elkins thesis in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture .[25]
Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), 223-288. A provocative earlier attack on the Tannenbaum-Elkins thesis appeared in Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York, 1964), 65-94. But its thin documentation and polemical tone limited its influence among historians.
Although this work was mainly a history of ideas about slavery within an international context rather than a comparative history in the strict sense, it contained a long section showing the basic similarities of slave institutions in British and Latin America. Arguing that slavery necessarily involved some kind of tension or compromise between the conception of the bondsman as property or thing and the recognition of his essential humanity, Davis suggested that Tannenbaum and Elkins had exaggerated the extent to which the legal systems of British and Iberian America stressed different sides of this inescapable duality. He also cast doubt on the assumption that Latin American slaves were treated less harshly by their masters. In a later essay summarizinghis argument, Davis conceded that "American slavery took a great variety of forms," but attributed the differences less to the cultural-legal traditions stressed by Tannenbaum and Elkins than to "economic pressures and such derivative factors as the nature of employment, the number of slaves owned by a typical master, and the proportion of slaves in a given society."[26]
Davis, "Slavery," in Comparative Approach, ed. Woodward, 130.
The stage of economic development in particular regions, he concluded, was probably more important for distinguishing slave regimes than was the national or cultural background of the slave owners. Subsequent comparative studies of slave conditions have tended to sustain Davis's position. The work of Franklin Knight, Carl Degler, and others has deepened our sense of how economic and demographic conditions shaped the treatment and governance of slaves in fairly predictable ways that were to a great extent independent of cultural and legal traditions.[27]See Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison, Wis., 1970) and The African Dimension in Latin American Societies (New York, 1974), 5-49; Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971), 25-92; and H. Hoetink, Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas: An Inquiry into Their Nature and Nexus (New York, 1973), 3-86.
But Davis had left open an avenue for cross-cultural contrast by acknowledging the validity of Tannenbaum's contention that manumission was easier to obtain and much more extensive in Iberian America than in British settlements and that subsequent distinctions between freedmen and whites were less rigid. What he was questioning was the extent to which this difference resulted from "the character of slavery."[28]
Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 262.
In an essay entitled "The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries" Eugene Genovese helped to clarify the issue and pointed toward a possible synthesis by distinguishing among various kinds of "treatment." Where Tannenbaum's followers went wrong, he suggested, was in contending that slaves were better treated on a day-to-day basis in Latin America than in the United States and then using this alleged contrast to explain the readier access of "the black slave as a black man" to "freedom and citizenship."[29]Genovese, "The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Application of the Comparative Method," in Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History, ed. Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), 203.
There was in fact no necessary causal relationship and hence no contradiction between studies showing that physical treatment was dependent on material conditions and those claiming a significant cross-cultural difference between patterns of racial mobility and differentiation.In the early 1970s, therefore, day-to-day conditions of slave life were less and less taken as a basis for contrasting British American and Latin American slave societies. The generalization that slavery in this sense was milder in Latin America than in the United States appeared to be almost totally discredited. But the difference that Tannenbaum had also found in the racial attitudes and policies arising first during the slave era in relation to manumission and free people of color and then persisting after emancipation now came to the forefront as something that
needed to be explained independently of the harshness or mildness of plantation regimes. The most important and successful study that clearly distinguished the determinants of slave conditions from those of race relations was Carl Degler's Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (1971). Degler argued that demographic factors, particularly the persistence of an international slave trade that provided relatively inexpensive bondsmen, actually made slavery a harsher institution in Brazil than in the United States. In the latter case, the earlier closing of the trade and the need for domestic reproduction of the slave force resulted in better material conditions and less flagrant cruelty. At the same time, however, the American system produced a more restrictive attitude toward manumission and imposed a racial caste system on freedmen and their descendants that had no real analogue in Brazil. Although he documented a tradition of color prejudice and discrimination in Brazil, Degler found that a "mulatto escape hatch" provided a chance for upward mobility for many Brazilians of African descent. He explained this difference from the more rigid American form of racial stratification in terms of larger differences between Brazilian and American social and cultural development. The contrast between a rapidly modernizing, politically democratic, and formally egalitarian society and one that has been characterized by underdevelopment and the persistence of a hierarchical social order provided a contextual basis for understanding why race relations have differed in the two countries.
Despite its extremely favorable reception, Neither Black nor White has not been followed by similarly ambitious and detailed comparisons of the historical origin or background of race patterns in two or more New World societies. An important article by Donald L. Horowitz, published in 1973, drew attention to the circumstances surrounding early miscegenation and to the security needs of various slave societies as key variables in determining whether or not an intermediate mulatto or "colored" group emerged.[30]
Donald L. Horowitz, "Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1973), 509-541.
For the most part, however, the trend in the 1970s has been away from the direct comparison of slave societies and the racial systems associated with them. As evidenced by volumes emanating from "comparative" conferences, the scholars of various disciplines who are interested in New World slavery and race relations have been devoting themselves mainly to applying new and more sophisticated approaches and techniques, particularly those involving quantification, to the study of individual cases.[31]See David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore, 1972); Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1975); and Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 292 (New York, 1977).
Explicit comparison has been left largely in the hands of editors and reviewers, who havebeen understandably reluctant to draw sweeping comparative generalizations from such a complex mass of new data. In the long run, this particularism may lead to better and more subtle comparisons; but for the moment its stress on the shaping effect of local economic, demographic, and ecological contexts makes cross-cultural contrast more difficult and problematic than it has been in the past.
Somewhat distinct from the mainstream of interdisciplinary comparative slavery and race-relations studies are efforts to deal cross-culturally with slaveholding classes, antislavery movements, and the causes and consequences of emancipation. Instead of focusing on the enduring structural features of multiracial slave societies, this body of work has concentrated on historical processes and transformations with a crucial political dimension. The landmark study of this kind was the first long essay in Eugene Genovese's World the Slaveholders Made , which differentiated between slaveholding classes in various parts of the Americas and tried to account for their divergent responses to the threat of abolition.[32]
Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), 3-113.
The important variable for Genovese was the nature of class consciousness among planter groups as determined by their relations both with dominant classes in a metropole and with their own slaves. Although not systematically comparative, Robert Brent Toplin's Abolition of Slavery in Brazil frequently referred to analogous developments in the United States and lent support to some of Genovese's arguments.[33]Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York, 1971).
In a 1972 article, Toplin made direct comparisons between slaveholder reactions to abolitionism in the two contexts.[34]Toplin, "The Specter of Crisis: Slaveholder Reactions to Abolitionism in the United States and Brazil," Civil War History 18 (1972), 129-138.
David Brion Davis's Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution dealt with antislavery movements on both sides of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[35]Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975).
Like his earlier work, this study was more in the genre of "international history" than an example of sustained comparative analysis, but it did provide considerable insight into how the hegemonies of social class could influence antislavery attitudes and actions in various settings. In 1978 C. Vann Woodward and I both published essays pointing beyond slavery itself and comparing emancipations and the subsequent establishment of new racial orders in a variety of situations.[36]George M. Fredrickson, "After Emancipation: A Comparative Study of White Responses to the New Order of Race Relations in the American South, Jamaica, and the Cape Colony of South Africa," and Woodward "The Price of Freedom," in What Was Freedom's Price?, ed. David G. Sansing (Jackson, Miss., 1978), 71-92 and 93-113.
My use of the Cape Colony of South Africa as one of three cases may be part of a new trend to look beyond the Americas for forced-labor or racial situations suitable for comparison with those in the United States. William Wilson's sociohistorical analysis of race relations in the United States and South Africa in Power, Racism, and Privilege[ 37]
Wilson, Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (New York, 1973).
and Kenneth P. Vickery's 1974 article "Herrenvolk Democracy and Egalitarianism inSouth African and the U.S. South"[38]
Comparative Studies in History and Society 16 (1974), 309-328.
suggested the potentialities of a comparative approach to the development of patterns of racial inequality in North America and South Africa.[39]A study of my own, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981), attempts a detailed and systematic comparison of white-supremacist attitudes, ideologies, and policies.
The introduction to the volume edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa ,[40]Miers and Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, Wis., 1977).
and the comparative essay that provides the conceptual framework for Fredrick Cooper's Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa[41]Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977), 1-20.
have begun the process of integrating indigenous African slave systems into the universe of cross-cultural slavery studies. Work is also in progress comparing American slavery and Russian serfdom.[42]By Peter Kolchin, who has presented papers on this topic at historical meetings.
A pioneer effort to extend the comparative study of race relations into modern urban situations on both sides of the Atlantic is Ira Katznelson's Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900–1930, and Britain, 1948–1968 .[43]London, 1973.
If the civil rights movement of the 1960s gave an impetus to the comparative study of slavery and race relations, something similar is now beginning to occur in the new field of women's history that is associated with the recent revival of feminism in the United States. The role and status of women are obviously subjects readily accessible to cross-cultural analysis. As yet, however, comparative women's history has not produced any major hypotheses that lend themselves to testing in a variety of situations. All we have, in fact, are a small number of isolated studies that do not bear any clear and direct relationship to each other. The most important of these are Ross Evans Paulson's Women's Suffrage and Prohibition ,[44]
Paulson, Women's Suffrage and Prohibition: A Comparative Study of Equality and Social Control (Glenview, Ill., 1973).
an analysis of the interaction between feminist and temperance movements in the United States, England, and the Scandinavian countries (with asides on France, Australia, and New Zealand); Roger Thompson's Women in Stuart England and America ,[45]Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (Boston, 1974).
an attempt to explain why women were apparently better off in the colonies than in the mother country; and, most recently, Leila Rupp's Mobilizing Women for War ,[46]Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Princeton, 1978).
an ingenious comparison of the nature and success of propaganda directed at increasing female participation in World War II in the United States and Germany. Because this body of work lacks a common focus, theme, or set of theoretical assumptions, it is clearly premature to speak of a comparative historiography of women and sex roles in the same sense that one can point to a tradition of comparative slavery or frontier studies.During the past decade or so, there have also been a small number of "one-shot" comparative works that have not as yet been followed up. Perhaps the most significant of these was Robert Kelley's Transatlantic
Persuasion , a study of liberal-democratic ideologies and spokesmen in the United States, England, and Canada in the mid- to late-Victorian period.[47]
Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969).
But Kelley's pursuit of uniformities and his conviction that he was really dealing with a single transatlantic phenomenon inhibited his use of comparative analysis. Another kind of comparativist would have been more alert to differences that would require explanation. Some of the essays in C. Vann Woodward's Comparative Approach to American History suggested some excellent possibilities for comparative history that have still not been pursued systematically. John Higham's short but provocative discussion of how American immigration looks in relation to the experience of "other immigrant receiving countries," such as Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia, provided an open invitation for detailed comparisons of immigration and ethnicity.[48]Higham, "Immigration," in Comparative Approach, ed. Woodward, 96-98.
David Shannon's fine essay "Socialism and Labor" revived the old question of why socialism failed to develop in the United States in the way it did in other industrial nations.[49]Shannon, "Socialism and Labor," in ibid., 238-252.
The current vogue of labor history should eventually inspire some brave scholars to attempt sustained comparisons of the political role of labor in the history of the United States and other modern societies. The possible rise of a new focus of comparative historical interest—the maintenance of public order—may be heralded by two books published in 1977, one comparing police activity in New York and London in the mid-nineteenth century[50]Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police and Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (Chicago, 1977).
and the other analyzing problems of public security in Ireland during the era of World War I and in Palestine in the late 1930s.[51]Tom Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security: The Case of Ireland, 1916-1921, and Palestine, 1936-1969 (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1977).
When all is said and done, however, the dominant impression that is bound to arise from any survey of recent comparative work by American historians is not how much has been done but rather how little.[52]
In addition to the works already cited, however, a small number of comparative essays or articles deserve to be mentioned. Daniel Walker Howe, "The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study," Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (1972), 302-327, is a good example of how to compare the fate of a common set of ideas in different societies. C.K. Yardley's "The 'Provincial' Party and the Megalopolises: London, Paris, and New York, 1850-1910," ibid., 15 (1973), 51-88, is an important attempt at comparative urban history, a field that remains surprisingly underdeveloped. John A. Garraty, "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression," American Historical Review 78 (1973), 907-944, represents the first results of an inquiry into the effects of the Depression on major industrial nations. It demonstrates the usefulness of examining the impact of an international cataclysm, such as a depression or a world war, on two or more comparable societies.
What we have been considering is in fact a very small fraction of the total output of American historians. The percentage would shrink even further were we to limit our attention to the work of those who are historians in the strict disciplinary sense. Such notable comparativists as Moore, Wolf, Wallerstein, Hartz, Lang, Wilson, and Katznelson have in fact been trained in other disciplines. A main reason for what was earlier referred to as the "sparseness" of comparative work is the way the historical profession is organized in the United States. Historians receive most of their predoctoral training in the history of a single nation or cultural area. Teaching and publication are similarly specialized. There are, to my knowledge, no professorships of comparative history at major institutions.[53]Tufts University, however, is in the process of establishing one.
There is no journal devoted exclusively to comparative history, although Comparative Studies inSociety and History provides a forum for historians along with comparativists from other disciplines. The absence of doctoral programs, professorships, and journals devoted to comparative history per se has clearly had an inhibiting effect on the development of this mode of historical analysis. Since reputations and successful careers are the products of intense geographical specialization, young historians launch into comparative work at some risk to their future prospects. Established scholars can afford the luxury of a foray into cross-cultural analysis, but are reluctant to go too far lest they lose touch with the main lines of development in their own field of specialization. This is especially true because historians are more uncomfortable than sociologists, for example, with generalizations that are not based on detailed knowledge and some immersion in primary sources. It thus becomes necessary for would-be comparativists to develop what amounts to a second or even a third field of specialization, almost equivalent to their original area of expertise, if they wish to go beyond "comparative perspective" and do sustained comparative history that will be respected by experts on each of the societies that they are examining. Understandably, therefore, few historians are willing to devote the time and energy that such an enterprise involves. Unless comparative history becomes a distinct field or recognized subdiscipline within history, in the manner of comparative sociology, politics, or literature, it is unlikely that it will become a major trend within the profession. Perhaps the decision to make comparative history the theme of the 1978 convention of the American Historical Association reflected some tentative movement in this direction. But for the moment, most comparative history is done by scholars who are either based in another discipline or taking an extended holiday from their normal role as historians of a single nation or cultural area.
Chapter Two
The Frontier in South African and American History
The frontier experience still looms large in popular descriptions and explanations of the "American character." Pioneers hewing new communities out of the wilderness are revered as the archetypal American democrats and individualists, a notion that received historical respectability in the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner and his disciples. Other nations have also had frontiers and frontier interpretations of their history, and one of the most conspicuous is the Republic of South Africa. Afrikaner nationalism—the ideology of the dominant segment of the ruling white minority—draws strength and determination from a romanticized image of the Great Trek, a mass migration of Dutch-speaking stock farmers into the interior of South Africa during the 1830s and 1840s.
For Afrikaners the Great Trek combines elements of our revolution and the westward movement; for the migrants known as Voortrekkers were not merely seeking new pastures for their cattle and sheep but were also making a conscious effort to escape from the mildly autocratic rule that the British had established over the Cape of Good Hope earlier in the century. The republics they founded in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal did not survive the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, but Afrikaner nationalists regard them as prototypes for the modern South African state.
The American and South African frontier myths differ somewhat in the kind of nationalism they project. According to Turner, the West was a
great melting pot for various white ethnic and sectional groups—out of the mixture came a common American nationality. The Voortrekker experience, on the other hand, is the exclusive property of only one of the two major white ethnic groups in South Africa. English speakers—about 40 percent of the present-day white population—have inherited some of the stigma attached to their ancestors for opposing Afrikaner independence.
But in another respect the two mythologies are quite similar: both necessarily deny the right of indigenous populations to the land that people of European origins settled in the course of frontier expansion. They do this in part by making it appear that native peoples were very thin on the ground in all or most of the territory now occupied by whites. Turner and his followers virtually ignored the American Indian and generally referred to the areas settled by pioneers as "free land." Low estimates of Indian population at the time of Columbus—now believed to be a small fraction of the actual numbers—reinforced the myth that America was scarcely peopled at all before the whites came.
Popular Afrikaner historiography makes the similarly misleading claim that Europeans occupied most of South Africa before Bantuspeaking Africans, migrating from the north, had arrived. The fact is that Bantu-speakers were thickly settled almost everywhere except in the present-day Cape Province before the first white settlement in 1652, and other indigenous peoples occupied the Cape itself. Because of the historical accident that many of the Voortrekkers migrated into areas recently depopulated by wars among Africans, even the great interior plain known as highveld is portrayed as a kind of demographic vacuum into which whites could move without really dispossessing anybody.
Yet the histories of both America and South Africa are filled with wars between white settlers and indigenous groups fighting to maintain their territory. Celebrants of white expansionism have thus been unable to ignore entirely the historical record of conquest and dispossession. To justify the forcible displacement and subjugation of American Indians or indigenous Africans, they have resorted to the ethnocentric—and at times downright racist—argument that the encroaching white civilization was so vastly superior to the way of life of "savages" who got in its way that human progress or the will of God was served by its triumphant march.
This one-sided, self-serving, and stereotypical view of the frontier process remains deeply embedded in the popular consciousness of contemporary white Americans and South Africans. But, because of the enormous difference
in the numbers and relative importance of surviving indigenous groups, it is a mythology that has much more resonance in the South African case. American Indians were so decisively outnumbered, defeated, and dispossessed in the course of American history that they have been relegated to the margins of American life and consciousness—objects of neglect or paternalism rather than fear and systematic repression.
In South Africa, of course, the descendants of those on the "other side" of the frontier remain the overwhelming majority of the total population. There is a genuine and plausible fear among whites that the frontier will, in a sense, reopen and that the European dominance achieved by violence in the late nineteenth century will be violently overthrown in the late twentieth. It is inconceivable that American Indians will ever regain their original domain, but it seems highly probable that Africans will some day win back theirs. Hence the legendary exploits of the Voortrekkers in their wars with the Zulus or Ndebeles retain a deadly contemporary relevance. White American children can casually divide up to play "cowboys and Indians," but it is hard to imagine Afrikaner youngsters playing "Voortrekkers and Zulus." Traditional enemies who remain dangerous are not romanticized and made into heroes with whom children can identify.
The books under review seek to dispel ethnocentric mythologies by viewing frontier phases of South African or American history in their full complexity, and from the indigenous as well as white perspective.[1]
The books discussed in this essay are Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981); Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820 (Cape Town and London, 1979); and Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, eds., Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980).
All three are collections of essays by several authors, and this of course makes it impossible to do justice to most of the individual contributions or to the full range of issues explored. Only one of them—The Frontier in History —focuses exclusively on the frontier per se and attempts a comparison of the American and South African experiences by juxtaposing essays that treat similar aspects of each.The others—The Shaping of South African Society and Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa —bring together the work of a new generation of scholars (British, American, and South African) concerned with various aspects of South African history between the beginnings of settlement in the seventeenth century and the consolidation of white rule by the British at the beginning of the twentieth. But several of the contributors address the nature of frontiers and the role they have played in the rise of a white-supremacist nation-state.
In the introductory essay to The Frontier in History , a path-breaking work of comparative history, Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson
define a frontier "not as a boundary line, but as a territory or zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies. Usually, one of the societies is indigenous to the region, or at least has occupied it for many generations; the other is intrusive."[2]
Lamar and Thompson, The Frontier in History, 7.
To understand fully what is going on in a given frontier zone, they maintain, the historian has to look at the process from the indigenous as well as the "intrusive" side. In contrast to earlier frontier historians, who concentrated on the actions and attitudes of European colonists and pioneers, most of the contributors to The Frontier in History devote at least as much attention to the outlook and responses of Indians or Africans. Indeed, the essays on the American frontier tend to go to the opposite extreme by dealing much more extensively with the Indian reactions or adjustments than with the causes, motivations, and long-term consequences of white expansionism.Unlike Turner's, the Lamar-Thompson frontier is more a phase of race relations than a wilderness where settlers were free to build new societies. But it does retain one feature of Turner's theory: it "opens" and "closes" in predictable ways. According to the essay by Hermann Giliomee, a leading South African historian, a frontier is open so long as neither the intruders nor the original inhabitants have exclusive political control and must, for some purposes at least, deal with each other as equals. It closes when the whites have effectively conquered and subordinated the indigenous peoples. For Turner the closing of the frontier meant that there was no more free or empty land for settlement; for Giliomee and other contributors to The Frontier in History , the frontier phase is over when there are no more independent sources of opposition to white political dominance.
There is a teleology at work here that raises questions about the relationship of frontiers to broader patterns of historical development. If one asks why whites in the United States and South Africa bothered to open frontiers in the first place and what they had achieved once they had closed them, the inquiry has gone beyond the usual bounds of frontier history. Most of the writers on South African frontiers in Lamar and Thompson (and also in the other two anthologies) explicitly or implicitly reduce the frontier to a phase or chapter in some larger, continuing process. Their counterparts among American historians—with their stress on how the white triumph irrevocably destroyed the Indian way of life—are less likely to achieve this broader kind of perspective.
The work of the South Africanists suggests that it is not enough to counter ethnocentrism by looking at the frontier from the "other side." It is also necessary to expose the underlying forces or ideologies
that affected both sides, determined the outcome, and shaped the "postfrontier" society. But these historians are not of one mind on the nature of these deeper influences. One school of thought stresses material or economic forces. According to Robert Ross in Lamar and Thompson's book and Martin Legassick and other contributors to the book edited by Marks and Atmore, frontier interaction can best be interpreted as an episode in the growth of capitalism. The long-term development that preoccupies them is the transformation of members of independent tribes into oppressed proletarians.
There are differences of opinion on exactly how or when this occurred. According to several writers in Marks and Atmore, the commercial capitalism of the frontier and immediate postfrontier periods offered substantial opportunities for indigenous black "peasants" to produce for the new markets created by white expansionism. It was not, in their view, until the triumph of industrial capitalism in the early twentieth century that Africans were turned en masse into an economically exploited class, a process rationalized by racism rather than caused by it. From this perspective the frontier stage itself begins to look surprisingly benign.
South African settlers, we are told, not only fought against black Africans but also traded with them, formed alliances with them against other whites, and sometimes even married them. It appears that there was much more racial tolerance and mutually advantageous give-and-take than in the brutally repressive society that emerged after the frontier closed. Robert Ross, on the other hand, seeks to qualify this image of a preindustrial age of racial accommodation and African opportunity by arguing that the extension of capitalistic relationships which began in the seventeenth century had always tended to undermine native economies, deprive Africans of access to the means of production, and force them to do menial work for whites. During the two and a half centuries of white expansion, there were recurrent opportunities for independent native producers to feed off the white economy, but they were invariably squeezed out as soon as Europeans were in a position to do their own hunting, livestock raising, or farming. The industrial revolution, one might conclude, did not bring a decisive change in attitudes and policies; it merely offered a new arena for traditional forms of exploitation.
Several of the writers in The Frontier in History as well as in The Shaping of South African Society resist the notion that economics and
the rise of capitalism were at the root of all major frontier developments. For them, culture and ethnicity have a life of their own that is not completely reducible to the pursuit of profits, markets, and labor. From the beginnings of settlement white colonists manifested a strong sense of cultural or racial superiority over their indigenous rivals. A major theme of The Shaping of South African Society is the early rise of color prejudice and discrimination in South Africa—not as a result of the frontier itself, as an earlier generation of historians had claimed, but mainly because of preconceptions brought from Europe and the subsequent opportunity to identify race with social status. While the frontier was still "open," conditions on the outer fringe of settlement actually worked to leaven or modify these racist attitudes, because survival often required cooperation with, and sometimes even dependence on, indigenous groups. But when white rule was firmly established, the discriminatory ethos already rooted in the more settled areas rapidly took over. These historians see in the larger setting for frontier history the early emergence of white supremacy as an ideology with deeper roots than economic determinists will acknowledge.
Whatever the extent and depth of early white racism—and this is a debatable issue—it is clear that Africans did not think so readily of the difference between "us" and "them" as Europeans were capable of doing when the chips were down. English and Afrikaners quarreled and even fought with each other, but when the European presence was clearly threatened by African resistance, they generally found some way to collaborate. Africans, on the other hand, tended to place loyalty to tribe or nation above the need for a common front against the intruder. There were few "native wars" in South African history that did not find indigenous blacks joining forces with whites as a way of revenging themselves on some traditional enemy.
American Indians also failed to match the white invaders' racial solidarity, and some of the essays in Lamar and Thompson's book shed additional light on this weakness and help to explain why the white "side" prevailed on both frontiers. Here, too, purely economic pressures are played down and stress is placed on cultural differences that gave greater cohesion to the intruders. In his fine essay on "The North American Frontier as Process and Context," Robert Berkhofer notices the incompatibility between Anglo-American and Indian economies, but he emphasizes differences in political culture as determining the nature of the conflict and its outcome. Crucial for him is the fact that whites belonged to nation-states while Indians were members of "stateless societies."
This meant that conquering the Indians was a slow and piecemeal process, but it also ultimately gave whites the upper hand, because they were capable of mobilizing and commanding the loyalty of larger populations while at the same time exploiting the differences among many autonomous and weakly governed Indian groups. This insight is not entirely applicable to South Africa; for there were indigenous nation-states in southern Africa—most notably the centralized Zulu kingdom. But there, as in the United States, the comparatively broader and more inclusive national, ethnic, and racial identities of whites usually gave them the edge in confrontations with indigenous peoples.
In another perceptive essay, James Axtell compares Anglo-American and Amerindian religion during the colonial period. The former was militant, aggressive, and intolerant; the latter was pluralistic, pragmatic, and capable of borrowing and synthesizing the usable elements of other faiths. In a good companion piece, Richard Elphick describes the great energy and dedication that characterized white missionary activity in South Africa during the nineteenth century. The missionaries were successful in converting Africans because their message seemed more appropriate to the circumstances of colonized blacks than indigenous religions that had worked well enough before the great disruptions brought by the European invasion. Although they differ somewhat in tone and interpretation, the two essays suggest that aggressive Christianity was a powerful weapon in the white arsenal, because it could sow doubts about traditional world-views and create serious cultural divisions which whites could sometimes exploit. (It could also backfire in the form of millenarian protests inspired in part by Christian eschatology.)
Making the frontier primarily a zone of cultural or ideological conflict in which whites had most of the advantages runs the risk of overlooking some of the more mundane reasons why the whites won out. If an ideological or cultural interpretation is a useful corrective to materialist explanations, the reverse is also true. Would Indians and Africans have been so culturally vulnerable if they had not already been weakened or outgunned by purely physical factors?
The physical vulnerabilities of American Indians are well described in Ramsay Cook's essay, in The Frontier in History , on the Canadian fur trade. Initially, Cook points out, the trade "provided the framework for a mutually profitable partnership" between whites and Indians. Tribes involved in this commerce retained their cultural integrity and
independence for extended periods. But inexorably the trade created dependence on Europeans and induced native Americans to exhaust their capital of fur-bearing animals. Furthermore, "the same trade routes that brought buyer and seller together also brought epidemic diseases." Cook then summarizes the recent work suggesting that "the most significant consequence of early contact was biological." It is now estimated that there were perhaps 4.5 million Indians north of Mexico in 1492; by 1900 the figure had fallen to approximately 350,000. The main cause of this demographic disaster was the introduction of European diseases—smallpox and many others—for which native Americans had no immunity. Germs and viruses actually did more to ensure white conquest than settlers or armies. Besides merely reducing the numbers of Indians capable of resisting the white advance, epidemics caused "a breakdown of traditional values and beliefs"; for Indian medicine and religion "were totally ineffective when faced with these foreign contagions."[3]
Ibid., 188-191.
Again the parallel with South Africa is inexact. Differences in the degree of indigenous susceptibility to the diseases brought by Europeans assume enormous comparative significance. In the early phases of white settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, as described in Elphick and Giliomee, the Dutch intruders confronted a native population with a relatively limited immunity to European microbes. As a result, the Khoikhoi—aboriginal herders known to Europeans as "Hottentots"—were decimated by a series of epidemics and greatly weakened in their capacity to resist Dutch encroachment and eventual reduction to semislavery. But the Bantu-speaking Africans whom settlers encountered for the first time on the eastern Cape frontier late in the eighteenth century were more resistant to epidemiological disaster. They not only kept their numbers but maintained a high rate of natural increase throughout the period of frontier contact and afterward. This demographic vitality is one of the main historical reasons why white domination of native populations remains fragile and reversible in South Africa.
It also helps to explain the differing situations of indigenous peoples after the frontier was closed. The most obvious contrast between the fate of the original inhabitants of the two places is that Africans became the principal source of labor for a white-dominated capitalistic economy while Indians were simply shunted aside to make way for plantations worked by African slaves and factories relying heavily on the labor of European immigrants. There are several reasons why Indians never became a significant part of the agricultural or industrial labor
force in the United States, but the most important is the sheer lack of numbers resulting from the ravages of disease.
That the Euro-American triumph in the United States was so complete makes understandable the reluctance of historians interested primarily in the Indian experience to investigate the legacy of the frontier as a force in contemporary American life. Their concern is with a tragedy that is essentially over and irreversible, although Indian claims to land and self-government remain a live issue and a burden on the conscience of Americans committed to minority rights. But the questions Frederick Jackson Turner raised about the lasting impact of the westward movement on Euro-American culture and society deserve reconsideration from a new perspective that would be less given to emphasis on triumphs of the frontier settlers. To what extent is the careless and wasteful exploitation of natural resources in the United States an inheritance from the frontier scramble for seemingly limitless wealth? Does the resurgent American ethic of "looking out for number one" in any way represent a carryover of frontier individualism? Are we bellicose and moralistic in international relations partly because of habits of mind acquired during the conquest of North America? Do liberal fears of "a cowboy in the White House" represent more than a loose metaphor?
The historians in Lamar and Thompson's book shed little light on such questions because they assume that the frontier ended when the Indians were defeated. But some other recent writers on Indian-white relations have tried to see the process of Indian expropriation as a formative episode in the history of American capitalism.[4]
See for example, Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York, 1975); and Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975).
If we look upon the frontier as a place where the spirit of capitalistic accumulation could flower without restraint, we can perhaps begin to recapture its significance for American history in general.The extent to which the South African frontier prepared the way for what came later, namely the modern apartheid regime, remains a burning question for the Afrikanist contributors to these volumes. But virtually all of them conclude that the frontier experience per se was not a principal cause of contemporary racism, despite the popular metaphor of the "laager mentality" for Afrikaner attitudes. The historians of early white attitudes in Elphick and Giliomee are inclined to trace apartheid back to traditions established in the early postfrontier society of the western Cape (essentially Cape Town and its hinterland). The Marxist scholars writing in Marks and Atmore tend to attribute
the theory and practice of apartheid to the rise of industrial capitalism after the closing of the last nineteenth-century frontier. It is not possible here to assess the particular strengths and weaknesses of these arguments. But it seems to me that these historical revisionists, in their zeal to refute an earlier and oversimplified view of the frontier as the determining factor in contemporary race relations, are in danger of forgetting some real contributions that the frontier made to the shaping of the South African brand of white supremacy.
A clear foreshadowing of modern apartheid policies can be found in the Afrikaner republics and the British colony of Natal in the mid-nineteenth century. In the former, the principle was established for the first time that only those of white ancestry were eligible for citizenship rights; in the latter, policies of territorial segregation and separate governance for Africans and Europeans were first devised. Hence two key elements of apartheid—a white monopoly on political power and the designation of separate living areas or "homelands"—were set out in preindustrial frontier polities still struggling with independent African nations on their borders.
Settlers in these areas had two urgent needs—physical security from the masses of Africans who either remained independent or were under only a loose form of white control, and an adequate supply of agricultural labor. In other words, they both feared and needed blacks. Efforts to exploit Africans as workers without giving them power and citizenship in white-dominated states or colonies not only antedated the migratory labor system and occupational "color bar" that developed in the gold mines at the end of the nineteenth century but also helped to provide a precedent for them.
Thus some of the attitudes and policies associated with contemporary apartheid were rooted in that phase of the frontier experience involving the initial establishment of white settler states in the interior of South Africa. Inherited prejudices may have influenced these pioneers, and the rise of industrial capitalism obviously suggested new and modified applications for the basic devices that they had developed for racial control and exploitation. But their contribution was important enough, in my view, to raise doubts about the emerging consensus that the frontier was not a significant source of the apartheid mentality.
Chapter Three
From Exceptionalism to Variability
Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History
Seventeen years ago, I attempted to sum up the state of comparative history in the United States and concluded that "the body of work that qualifies as comparative history in the strict sense is characterized both by its relative sparseness and by its fragmentation." In 1997, work of this kind is no longer sparse, but it remains fragmented.[1]
George M. Fredrickson, "Comparative History," in The Past before US: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, 1980), 459. This essay is reprinted as chapter 1 of this volume. For a call for a broader definition of comparative history than appears there, see peter Kolchin, "Comparing American History," Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982), 74-75.
The sheer volume of cross-national comparative work has increased markedly, but there is little commitment to comparative history as a primary specialization within history or even within sociology (where it is subsumed under the rubric of historical sociology). In both disciplines, cross-national comparative work exists primarily as a vehicle for the exploration of a particular problem or topic. Historians normally start with concerns arising from a particular problem or topic. Historians normally start with concerns arising from a particular national history and then seek to gain insights by examining an analogous phenomenon elsewhere. For historians of the United States, the anticipated payoff—at the outset, at least—is likely to be a better understanding of something American.
For sociologists and political scientists, the trigger is interest in a transnational process or recurring condition, such as class formation, ethnicity, state building, or revolution. For most historians and social scientists, comparative history is a way of isolating the critical factors or independent variables that account for national differences. But the former usually value the discovery and explanation of differences primarily as a stimulus to the reinterpretation of national histories; the latter value their
contribution to the development of a better model or theoretical understanding of the process, structure, or condition being studied.
It follows from such topical specializations—whether nationally specific or international and theoretical—that those who do cross-national comparative history do not usually have a strong awareness of, or interest in, comparative work on other themes or topics. The two topics that have generated the most intensive and sustained comparative interest in recent years are slavery and race relations and the growth of welfare states (with special attention to the role of women and gender). But comparative historians of race and those of welfare do not normally interact or comment on each other's work. Cross-disciplinary fertilization is most likely to occur in work on similar topics. To increase the chances for such fertilization, to make more historians aware of the potential gains from comparative studies, we need to transcend the existing fragmentation.
This essay attempts to do that by surveying and classifying recent comparative studies of interest to Americanists. I have tried to show the connections among comparative studies by scholars in different disciplines and those on different topics. I offer the survey in the hope of stimulating awareness, because the prospects for the development of comparative history seem brighter than in 1980—indeed, than ever before.
What should comparative historians compare? How should nation-states figure in their work? There is a lively debate on this issue. Like other fields in modern history, comparative history has traditionally focused on nation-states. But some historians are now skeptical about the value of cross-national comparisons, those that examine similar developments in two or more nations, discussing each case in roughly equal depth and detail. Instead they advocate international or comparative perspectives that do not juxtapose nations as such. In a thoughtful essay criticizing historians of the United States for their failure to adopt comparative perspectives, Raymond Grew argued that "the tendency to make the nation (and the nation as defined by the state) the ultimate unit of analysis" is "the single most important inhibition on comparative study." "Whole nations," he maintains, "usually prove too grand, too comprehensive for the kind of fruitful comparison that uses discriminating logic to make a discovery or establish a point not visible before." Ian Tyrrell echoed these concerns in an appeal for "international," as opposed to what is here described as cross-national comparative history. "The critical failure" of American historians with
cosmopolitan ambitions, he contended, "has not been comparative and international perspectives themselves but rather the failure of comparative history to transcend the boundaries of nationalist historiography." Although they did not supply examples, Grew and Tyrrell implied that historians of the United States who do comparative work are likely to use other cases to buttress an exceptionalist view of the American past.[2]
Raymond Grew, "The Comparative Weakness of American History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (Summer 1985), 93; lan Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review 96 (Oct. 1991), 1933.
American exceptionalism is in ill repute among contemporary historians for good reasons. The history of every nation has distinctive features, but the notion that the United States has exhibited radical peculiarities that have made its experience categorically different from that of other modern or modernizing countries has encouraged an oversimplified and often idealized view of the American past. Recent historians have shown that the United States was not immune to the tensions and conflicts that have occurred in other nations at similar stages of social and economic development. To the extent that cross-national comparative history involving the United States inevitably promotes radical exceptionalism, any claims that it contributes significantly to historical understanding would be highly suspect.
A distinction needs to be made between two ways of doing cross-national comparisons. Efforts to compare the entire history of one country with that of another—for precisely the reasons that Grew pointed out—have rarely been attempted. Continental Divide , by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, is the closest approximation that comes to mind, but this contrast of "the values and institutions of the United States and Canada" focuses on the present and makes brief forays into history in search of the origins of differences revealed by contemporary observations and opinion surveys. (Lipset, an unreconstructed American exceptionalist, argues that the Revolution bequeathed to the United States an enduring pattern of liberal individualism that to this day contrasts with a Canadian culture and institutional life that retain significant traces of Tory conservatism and collectivism.[3]
Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York, 1990).
) More commonly, cross-national historians compare a specific ideology, institution, or historical process in one society with its analogue in another and then explore the respective national contexts in order to uncover the sources of the similarities and differences that they have found.Comparative historical sociologists, now major practitioners of comparative history, generally endorse the nation-state as a unit of analysis. According to the historical sociologist Aristide R. Zolberg, for example, "throughout modern history, national variations in economic
organization and development determined different patterns of social stratification, and these in turn contributed to varied outcomes in state and nation formation." There is nothing sacred or primordial about nation-states, but in the West during the past two or three centuries and everywhere during the past fifty years, they are the largest units that provide an adequate context for most social, political, and cultural phenomena. Use of the nation-state—or of the semiautonomous colony or possession of an imperial power—as a unit of analysis does not by itself commit the historian to historiographic nationalism or to a belief in national exceptionalism. As Zolberg points out, the recognition that every nation is the unique product of its particular history does not necessarily mean that one nation departs from a general pattern manifested by all the others. A historian studying some comparable phenomenon in two nations would have no reason a priori to consider one of his cases the exception and the other the rule. That even the most localized comparative studies can benefit from a cross-national perspective is demonstrated by Norbert MacDonald's Distant Neighbors: A Comparative Study of Seattle and Vancouver. MacDonald argues convincingly that the most important source of difference in the way these similarly situated cities have developed is that one is in Canada and the other in the United States.[4]
Aristide R. Zolberg, "How Many Exceptionalisms?," in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton, 1986), 430-431. See also Charles A. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley, 1987), 17. Norbert MacDonald, Distant Neighbors: A Comparative History of Seattle and Vancouver (Lincoln, 1987).
The case for the nation-state as a basic unit of analysis in comparative historical studies gains additional credibility from the recent trend away from depoliticized social history and toward a recognition of the state or the polity as having a life of its own and an ability to shape, as well as be shaped by, economy and society.[5]
See especially P. B. Evans, D. Rueschmeyer, and T. Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back in (Cambridge, U.K., 1985).
Patterns of social and economic development in different national settings may seem similar, and invocation of such rubrics as advanced industrial capitalism can give an illusion of homogeneity. But differing governmental and political structures may produce widely divergent social movements and policies.The interest in national differences is not limited to political sociologists and historians of the state. A competing paradigm emerges from the work of cultural sociologists such as Liah Greenfield. Her recent comparative study posits enduring cultural and ideological differences as the source of the diverse forms of nationalism that emerged in England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States.[6]
Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
Whether one chooses political structure or political culture, national differences remain crucial to recent efforts to understand modern world history.Those who favor international history over cross-national comparative history, such as Ian Tyrrell, are doing important work on efforts to transcend nationalism and national consciousness by affirming identities
and developing organizations based on something other than national origin—in his work, gender or international sisterhood. But, despite Tyrrell's intentions to the contrary, his study of the international activities of the Women's Christian Temperance Union movement between 1880 and 1930 implicitly affirms the importance of national differences and identities. The women from various countries did not succeed in creating enduring solidarities based on gender. National differences got in the way and led to a fragmentation of interests and priorities.[7]
Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World / Woman's Empire: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1991).
One might wish that it were otherwise. but historians have to confront the world as it has actually existed rather than as they would like it to have been. Nations and national identities are not facts of nature; they were socially and historically constructed, but they have become potent forces—probably the most salient sources of modern authority and consciousness. Historians, comparative or otherwise, can scarcely afford to ignore them.
To treat international and cross-national history as mutually exclusive would be a mistake. Nations are affected by international movements as well as by their own internal dynamics. In their practice historians recognize this. Such studies as David Brion Davis's two volumes on the problem of slavery effectively combine international and cross-national perspectives. My work on the comparative history of black ideologies in the United States and South Africa necessarily employs two distinct frames of reference—the national contexts and the international movements for liberation that inspired blacks in both countries.[8]
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995).
Nations have their peculiarities that should never be forgotten, but they do not exist in isolation. There may be (as there were in the United States and South Africa) nations within nations—distinctive population groups that identify with an imagined community that transcends state boundaries and is very different from the polity in which they are forced to live.Acknowledging the international context does not mean disregarding the nation as a unit of analysis. The most profound insights may come from showing how the national and international dimensions interact and modify each other. It might be argued, for example, that the living conditions of slaves were affected more by international economic imperatives than by specific national or colonial cultures and polities but that the racial ideas and practices that emerged from slavery and outlasted it were more variable and culturally specific.[9]
Although the logic of cross-national history does not require an exceptionalist perspective, the focus on the nation may at times give rise
to the distortions of exceptionalism. A historian's preoccupation with the single nation that he habitually studies may contribute to the problem. It may be hard to avoid treating that nation as the foreground and creating a generalized image of others as background. But whatever its roots in habits of mind and in concerns about a particular nation, the chief source of the problem is a faulty method, resting on unexamined assumptions. It may be, as Grew and Tyrrell suggest, that historians of the United States who view their work as comparative find it difficult to avoid concluding that American history has been singular in some fundamental respect. If the other case or cases are assumed to represent an international norm from which the United States deviates radically, cross-national studies are likely to strengthen, rather than weaken, the notion of American exceptionalism. To skirt the trap, the comparative historian needs to begin with the assumption that each of her cases may be equally distinctive, equally likely to embody a transnational pattern or to depart from it. Notions of exceptionalism have long been woven into the fabric of comparative history involving the United States, but some comparative works of recent decades offer salutary models of nonexceptionalist history.
It was a contrast between the United States and certain European nations that gave rise to the exceptionalist historiographic tradition. Contrary to what is often alleged, that contrast was not always an unthinking one based on a vague notion of Europe; at times, it was rooted in a detailed knowledge of European history and culture.
The godfather of cross-national comparative history involving the United States, and the unwitting godfather of a certain view of American exceptionalism, was Alexis de Tocqueville. Although he never set out systematically to compare the two countries, his work, as the French scholar Jean-Claude Lamberti has pointed out, was "from beginning to end based on comparison of France and the United States" and was driven primarily by a desire to understand the legacy of the French Revolution. Yet Tocqueville did not intend to examine the United States as an exception. As Lamberti observed:
To argue that the lessons of Democracy in America are relevant only to the United States is to encourage belief in American exceptionalism while discouraging the use of comparative method in political science. It is also to neglect the fact that the unique features of democratic liberalism in the United States are due to the absence of a great revolution in its origin.[10]
Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 2.
If France was the norm, the United States was indeed exceptional, but Tocqueville was keenly aware of the singularities of French history even
within a European context (as compared with English history, for example). For the most part, he took American, rather than French, democracy to represent the normal path for egalitarian societies.
When Tocqueville was rediscovered by American historians in the 1940s and 1950s, they ignored his larger comparative framework and made his insights the basis of the "liberal consensus" view of the American past. But most neo-Tocquevillians did not do cross-national comparisons to sustain their view that the United States was exceptional because of its lack of both a feudal tradition and an antifeudal democratic revolution. They simply took for granted the notion that the United States had been spared the ideological and social cleavages that characterized West European history. The political scientist Louis Hartz was a partial exception. Hartz, who taught European as well as American political thought at Harvard University, combined Tocqueville's view that the United States was a liberal or democratic society virtually from its beginnings with a Marxian conception of the ideological history of Europe. The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) is actually a comparative work.[11]
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955).
Although it focuses on American liberal thought, it makes innumerable references to European, especially French and British, thinkers. Had Hartz made his view of West European ideological development more explicit—rather than simply referring continually to European theorists and ideas (mostly to show how unimaginable they would have been in an American setting)—his work would have had greater weight.In 1964, Hartz and several other scholars produced The Founding of New Societies , a pioneering comparative examination of the "settler societies" produced by European expansion. This work compares the United States as a liberal "fragment" of Europe with other fragments—Latin America, Canada, Australia, and South Africa—each exceptional in its own way. Hartz can be criticized for his relatively static conception of the fragments—only Europe, it seems, had an intellectual history, while its extensions and dependencies failed to evolve ideologically—but he cannot be accused of making the United States more "exceptional" than, say, South Africa. Rather than portraying a United States that departs from a general pattern, the book conveys the impression that the "new societies" presented a range of peculiarities. But Europe, the source of settlement, continues to serve as the standard from which all deviations are measured. The greatest significance of The Founding of New Societies was that it encouraged comparison
between the United States and other settler societies and that it suggested a new and more sinister kind of American exceptionalism—the peculiarly rigid and intense racism that results when liberal democracy and the subjugation and exploitation of nonwhites are combined.[12]
Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia, with contributions by Kenneth D. McRae, Richard M. Morse, Richard N. Rosecrance, and Leonard M. Thompson (New York, 1964). My interest in the comparative history of the United States and South Africa was awakened by The Founding of New Societies.
Attempts to explain that kind of exceptionalism—and the habit of comparing the United States with the other settler societies—played a major role in the practice of comparative history involving the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The most significant work in the genre avoided explicit contrasts with Europe and focused on slavery and race relations in the Americas. It debated the thesis developed earlier by Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins that North American slavery was peculiarly harsh mainly because of cultural differences between English and Iberian colonizers. At the root of this comparison, therefore, was an intra-European cross-national contrast. The United States became peculiar in its race relations partly because of its English Protestant derivation. As Elkins developed the thesis, a lack of Catholic hierarchicalism and organicism permitted the growth of an intensely capitalistic and individualistic society that produced an especially dehumanizing form of slavery and a uniquely rigid color line.[13]
See Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946); and Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959).
In the 1960s and early 1970s, critics of the Tannenbaum-Elkins hypothesis—Marvin Harris, David Brion Davis, Carl Degler, and others—rejected or qualified this cultural explanation for variations in the treatment of slaves and questioned the notion that the slave regime in English North America was peculiarly harsh. They maintained that the treatment of slaves depended on economic and demographic variables that sometimes made for better living conditions for slaves in the United States South than elsewhere. But Harris and Degler also acknowledged that demographic variables (early race or sex ratios) produced something like the rigid color line and peculiar categorization that Tannenbaum and Elkins had attributed to an individualist Protestant heritage.[14]
Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York, 1964); Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 233-288; Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971).
Only one revisionist study published in those decades took the form of a direct cross-national comparison: Degler's Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. While denying the national uniqueness of slavery in the southern states, Degler implied that race relations in the United States had exceptional features. If Brazil's "mulatto escape hatch," or something like it, existed in other Latin American societies, the North American two-category pattern of race
relations with its "descent rule" (meaning that anyone with known African ancestry was categorized as black) could scarcely have developed.[15]
Degler, Neither Black nor White, 226-232.
By the 1970s, therefore, comparative studies had given rise to a new and more malevolent conception of American uniqueness. In an era of racial conflict and of calls for Black Power, historians concluded that the United States was exceptional because of its intense and exacting racism.
There was a subtle continuity between the new and old versions of exceptionalism. The liberal-democratic tradition that the consensus historians had emphasized figured in the comparative work on American race relations done by Degler and other historians of the 1970s (as it had in Hartz's Founding of New Societies ). The norms of equality and democracy that set the United States apart from other New World societies with quasi-feudal or patrimonial traditions now explained the rigidities of the color line. White prejudice that denied blacks in the United States social and political equality set them apart and denied their humanity more thoroughly than would the means of enforcing subordination in a less professedly democratic and more consistently hierarchical society. As Degler recognized, Tocqueville had first made the connection between American democracy and American racism when he asserted that "the freer [that is, the more democratic] the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated [from other races] it will remain."[16]
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, trans. Henry Reeve (2 vols., New York, 1948), I, 373-374, quoted in Degler, Neither Black nor White, 258-259. (The first bracketed phrase is Degler's.) Other works of the 1970s that linked the growth of democracy and the rise of racism (without making explicit or extensive comparisons) include George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971); and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).
The case for exceptional racism was therefore linked to the Tocquevillian argument for liberal-democratic exceptionalism that had inspired the consensus historians. It was the other and uglier side of the same coin. Now, however, the American egalitarian tradition, in its racially exclusive form, became a cause for conflict and dissension rather than for social peace and unity.In the 1970s exploratory studies in comparative women's history suggested the potentiality of cross-national examinations of feminism and gender issues. Ross Evans Paulson's Women's Suffrage and Prohibition and Richard J. Evan's The Feminists surveyed and compared the growth of feminist consciousness and women's movements in the United States and several other countries.[17]
Ross Evans Paulson, Women's Suffrage and Prohibition: A Comparative Study of Equality and Social Control (Glenview, 1973); Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women's Emancipation Movements in Europe, America, and Australasia, 1840-1920 (London, 1977).
In these works, the sense of a shared international context was strong, and the United States evinced no radical peculiarities. By dealing with several countries even-handedly, without privileging one case or establishing a normative framework, they demonstrated how to do a comparative history in a nonexceptionalist way. They depicted a range of variations on a common theme, ratherthan a sharp contrast between the American case and the others. Giving rise to women's rights movements in a variety of nations were the growth of middle-class liberalism and the extension of its conception of individual rights to include the right of women to be free of male domination over their persons and property. Besides agitating for legal equality, women promoted social reforms designed to prohibit or control male behavior considered detrimental to women; thus there was a close association between feminist movements and campaigns against alcohol and prostitution. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism culminated in successful campaigns for woman suffrage that were based on an expectation that the empowerment of women would purify politics and society. Variations in this general pattern resulted form differing local conditions, but they were in the end less significant than the similarities, unless one extended the comparison (as Evans did) to include Catholic countries. Not surprisingly, women's rights movements were stronger and had greater success in Protestant cultures than in those where Catholicism predominated.
These works had relatively little impact, because they most often confirmed what historians of feminism in individual nations had already discovered. Unlike comparative studies of slavery and race relations, they did not uncover unsuspected variations that generated new explanatory hypotheses. They did not, for example, follow up on evidence suggesting that American women were more likely than women elsewhere to form independent organizations and movements, rather than working in close cooperation with liberal or socialist movements dominated by men. Had these studies done so, they would have raised questions that generated a deeper consideration of how the character and consequences of women's movements were affected by differing cultures, political systems, and economies. Part of their problem was that they dealt with too many cases to go deeply into any of them. Works such as those of Paulson and Evans brought cosmopolitanism to women's history, but they did not convince many historians that important new insights could be learned from cross-national comparisons. As a consequence, before the late 1980s, cross-national women's history remained relatively underdeveloped despite a significant growth in feminist scholarship.
In the 1980s the most widely noticed comparative work continued to be devoted to the history of slavery and race relations. Between 1980 and 1982 books on white supremacy by Stanley Greenberg, John Cell, and myself broadened the frame of reference beyond the Americas to
include South Africa and transcended the exceptionalist paradigm. Despite differences in emphasis and interpretation, these works all found major commonalities in the ways that racism developed and manifested itself in the United States and South Africa. Since white South Africans, and especially Afrikaners, were formally democratic and egalitarian in their relations with each other, no stark contrast between aristocratic-hierarchical and liberal-egalitarian cultures could be invoked to explain differences. (My interpretation, unlike the others, attributed some explanatory power to the universalist and potentially nonracial character of the American equal rights tradition.) More significant and calculable were variations in the rate and character of economic development and state formation. Greenberg examined the relationships among business interests, labor systems, and government race policies in Alabama and South Africa in the twentieth century, Cell emphasized the nexus between urbanization and the rise of legalized segregation in South Africa and the American South, and I attempted to correlate the development of racist ideologies and programs with changing patterns of white economic and political activity throughout the histories of the two countries.[18]
Stanley Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (New Haven, Conn., 1980); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, U.K., 1982).
What most distinguished my work from that of the others was the importance that I attributed to one American peculiarity—the enduring ideological and constitutional consequences of the Civil War and emancipation.[19]
I compare my work with that of Cell and Greenberg and discuss the special features of my interpretation in George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, 1988), 254-269.
If the history of race relations in the United States remains truly exceptional, I would maintain, it is because slavery was abolished through a massive internal bloodletting without analogue in any comparable society and was followed by a Reconstruction that affirmed—prematurely and inadequately, as it turned out—what contemporary South Africans would call a "nonracial" citizenship. It opened the way for an extension of the limits of democratic inclusion beyond what Tocqueville thought was possible, although it did not make racial equality easy to attain or inevitable. I now realize, however, that this breakthrough was not, as national exceptionalists might argue, simply a logical outgrowth of the abstract commitment to equal rights contained in the Declaration of Independence. As historians are increasingly discovering, it took the courageous initiative of African Americans, then and later, to move the nation slowly and tortuously toward racial democracy, just as it took the black antiapartheid movement of the 1980s to deracialize South Africa.[20]I deal with some of these issues in Fredrickson, Black Liberation. The case for black agency in emancipation and Reconstruction is effectively made in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988).
A recent development in the cross-national study of slavery and race is the appearance of two major works that compare slave society in the Old South with aristocratic agrarian regimes inEurope. Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom and Shearer Davis Bowman's Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers draw our attention away from the similarities and differences in the circumstances of black people in the United States and in other multiracial societies and focus it on patterns of agrarian domination and resistance to modernization in the United States and parts of Europe in the early to mid-nineteenth century.[21]
Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York, 1993). See chapter 4 for a detailed discussion of these works.
In general the work of the eighties and early nineties on comparative slavery and race relations makes every society distinctive, but none truly exceptional. There is a potential debate on whether race—as manifested in such societies as the United States and South Africa, where subordinate status had traditionally been based on skin color and descent from nonwhite ancestors—functions differently from ascriptive inequalities based on other criteria, as in Russia and Prussia. But there seems little warrant in this work for maintaining that the United States can be categorically distinguished from all other societies through the possession of some unique basic and enduring trait.
Another focus for cross-national comparative history developed during the 1980s and is now producing sophisticated and significant work. Interest in the emergence of modern social insurance and welfare policies in the United States and Western Europe has generated a substantial literature, to which sociologists, political scientists, and historians have all contributed. The historical sociologists Theda Skocpol and Ann Shola Orloff took the lead in a 1984 article contrasting policies of social spending in Britain and the United States in the early twentieth century. Their work came to fruition in the early nineties when Orloff published a major study comparing "the politics of pensions" in Britain, Canada, and the United States between 1880 and 1940, and Skocpol applied a broad comparative perspective in her notable work on "the political origins of social policy in the United States."[22]
Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, "Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s to 1920," American Sociological Review 49 (Dec. 1984), 726-750; Ann Shola Orloff, The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880-1940 (Madison, 1993); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
Skocpol and Orloff explain the failure of the United States to establish a system of publicly administered old-age pensions in the early twentieth century, when Britain was doing so, by the American experience with its Civil War pension system. That experience created among the middle class of the Progressive Era a distrust of government action in this sphere. Underlying this distrust was an awareness that the United States, then in transition from a patronage-based popular politics to a system that relied heavily on independent commissions, lacked
the professionalized civil service and "administrative capacities" that existed in Britain. But, as Skocpol's work shows, "maternalist" welfare policies that aided mothers and children developed early and extensively in the United States because of the political influence that women's voluntary groups could exert in a relatively weak state, even though women were still denied the right to vote and hold office.
Reflecting an approach to comparative history known as "macrocausal analysis," Skocpol and Orloff first demonstrate the basic similarities between their cases.[23]
On the method, see Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, "The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry," Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (April 1980), 174-197.
They maintain that there are no essential differences in ideology and social structure between the English-speaking democracies that they are comparing. The causal variable is therefore political, rather than cultural or socioeconomic. The failure of the American state to overcome fully the reliance on courts and patronage-based parties that had historically limited its administrative capacities explains, more than anything else, the failure to adopt "paternalist" welfare policies such as pensions and unemployment insurance in the early twentieth century.[24]The work of Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol draws on Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982). On this explanation of American distinctiveness, see Orloff, Politics of Pensions, 215-217.
This argument comes close to advocating a new version of American exceptionalism—what made the United States unique, at least in the period under consideration, was the absence of a "normal" state apparatus.An alternative way to view variations in the growth of welfare and social insurance in Western nations is found in Daniel Levine's Poverty and Society . Levine attributes the differences he finds to national cultures. Refusing to isolate structural variables and single causes, he develops what is essentially a national character contrast. The basic attitude toward poverty engendered by a particular nation's historical experience and cultural heritage explains the differing social policies. Levine's cultural or historicist approach makes every case exceptional, or at least unique; it is diametrically opposed in spirit and method to the structural or social-scientific analysis of Orloff and Skocpol.[25]
Daniel Levine, Poverty and Society: The Growth of the American Welfare State in International Comparison (New Brunswick, 1988).
There are problems with both orientations. Levine's radical nominalism, which treats each case as simply a unique constellation of special features, comes close to rendering comparison superfluous. But Skocpol and Orloff's approach impoverishes historical explanation by giving so much weight to the effect of formal political arrangements that little room is left for intellectual and cultural agency. What is needed is a comparative method that takes both culture and structure seriously but makes neither deterministic. A good general statement of such an approach can be found in Liah Greenfield's recent comparative study of nationalism. According to Greenfield:
Neither "structuralism" nor idealism recognizes the significance of human agency, in which structure and culture are brought together, in which each of them is every day modified and recreated, and only by—not through—which both are moved and shaped and given the ability to exert their influence.[26]
Greenfield, Nationalism, 19.
But structure and culture do not always make roughly equal contributions to historical outcomes. The historical sociologist Jack Goldstone argues in a comparative study of early modern European revolts and revolutions that whether "material" or "ideological" factors dominate in a particular case should be resolved by empirical investigation. "to assume that it is always material factors (or conflicts) or always ideological factors (or consensus), or always both that provide the key to social dynamics is to theorize historical variation out of existence."[27]
Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Modern World (Berkeley, 1991), 49. In White Supremacy, I found that material interests played a more important role in the making of South African segregation than in the rise of Jim Crow in the South. However, Cell, in The Highest Stage of White Supremacy, assumed similar patterns of causation—which he derived from the neo-Marxist historiography on South Africa.
Approaches that take seriously both cultural and structural factors and that (without deterministic preconceptions) probe their interactions may help counter the tendency of cross-national comparative historians to endorse national exceptionalism. Each nation has a distinctive culture, but each confronts similar structural problems or conditions during modernization. The strength and salience of both the culture and the physical circumstances are variable and in flux. Ideology might be viewed as a group's mobilization of cultural resources to deal with structural opportunities or challenges. Ideologies themselves have both nationally specific and cross-cultural aspects. They often represent ideas with international currency that are modified and adapted to fit local cultural and structural circumstances.
The most important political and social ideologies of the modern world—liberalism, socialism, and fascism—can be studied as international movements of thought that took on special characteristics in particular national settings. One can imagine, for example, a comparative study of British and American socialism that would acknowledge common sources of socialist ideas (Karl Marx and the First and Second Internationals), as well as similarities in economic and social conditions resulting from massive industrialization, and then examine how differing cultural traditions modified the basic doctrines and influenced courses of action. In the British case, there was tension between antimodernist traditions stemming from the craft heritage of the medieval guilds and from the "moral economy" of early modern village life—as reflected in the thought of William Morris, G.D.H. Cole, and Raymond Williams—and the modernist ideal of bureaucratic centralization advanced by Beatrice and Sidney Webb and other Fabians. In
the United States, a comparable tension may have existed between the residue of nineteenth-century democratic republicanism or "producerism" that influenced Eugene Debbs and the technocratic utopianism advocated by Edward Bellamy or Thorstein Veblen. The comparativist would analyze how these socialist or protosocialist currents of thought were synthesized in each country before comparing the resulting mix with the one found in the other country. To explain the differing success of the socialist movements in the United States and Great Britain, the historian would need to asses the strength within broader national cultures of the strands that favored socialism and to consider how the institutional setting for political action favored or hindered leftist movements.
Comparing the way that similar ideologies vary with the situation, serve differing purposes, and contribute to divergent policy outcomes can bring the general and particular into balance. The general and the particular can coexist when one studies, for example, how Pan-Africanist ideology was used—and with what results—in the struggles of black people against white supremacy in the United States and South Africa.[28]
This is what I have attempted to do in Black Liberation.
Within comparative welfare history, where a disagreement between structuralists and culturalists has been especially sharp, important recent work on "maternalist" ideologies and policies in various national settings has begun to bridge the gap. Following the lead of Skocpol and Orloff, that work places major emphasis on variations in political structures and "administrative capacities." But the first full-scale cross-national history of maternal and infant policies in two countries—a study of the United States and France by the historian Alisa Klaus—argues that differences in ideology and culture also mattered. "While female activists in the United States and France shared a legacy of domestic ideology and a sense of the special role women were destined to play in social reform," Klaus maintains, "the nature of their reform activities and their influence on the development of welfare-state policies differed strikingly. … These differences were the result of both structural and ideological factors." The prime mover in French maternalist legislation in the early twentieth century was the government, which regarded the declining French birthrate as a threat to national security. The state inaugurated pronatalist policies primarily to provide soldiers for future wars. Although women contributed to the development and implementation of governmental efforts to protect the health of mothers and children, men played the dominant role.[29]
Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890-1920 (Ithaca, 1993). For a summary of some of her findings, see Alisa Klaus, "Depopulation and Race Suicide: Maternalism and Pronatalist Ideologies in France and the United States," in Mothers of the New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York, 1993), 188-212, esp. 188-189. The other essays in this collection deal with single cases, although the editors make some comparative observations in their introduction.
In the United States, the problem was defined differently—it was the quality, not the quantity, of the population that mattered. Fears of the "race suicide" of old-stock Americans because of the higher birthrate of recent immigrants focused anxieties about the health of women and children on the native-born white segment of the population and called forth racist and eugenicist arguments for government intervention. Women took the lead in the movement and in staffing the state and federal agencies that resulted because of the relative strength of autonomous women's organizations in the United States and because of the space for female political activism in a decentralized state without a strong tradition of public bureaucracy. In the United States, established male political leaders were more reluctant than their counterparts in France to sanction a permanent and far-reaching increase in the welfare responsibilities of government, but they were willing, under maternalist pressure, to make a limited exception for programs serving women and children. The differences also meant that American maternalist policies had a weaker foundation than did the French; most of them did not survive the 1920s, making it necessary to reinvent an American version of the welfare state during the New Deal.
Klaus's work provides a good model for a cross-national comparative history that does justice to culture and ideology as well as structure, draws attention to the most significant causal variables, and shows the peculiarities of each case without making one of them the exception to a general pattern represented by the others. It suggests that other bilateral studies of gender-based ideologies in the United States and comparable countries would be valuable. The earlier attempts in this genre have been disappointing. Olive Banks's Faces of Feminism deals with women's movements in the United States and Great Britain, but it is not a comparative study sensitive to national differences. It is instead an effort to treat what happened in the two countries as a single narrative.[30]
Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford, 1981). A more recent comparison of British and American feminism makes a commendable effort to deal with differences as well as commonalities. Unfortunately, it came to my attention too late to be discussed in this essay. See Christine Bolt, The Women's Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Hemel Hempstead, U.K., 1993).
(For some inquiries in cultural and intellectual history, such a homogenization of the two great "Anglo-Saxon" nations is legitimate.) Donald Meyer's Sex and Power contrasts women's experiences and movements in the United States, Russia, Sweden, and Italy without clearly specifying the critical causal factors, because, like Levine's study of welfare policy, it makes variation simply the product of the cultural peculiarities of each country.[31]Donald Meyer, Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden, and Italy (Middletown, Conn., 1987).
Those undertaking cross-national gender studies would, in my opinion, be well advised to follow Klaus rather than Banks or Meyer.Greenfield's Nationalism , an erudite comparison of the rise of national consciousness in five countries, offers a methodological prescription
to mediate between structuralism and idealism, but it does not consistently follow it. Although the book analyzes the structural conditions that contributed to the origins of each national consciousness, it fails to specify how changing circumstances subsequently altered the national consciousness in England, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States. Once implanted, it seems, a nationalist ideology becomes a virtually autonomous and unchanging mind-set that acts but is not acted upon. To a historian of American race relations, it also seems curious, if not perverse, to view American nationalism as simply and straight-forwardly a democratic individualism of British origin. If recent historiography on the formation of white American racial or ethnic identities has taught us anything, it is that American nationalism has often been circumscribed by implicit or explicit racial limitations that belied its universalistic promises—thus it has had some covert affinities with the "ethnic nationalisms" of Germany and Russia. Emphasis on the exclusionary aspect of white American national identity undermines Greenfield's stark contrast between the "civic" and "ethnic" varieties of nationalism.
A recent cross-national study that shows the racist potentialities of American nationalism is John Dower's War without Mercy , a penetrating comparison of the role of race in American and Japanese propaganda during World War II. But Dower's cross-cultural perspective permits him to avoid the version of American exceptionalism that makes intense racism a peculiarly American trait. He shows that the Japanese were quite capable of racially stereotyping their American antagonists and proclaiming their own innate superiority to the Yankee "devils."[32]
John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986).
The phrase "American exceptionalism" originated within the Marxist tradition in response to the perception that the United States, unlike other industrial societies, failed to develop a strong socialist movement because of its inability to generate a proletarian class consciousness. But recent labor historians have generally eschewed American exceptionalism, arguing that the early industrial United States had a tradition of class consciousness and working-class activism, albeit one that was normally based on "radical republican" or "producerite," rather than socialist or Marxist, principles.[33]
See, for example, Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (New York, 1984).
It thus seems curious that there have been no book-length cross-national studies by American labor historians to see if working classes in other nations also expressed their opposition to industrial capitalism in other particular, culturally conditioned ways that depart from the classic Marxist view of class conflict. The lesson that
such was the case, and that varying cultural and structural conditions made each working-class movement equally "exceptional," can be drawn from the work by historical sociologists and social historians of Europe that was brought together in 1986 in a notable volume, Working-Class Formation .[34]
Katznelson and Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation.
Close attention by American labor historians to labor protest and politics in other nations might raise new issues for analysis and interpretation. Why, for example, did American strikes tend to be more violent than those in Britain? Why were American and French workers, but not those in Britain and Germany, attracted to anarcho-syndicalist ideologies and organizations in the early twentieth century?Historical sociologist Jeffrey Haydu's comparative study of "skilled workers and factory politics" in the United States and Britain between the 1890s and the 1920s shows the similarities and differences in the fate of craft radicalism and movements for workers' control in the two countries. Closely examining workers' control movements among machinists or engineers in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Coventry, England (placing each in the context of labor relations in its nation), Haydu discovers that the efforts of skilled craftsmen to retain control over the work process were undermined during the era of World War I in two quite different ways. In Britain, where organized labor was relatively strong, employers worked with national union officials to limit radical factory politics, but this accommodation restrained employers from adopting technological innovations and management techniques that diluted skills and reduced workers to a common level. In the States, with its weak unions, the "open shop" permitted employers to establish company unions that posed no obstacles to "scientific management" and the deskilling that went with it. Haydu's work suggests the value of additional comparative studies of workers in the same crafts or industries in different countries.[35]
Jeffrey Haydu, Between Craft and Class: Skilled Workers and Factory Politics in the United States and Britain, 1890-1922 (Berkeley, 1988).
Why have historians of American labor and class relations not become as cross-cultural and as systematically comparative as those interested in gender, race, and nationality? Perhaps that failure reflects the recent propensity of American social historians to avoid macrosocial analysis, or efforts to deal with the forces shaping society as a whole, in favor of localistic and subcultural phenomena that do not lend themselves readily to cross-national comparison. Comparative work may require greater efforts at synthesis and generalization than many labor and social historians are inclined to make. Social historians are often among those who would deemphasize the nation-state as a unit of
analysis and comparison. But surely the governmental structures and national cultural traditions that helped determine the fate of race- and gender-based movements also affected those deriving from class or occupational consciousness. And, as this essay has tried to show, using the American nation as a unit of comparison does not require endorsing American exceptionalism.
Cross-national comparative history can undermine two contrary but equally damaging presuppositions—the illusion of total regularity and that of absolute uniqueness. Cross-national history, by acquainting one with what goes on elsewhere, may inspire a critical awareness of what is taken for granted in one's own country, but it also promotes a recognition that similar functions may be performed by differing means. For example, the notion that the United States has had a peculiarly weak or inactive central state during much of its history is true and important. But it is also significant that private or semiprivate bureaucracies, including nonprofit corporations, charitable and philanthropic organizations, professional associations, and self-regulating business federations and exchanges, developed in the late-nineteenth-century United States to perform many tasks assumed by government in other modernizing societies. A comparative perspective might therefore spur historians to investigate the causes and consequences of differing relations between government and civil society in the United States and in comparable industrializing nations.
Finally, cross-national history encourages interdisciplinary perspectives. Contact with the comparative work by sociologists and political scientists can help historians cultivate methodological awareness and rigor. At a bare minimum, historians' efforts to define what they are comparing will require theoretical attention to the meanings of such analytical categories as slavery, race, class, gender, urbanization, government, nationalism, and social movements. The cautious rapprochement of historical sociology and comparative history that can be perceived in studies of welfare states, patterns of race, and varieties of nationalism results not only from the interest of some historians in social theory but also from the fact that social scientists are learning from historians how to use primary sources and to recognize the complexity and multiplicity of historical causation.
Now, far more than when I reviewed work in comparative cross-national history seventeen years ago, it is possible to imagine the field as a coherent cooperative enterprise. It is not yet a single community of inquirers, but it is not too much to hope that it can someday become one.
Chapter Four
Planters, Junkers, andPomeschiki
Cross-cultural comparative history in the fullest and strictest sense—sustained comparisons in which equal attention is paid to the exotic cases—remains relatively rare. An obvious reason for this state of affairs is that historians of the United States, or any other nation state, are not normally prepared by their training, or encouraged by the nature of their professional responsibilities, to undertake sophisticated, in-depth work on other societies and cultures.
I suspect that there are also doubts in some quarters as to whether the results of cross-national comparisons are worth all the effort. Often the more ambitious and systematic comparative works appear at first glance to do little more than confirm what is already known from studies focusing on a single nation. It can scarcely be denied that the bold hypotheses of broad-gauged and freewheeling works of comparative history or historical sociology like Frank Tannenbaum's Slave and Citizen (1947), Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), and Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolution (1979) have generated new questions and stimulated inquiry. But careful historical examination of particular cases has usually led to the modification or even the discrediting of some of the bold claims made by such works. The books by historians of the United States that have systematically compared some American phenomenon with its analogue in another society have nurtured the growing cosmopolitanism in their fellow Americanists, added some weight to one side or the other in current historiographic debates, and, crossing disciplinary lines,
helped to improve the historical sensitivities of comparative sociologists and political scientists. But, up to now, they have not had a major impact on the main lines of historical interpretation established by historians whose work may employ comparative perspectives for heuristic purposes but does not go deeply into exotic cases.
What cannot be known to most Americanists is the extent to which bilateral studies have raised new questions or even suggested new interpretations in the other historiography on which they impinge. It may be significant that two of the most influential and provocative comparative studies involving the United States were actually written by historians specializing in the other case—the Latin Americanist Frank Tannenbaum and the Africanist John Cell, whose The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1982) shed new light on American segregation but had no discernible impact on the historiography of South Africa. It would not be surprising if fresh insights came most readily from looking at another history from the vantage point of the one that is more familiar, but to reach its full potentiality, comparative study should jolt historians out of accustomed ways of thinking about their original areas of specialization and enable them to look at the familiar in a new way. The Balkanization of the historical profession is an obstacle to the appreciation, as well as the practice, of cross-national comparative history. Too few of the readers and evaluators of such works are knowledgeable about, or even strongly interested in, both sides of the comparison.
The two most ambitious recent examples of bilateral comparison by historians of the United States are Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor and Shearer Davis Bowman's Masters and Lords .[1]
Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), and Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Russian Junkers (New York, 1993).
It is not surprising that both of them involve aspects of the social history of the antebellum South. Slavery and slave society is the single aspect of American history that has inspired the most extensive and sophisticated comparative literature. But whereas most previous work has focused on slavery in the Americas, these studies broaden the frame of reference to include parts of Europe where, by the mid-nineteenth century, landed gentries with unfree or quasi-free labor systems were confronting pressures and challenges comparable in some ways to those faced by the slaveholders of the Old South at roughly the same time. One virtue of extending the comparison to Russia and Prussia is that it sharply poses the question of what difference, if any, arose from the fact that southern slavery was based on distinctions of "race"—meaning that masters and unfree workers differed in pigmentation and geographical origins—whereas the European patterns of agrarian dominance and dependency werenot, or at least not to nearly the same extent. (This variable is of course lacking in inter-American studies or in comparisons of the United States and South Africa.)
There are, however, significant differences in the nature of the two works. Kolchin's study is broader in scope and more ambitious than Bowman's. It treats the entire history of American slavery and Russian serfdom up to the point of emancipation (which will be the subject of a second volume), and it attempts to compare the experiences of slaves and serfs as well as those of slaveowners and serfholders (pomeschiki ). Bowman, on the other hand, limits his attention mainly to the nineteenth century and to dominant classes of planters and Junkers. He makes no effort to compare the lot of southern slaves with that of peasant workers on the Prussian estates. Another difference is that Bowman gives prominence to theoretical and historiographical issues, addressing them at length in his text, while Kolchin is, for the most part, content to state his conclusions without ruminating on their relevance to current debates among historians and sociologists. The books differ in substance as well as in approach: in fact their respective comparisons are used to support contrasting views of slave society in the Old South and especially of the character of its dominant class.
Kolchin's massively erudite and elegantly crafted study begins by establishing a fundamental similarity between American slavery and Russian serfdom. He persuasively demonstrates that by the eighteenth century the legal status of the serfs differed little, if at all, from that of slaves in the Americas. Contradicting what is theoretically the defining characteristic of serfdom—that workers were tied to the soil—he shows that they could be, and sometimes were, moved about and even bought and sold at the whim of their masters. This finding is meant to persuade the reader that he is not merely comparing the apple of slavery with the orange of serfdom, but he does not fully put to rest the suspicion that his study is the predictable contrast between too inherently dissimilar institutions. In fact the differences that he finds end up being more or less what one would expect from a comparison of classic slavery and classic serfdom. Unlike slaves, the serfs lived in partially self-governing village communities and spent at least part of their time working for themselves on lands assigned for their communal use. One class of serfs were also required to work as laborers in their masters' fields, but others were permitted to discharge all of their obligations to noble landlords by paying rent. Kolchin argues that traditions of lord-peasant relations originating in the time before serfdom became legally
transformed into a form of slavery that helped to maintain this pattern. One could just as well say that although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia may have had de jure slavery, or something close to it, it had a de facto or customary system of serfdom. If practice rather than law is taken as the defining characteristic of this system, then much of Kolchin's comparison merely validates and elaborates the predictable differences between categorically different systems of unfree labor. His somewhat contentious argument that the relatively rich communal experience of the serfs shows how "rudimentary" the organization of the slave community really was (p. 200), implying that historians need to rethink recent efforts to celebrate the way the slaves came together and made a collective life for themselves, may simply follow from the axiom that a society of lords and peasants offers greater opportunities for bottom-up community organization than one of master and slaves.
But one major difference that Kolchin finds between slavery and serfdom is more historically specific and does not seem to follow quite so inevitably from a typological contrast of the two systems. Relying heavily on the work of Eugene Genovese, he argues that American slavery was more "paternalistic" than Russian serfdom. By this he does not mean that southern slaveowners were necessarily kinder than Russian pomeschiki , but they felt a greater responsibility for the moral and physical condition of their unfree workers. "The essence of this paternalism," he contends, "was to treat the slaves as permanent children, who on the one hand needed constant protection, but on the other needed constant direction and correction" (p. 134). The pomeschiki , by contrast, normally felt few paternal obligations and left their serfs to shift for themselves so long as they discharged their formal obligations. Kolchin explains this difference in much the same way that Genovese explains the paternalism that he takes to be the major divergence between southern slavery and that in many other parts of the Americas: slaveholdings were comparatively small in the United States and masters were much less likely to be absentees than their Russian counterparts.
To explain the fact that slaveholders militantly defended their peculiar institution and ultimately went to war to protect it, while serfowners acceded to the authority of the czar to determine the fate of their labor system, Kolchin points to four characteristics present in the United States but absent in Russia: "a racial distinction between owner and owned, a democratic political system, freedom of the press, and the sectional nature of servitude," and then adds a fifth "which subsumes
the other four and is the most basic of all, the independence of the master class and the strength of its civilization" (p. 182). Although acknowledging a role for American race consciousness, he does not in the end give it a very significant one. He presents much evidence to show that the pomeschiki regarded the serfs as so radically and unalterably inferior to themselves that their social attitudes and practices become difficult to distinguish, functionally or even ideologically, from the racism of southern whites.
Bowman contends that his comparison of southern planters and Prussian Junkers is based on a stronger analogy than Kolchin's. He can scarcely claim, as Kolchin does, that the labor systems were roughly equivalent—there is obviously a substantial difference between a quasi-feudalism evolving into a system of agricultural wage labor and chattel slavery—but his choice of a landed gentry to compare with that of the Old South eliminates most of the variables that Kolchin uses to distinguish between slaveholders and pomeschiki . Like southern planters, the Junkers were a regional elite, residing in most cases on relatively small estates, and generally businesslike in their orientation toward market production. (Kolchin pays little attention to the fact that slaveholders had to be more entrepreneurial in their outlook than pomeschiki , who tended to have so much land and so many inherited "souls" that they did not need to be very efficient and calculating in order to maintain their position.)
The theoretical basis of Bowman's claim of comparability between Junkers and planters is a distinction between capitalism and modernity. Departing from the neo-Marxist synthesis of Eugene Genovese and his followers, Bowman argues that southern planters (and also Prussian Junkers) were capitalistic and antimodern at the same time. (His conception of modernization relies heavily on the neo-Weberian theories of Reinhold Bendix.) What made these agrarian elites antimodern and reactionary, in Bowman's view, was not some repudiation of the market and capitalist enterprise but their opposition to the political and legal principles that were associated with the growth of representative democracy and equality under the law. Differing intellectual traditions shaped Prussian and southern defenses of authority and hierarchy—the former drew on nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism, while the latter harked back to Edmund Burke's more matter-of-fact critique of Englightenment rationality and reformism—but the result in both cases was the promulgation of a conservative ideology at odds with nineteenth-century conceptions of political and legal progress. But
Bowman does not assume that most planters and Junkers were conservative intellectuals or ideologues. He makes a distinction between the "idealists," who were ready to live and die for their beliefs, and the larger number of "pragmatists," who put their practical interests ahead of ideological rigor or consistency and were willing to bend or compromise if they saw some immediate advantage in it.
The differences that Bowman finds between planters and Junkers are nevertheless substantial, and they stem for the most part from the peculiar conjunction of racism and republicanism in the southern case. Following the lead of a number of recent historians, Bowman describes how the racist subordination of blacks enabled the southern elite to accept and even on occasion to celebrate the republican citizenship of all white males, without at the same time surrendering to the liberal principle of equal rights for all and thereby undermining their defense of slavery. The Junkers, on the other hand, were monarchists and defenders of a multitiered hierarchy of legally constituted status groups or orders. Whether one prefers to characterize the Old South as a "Herrenvolk democracy," calling attention to its de jure equality for all white males, or "an aristocracy of race," which underlines the undemocratic features of this society when viewed from a nonracist perspective, it is clear that it differed from the kind of corporate hierarchy that the Prussian Junkers were defending. As we have seen, Kolchin acknowledges the role of racism in differentiating the American case from the Russian, but he raises doubts about the sharpness of the contrast and accords less weight to racism than to other variables. Perhaps if Bowman had examined more closely the attitudes of Junkers toward the peasants on their estates, he would have found the same kind of quasi-racism that Kolchin detected among the pomeschiki . But regarding subaltern people as hopelessly inferior is not the same thing as consciously and deliberately basing a social order and a polity squarely on the alleged fact that one large population group is radically and permanently inferior to another.
The other main contrast between the two books is in their treatment of the capitalism/paternalism issue. For almost forty years historians of the American South have been debating the question of whether or not southern slavery can be persuasively described as a paternalistic institution. Since paternalistic social and economic relationships were assumed to be characteristic of precapitalist society, neo-Marxist historians, led by Eugene Genovese, have argued further that the South was a precapitalist society and that the world view of its ruling class
was antithetical to that of the bourgeois North. From this vantage point, the Civil War becomes comparable to European struggles between the rising bourgeoisie and the old order of landed aristocracies and their peasant retainers.
Kolchin does not explicitly invoke the dichotomy of a capitalist North and a precapitalist South, but he has no doubts about the paternalistic character of the master-slave relationship. His assurance on this issue is surprising given the serious attacks that have been mounted recently on this view of slaveholders' mentality. But since his book was published in 1987, he could not have had the benefit of such works as Michael Tadman's Speculators and Slaves (1989) and Norrece Jones's Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave (1990). These studies focus on the crass commercialization of slave labor and the callous attitudes that must have been associated with it. The heavy dependence of most masters on the internal slave trade for purposes of speculative profit and for the leverage that the threat of sale gave them over their unfree workers strongly suggest that paternalism was more myth and ideology than social reality. If Kolchin had compared the slave trade to the more incidental and marginal trade in Russian serfs, he might have come to a different conclusion as to which system was more paternalistic. Parental neglect may be a poor form of paternalism, but a willingness to sell one's "children" cannot be reconciled with any conception of familial governance; it clearly represents the triumph of the capitalistic marketplace over any conceivable ethic of paternal responsibility.
Bowman's treatment of the capitalism/paternalism issue is, to my mind, more persuasive than Kolchin's. "Although slavery manifested some paternalistic features," he concludes, "positing the paternalistic character of the institution is more problematic than portraying planters as 'capitalist in every sense of the word.' Even plantation labor itself was capital, in the literal sense of a productive asset used to create more wealth" (p. 183). Bowman argues that nineteenth-century planters and Junkers were essentially market-oriented capitalist producers and that their professions of paternalism revealed more about their reactionary political ideas than it did about their relations with their unfree or semifree laborers. He thus comes down decisively on one side in the debate that has divided historians and sociologists over the essential features of capitalism. For him capitalism means private property and the pursuit of profit through market activity; he agrees with Jean Baecher that "There is no necessary or essential link between the capitalist system and free labor" (p. 100). There is also in his view no
essential link between capitalism and political democracy. Agrarian capitalists dependent on legalized hierarchies of race or status will tend to be fierce opponents of the equalization of status and citizenship when they confront liberal reformers. The difference between the planters and Junkers was that the former could use the racism that they shared with most nonelite southern whites to avoid a direct conflict with the American republicanism that they had embraced when they supported the American Revolution. The monarchism and (in most cases) the legally sanctioned aristocratic status of the latter permitted a more comprehensive and straightforward defense of inequality. Such a comparison makes a great deal of sense and may help to dispel some persistent but misleading notions about "the world that the slaveholders made."
Although narrower and not as well-written as Unfree Labor, Masters and Lords comes closer to achieving the full promise of comparative history. Southern planters look different to me than they did before Bowman had compared them to the Junkers, whereas the southern slavery of Kolchin's study seems to the whole relatively familiar. Perhaps the greatest potential contribution of Unfree Labor, and it is a valuable one, is to convey an understanding of Russian serfdom that will make it, along with the salve societies of the Americas and white supremacist regime in South Africa, an unavoidable point of reference in the search for perspective on the enigmatic history of the American South.