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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just Another Country, 12 Jun 2009
I first read this book when it was originally published, back in 2006, but after reading books such as Simon Schama's The American Future and Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation I decided to revisit to remind myself of Thomas Bender's angle.
As Bender says, most North American history is viewed through the lens of the United States. Instead, he takes a look through the other end of the telescope: the first post-Colombian settlements in North America were not in New England but Florida; the first Asiatics to settle were Filipino mariners who jumped ship and made their way to Louisiana; Louisiana was, at the time, French.
Before 1492, people in Europe, whilst not being intimately familiar with, say, China, at least knew of its existence - Bender helpfully informs us that its European names derive from the Xin dynasty, which he tells us preceded the Han but unhelpfully does not tell us when either was (the Xin was 9-23 CE, and actually post-dated the Western Han Dynasty; it was the Eastern Han it preceded).
They had known the world was round for centuries: the Greeks, naturally, had told them, and had also calculated the circumference pretty accurately, though Columbus chose to use a different estimate, one reason he thought he'd reached the East Indies, when he's actually only got a part of the way there.
But the realisation that there was a whole new, massive continent waiting for them on the other side of the Atlantic must have been earth shattering, but only figuratively - for the incumbents on the "new" continents the earth shattering effect would have been pretty well literal.
Bender proceeds to demonstrate how, far from being a world apart, the places now collectively known as the United States of America have always been intimately embroiled in global events. For example, in the latter part of the 18thC the histories of Britain, France, Spain and the emergent United States were conjoined through a series of conflicts Bender characterises as both the first really global war and the culmination of the second hundred years war. Whilst the French and American revolutionaries were allies during the American revolution, the relationship cooled somewhat following 1789, to the extent that, ironically, the United States sided with the slave rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture in Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti), following whose success sugar plantation slavery was displaced to Louisiana and Cuba.
Bender skirts around the events of the Civil War somewhat - I suppose he assumes his readership's familiarity therewith - and concentrates instead on the context, again to demonstrate the flimsiness of the American Exceptionalism argument. His view is that the Civil War can be seen as a part of the upheavals then convulsing much of Europe and the European diaspora, beginning with the revolutionary events of 1848 and culminating sometime around the time of the Paris Commune of 1871, with internecine warfare being waged in South America as well as North America.
In his analysis of the United States as an imperial power, Bender makes a good case in favour of the viewpoint that the nation's record is not as clean as some would have us believe, with plenty of imperialist escapades being dressed up as rescue missions - the Spanish-American war at the end of the 19thC is cited as a good example of this, and here he concurs with Robert Kagan. Where he differs with Kagan is in the motivation behind the Mexican war, which saw the annexation of territory which is now the South Western United States. Where Bender discusses it as an instance of imperialism akin to any other, Kagan attributes the motivating force to the desire of slavers to expand their influence in Congress through the accumulation of representatives from new slaving states, in order to stem the tide of influence of the abolitionists.
Apart from the taking of territory, the other thing the US had in common with other imperialists was its attitude to those being overthrown. Whilst the American Revolution was fought in order to emancipate a colony from its imperial yoke, emancipation only extended so far. There were people who were "different" and "inferior" - blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans - and who did not deserve to hold land, hold down a paying job or hold a ballot paper.
Some of the detail has become common currency amongst similar histories such as Findlay and O'Rourke's Power And Plenty and William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange. For example, the account of China's naval supremacy under Zheng He. But as Bender's work predates both of these I'll give him the credit.
He also makes some interesting revelations about origins, as where he informs us that the origin of "factory" is the Portuguese "feitoria", a name Portugal's emissaries gave to the trading posts they established.
At times it is true I found his tendency to take the long way somewhat disorienting. As he breezily bypasses the Civil War, for instance, he suddenly rebounds to the revolution, shoots forward to the Spanish war, and then returns to discuss the Gettysburg address.
It's not a big deal, however, and certainly not enough to detract from A Nation Among Nations being a valuable read.
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