The United States, 1783-1861: Britain's Honorary Dominion?

This essay reinterprets the evolution of the United States between 1783 and 1861 from the perspective of imperial history. The established literature on this period focuses on the national story, and particularly on the struggle to achieve liberty and democracy. Historians of empire, however, routinely distinguish between formal and effective independence and evaluate the often halting progress of ex-colonial states in achieving a substantive transfer of power. Considered from this angle, the dominant themes of the period were the search for viability and development rather than for liberty and democracy. The article illustrates this proposition by re-evaluating the political, economic, and cultural themes that are central to the history of the period. The argument in each case is that the United States remained dependent on Great Britain to an extent that greatly limited her effective independence. The standard controversies of domestic political history, notably the battle between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian visions of the state, are recast as differing strategies for achieving real and permanent independence. Strategies for achieving economic development made practical politics of competing arguments for protection and free trade, but failed to release the economy from its dependence on the British market and British capital. Attempts to create an independent national identity were compromised by the continuing influence of British culture and by the related notion of Anglo-Saxonism, on which prevailing policies of assimilation relied. In all these respects, the United States was an unexceptional ex-colonial state, and indeed closely followed the trajectory of other colonies of white settlement that were classified as dominions within the British Empire. The United States, however, was a dependent state that failed in 1861, and its struggle for independence had to be renewed after the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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