Beware the weak state

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 64, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 271-274

  Rothman, Adam ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449291714     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. Jack P. Greene, Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 249.
2. The broadest survey of colonial America in a continental frame is Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001).
3. Exemplary monographs include Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000)
4. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York, 2001).
5. D. W. Meinig, Continental America: 1800-1867, vol. 2, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 78 (quotation). Meinig's analysis of republican imperialism is magisterial. I have tried to call attention to the powerful effect of the national government in the region that eventually became the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
6. See Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
7. The idea of the early U. S. government as weak is criticized in Ira Katznelson, "Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding, " in Shaped By War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, N. J., 2002), 82-110
8. For an analysis of American nationalism that begins with James Madison's invocation of "mingled blood, " see Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (New York, 2006), 266-72 (quotation, 266).
9. The centrality of the Revolutionary War to American nationalism is the theme of Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2002).
10. On the diminishment of the states in the revolutionary and early national period, see J. R. Pole, "The Politics of the Word 'State' and its Relation to American Sovereignty, " Parliaments, Estates and Representation 8, no. 1 (June 1988): 1-10.
11. Ira Berlin overturns the traditional, static image of American slavery in Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
12. His description of slavery's divergent paths in different regions during the "Revolutionary Generations" (pt. 3) is esp. relevant to this Forum. For a new treatment of the American Revolution's effect on British antislavery, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N. C., 2006).
13. For a comprehensive account of the federal government's involvement with slavery, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001).