Early American Nations as Imagined Communities

White, Ed.
American Quarterly, Volume 56, Number 1, March 2004, pp. 49-81 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/aq.2004.0014

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Early American Nations as Imagined Communities

ED WHITE Louisiana State University

BY THE END OF THE 1980S CULTURAL CRITICS SPOKE REGULARLY AND CONFIDENTLY of an analytical Holy Trinity: Race, Class, and Gender, three categories delineating the fundamental contours of cultural power in modern societies and consequently defining emancipatory scholarship and pedagogy. The triumvirate seemed so solidly established and comprehensive that it was difficult to imagine another category achieving a similarly hegemonic status.1 Nonetheless, by the 1990s another categorythe nationnot only achieved a critical hegemony on a par with the Trinity but in fact threatened to displace class. To take a simple but telling example, a 1993 special issue of American Literature was republished as Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, prefaced by an editorial statement silently passing over class while declaring a committed responsiveness to current scholarly interests.2 The nation had arrived. The contemporaneous influences on this turn to the nation were and are many and varied (the end of the Cold War, the rise of Eastern European nationalisms, growing scholarly interest in Nazi Germany and the independence movements of the Third World, etc.), and the new wave of nation studies has been eclectic and transdisciplinary in its interests and methods.3 Yet for all the complexity of the phenomenon, its literary and cultural branch can indisputably be traced to Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The popularity and influence of this workfirst published in 1983, with a spectacular re-edition in 1991has been
Ed White is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. His book The Backcountry and the City: Feelings of Structure in Early America is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.
American Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (March 2004) 2004 American Studies Association 49

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tremendous and unavoidable, with practically every study of the nation offering the obligatory and often oblique reference to imagined communities or, perhaps, to the kin concepts of print-capitalism and simultaneity.4 Almost as celebrated, within American studies, has been the thesis on creole nationalismthe location of the first wave of nationalism in the Western Hemispherewhich has made Early American studies one of the critical fields in which recent nation criticism has concentrated. Yet just as stunning as Imagined Communities rapid entry into todays critical canon has been its amazing critical insulation, at least among U.S. scholars. Although the historical argument about creole pioneers has inspired numerous studies of early national and antebellum America, there has yet to appear any sustained reckoning with that portion of Andersons own argument dealing with the United States; the historical foundations of the American imagined community have been largely ignored even as critics have embraced selected conclusions or corollaries. Complementing this historiographic silence has been an equally noticeable theoretical neglect, with little sustained examination of Andersons critical underpinnings. One easily gets the sense that his theoretical commitments are either transparently obvious or mysteriously elusive, though in any event somehow ecumenical enough to accommodate a wide range of approaches. The U.S. context might be contrasted with the Indian with a simple observation: there has been no U.S. equivalent of Partha Chatterjees detailed engagement with Anderson.5 Rarely has a critical best-seller been so popular and so ignored at the same time. Yet there is much to be gained from a critical engagement with Andersons study. For example, if we consider the validity of the creole pioneers thesis, it becomes clear that Imagined Communities actually says very little about the United States, while what it does say is profoundly flawed and uninformed. Specifically, Andersons claims about creole nationalism rest on a sleight-of-hand conflation of the American Revolution with the Latin American revolutions of a generation later, with a misleading caricature of print culture to the north. But my intent is not the wholesale dismissal of Andersons work, for in his theoretical development of the concepts of simultaneity and seriality we find valuable critical tools for understanding the national imagined community. Based on a more detailed examination of seriality, and with the historical critique in mind, I would like to offer some alternative speculations about the origins of the imagined community called the

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United States. My central point is that we cannot consider the early American nation apart from its complicated, racialized associations with Native Americans, and the ways in which land speculators sought to construct an empire. The North American nation first appeared as the imagined community of the Native American Other, with important consequences for its subsequent development, from the revolutionary period into the nineteenth century. The Original Formula The chapters of Imagined Communities preceding its discussion of Western Hemispheric nationalism describe the breakdown of two competing imagined communities of antiquity: the great sacral cultures and dynastic realms. It is these two systems that preceded nationalism and out of whichas well as against whichit came into being (12). What was the nature of these earlier communities? Within the sacral cultures, the imagination of communities took shape through the medium of a sacred language and written script (13). Each privileged system of re-presentation viewed itself as unique and, consequently, admitted any outsider into the community provided access to the sacred language was earned in some process of conversion (14, 13). Further, the hierarchical elitism of sacred languages meant that the religious community was lived as centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and horizontal (15). A similar organization characterized the imagining of dynastic communities, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another (19). If sacral and dynastic realms displayed centripetal and hierarchical conceptions of space without clear borders, they similarly shared a premodern sense of time, which Anderson variously calls Messianic simultaneity or simultaneity-along-time (24). This conception of history does not register the cause and effect of sequential time or radical separations between past and present (24). Instead, sacral-dynastic time sees a cosmological continuityor, more radically, coincidenceacross time, whether in the series of dynastic rulers or in religious episodes. Richard III is another in a series of ruling Richards, while the sacrifice of Christ repeats the sacrifice of Isaac, for example. In both instances we see a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable (36).

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Yet these imagined communities of antiquity experienced a slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties (36). New World exploration and a corresponding relativism, the demotion of sacred languages, the Reformations stimulus in creating large new reading publics and administrative vernaculars, the relatedly explosive interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of linguistic diversityall of these led to the formation of monoglot reading languages, or print-languages in Andersons terms (3643). On the one hand, these print-languages established spatial linguistic fields of intermediate sizes, narrower than Latins range, broader than those of the spoken vernaculars. On the other hand, they temporally fixed the form of languages as they were linked to state administration (4345). The premodern simultaneity-across-time yielded to a new temporality of homogeneous, empty time taking shape in novels and newspapers (2436). Of course, these processes of disintegration and reconstitution were not common to all of the great ancient cultures privileged by AndersonChristendom, the Islamic Ummah, and . . . the Middle Kingdom (12)but were concentrated in Europe. Such Eurocentrism is justifiable given the historical particularity of the primary destructive and reconstitutive phenomenoncapitalism.6 But the European focus actually points to a new site of significancethe Western Hemisphere. For the New World, as presented by Anderson, is that global extension of the newness of Europe (print, exploration, markets) without the older tradition. Hence the significance of the creole, defined, after the Spanish colonial fashion, as pure European descent but born in the Americas (47n1). Translated into Andersons framework, the creole will be the subject of Europes capitalist modernity, though purified by removal or isolation from sacral-dynastic antecedents. Amid the flood of sociological details, one pattern, of the relation of space and time, takes center stage. Spatially, sacral and dynastic communities are vast realms with porous and indistinct borders, although organized around centers and peaks, whether sites of pilgrimage or ascensionin implicit contrast to the nascent nation of a clearly limited and bordered space of horizontal evenness. Temporally, the domains of antiquity are intelligible through a simultaneity-alongtime that gives way to homogeneous empty time of newspaper or novel consumption. And when we speak of space and time here, we are not speaking of objective dimensions or spans that might be measured independently of the cultures in question. Rather, we are speaking first

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of all of the phenomenology, or the existential experience, of realm and history. The imagining of the community is not a matter of the communitys content, for A may be engaged in different daily activities from B, while perhaps even speaking a different vernacular from C or practicing a different religion from D. What is important, rather, is how A feels connected to B, C, and D in time and spaceas if the starting point for cultural analysis is its organizing forms rather than the content we normally stress. At the least, this analytical framework challenges any first emphasis upon cultural differences within the national community, insisting instead that the existential structures of space and time precede and encompass such local differences. These emphases need to be stressed, given the common appraisal of Anderson as having shifted from structural and material analyses of nationalism to an approach stressing the meanings and effects of a sense of nationality and the intimate connections between personhood and belonging to a nation.7 While Andersons opening anti-Marxist asides seem to confirm this, the contrary is true. For as the preceding summary suggests, he is quite profoundly committed to structural and material analyses of one kind: the material structures of printlanguages, administrative practices, capitalism, geography, and the like provide the very foundation for his claims, for they establish the sense of space and time in which the nation emerges. As for the meanings and effects of nation-ness, these are surely connected to personhood and a sense of belonging, but perhaps not in the strong sense of identity implied in the above citation. For the details or content of individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity may, in many cases, be unimportant in light of the more general and material experiences of time and space. This point should be clear from the very generalizations Anderson can make about Islam from Morocco to the Sulu Archipelago, Christianity from Paraguay to Japan, or Buddhism from Sri Lanka to the Korean peninsula (12). Not only are the differences within these realms of secondary importance, but so are the differences between them. The community, in sum, is less a cultural system of thick descriptors and more a fairly stark relational network. Imagined Creoles Having relocated European modernity to the New World, Anderson can then focus on the large cluster of new political entities that sprang up in the Western hemisphere between 1776 and 1838 (46). He begins

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with a threefold rebuke of historiographic conventions about nationalism. Challenging the trope of linguistic nationalisms, Anderson insists that monoglot print-languages could not be an element that differentiated them from their respective imperial metropoles since creoles shared a common language and common descent with those against whom they fought (47). Challenging the trope of populist-democratic nationalisms, Anderson counters that creole nationalism was a fundamentally elite phenomenon motivated, in fact, by the fear of lowerclass political mobilizations (48). Finally, he dismisses a series of conventions about the New World revolutions stressing socioeconomic or ideological factors (e.g., Americans resisting an exploitative European mercantilism or motivated by Enlightenment ideologies of republicanism or liberalism). Such analyses misleadingly privilege the content of a culture and cannot explain why entities like Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico turned out to be emotionally plausible and politically viable . . . [n]or, ultimately, do they account for the real sacrifices made by the New World elites (5152). What then accounts for creole nationalism? The framework of a new consciousness emerges from the decisive historic role of two groups: pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen (65). Drawing on Victor Turners anthropological framing of the journey as a meaning-creating experience linking times, statuses and places, Anderson returns for a moment to sacral-dynastic precedents, which witnessed two such modal journeys, the pilgrimage and the feudal career. In the former, countless, ceaseless travels to sacred sites created a sense of circulation that gave shape to those centripetal, hierarchical spaces of religious antiquity (54). In the latter, interchangeable noble functionaries attempted to ascend to the absolutist summit through various posts and through that movement experienced a consciousness of connectedness (5556). The feudal-absolutist journey should have been transferable to the Americas but was in fact restrictedor crampedby the confluence of a time-honoured Machiavellism with the growth of conceptions of biological and ecological contamination (58).8 European-born administrators thus took the highest colonial positions of power, leaving creoles to horizontal circulation within the set administrative boundaries of Spanish viceroyalties. Such were the cramped viceregal pilgrimages fostering a purely local interconnectedness for which European imperial centers were always unattainable (61).

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More decisive, however, were the printers in a uniquely creole manifestation of print-capitalism. In the Americas, as in Europe, print mapped out a bounded market terrain, but there were significant differences in the New World. First, there emerged a unique caste of printer-journalists, first in the northern Americas, where Benjamin Franklin was the exemplar, then later in the Spanish Americas (61). These printer-journalists departed from the European pattern in producing newspapers for which the printer was usually the main, even the sole, contributor, thus finding himself engaged more aggressively in the entrepreneurial project of reaching readers (61). Strong alliances with the postal system emerged (we might think of Franklin here), guaranteeing the American newspaper a centrality in communications and community intellectual life in a way not experienced in the metropoles, or imperial centers (61). The printer-journalists newspapers in turn coincided with the cramped zones of functionaries, given an asymmetry in newspaper consumption. Officials temporarily stationed from the European capitals would ignore the local papers, abnegating any cultural-experiential bridging between province and metropole (62). The practical limitations of communication overdetermined the spatial divide between hemispheresand within the broad expanses of Spains American territorylimiting the imagined community to the range of the provincial newspaper (63). Further, a sense of contemporaneity emerged via the coexistence of colonial papers: The newspaper-readers of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Bogota, even if they did not read each others newspapers, were nonetheless quite conscious of their existence (62). Consequently, the congruence of reading public, reading matter, market zone, and administrative field came to be more pronounced in the Americas than in Europe. The various factors only beginning to emerge in the Old World reached a decisive critical mass in the New World. Andersons existential focus on temporal and spatial coordinates is again clear. Creole functionaries provided a sense of space, in their lateral, level, and circumscribed administrative circuits. Within the contours of these cramped viceregal pilgrimages, print-journalists fostered the temporal coordinates of a bounded simultaneity, a simultaneity within rather than along time, creating a sense among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these shops, brides, bishops and prices belonged (62). Specific ideologies (liberalism, republicanism, democratic populism, anti-mercantilism, Machiavellianism, racial

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exclusivism) were secondary or even tertiary phenomena, in some cases contributing to these contours, in others giving them a misleading hue. North and South Such are the contours of the creole pioneers analysis. But what is the specific position of the United States in this argument? The Thirteen Colonies figure in the historical presentation at essentially four points: 1. Periodization: In a brief acknowledgment of limited ideological influences upon the creole movement, Anderson observes, The success of the Thirteen Colonies revolt at the end of the 1770s, and the onset of the French Revolution at the end of the 1780s, did not fail to exert a powerful influence (51). This surprising claim, that the United States served as a model for a subsequent creole pattern, might be read as a stunning logical contradiction in Andersons argument (creole nationalism influenced creole nationalism). But in fact it points to a deeper problem of periodization as a result of which the seventy-year period from 1760 to 1830 (64) has little value. This is not a minor point, given the importance of practical precedents and modularity for Andersons argument: more than a generationfrom the 1770s to the 1810scleaves the Western Hemisphere in two, with the northern variant serving as a model, however imprecisely, for its southern counterpart. 2. Southern functionaries: At another point, while insisting upon the elitism of creole nationalisms, Anderson notes that many U.S. independence leaders were, like Thomas Jefferson, afraid of slave rebellions and thus reacted against popular, often racialized, emancipatory movements (49). Significantly, though, these tentative claims of U.S. elitism are never developed and are, in fact, avoided, as when Anderson revealingly notes, At least in South and Central America, Europeanstyle middle-classes were still insignificant at the end of the eighteenth century (48). We may read this as a tacit acknowledgment that middle-classes were a meaningful presence in the British plantations of the northern seaboard. This seemingly minor point actually signals a related and more troubling gap: namely, the total silence about creole functionaries in North America. For one of the two historic agents in creole nationalism, the elite creole functionary, is never discussed in the

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U.S. context. The nearly total reliance on Spanish examples is selfevident in the telling references to cramped viceregal pilgrimages, which presumably have no northern counterpart. And given the administrative-colonial divisions within what became the United States where thirteen colonies, rather than a single viceroyalty, became one nationit is evident that this analysis of the creole pilgrimage is confined to the south. 3. U.S. anomalies: At another point, in commenting on the more limited spatial cohesion of the United States relative to the other creole nations, Anderson stresses two anomalies of the U.S. case: on the one hand, an unusual shrinkage, as it failed to incorporate Canada (and, we might add, the Caribbean isles), and, on the other, an internal weakness that required an internal war to confirm its own north-south bond (6364). These brief observations further highlight the troubling application of the logic of the creole functionary to the U.S. context, whose administrative journeys created the borders of the future nation. It follows that the North American nation should encompass either the whole of British territory (the U.S. plus Canada) or the tiny spheres of the particular colonies (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, etc.). The logical problem here, which must be explained with reference to a military weakness in the eighteenth century and a civil war in the nineteenth, further highlights the inadequacies of the creole functionary argument for the U.S. context. 4. Northern printers: If the bias is toward the southern Americas in the discussions of creole functionaries and in periodization, the bias is decidedly northward in the discussion of printer-journalists, for whom Benjamin Franklin is the clear archetype. And in the construction of the printer-journalist, we find a cobbling together of features from north and south. Claims about the combination of printer and journalist activities, or about printer-administrative alliances through the postal service, rest on the predictable historical inflation of Franklin and an unfortunate overreliance on Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martins Coming of the Book, which includes a celebratory caricature of Franklin as genius printer.9 These northern qualities are quietly joined with essentially southern claims about an asymmetrical reception of local papers and a serial similitude, from Mexico to Buenos Aires, of imagined reading communities. In short, the portrait of the printerjournalist draws an element from the north here, one from the south there, with empirical continuities between regions largely maintained

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by assertion rather than evidence. One can of course sense the rationale behind these exaggerations. Since the creole functionary is primarily a southern, Spanish figure, the printer-journalist must correspondingly provide a northern, English counterpart. But too much emphasis on the north, in which printing was often localized in specific colonies, opens the same can of wormsthe odd status of thirteen quasi-unified coloniesthat had to be avoided in consideration of the functionarys role. According to Imagined Communities, creole nationalism surpassed its specifically European antecedents through an intensification and overdetermination of continental elements. But the historical record, as presented by Anderson himself, illustrates instead a clustered dispersal of the relevant elements with a strong north-south split. The formula for the creole pioneer is crafted only through a forced combination of elementsprinters from the north, functionaries from the south joined in a unified period blind to a decisive, generational division.10 In short, the foundations of the creole pioneers argument seem remarkably flimsy. But we might ask, in Andersons defense: Is it possible that the northern branch of this argument is not ultimately that dependent on its southern functionary counterpart? Despite Andersons insistence that the two developed in tandem, could we not more modestly say that we are speaking instead of two possible or complementary creole paths toward nation-ness? Certainly this has been the implicit perception of Andersons argument among scholars of the early United States. One struggles to find, in early American scholarship, any treatment of the creole functionary, or even an acknowledgment that it is part of Andersons argument. By contrast, references to the printer-journalist, print-capitalism, and print simultaneity abound, as if these provide sufficient foundations for the new nation. Even so, critical scrutiny of the printer-journalist argument has been, at best, minimal. We have yet to see any sustained engagement with Andersons narrative of northern printing, perhaps for good reason. For the picture is quite different from that adopted from Febvre and Martin. For one thing, Andersons printer-journalists, who always included a newspaper in their productions, to which they were usually the main, even the sole, contributor (61), are nothing but mythical figures. Any review of Franklins newspaper production, for instance, will reveal that his written contributions to his newspapers were extremely limited and in fact diminished significantly with his retirement from the newspaper business in 1748, long before the crucial

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period in question. The bulk of colonial newspaper content was taken from European sources or from the official records of adjacent colonies, with minimal contributions from the local printer. American newspapers avidly followed events, political or social, in the metropole. The most striking feature of the local newspaper is in fact the tremendous dearth of local news, with the exception of official provincial records. In Franklins paper one was more likely to get details from Poland or Turkey than from Philadelphia; far from reading about local concernsthese ships, brides, bishops and prices provincial readers more commonly read about those demonstrations, parties, and leaders. Finally, insofar as locals shaped the content of newspapers, the more accurate model would seem to be that of a club or cabal of contributors, often aligned with a colonial party.11 Organized around and by a segment of the local population, most colonial newspapers faced at least one local competitor associated with an oppositional faction. In some locations, feuding papers, in their foreign coverage, implicitly divided the world into ours and theirs. In short, colonial newspapers in the British plantations bridged the Atlantic in significant respects and were thus more extensive than Andersons argument allows; yet at the same time, in their implicit or explicit factionalism, they were less intensive at the provincial level than his argument requires. Even detached from the southern figure of the functionary, the northern figure of the printer-journalist does not stand up to scrutiny. If the historical underpinnings of Imagined Communities are so flawed, at least concerning the United States, what is left of Andersons argument? Do the inexact generalizations about printers and functionaries, or the periodization of New World movements, simply need to be tweaked and clarified, or do we need to return to Andersons prior theoretical principles, whatever these may be? Can an analytical framework separate from the historical details be salvaged, and if so, what would this mean? Serial Nation Andersons dual focus on time and space turns our attention to how community members existentially define and situate themselves in history, and how they locate the scope and boundaries of their community. Sacral-dynastic communities must be understood in terms

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of their prenational experiences of time and space, which were substantively transformed in the crucible of the New World; the two clusters of creole pioneers embody these changes, traveling functionaries providing the cramped national sense of space, printer-journalists a concurrent sense of time, with the intersection of the two forming the outlines of the imagined nation. Andersons term for this intersection, and one of the most frequently cited elements of his argument, is simultaneity, most prominently illustrated in the sensibility that takes shape while reading the novel and the newspaper (25). The novel provides a primer of sorts for this experience of simultaneity: while characters A and B act together here, C and D act together there, and later A and C may interact; in the logic of simultaneity, this sequence ultimately connects A to D, even if they have never met (25). It is worth noting that the specific content of A, B, C, and Ds activities doesnt really matter hereit is rather the form that makes it possible, even unavoidable, to imagine their activities within a coherent, bounded community. Of course, the more important form of book here is the newspaper, in the reading of which the national imagined community takes shape. Not only did the newspaper perform the same function as the novellinking the local As, Bs, Cs, and Ds that fill the newsbut, just as importantly, it allegedly produced the experience of simultaneity in its reading: as A reads the newspaper, he imagines B, C, and D doing the same.12 Simultaneity is thus a temporal and spatial phenomenon: the member imagines the community existing at the same time within certain limits, as if simultaneity marks the outer limits of temporal and spatial imagination. And it is this logic of simultaneity that has been so immensely popular to Andersons readers and that explains, to a large degree, its trans-theoretical appeal. For while the simultaneity of Andersons nation is delineated with clear material coordinates, most poststructuralist adaptations have simply granted existential depth and national breadth to any discourse linked to a print medium. In this way, the theoretical portability of the simultaneity argument has proven a disincentive for any critique of Imagined Communities historical foundations, as the simultaneity of discourse serves as its own starting point. Simultaneity, then, may be a useful starting point in assessing Andersons theory. This is not, I think, a matter of challenging the selfevident value of this collective phenomenology, but rather of further exploring seriality. Are there other forms of simultaneity that compli-

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cate or challenge Andersons history? And are there other forms of imagining time and space that complicate this stress on the simultaneous? Andersons subsequent work sheds some light on these questions. The lead essay in The Spectre of Comparisons (1998) took up the question of Nationalism, Identity, and the Logic of Seriality, stressing the distinctionalready present in Imagined Communitiesbetween two profoundly contrasting types of seriality . . . unbound and bound.13 Bound seriality may be illustrated by certain imaginative conventions of the census. The integrity of the body as an integer is asserted; data is compiled not primarily to calculate percentages and fractions, but to count members. At the same time there is a commitment to anonymity; the bodies are counted together but not linked via proper names or knowledge of one another. And, finally, there is a commitment to the quantitative capture of all within the community, under the rubric of statistics, information within and about the totality of the state (3538). The imagined community here is the series of the national citizenry, as in the series famously counted by the 1790 U.S. censusthat is, citizens bound together in a finite, total series within the nation. Here we are very close to the sense of simultaneity already summarized in the opening chapters of Imagined Communities: the seriality of the viceregal pilgrimage or the newspaper/novel. But there is a second, unbound seriality, whereby it is imagined that certain categories are universal and applicable to zones outside of the bound totality. A range of institutions and practicessuch as general elections, presidents, censors, parties, trade unions, rallies, police, leaders, legislatures, boycotts, and the like (32)are imagined to exist elsewhere, as quotidian universals that seeped through and across all print-languages for a series of totalities (33). Underlying this unbound sense of series is the grammar of the modelling process, whereby other totalities model themselves on the apparently universal terms either through the formation of new institutions or via analogy and translation (32). So while there will be local specificities that rule out any strict identity across totalities, analogical comparisons will be made nonetheless. The sakdina social system of Thailand is unique to Thailand, but through the modeling imperative of unbound seriality, it will come to be understood, by Thais and non-Thais, as the feudal system challenged by national revolution (3334). This second form of simultaneityunbound seriality, the spectre of comparisonsalso

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figures prominently in Imagined Communities, if not in the Creole Pioneers segment. For it is the unbound seriality as the logic of modeling that sends nationalism throughout the world in successive waves, first to the Old World from 1820 to 1920, then to the Third World in a succession of models that Anderson calls The Last Wave (113). Unbound seriality is not, however, a significant force for the creoles, because as pioneers they are exempt from the logic of modeling. The importance of seriality for Andersons account of nationalism is undeniable and profound, and has a surprising inspiration. For the theory of seriality utilized by Anderson is fully developed in the first volume (1960) of Jean-Paul Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason: Theory of Practical Ensembles. In this odd work, Sartre, inspired by an emerging structural anthropology, sought to present a phenomenology of the dominant collective forms, or practical ensembles, of modern society, each examined in terms of its framing material conditions, its dominant activity, its internal relations of reciprocity, and its relations to those outside the ensemble. Sartre identified one ensemblethe seriesas predominant within modernity, and he discusses this seriality through a tremendous range of examples, from the line at the bus station or the experience of listening to top ten hits on the radio, to the free market, the rumor, and the working class.14 There are strong, unacknowledged echoes of the Critique in Andersons work: his account of newspaper simultaneity evokes Sartres treatment of the radio broadcast, mention of the voting line has obvious references to Sartres famous discussion of the bus queue, and his treatment of national identity echoes Sartres exploration of the identity-based logic of anti-Semitism. And while Sartres account of seriality is obviously more detailed, Andersons summation essentially jibes with that of the Critique.15 Where Sartre strongly diverges from Anderson, however, is in his exploration of other practical ensembles: the fused group, the statutory group, the organization, and the institution, with gradations in between. Sartres analysis of these other practical ensembles need not be summarized here,16 but it will suffice to highlight two crucial divergences. The first is the descriptive, analytical point that practical ensembles cannot be discussed in isolation from one another. At any given moment the series is defined, in the most radical sense, by its relationship to more cohesive and differently unified fused groups and institutions; that is, the experience of seriality will be understood not

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simply as membership in the series, but as nonmembership in the institution or the group. The related second point is evaluative and political: Sartres insistence that seriality is modernitys paradigmatic expression of collective political weakness through isolation. In short, Sartre insists that in crucial instances, seriality, bound and unbound, is perceived and pursued with a reflexive awareness of its dimensions. This point becomes critical when he links the nation with its national government. For he insists that the state, with a strategic awareness of seriality, sets itself the aim of manipulating the collectives without extricating them from serialitythat is, the state functions as a permanent institution and as a constraint imposed by a group on all serialities (63738). This analysis may smack of a retrograde combination of Robinson Crusoe fantasy and conspiracy theory, but Sartre is making no claims about the origins of the state and society these have to be explored in their historical specificitiesnor is a diabolic mastery at stake. This is simply a map of a state in relation to its society, regardless of its particular origins: the state will seek to maintain series with maximum order, even as it has a certain seriality of its own (the series of the dominant class or classes). Sartre will develop this account of state and society with an eye to class relations, identity politics, a theory of revolution, and a range of other concerns that cannot be adequately summarized here. For the purposes of this essay, his critical point is that the national/societal series cannot be discussed in isolation but takes its meaning as a nation in relation to the state. The contrast with Anderson should be clear. Imagined Communities largely naturalizes and neutralizes the experience of seriality (particularly of the bound variety), which seems to emerge and spread organically. The proto-national creole series takes shape in printing and pilgrimages, then makes the leap to a nation-state. The details of that process are unimportant once the equation series equals nation has been established; the national series is the default foundation or form of the new state, whose importance is secondary. To return to the creole pioneers, then, Sartres more nuanced treatment of seriality invites the following caveats. First, in reconstructing the origins of the national series, we need to locate the dominant and influential forms of serialitywhich we will not find, in the Thirteen Colonies, in the newspaper, the novel, or the functionary pilgrim. We then need to determine which of these series have a crucial link with the emergence of the nation and with the nation concept

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itself. And, finally, lest we lapse into an organicist account of the natural emergence of the nation, we must examine other collectives at work in the construction of the national series. Such an examination is particularly important in the U.S. context for the reasons acknowledged by Anderson himself: the situation of the North American colonies was in significant respects hostile to nation formation, given the dispersed structures of provincial colonization and the subsequent internal weaknesses of the United States. The History of Nations Nation was a complicated and slippery term in the eighteenth century, but we can fairly say that its dominant practical association at the time was with Native Americansthat is, with the nation as the Other. In this sense, the first national literature of the American colonies century explored the question of indigenous collectives, trying to classify such politiesnationsin a broader imperial context. We may take as an example Scots-American Cadwallader Coldens History of the Five Indian Nation (2 vols., 172747), a survey of seventeenthcentury relations between the French, British, Dutch, Hurons, Delawares, and Iroquois. Iroquois is an anachronistic term in this context but worth mentioning simply to emphasize its absence; this originally French term suggests a cultural distance (the Iroquois were enemies of the French thanks to Champlain) from which a cultural and ethnic unity is perceived and granted. The English, by contrast, found five (and later six) Nations.17 Such is the context of Coldens History, something of a departure for this correspondent of Linneaus, whose earlier intellectual projects mostly concerned taxonomic classification of American flora and fauna. Turning to political history, Colden clearly found it a challenge to classify the Five Nations, as his introductory remarksA Short View of the Form of Government of the Five Nationsdemonstrate. It will be sufficient to juxtapose a few passages from that short explication:
The Five Nations (as their Name denotes) consist of so many Tribes or Nations joynd together by a League or Confederacy, like the United Provinces, without any Superiority of any one over the other . . . They are known to the English under the Names of Mohawks, Oneydoes, Onnondagas, Cayugas and Sennekas; but it is probable that this Union at first consisted only of three Nations . . . and that the Oneydoes and Cayugas were

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afterwards adopted or received into this League; for the Oneydoes acknowledge the Mohawks to be their Fathers, as the Cayugas do the Sennekas to be theirs. Each of the Nations are distinguished into 3 Tribes or Families . . . Each Nation is an absolute Republick by it self . . . The Tuscaroras, since the War they had with the People of Carolina, fled to the Five Nations, and are now incorporated with them, so that they now properly consist of Six Nations . . .18

Colden concludes enthusiastically with the naturalists observation that the present state of the Indian Nations exactly shows the most Ancient and Original Condition of almost every Nation; so I believe, here we may with more certainty see the Original Form of all Government, than in the most curious Speculations of the Learned (xxi). But what, exactly, have we learned about the Ancient and Original conditions of nations? For starters, Coldens remarks can be read as tracing the transition from the folk, or ethnic, understanding of the nation to the political conception. We see this in the passage from his initial equation of nations with tribes, to the immediately following division of nations into Tribes or Families. The nation is thus grounded in a biological or familial unity, which in turn provides the basis for the lateral equality of the nationkinship prevents any Superiority of any one over the otherwhile at the same time it embodies the milder, naturalized hierarchy of family status (as in the child status of the Cayugas to their Seneca fathers). We likewise find an interesting attempt to fit these nations into the political vernacular of British statecraft. Each tribal nation is an absolute Republick by itself, guaranteeing the egalitarian status of the confederacy or league, political terms of a larger scale and force than the nation. If we have any doubts about the secondary political status of the nation, we need only note the incorporation of the Tuscaroras into the League of the Six Nations. But the central objective of Coldens History is clearly the practical and theoretical alignment of Indian polities with their European counterparts, for which Colden gives us confusing messages. The confederacy of Indian nations is like the (Dutch) United Provinces; the Six Nations exist under the Government of New-York; the Tuscaroras battled with their English analogue, the People of Carolina. What do we make of these observations? Coldens map of imperial politics seems to imply an equation of provincial peoples with ethnic Indian polities (Tuscaroras Carolinas), a similar equation of confederacies with complex political

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states (Six Nations United Provinces), and finally a hierarchical distinction between nation and government, such that the latter of course encompasses the former (Tuscaroras < New-York). This initial map more or less underlies Coldens analyses, which seek to untangle and redirect the imperial politics of the New York region. Here is his synopsis of volume 1:
For whoever considers the state of the Indian Affairs during this Period, How the Five Nations were divided in the Sentiements and Measures; The Onnondagas, Cayugas, and Oneydoes, under the Influence of the French Jesuits, were diverted from prosecuting the War with [French] Canada, by the Jesuits cunningly spiriting up those three Nations against the Virginia Indians . . . The Sennekas had a War at the same time upon their hands with three numerous Indian Nations . . . And the Measures the English observed with the French all King Jamess Reign, gave the Indians rather grounds of Jealousy than Assistance. I say, whoever considers all these things, and what the Five Nations did actually perform under all these disadvantages against the French, will hardly doubt that the Five Nations by themselves were at that time an over Match for the French of CANADA. (74)

In this survey of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonial politics, then, we have historical agents of several different orders. For it is clear that, for Colden, the French do not exist on the same level as, say, the Cayugas: the French are an imperial power of multiple agents, including the Jesuits, just as the English are to be understood with reference to an imperial center located around King James. We can say, then, that historical agents fall into three categories: the nations (the Five Nations acting independently of the confederacy, and four other Indian Nations); specific groups (of which the French Jesuits are most prominent); and the institutional empires (the French and the English). Grasping imperial politics means understanding the possible interactions among these different collectives, and specifically understanding the management of nations by specific groups for the benefitor to the detrimentof the encompassing empire. For, as Colden also explains in the 1747 preface to volume 2, the great threat to the English empire in the region was the undermining presence of a class group, the New York merchants whose fur trade with the French repeatedly threatened to undermine the elaborate networks of EuropeanNative American diplomacy. How does The History of the Five Indian Nations illuminate Andersons narrative of the nation as the emergent imagined commu-

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nity? Coldens history takes us back to the question of the transition from dynastic-sacral community to nation, but with important revisions. Clearly the overarching imagined community is the empire, imagined as a complicated community of hierarchies and relations, an encompassing system whose viability hinges on the careful construction, regulation, and maintenance of certain smaller collectivities. But, most importantly, empires already contain nationsin the plural understood as binding, differentiated communities of the Other. Colden doesnt imagine himself in any nation, but nonetheless imagines nations as the crucial mediating and relational communities linked with lateral, subordinate, and supervisory collectives within the imperial framework. The fate of the empire is the fate of its assembled nations, as these bordered, cohesive communities interact with one another. It is likely that some of Coldens terminological confusion creativity may be a better termstems from the concurrent project of more closely incorporating Scotland within the United Kingdom,19 and I think this suggests that the colonies figure predominantly as nations as well (as in the equation of the people of Carolina with the Tuscaroras), despite occasional references to the colonial placemen (the Government rather than the people of New York) who work to situate nations in the imperial frame. To some extent, then, Coldens History confirms Andersons focus on both the colonial functionary and simultaneity, though with very different inflections. If Colden is in any way representative (and I think he is), the pre-U.S. functionary does not simply develop a default national sensibility from being crowded out of the empire, but rather situates himself squarely in the empires development and expansion; in the context of imperial frontiers and autonomous Indian nations, the imperial sensibility, far from being cramped, was encouraged. And in this context of European-Indian contact, the functionary findsor at least imaginesnations existing as preformed Others, the necessary building blocks for the new imperial framework. Yes, these nations the Mohawks, the Onondagas, the Twightwees, the people of Carolina, and so onexist simultaneously or serially, and this is the key to their importance: the empire is the sequence of nations. But that seriality does not resolve the problem of the nation. It is rather the beginning of the national problemthe problem of studying, coordinating, and regulating.

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National Literature With Coldens work we are jumping into the middle of the literary history of the nation, which can now be located within a broader colonial tradition of national literature. We should first return to that favored genre of colonization, the ethnography, the detailed description of the manners and customs of Indians. An essential element of English colonization from Thomas Harriot into the eighteenth century, the ethnography attempted a comprehensive account of the nation as other, touching on physical appearance, marriage, birth, dress, diet, handicrafts, warfare, political organization, economy, trade, language, and so on. These ethnographies offered hypostatized descriptions of nations, stressing the universals constituting the samenesses that extend across all societies; further, the features of these nations are described in the present tense as if all the Indians have always practiced marriage, hunting, or medicine in that way.20 It is these ethnographies that first expressed a variant of the nation-ness described by Anderson: these are the first nations, clearly bounded and existing in simultaneous time, moving through history in a perpetual, eternal sameness. What deserves more attention, however, is the characteristic framing of these ethnographies. When William Penn, in his first letter from Pennsylvania (1683), offered his ethnography of the local Indians, for instance, it was situated within a broader framework of the colonization project. The letter moves through thirty-three enumerated observations, 1 through 4 describing the land, 5 through 10 the plant and animal resources, 11 through 26 the Indians, and 27 through 29 brief references to the previously colonizing Dutch and Swedes, before finally arriving at the Condition we are in, and what Settlement we have made in the final sections.21 This structure is typical insofar as identification of the Indian nation figures as a dominant element of colonization, a national resource that must be reckoned with, situated within the colonial program, just as landscape, birds, and fish must be addressed. There is nothing unique about Penns approach, which we also find in the ethnographies of Harriot (Roanoke), Smith (Virginia), Alsop (Maryland), Williams (New England), Byrd (Virginia), and so on: in each case, the Nation, as Other, is a necessary element of the Colony. In each case, two implications follow. First, the colony will itself become something of a nation after the fashion of the local Indians, who will be either incorporated or eliminated; but secondly,

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the master colonizers are themselves managers or overseers of nations, of the empire but not of any nation. This is precisely how the ethnography developed in colonial writing, in which we can find two dominant currents. Indian ethnographies continued, of course, but in the early eighteenth century we witness the gradual emergence of the provincial ethnography, offering descriptive accounts of the immigrant or creole populations. In some cases these are properly provincial histories, reflections on the first generations of colonial development, from Cotton Mathers Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) to Samuel Smiths history of New Jersey (1765).22 In other instances, these creole ethnographies appear within travel narratives, as if a central feature of colonial travel is the encounter with the other local nations. Here we may cite Sarah Kemble Knights vernacular ethnographies of Connecticut and New York (1704), William Byrds accounts of North Carolinians (1729), or Dr. Alexander Hamiltons roving ethnographies in the Itinerarium (1744).23 These creole ethnographies are rarely the radically hypostatized descriptions one finds in the Indian ethnographies, though the tendency to define at moments a provincial way of life, or to describe the local character, persists nonetheless. And it was these creole ethnographies that could allow William Byrd to describe the colonies as Limb[s] lopt off from Virginiaa series of distinctive nations moving ever farther from unification as the British main was increasingly carved into discrete parts.24 It is these ethnographies that encouraged Benjamin Franklin to write, in 1760, that the colonies were not only under different governors, but have different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners.25 One gets the sense that Franklin is writing, despairingly, about scattered Indian nations, and in this assertion of unbound seriality we seem a long way from the imagined community of a unified United States. But here we need to register another emerging colonial genre, which might usefully be called the imperiography. It began haltingly in the late 1720s and continued through the 1730s and 1740s, with works like Coldens History (1727, 1747) and Joseph Morgans Temporal Interest of North America (1733), William Douglasss Discourse Concerning the Currencies of the British Plantations (1739), Franklins Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America (1743), and Douglasss Summary, Historical and Political . . .

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of the British Settlements in North America (174951). But the imperiography truly blossomed in the 1750s and 1760s, as the Seven Years War increasingly prompted creoles to think imperially, from Aaron Burr Sr.s Discourse . . . on Account of the Late Encroachments of the French, and Their Designs against the British Colonies in America (1755) right up to Pownalls Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America . . . (1776).26 If we look ahead to the revolution and divide these texts into royalist and proto-independence camps, we miss what they have in common: an emphasis on the grand imperial picture of North America, British Northern America, or the Colonies in the plural. Whether they agree or argue with imperial policy from the metropole, each of these works thinks imperially, imagining possible connections among the colonial nations, piecing together the creole ethnographies into a master map of empire. Pownalls Topographical Description is exemplary in this respect. Drawing on his earlier primer on colonial administration and Lewis Evanss essays and maps, it contains a sequence of local ethnographies, whether of Indians or Christian utopian communities such as the Pietist Unitas Fratrum in Pennsylvania. In a preface reprinted by Pownall, Evans had complained that the inattentive Observer might imagine there was nothing but Confusion in the American landscape; many authors, he revealingly noted, have taken every little Society for a separate Nation. Yet the point here was not to deny the existence of nations: Pownall was to declare his own interest in the colonial ethnography, promising in future editions a Description of their Nature, their System of Life, and Mode of Subsistence; of the Progress they have made, and of the Point in which they are found as to Society, Communion, and Government; as to their Manners in the Individual, the Family, the Tribe; as to the general Spirit by which they regulate themselves when considered as a Nation. The imperiographies, in short, did not resist the logic of the ethnography, but rather sought to incorporate or map these ethnographies into a master system. In Pownalls words, he sought to present an Account of this Country IN ITS SETTLED AND CULTIVATED STATE, containing an Account of the Mode of Settling, and a Detail of the Nature, Progress, and Completion of these Settlements. Or, as Evans put it, he would explain the Climates, the Healthiness, the Produce, and Conveniences for Habitations, Commerce, and Military Expeditions, to a judicious Reader in a few Pages.27 The imperiography, then, amounted to an encyclopedia of

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ethnographies in an unbound seriality that would find cohesion in the imperial framework. The telling word in Pownalls account is perhaps completion, as if to insist that the eternal ethnographic and national moment is over, such that a properly imperial, para- or transnational history of management, coordination, and administration may now begin. In a similar vein, Evans offers the judicious Reader a birdseye view of every little Society or nation in order to inaugurate a new era of Habitations, Commerce, and Military Expeditionsa properly imperial moment of occupation, mercantile connection, and military mastery, when nations might be coordinated and connected.28 Literature about nations (plural), but no literature of the nation (singular). By the middle of the eighteenth century the dominant imagined community for creoles became the empire containing the nation. The authors of the imperiographies clearly locate themselves beyondor better, abovethe nation, which still bears the inferiorizing association with the Other. It is less a matter of imagining a (bound) simultaneity with these shops, brides, bishops, and prices, and more a matter of imagining the (unbound) seriality of those shops, brides, etc., and those shops, brides, etc., and those shops, brides, etc., under the regulation of the empire. The Speculators We might reflect here on J. Hector St. John de Crvecoeurs Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Does this work not show the nation as the dominant imagined community? After all, doesnt Crvecoeur ask and answer the question What is an American? We should remember that an American, as described by Crvecoeur, is actually the Pennsylvanian and that the author goes on to provide two further, distinct creole ethnographies, that of the Manners, Customs, Policy, and Trade of New England (or more specifically Nantucket) and of Charles Town to the south. In a very real sense, were given portraits of (at least) three American nations. And the concluding letter, Distresses of a Frontier Man, set at the crisis moment of the Seven Years War, envisions the frontier farmer in a quasi-Indian community as the imperial powers battle it out.29 In short, Crvecoeurs writings, as late as the 1780s, reasserted the ethnographic equation of colony and Indian nation while accepting, for others, the imperiographic project of population oversight: the farmer huddles on the frontier waiting for the

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order of nations to be reestablished. Still, it is fair to say that with Crvecoeur we are witnessing a transition to the nation of the United States. It remains to briefly outline this transition, something I want to attempt via a revision of Andersons notion of the creole functionary. As Ive said, the North American functionary was hardly cramped in the sense of provincial confinement. We need only consider the case of Franklin, who began his career in Pennsylvania, who extended his printing influence (via trained apprentices and capital investment) to other colonies, who helped place his son in the governorship of New Jersey, who spent years of his career in England, who served the colony of Massachusetts, who drafted the Albany Plan, and who happily hobnobbed with imperial administrators like Thomas Pownall, who was himself the Crowns unofficial representative to the Albany Congress, lieutenant governor of New Jersey, secretary extraordinary to Lord Loudoun during the Seven Years War, governor of Massachusetts, and eventually appointee to the governorship of South Carolina. Whatever the North American creole functionary may be, it is not the figure described by Anderson: confined to a provincial sphere and developing a local sense of nation-ness. Rather, we must look to the land speculators as the class behind the imperiographers. Speculation in lands was constitutive of colonization from its beginnings, but large-scale corporate investments took off only in the mid-eighteenth century. The Ohio Company was organized in 1747, the Loyal Company in 1749, the Greenbrier Company in 1751, the Susquehannah Company in 1753, and then, after the Seven Years War, the Illinois Company in 1766, the Indiana Company in 1768, the Grand Ohio or Vandalia Company in 1769, with the Wabash, Transylvania, and second Illinois Companies following in the 1770s. Alongside these major ventures existed dozens of less formalized speculation schemes, with an additional major wave of land companies appearing after the Revolution, and through this period there was frequent competition and absorption of rivals. There remains to be written a systematic survey of the speculation companies,30 but for our purposes several recurring features stand out. First, most of these companies sought to extend or transcend a colonial charter, whether by legally pressing for the extension of charter boundariesa frequent tactic with the Virginians and Pennsylvanians, but more spectacularly attempted in Connecticuts claim on northern Pennsylvaniaor, eventually, with schemes for new western colonies

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such as Transylvania, Westsylvania, Franklin, and so on. The partial success of these attempts is today apparent in familiar state names such as Indiana, Ohio, and Illinoisechoes of the transcendence of the older provincial boundaries. But we should remember that these states first emerged as companies, which, in their demand for capital, achieved the practical alliance of the great bourgeois merchants and landowners. Each potential nation thus began as a group of directive elites. Furthermore, because this westward movement required negotiations with, and management of, competing Indian claims of varying legal status, the companies all needed the expertise of men engaged in Indian diplomacy and tradethat is, well versed in the imperial discourse of Indian nations. Most qualified in these respects were the diplomats from the provincial governments, merchants at either end of the major Indian trade routes (frontier traders or seaport capitalists), and imperial placemen assigned to oversee imperial interactions. Consequently the land companies frequently united creoles and investors with strong ties to, sometimes even residence within, the metropole; the speculators were decidedly transatlantic. And finally, although these companies sometimes required secrecy in the preparation of claims, they also required a certain amount of publicity to attract investors and influence imperial policy, which, after the Proclamation of 1763, posed serious obstacles to many speculation schemes. So the speculators always included vernacular theorists and propagandiststhe imperiographers whose writings reproduced the original colonial tracts and reports with the grandeur of an eighteenth-century transcolonial vision. Transprovincial capitalists of various positions and locations within the empire, profoundly connected to Indian affairs and active in promoting their plans in writing: these were the speculators behind the imperiographers. The Illinois Company offers a brief illustration. The major investors included the western trader and sometime diplomat George Croghan; Sir William Johnson, an imperial placeman serving on the New York Council but more importantly the superintendent of Indian affairs; Joseph Galloway, prominent member of the Pennsylvania Assembly and author of the 1774 imperiography Plan of a Proposed Union between Great Britain and the Colonies; Benjamin Franklin, the writer and promoter of the group; William Franklin, Benjamins son and governor of New Jersey; and John Baynton, George Morgan, and the Whartons, major merchants in Philadelphia. The group first proposed a grant of 1,200,000 acres, although, as

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Franklin wrote to his son, they had their eye on 63,000,000 acres; Johnson was to be the governor, and the senior Franklin was to press for the plan in London, where he succeeded in gaining the support of the southern departments secretary of state before the initial plan was halted by the Board of Trade.31 Can we assume these thwarted speculators eventually supported independence? No: Galloway, Johnson, and the younger Franklin were to be Tories in the Revolution, while the elder Franklin, Croghan, and the Philadelphia merchants supported independence. Although the speculators deserve the privileged position in British North America that Anderson gives the creole functionary, they were neither cramped nationalists nor simplistic defenders of Old World empire. Rather, they sought to envision the empire as a network of coordinated nationsIndian and white, tribes and coloniesin which they would serve as developers and managers rather than as mere members (consumers or renters) of the proposed nations. In this sense, speculation is a fortuitously charged term. It suggests imagined communities, but imagined not from within, as bounded lateral entities, but from without, as the unbound speculative seriality of potential nations somehow on a par with colonies or provinces or Indian tribes, and overseen by a hierarchy of managing companies. As Peter Onuf notes, [F]or provincial Britons [in America], empire did not evoke, as it now does, centralized, despotic, and arbitrary rule, but was instead a matter of imagining a transcendent, inclusive, imperial community, a greater Britain that reached across the Atlantic.32 The Fate of the Nation If not all speculators and imperiographers became revolutionaries, many revolutionaries were nonetheless speculators or imperiographers, and we may see the emergence of the United States as a major political consequence of speculation. Again, it is important that we not reduce land speculation to some brute economic determinism, as if a simple return on investment shaped the revolution. But understood as an imaginative political project, with a profound connection to EuropeanIndian contact and a commitment to the commercial development of new commonwealths, speculation determined the eventual formation of the United States. We should always keep in mind an oddity of the American situation mentioned but largely ignored by Anderson: that its

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nameallegedly given by an Englishman, Thomas Painestresses the union of multiple entities. The label United States of America cannot be retrospectively explained with reference to the constitutional federalism of the 1780s; nor can it, in some simple form of reflection, be ascribed to the existence of multiple colonies. Rather its roots are to be found in the colonial concept of the indigenous nation and the imperiographies that envisioned an imperial rather than national union in the decades before the revolution. The founding fathers, many of whom were speculators or merchants tied to speculation, were to formulate a sovereign political identity characterized by this split inflection of nation. The new country was to express the imperial overtones of the United Kingdom minus the monarchical reference, suggesting that nation-states were the constitutive units for a new imperial system eventually labeled federalist. The briefly proposed fourteenth colony for Indians in the Ohio Valley highlights this imperial framework, as does the long-lasting sense of regional or state cultures and the threatened secession movements that shaped U.S. politics not only with the Civil War but in western independence movements and conspiracies and in the New England of the 1810s. More cynically but at the same time more profoundly, we find the imperial attitude toward local nations in much elite organizing during the revolutionary period, as elites from the various states would correspond about the management of their respective, frequently more radical, populations. Thus the primary political body of the revolution was called the Continental Congress, not the National Congress, its major military wing the Continental Army, complemented by state militias. It was the continent, with its imperial overtones, that justified the union of the smaller local nations whose unbound seriality was emphasized by the nationto-nation or state-to-state Committees of Correspondence. Nonetheless, there were at the revolutions outset attempts to imagine the unified colonies as something of a nation. We cannot simply note the absence of national terminology in the revolutionary institutions, for the congressional faction supporting a stronger Continental Army took the informal label nationalists in opposition to the decentered power of state governments. In this case, nation expressed the perceived cohesion of state unification, offering the binding overtones unavailable in the imperial descriptor continental. In short, this first national revolution produced a profoundly and literally ambivalent sense

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of nation. The United States constantly intermixed vocabulary of empire and nation, described so well in Peter Onufs study of Thomas Jefferson, is not simply a vestigial terminological tic, but expresses its deeply para-national origins, ever haunted and influenced by its Indian populations and policies. Building on and continuing the British empire of nations, the United States needed at the same time to become a new, imperial nation. The ambivalent, imperiographic nationalism of the early United States explains in part an underappreciated oddity of contemporary American studies scholarship, which has focused almost exclusively on the slow development of nationalism after independence, whether in the 1790s or in the antebellum period more generally. The obvious gap in this scholarship has been its silence about, even disinterest in, the colonial origins of nation-ness, as Andersons foundations are typically accepted or reasserted in misleading references to print culture and an emerging public sphere. Yet the antebellum focus likewise reveals an important truth about U.S. nationalismthat, given the imperial framing of the original nation, a proper lateral nationalism had to emerge in the decades following the appearance of the nation itself. But the final point of this essay is that these blindnesses and insights in contemporary scholarship cannot be remedied through a simple supplement: the colonial origins of the nation are not simply the prequel to antebellum nation construction. Study of the development of U.S. nationalism needs to map the transition from the imperial imagined community of unbound serial nations to the insistence upon the bound unified and singular nation, with some appreciation of the stages of this process. I conclude with three hypotheses about this process and possible research. First, the period from roughly 1785 to 1815 was centrally concerned with the persistent problem of fractious backcountry populations. From Daniel Shays to Tecumseh, with the Whiskey and Fries insurrections, the Blount and Burr conspiracies, and the St. Clair expedition in between, rebellious internal groups, nations, or potential republics profoundly shaped the directions of national thought and the ways in which Americans imagined their extended community. The literary markers here are Royall Tylers Contrast (1787, alluding to the Massachusetts Regulation); Hugh Henry Brackenridges narrative of the Whiskey Insurrection (1795) and Modern Chivalry (1792 and following); Charles Brockden Browns Wieland (1798, reaching back

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to the Paxton Riots), Edgar Huntly (1799, alluding to current Indian unrest), and Arthur Mervyn (1799, speaking to the Whiskey uprising); and Tabitha Tenneys Female Quixotism (1801, with allusions to St. Clair and Fries). Given the deep challenges posed by these fundamentally internal conflicts, no easy sense of nation could develop, while the class and racial conflicts that these events expressed became entangled with the terminology of the nation. The class upheavals and racial wars of this period demand further attention for our appreciation of a premature U.S. nationalism. Second, scholars have long noted the remarkable cultural interest in Native Americans that emerged in the 1820s, the decade of John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckwelders missionary narrative (1820); James Fenimore Coopers Pioneers (1823), Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Prairie (1827); James E. Seavers Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824); Lydia M. Childs Hobomok (1824); Nicholas Hentzs Tadeuskund, the Last King of the Lenape (1825); Catherine Maria Sedgwicks Hope Leslie (1827); William Apesss Son of the Forest (1829); John Augustus Stones Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829); and Joseph Smiths Book of Mormon (1830), not to mention a number of poems, plays, and essays about Native Americans. Critics too numerous to mention have rightly stressed the importance of Native Americans to the development of American nation-ness, but we will not be able to do full justice to the Indian boom of the 1820s and its interest in colonial sources unless we are more attentive to the original colonial and indigenous resonance of the term nation. Not only does the moment reveal a self-awareness, negative or positive, about the Indian context of American nationbuilding, it also reveals a strong sense of the persistence of empire and the possibilities for a national critique. The 1820s were also, of course, the decade of the culmination of the Latin American revolutions. And this suggests a third important dimension of the transition that has yet to be adequately addressed: the reflective analysis of this second generation of nations to the south, from Haiti to Mexico. Now this second generation of nations, for which the United States had been a model seen from a distance, could reflect or refract the earlier northern experiences: that Simn Bolvar could be celebrated in the United States as the Latin George Washington says more, perhaps, about a U.S. grappling with Washington than it says about Bolvars career. The growing literary fascination with Latin

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Americanan Hispanicism analogous in ways to European Orientalismsuggests not only an interest in new nations but also an imaginative return to the colonial foundations of the Western Hemisphere, most evident in Prescotts histories of Mexico (1843) and Peru (1847) and in a range of Washington Irvings writings, from the biographies of Columbus (1828) and his companions (1831) to The Alhambra (1832). There had been an earlier fascination with Columbus in the revolutionary period in works like Joel Barlows Vision of Columbus (1787), but this later Hispanicism returned to Corts and Pizarro with an eye to their national descendants. Earlier the Haitian revolution had forced Americans to think about connections with France even as Louisianain some respects occupied by the rejects and prisoners of the Haitian experiencewas purchased and incorporated. If the unified category of creole pioneers offers little explanation for the first creole nation, the southern generation eventually proved as important to its northern model as the northerners had been for the south.

NOTES
I have benefited from the careful readings of a number of people, including Jim Holstun, Michael Drexler, Rick Moreland, Cheryl Higashida, Dan Kim, and Gerry Kennedy. Im particularly grateful to Peter Onuf for his insights, which helped me undertake a major revision of the essays second half. Thanks also to Beth Younger, Jeff Smithpeters, and Andrew Curry, for comments in a seminar on George Washington and early nationalism. 1. Two contenders, ethnicity and sexuality, did in fact achieve greater prominence in the decade to follow. Yet the incorporation of each essentially involved the expansionat first supplementary but eventually complementaryof one of the original trinitarian concepts: race and gender, respectively. 2. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson, eds., Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). 3. See the overviews in E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation, in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. G. Eley and R. G. Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 337; and Preface to the Second Edition, in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). Further citations from this last work are given parenthetically in the text; emphases occur in the original unless otherwise noted.

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4. Characteristic are the eight citations of Anderson in Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), which refer either to the general argument about imagined communities (219n2, 225n4, 226n10, 229n37) or to the thesis about simultaneity (227n21, 227n22, 249n32, 257n29); see also the references to print-capitalism (63) and imagined simultaneity (112) in Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). These were two of the most influential works in American criticism at the dawn of the nation boom. 5. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). 6. Anderson notes at one point that while the factors involved in the shift from older systems to the nation are obviously complex and various . . . a strong case can be made for the primacy of capitalism (37). 7. Eley and Suny, Introduction, 4. 8. The reliance here upon socioeconomic and ideological explanation should not undermine the point stressed earlier. For Machiavellianism and the racism of contact do not provide the content of the new community, but rather contribute to the contours of its form. 9. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 14501800, trans. David Gerard (New York: New Left Books, 1976), 210 11. 10. This is the place to comment on the role of the other important northern nationalism elided in Andersons argument: that of Haiti. The Haitian revolution is mentioned only once, and then as a terrifying motivation for the South American creole (4849)in other words, as an antimodel. One can see the various problems Haiti poses for the creole formula: (1) whatever the role of various elite groups, it indisputably became a popular movement that ultimately eliminated most elites; (2) it was a movement based on overturning a socioeconomic system; (3) it was a movement not grounded intensively in print culture, however important French materials may have been; and (4) it was a movement triggered by a European class war. These departures consign the second independence movement in the Western Hemisphere, and the only one truly proximate to the U.S. revolution, to a nonmodular obscurity. 11. On this point, see David Shieldss discussion of James Franklins New England Courant, which followed Addisons model of a newspaper formed around a partisan club, in British-American Belles-Lettres, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 313. In Pennsylvania, a further complication emerges: the colonys third durable paper marked the strong presence of a foreign-language press, further complicating the idea of an imagined community. Clearly more extensive study of colonial newspapers is necessary, and in the meantime we must not fall back on the heroic legends of Franklin. 12. This image of simultaneous reading has its own problems, given what we know about collective newspaper reading, in coffee houses and taverns, in the colonial and early national periods. Andersons later video on Imagined Communities added the industrial time clock as the privileged medium of simultaneity, while The Spectre of Comparisons (see note 13 below) added elections and the census, while qualifying the newspaper argument. These examples will be discussed further below. 13. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (New York: Verso, 1998), 29.

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14. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan Ree (New York: Verso, 1991), 253342. 15. Documenting the influence of Sartre on Benedict Anderson is a trickier matter that would require more space than I have here. The connection is via the work of his brother Perry Anderson, whose Lineages of the Absolutist State (New York: Verso, 1974) and Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (New York: Verso, 1974) may be read as prequels to Imagined Communities. Perry Anderson, whose account of feudalism emphasizes a bound seriality and whose account of absolutism relies on unbound seriality, later noted the influence of Sartre on his study in English Questions (New York: Verso, 1992), 34. 16. Most summaries have stressed three dominant practical ensembles: the series, the group, and the institution. For an overview, see chapter 4 of Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). The best summary available is Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, vol. 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 17. The first English use of the term Iroquois I can find is in the Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, in June of 1743, although it did not then become the dominant term. 18. Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), xvii, xxxxi. 19. The important role of Scottish immigrants deserves closer attention than I can give it here, but see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. chaps. 1 and 3. 20. See Gordon M. Sayre, Les Sauvages Amricains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), chap. 3, for an excellent overview. The quotations are taken from 102, 103, and 108, the middle reference citing J. M. Coetzees Idleness in South Africa. 21. Albert Cook Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 16301707 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 238. 22. This list would also include Robert Beverleys History and Present State of Virginia (1705), John Lawsons New Voyage to Carolina (1709), Daniel Neals History of New England (1720), Hugh Joness Present State of Virginia (1724), James Oglethorpes account of South Carolina and Georgia (1732), John Callenders Historical Discourse on Rhode Island (1739), the critical history of Georgia by Patrick Tailfer and other disgruntled colonists (1741), and William Stiths account of Virginia (1747), among others. 23. We should also consider as colonial ethnographies the descriptive accounts of creole religious communities, which, in their parallels to emerging ethnographies of Christianized Indians, further blur the Indian-European distinction, not to mention the captivity narratives that give us Indian ethnographies with implied ethnographies of the home community. 24. William Byrd, William Byrds Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. William K. Boyd (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1984), 1. 25. Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, Helen C. Boatfield, Helene H. Fineman, and James H. Hutson, vol. 9, January 1, 1760, through December 31, 1761 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 90. 26. This list would also include Lewis Evanss Essays (1755), Stephen Hopkinss True Representation of the Plan Formed at Albany for Uniting All the British Northern

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Colonies (1755), John Mitchells Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (1755), Franklins Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies (1760, cited above), James Otiss Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), Thomas Pownalls The Administration of the Colonies (1764), John Dickinsons The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies on the Continent of America . . . (1765), and Richard Blands Enquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766), among others. 27. Thomas Pownall, A Topographical Description of the Dominions of the United States of America: Being a Revised and Enlarged Edition of a Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America as Are Contained in the (Annexed) Map of the Middle British Colonies, &C. In North America, ed. Lois Mulkearn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949). The citations are found at 23 (Evans) and 153 (Pownall). 28. Let me mention here a related genre, the Indian treaty, which in presenting the interactions between, say, the Six Nations, the Delawares, the Virginians, the Twightwees, the Pennsylvanians, and the Marylanders not only insisted upon the equation of colonies with nations but also began to imagine their coordination. See, for instance, Julian P. Boyd, ed., Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 173662 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1938). 29. For Crvecoeurs fantasy of farmers in wigwams, see chapter 2 of Ed White, The Backcountry and the City: Feelings of Structure in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 30. The major overview prepared in the twentieth century was Thomas P. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1937), though a more recent, if less systematic, account is offered in Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), esp. pt. 2. For a focused account of speculation in Virginia, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 31. Abernethy, Western Lands, 2930. 32. Peter S. Onuf, Jeffersons Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 6.