Re-Conceiving the Age of Revolutions in the Age of Obama

January 14, 2016 By Benjamin Park in Historiography, Recent Scholarship, Whither Tags: Age of Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal 12 Comments

Plum Pudding Revolutions: What are they good for?

The organizational concept of “The Age of Revolutions” has been on my mind a lot lately. First, I recently finished a full book manuscript that includes a version of that phrase in its title, so I’ve naturally been engaging with that literature quite a bit. Second, I’m preparing to teach a course titled “Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Revolutions: America, France, and Haiti” this semester, which will begin next week. And finally, I’ve had a review copy of Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s excellent Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard UP) sitting on my desk for a few months, struggling to come up with a more professional way to say “Go Out And Buy This Excellent Book Right Now.” Continue reading →

My Favorite Books from 2015: Or, a Christmas Book List for Your Early American History Nerd Friends

December 7, 2015 By Benjamin Park in Lists, Recent Scholarship Tags: recent books 2 Comments

Polaski I often have a goal to write a substantive post that addresses crucial historiographical topics. I really do. But then, I’m also lazy. Further, I love book lists. So let me put on my salesman’s voice and offer a gift guide for all of you who are searching for books for your overspecialized-early-American-history-nerd-friends. These are, in other words, some of my favorite books from the past twelve months in early American history. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Correcting an Incorrect “Corrective”

November 4, 2015 By Tom Cutterham in Guest Posts, Recent Scholarship Tags: capitalism, Ed Baptist, Slavery 32 Comments

Edward E. Baptist is the author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. He would like to “thank Joshua Rothman, Jefferson Cowie, Louis Hyman, and David Silbey for advice on this piece of writing, and The Junto for letting me publish in their space.”

edwardbaptist-thehalf How was an immense increase in the “efficiency” of cotton production achieved in the nineteenth century? The question cuts to the heart of the debates over the history of U.S. slavery.

Last week, The Junto linked to sociologist John Clegg’s review in Critical Historical Studies, which considered several recent books on slavery and capitalism. This blog reported Clegg’s take on The Half Has Never Been Told as a “corrective.” Clegg attacks my argument that intense coercion drove a 400% increase in the efficiency of cotton-picking slave labor in the U.S. South between 1800 and 1860. His critiques directly build on the work of economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode. In a series of essays, they asserted that efficiency actually increased because of improved seeds. In a recent issue of the Journal of Economic History, Olmstead appears somewhat displeased that I disagree with their assertions. Continue reading →

Continuing the Debate on Slavery and Capitalism

October 27, 2015 By Tom Cutterham in Commentary, Historiography, Recent Scholarship Tags: capitalism, economic history, Ed Baptist, Slavery, Sven Beckert 43 Comments

Fig-6-Picking-cotton It’s been two and a half years since the new history of capitalism marked its arrival with the full red carpet treatment in the New York Times. So it’s about time we saw some serious and constructive critiques of the project. Robin Blackburn’s lengthy review of Empire of Cotton goes some way to bringing that Bancroft-winner back down to earth, particularly by scrutinising the concept of “war capitalism.” But what I particularly want to share with Junto readers today is an article by the NYU sociologist John Clegg recently published in the Chicago-based journal, Critical Historical Studies. Continue reading →

Q&A: Cassandra Good, Author of Founding Friendships

October 20, 2015 By Sara Damiano in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: Cassandra Good, Early Republic, Founding Fathers, Gender, Interview, Political history 1 Comment

In April, Tom Cutterham reviewed Cassandra Good’s new book, Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Women and Men in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Good received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is now the Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington. Today, she speaks with The Junto about Founding Friendships and her next project.
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The American Revolution within the British Imagination

August 21, 2015 By Christopher F. Minty in Commentary, Lists, Recent Scholarship Tags: 18th Century, American Revolution, Atlantic World, British Empire, Comment, Commentary, Duke of Bedford, Earl of Halifax, Early Republic, Frederick Haldimand, George Clinton, Henry Clinton, historiography, Methodology, OpEd, Opinion, Peter Warren, Politics, William Pitt 9 Comments

Four months ago, I reviewed Andrew D. M. Beaumont’s Colonial America and the Earl of Halifax. A biography of an often overlooked figure, Beaumont makes a strong case for including Halifax in standard interpretations of the coming of the American Revolution. As Beaumont showed, to enrich our understanding of colonial British America, including the 1760s and early 1770s, we must appreciate the importance of high-ranking British officials. We also need to isolate and account for the behavior of the people underpinning and changing the constitutional relationship between Britain and its colonies in North America. Continue reading →

Autumn Reads

August 19, 2015 By Sara Georgini in Lists, Recent Scholarship Tags: 19th Century, Adams, Africa, American Indians, American Revolution, Amistad, Antebellum South, Archives, Atlantic World, braddock, Caribbean, Charleston, Civil War, Confederacy, cultural history, Democracy, Diplomacy, diplomatic history, Early Republic, Founders, French Atlantic, Gender, George Washington, historiography, History of Medicine, Jefferson, John Adams, legal history, London, Methodology, museums, Nat Turner, Native Americans, New England, New York, Pirates, Politics, Print Culture, prisoners, Publishing, Quaker, Quakers, religion, religious history, renaissance, Romanticism, Slavery, southern history, Spanish Empire, theatre, Thomas Jefferson, university press, Virginia, visual culture, War of 1812, Washington Leave a comment

“Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn,” Thomas Moran (ca. 1862)

Fall brings new early American titles to explore. Enjoy our Spring Reads 2015 list, too, and share your finds below!

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The Origins of the American Revolution: A Roundtable

August 10, 2015 By Tom Cutterham in Book Review, Historiography, Origins of the American Revolution, Recent Scholarship, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: American Revolution, An Empire on the Edge, Boston Tea Party, Nick Bunker 21 Comments

“The origins and causes of the Revolution remain the two least studied parts of the Revolution in the last thirty years.” So we suggested in these pages back in spring. Was that assessment correct? Where have historians got to in understanding the origins of the revolution; and where do we still need to go? All this week, members of The Junto will weigh in on the question of causes, in an effort to take stock. This is not intended as a definitive overview of current scholarship. Rather, we’ll be exploring our own idiosyncratic approaches to revolutionary origins, and to the recent scholarship that interests us. We invite you to join in the conversation!

Empire on the Edge Beyond any new discoveries of evidence and perhaps new technological capacities, every new generation of historians has something unique to contribute to the study of the past—a consciousness of its own time and place. History is written on a tightrope between then and now. Even telling the same story again will always come out differently. Each time you walk the tightrope, there’s a slightly different view. In Nick Bunker’s recent trade book, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (Knopf, 2014), that slight shift of view comes from the economic crisis that took hold in 2008. At his most interesting, Bunker presents the revolution as a story of concatenating crises, how states try to deal with them, and how they are transformed in the attempt. The dominant context for Bunker’s account is not ideological or cultural. It’s what Sven Beckert would call “war capitalism”—the entwined processes of empire and commerce. Continue reading →

Q&A: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

May 7, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, book review, British Atlantic, British Empire, capitalism, Cromwell, historiography, indentured servitude, Jamaica, political economy, Slavery 2 Comments

Abigail Swingen is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX). She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. She specializes in the Early Modern British Atlantic Political Economy. Competing Visions of Empire is her first book and was reviewed here yesterday. The following is part of our (relatively) new tradition of reviewing a book and then offering a Q & A with the author the following day. [NB: You can find my review from yesterday here.] Continue reading →

Review: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

May 6, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, book review, British Atlantic, capitalism, indentured servitude, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell, Royal African Company, Slavery 1 Comment

**Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).**

There have been some fantastic new contributions of late that explore connections between slavery, economics, and empire. In his 2008 analysis of the American political economy, economic historian Gavin Wright concluded that the dependence on slave labor came not because of any institutional efficiency on the part of plantations, but rather, that no other form of coerced labor could have been made to meet the labor demands. Sven Beckart’s Bancroft Prize-winning book, Empire of Cotton, analyzes connections between cotton, and the slave labor behind it, and the rise of modern capitalism. Ed Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told, explores slavery’s role in the making of American capitalism.

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