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Journal of Southern History 34 (1968), 425-430; and Maurice Mandelbaum, "Some Forms and Uses of Comparative History," unpublished paper delivered at the Convention of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, 1978.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.