Modern European-American Relations in the Transatlantic Space Recent Trends in History Writing edited by Maurizio VAUDAGNA Matteo BATTISTINI Elisabetta BINI Alessandra BITUMI Giovanni BORGOGNONE Simone CINOTTO Cristina IULI Marco MARIANO Matteo PRETELLI Edoardo TORTAROLO Maurizio VAUDAGNA nova americana in english Modern European-American Relations in the Transatlantic Space Recent Trends in History Writing edited by Maurizio Vaudagna Modern European-American Relations in the Transatlantic Space. Recent Trends in History Writing Edited by: Maurizio Vaudagna Collana Nova Americana in English Comitato scientiico: Marco Bellingeri, Marcello Carmagnani, Maurizio Vaudagna Translator: Michelle Tarnopolsky his book has been published with the support of the University of Eastern Piedmont-Department of Human Studies, and the 2012 Ateneo-Compagnia di San Paolo Research Project Reinstating Europe in American History in a Global Context. Prima edizione, settembre 2015 ©2015, OTTO editore – Torino mail@otto.to.it http://www.otto.to.it ISBN 978-88-95285-57-3 È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo efettuato, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzato. Table of Contents Maurizio Vaudagna Introduction 7 Edoardo Tortarolo Universal History between the Two Wars: Research Avenues for a History of the Interactions between Europe and America 11 Maurizio Vaudagna Is here Such a hing as a European Perspective on American History? 31 Marco Mariano “he West”, “the Atlantic Community”, and the Place of Europe in American History. Conceptualizations and Historiography 53 Alessandra Bitumi Rethinking the Historiography of Transatlantic Relations in the Cold War Years: the United States, Europe and the Process of European Integration 71 Giovanni Borgognone he Prophet, the Priest and the Philosopher of Democracy: Albion Small and the Transatlantic Origins of American Social Science 97 Matteo Battistini Middle Class, Classe Moyenne, Mittelstand : History and the Social Sciences in the Atlantic World 123 v modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space vi Simone Cinotto Transatlantic Consumer Cultures: Italy and the United States in the Twentieth Century 149 Matteo Pretelli he Transatlantic Historiography of European Migration to the United States in a Global Context 177 Elisabetta Bini Transatlantic Histories of Energy during the Cold War: American and European Approaches 197 Cristina Iuli Trans-Atlantic Stories, Transnational Perspectives, Hemispheric Mutations: American Literature beyond the Nation 223 Authors 257 Introduction Maurizio Vaudagna In 2007, following a three-year study, the results of an Italian national research project were published in a book titled he Place of Europe in American History.1 he aim was to reconsider how Europe had contributed to the society, culture and place in the world of the US from 1876 to the present in the context of research trends launched in the 1970s that had revolutionized the narrative of the American past and the historical dimension of the many identities comprising contemporary American society. he project stressed the diverse social, cultural, political, economic, technological, intellectual and institutional dimensions through which the European presence on the North American continent had been both a component and a source of American historical developments and had helped shape the pluralist, multicultural and transnational features of American life. he book’s main premise was that key late-20th-century historiographical trends in social and multicultural American history had only lent a marginal or fractured scholarly relevance to Europe’s impact on modern America, which thus needed to be reinterpreted in light of more recent history writing trends. he original purpose of the research project that led to the present publication – to “reinstate Europe in American history” – remains at the heart of this volume. However, there is one diference, which is certiied in the book’s title. he increasing awareness of the radical innovations related to “Atlantic history” has necessitated a contextualization of interpretative and methodological changes in the study of European-American relations within the realm of this new historical perspective. The old “Atlantic history” is mostly identified with exclusionist notions of the “white Atlantic” and of North America as a “Greater Europe,” i.e., a fragment of the European diaspora. Notions like the “Atlantic Community” and the old “Atlantic history” of the late 1940s and 1950s inspired by the atmosphere of the Cold War implied that the transatlantic relationship was the center of the “West” and therefore of the 1. Maurizio Vaudagna (ed.), he Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth-Century Perspectives (Turin, 2007). 7 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space “civilized world.” While scholars using these concepts tended to view American history as a sort of branching out of the European experience, in mirror-like contrast stood its counterpart in cultural, economic, media and consumer history – i.e. “Americanization,” which described transatlantic crossings as unmistakably, strictly eastward-bound, moving from the United States to Europe. Reinterpretations and new understandings of “Atlantic crossings” have appeared in large numbers and have adopted new conceptualizations of the Atlantic space. For example, the notion of “circum-Atlanticism” in American studies has emphasized that cultures, identities and institutions in the United States can be investigated as particular, localized efects of larger relational networks in which the Atlantic basin is reconceptualized as a matrix of power, ideas and capital both worldwide and within nations. In the case of historical studies, the inluential new “Atlantic history” has led early modern historians of the colonial period, immigration and empires to envision the “Atlantic world” as a dense network of circulating social, economic and cultural messages to be approached as a distinct, cohesive unit of historical analysis that encompasses not only the white, Christian, “western” North Atlantic, but also Africa and Latin America. hese fresh approaches to the Atlantic space posit the need to construct a new narrative of Europe’s role in the transatlantic arena in light of the latest theories and methods being applied to historical and identity reconstruction. here is therefore much new ground to break in our exploration of how European political thought and institutions, intellectual exchanges, technological and scientiic innovations, corporate and consumer cultures, economic and social policies, environmental concerns, gender-based approaches, immigration and racial issues have inluenced American society since 1876 and have helped shape the many identities of the contemporary American scene. hese rediscoveries may be developed in diferent ways, and they bear with them the promise of vast heuristic potential. In relation to consumer culture, a study of the “global community emporium” has demonstrated that European goods and tastes were a vital part of the “stuf” used by the postwar American middle classes to create their own brand of domesticity and gender roles. In cultural studies, European histories and cultures are deeply enmeshed with the notion of the “circumatlantic,” which makes it particularly urgent to reassess Europe’s role in the making of US cultures and social institutions. In other instances, the creation of new categories and the comparison and adaptation of old ones have represented avenues for cross-fertilization between historians of diferent eras. he new early modern “Atlantic history”, which has reconsidered Europe’s role in shaping American life, posits to historians of the nineteenth and twentieth century the idea of recasting the new Atlantic paradigm in light of the historical categories (empire, race, colonialism, state and nation) and methods developed by students of the early modern Atlantic. Historians of the twentieth century can thus move beyond choosing between the 8 introduction monolithic notions of “Americanization” and “Europeanization” with the methodological awareness that inluences and messages, European or otherwise, belong to the larger relational networks that deine the circulation of cultures, ideas, goods, and people both worldwide and within nations. In turn, the outcomes of such circulation cannot be ascribed to either America or Europe, a fact that moreover helps better deine Europe’s role in the twentieth-century global world as considered from the perspective of “world history” by clarifying one of this ield’s most fundamental transnational connections. he sheer amount of studies on European-American relations that have appeared over the last thirty-ive years and have taken advantage of the methods and guidelines of the new Atlantic history is so large – and their multidimensional features are so important – that they truly merit a systematic survey. his book aims to be such a survey by focusing on historical studies of social stratiication, international relations, consumer cultures, literary studies, the social sciences, migrations and the history of energy exchanges across the Atlantic. Moreover, considering the comprehensive conversation currently underway in academia regarding the interactions between global and transatlantic history, the book’s initial essays respond to the imperative of contextualizing historical European-American relations within larger scholarly discussions by focusing on transatlantic relations and world history, pan-European interpretations of the American past, and intellectual rationales of the European-American proximity within a shared notion of “the West.” his book therefore aspires to be an informative, systematic, up-to-date historiographical tool available to all researchers who venture into the ield of transatlantic relations to better deine their hypotheses, research guidelines and conceptual instruments. 9 Universal History between the Two Wars: Research Avenues for a History of the Interactions between Europe and America Edoardo Tortarolo he interest in global, universal and worldwide forms of human history shown in recent years within broad areas of European and American historiographical culture has been most remarkable. We can get a general idea of some aspects of this interest by looking at the historiographical genres coming to the fore in international discussions and conferences and the extent to which these are characterized by a broad scope. he “world history” genre has profoundly innovated our way of viewing the past with respect to the historiography primarily interested in national history, which however still largely prevails in academic and non-academic historiographical practice. Codiied with the establishment of the Journal of World History, this subield was promoted by the organizational work and personal research of Jerry H. Bentley from his base at the University of Hawaii and thus overcame considerable initial skepticism. he study of world history began as a way to introduce the topic of the movements of products and people between cultures, societies and continents with a focus on the porous nature of the borders between states.1 National histories have typically either ignored the dimension of transmission-circulation between diferent cultural and political areas or considered it negligible. World history, on the other hand, especially that exempliied by the papers published in the Journal of World History, deals with the exchanges – peaceful or violent, egalitarian or asymmetrical – that have linked diferent human groups. he most prevalent historiography of the 19th and 20th century took the perspective of the nation state and considered states and cultures in isolation, without examining any of the interactions between them. Historians adopted 1. Jerry H. Bentley, “Why Study World History?,” World History Connected (October 2007), worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/5.1/bentley.html (20 Jan. 2015); Bentley, “World History and Grand Narrative,” in Writing World History 1800-2000, edited by Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (London-Oxford, 2003), 47-65. 11 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space this perspective because they identiied with the mission that was typical of the nation state and considered this geographical unit as the basis of the historical process. World history thus inevitably highlights the weakness of the Eurocentric vision, which is based on the principle of superior creativity and therefore the unquestionable importance of European history in the global context. Indeed, one aim of writing world history has been to challenge the centrality of the Euro-Mediterranean past, as done, to cite but two examples, by Joseph Needham in his encyclopedic work on China to demonstrate the technological superiority of the Chinese civilization over Europe and the chronological precedence of its inventions, and by Martin Bernal with his research on the African origins of the Greek civilization and the need to recognize that the roots of classical civilization were not aryan but rather to be found among black Africans.2 However, the changes that took place in international relations after the Cold War revealed much closer political, economic, social and cultural interconnections than what had existed before, and this led world history scholars to start considering interactions at various levels as key aspects of historical reality. In the mid-1990s, the growth in the global nature of phenomena was recognized as one of the roots of world history. As Michael Geyer, Charles Bright and Fernandez Armesto, among others, wrote emphatically, world history no longer had to be theorized or argued because it was part of the daily experience of each person.3 he recent publication of major (and self-celebratory) works on world history shows that it has become central to the international historiographical conversation.4 Such works stem from or were developed in the American university system because of the desire of liberal historians to counteract the patriotic, insular (and eminently white, AngloSaxon and protestant) vision of American history; to recognize the composite nature of US history with respect to the rest of the world; and, internally, to facilitate exchanges between communities of diferent origins. he world history approach has led diferent historiographical forms and interpretative acceptations to develop, expanding to touch upon research areas with interests and traditions that were diferent from the historical research prevalent in America. Various versions have been tried out and applied – everything from global history and entangled history to revisions of imperial history. Although each historiographical trend has its own speciic sources and methodologies as well as choices of narration and argumentation, these diferent forms of historical research share 2. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, (27 vol., Cambridge, 1954-2008); (the best recent biography on Needham is Simon Wichester’s he Man Who Loved China – he Life of Joseph Needham (New York 2008); Martin Bernal, Black Athena: he Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, (New Brunswick, 1987); Mary Lefkovitz harshly attacked Bernal’s book and accused him of lacking documentary sources in Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York 996). 3. Michael Geyer, Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” he American Historical Review, 100, 4 (Oct., 1995), 1034-1060, Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto, Millenium. A History of the Last housand Years (New York, 1996). 4. A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop (Chichester, 2012). 12 edoardo tortarolo epistemological interests that were also established outside American universities. hese have even sparked violent reactions that in turn challenged the legitimacy of the vision presupposed by world history. Such opposition was sparked not by a desire to recover national history (which incidentally has remained extremely vital despite the reorientation of the research), but by a vision of world history as a camoulaged version of neo-liberal, neo-imperialist globalization, one that extends the European way of viewing the past to the rest of the world. According to these critics of world history, we must preserve the speciic visions that each culture has developed of its past and resist the tendency of world history to imply that globalization is the inevitable result of the general historical process.5 Alongside world history and its various forms is another type of historiography that has regained momentum and beneited from a renewed interest in great historical visions, following a season focused on the history of the ininitely small. hough clearly distinct from world history, it is also linked to an underlying interest in a global, universal and transnational vision of the past. In this case, the characterizations are recent: big history, deep history, environmental history and historical ecology. hese histories take up the ambition to tell human history from the broadest chronological dimension possible, thus telling both the history of human lifeforms in the most extensive and comprehensive macro-time dimension possible (taking several centuries as a minimum unit) and placing it within the history of the earth and the cosmos. Founded on the massive increase in geological and astrophysical knowledge, as well as paleoanthropology and paleobotany, this history reconnects with (and substantially difers from) a thread of reconstructing the past that has taken very diferent forms in the majority of the cultures we have knowledge of, i.e. research on the origins of human beings and the evolution of their capabilities. Big history, deep history and their associated disciplines are presented as historiographically sound, acceptable forms of narration, scientiically indisputable, distanced from both unscientiic cosmologies and, more crucially, philosophies of history, especially 19th-century ones, which are empirically questionable and biased by ideological stances that are incompatible with a scientiic approach. In a much clearer way than do forms of world history, deep history and big history indicate the need for historiography to make systematic use of natural science research, thus overcoming the 19th-century distinction between the study of nature and the interpretation of culture in order to establish a perspective that uniies the diferent ways of studying the past on entirely new bases. here is no doubt that each of these late-20th-century forms of history with their macro-temporal viewpoint has an ideological core underlying the cognitive interest, just as world history and its forms are based on interpretative assumptions that are not always clearly expressed. In this sense, one of the critics of world history, Arif Dirlik, observed that “any world 5. EdoardoTortarolo, “World History in the Twenty-irst Century and Its Critics,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, 1, 2 (December 2004), 331-342; History and heory, 34, 2, theme issue: World Historians and heir Critics, edited by Philip Pomper (May 1995). 13 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space historian worthy of the name must be uncommonly aware of the constructedness of the past, if only because of an awareness of the variety of world histories that have been constructed at diferent times and in diferent places.”6 In their diferent forms, universal history, world history and their derivations – big and deep history – rank as developments and re-inventions within a speciic vision of history and its importance as articulated within the 18th-century scheme of the philosophy of history. More generally, they also correspond to our need for guidance along the time continuum, similar in many ways to our need to be oriented within the space continuum for which geographical maps have represented a tool, here too in highly varied forms. In fact, a brief comment on cartography may be useful, as scholars of historical cartography have tackled the topic of visualizing totality with original results. Maps of the world are the geographical equivalent of universal histories, and they have always existed, which is to say that repeated attempts have been made to visually present the totality of material space available to humanity. he focus of these scholars necessarily falls on the fact that cartography always has and always will involve attempts, approximations and experiments in communication. he twelve world maps analyzed by Jeremy Brotton, from those of the Mesopotamian civilization to the contemporaneity of Google Earth, are so radically diferent that they cause one to question whether they even refer to the same subject. Brotton’s book shows that world maps are the product of “creative processes” to solve various kinds of epistemological problems, including the visualization of principles of religious faith; the cultural perception of space; the ability to project three-dimensional reality onto a two-dimensional surface; and the choices of how to orient the earth with respect to the four cardinal points.7 hese creative processes of visualizing the earth depend on physics and mathematics skills and the cultural context in general just as much as they are an expression, knowingly or unknowingly, of commercial, military and geopolitical interests. As has been shown by studying the meta-geography of the continents, which represent the macro-unit for the visualization of the earth’s geographical space and are wrongly considered naturally obvious, there are undeniable parallels between universal history and world maps. It could also be pointed out that describing the world’s space on geographical maps and telling world history have encountered the same methodological problems, because both world geography and universal history try to describe a totality of space and time, respectively.8 From a historiographical perspective, the most interesting efect of this interaction has been the efort to spatially visualize the passage of time, a topic 6. Arif Dirlik, “Confounding Metaphors, Inventions of the World; What is World History For?,” in Writing World History 1800-2000, 91 f. See also he Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 22, 4 (2000), 323-367. 7. Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London, 2012). 8. Martin W. Lewis-Kären E. Wigen, he Myth of Continents. A Critique of Metageography (BerkeleyLos Angeles-London 1997), chapter 5 “Global Geography in the Historical Imagination,” 124-156. 14 edoardo tortarolo that attracted the attention of Europeans throughout the modern age to an extent that is now diicult to imagine. As the result of a long, tormented relection on the duration of human history and the possibility of reconstructing it synchronously and providing scientiic certainty in keeping with the biblical account, around the mid-18th century a “common visual vocabulary for time maps” was established. his was based on the idea that time progresses linearly and uniformly and we can therefore measure and compare historical periods and visualize political-cultural units of the past in the same way that we approach the continents.9 Geopolitical interests have been just as important for our visualizations of universal history as the religious principles that shape our view of the past. As Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg have highlighted, in 19th-century America not only was linear history for the most part visualized diferently than how the narration of universal history was organized in Europe, but idelity to biblical chronology was also a well-founded principle for each visualization of universal history, again in clear contrast to European culture. Nineteenth-century American millennialism was also evident in the way universal history was conceived and visualized. To this regard, Grafton and Rosenberg cited the examples of William Miller, for whom the Second Coming of Christ was to occur between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844, based on a prophetic biblical interpretation of universal chronology; and Sebastian Adams, whose 1878 Monumental Illustrated Panorama of History showed the birth of humanity with Adam and Eve and followed the dating of Archbishop James Ussher, despite being aware of the diiculties created by this chronology. In early-20th-century American culture, the marginalization of religiously inspired universal history was less marked than in contemporary European culture. Some elements will be presented in the following pages that present a parallel unfolding of visions of universal history in Europe and the United States in order to identify some common, interaction-based elements in the biographies of some universal historians in the period between the two world wars. his reading is therefore intended as a preliminary relection for a study of 20th-century universal histories whose diferent forms and manifestations can be usefully analyzed to understand an important and altogether underestimated part of historiographical research. In fact, this period has been substantially overlooked in the recent historiography on world history. he extensive, detailed paper by Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann published in 2013, for example, only glosses over American universal historiography from the late 19th century to the 1950s. It also neglects to address the topic of comparison-interaction between the European and American universal histories carried out during a half century in which, while academic exchanges through publications and conferences were certainly limited, the shock of having so many European, and primarily German, historians emigrate to the United States after 1933 stimulated 9. Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time. A History of the Timeline (New York, 2010). 15 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space an interest in European universal history among American historians.10 While Hervé Inglebert’s important 2014 book presents a highly detailed overview of universal histories in terms of bibliography, his decision to prioritize the completeness of the list was made to the detriment of a description of the content and the speciic evolution of the universal histories he analyzes,11 which ultimately provide an undiferentiated picture of the political-cultural contexts of each history and the general function of the historiographical genre. In late-19th-century American culture, knowledge of history in general and universal history in particular was clearly less important for the public and the organization of university studies than in Europe at the time. As Michael Adas has written, the vision of the global past in America was distinguished from the start by the paradox of the exceptionalist claim of American history and the political messianism of its foreign policy, which was very diicult to reconcile with research on a universalism shared by all the cultures and political traditions of the world.12 Nevertheless, there was no shortage of non-religious attempts to interpret universal history that questioned the biblical perspective. he most interesting case is that of Brooks Adams, who presented “history” as governed by a rigid law of civilization and decay. Inluenced by positivism, Adams’ approach was strictly areligious and concerned with inding development regularities in the past to be projected into the future. According to Adams, the observer did not bear any moral responsibility for having found such regularities, since in the observer’s eyes human societies were equal to animal communities. After the irst edition was published in London in 1895, Adams introduced variations in the vocabulary – some signiicant – to the 1896 edition published in New York and the 1899 edition published in Paris (in French), while maintaining the interpretative structure set forth in the preface: I venture to ofer an hypothesis by which to classify a few of the more interesting intellectual phases through which human society must, apparently, pass, in its oscillations between barbarism and civilization, or, what amounts to the same thing, in its movement from a condition of physical dispersion to one of concentration. […] he theory proposed is based upon the accepted scientiic principle that the law of force and energy is of universal application in nature, and that animal life is one of the outlets through which solar energy is dissipated. 10. Matthais Middell-Katja Naumann, “he Writing of World History in Europe from the Middle of the 19th Century to the Present: Conceptual Renewal and Challenge to National Histories,” in Transnational Challenges to National History Writing, edited by Matthais Middell and Lluis Roura (Basingstoke, 2013), 54-138. In the same volume, see also Edoardo Tortarolo, “Historians in the Storm: Emigré Historiography in the 20th Century,” 377-403. 11. Hervé Inglebert, Le monde l’histoire. Essai sur les histoires universelles (Paris, 2014). 12. Michael Adas, “Out of Step with Time: United States Exceptionalism in an Age of Globalisation,” in Writing World History 1800-2000, 137-154. 16 edoardo tortarolo Starting from this fundamental proposition, the irst deduction is, that, as human societies are forms of animal life, these societies must difer among themselves in energy, in proportion as nature has endowed them, more or less abundantly, with energetic material. hought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous – Fear and Greed. Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood; and greed, which dissipates energy in war and trade.13 Adams searched for elements in the movements of civilizations that corresponded to the laws of physics. Accordingly, the speed of transformation of societies was proportional to energy and mass just as centralization – namely, the creation of the structures of civilization – was proportional to its speed of movement. To explain the growth, lourishing and disappearance of societies, which was the traditional concern of non-progressive universal histories, Adams resorted to a scheme that was in some respects similar to cyclical philosophies of history. He believed that the principle of fear formed the basis for the development of barbaric civilizations, in which the imagination was wild and creative. When civilizations were consolidated, fear gave way to greed. In turn, commercial and inancial objectives replaced military and emotional ones, and the wealth accumulated in the phases of the civilization’s creation dissipated, thus resulting in a long period of stagnation, a state of inertia that precluded disappearance, or unexpected collapse. Conducted through familiarity with European history and extensive travels in Asia and Africa as well as Europe, Adams’ research was marked by two important characteristics that link it to the universal histories of later years. Adams text was irst and foremost an “Essay on History.” But which history? Adams only considered European history. Indeed, the irst chapter opened with Roman history, starting from when the Romans were already “a race of land-owners who held their property in severalty, and, as a right of alienation was established, the formation of relatively large estates had begun.”14 His narration rejected neither chronological progression nor an analysis of speciic events and moments and it systematically sought regularity. he efort Adams made to ind a comprehensive approach to the research was also interesting. All the expressive forms moved in sync within the identiied regularity. his relationship and this regularity can be observed in the way Adams described the clash between the barbaric populations and the Eastern Roman Empire, which was a typical argument of the historiography of Edward Gibbon, whose work Adams knew very well: he movement of races in the Eastern Empire proceeded with automatic regularity. he cheaper organism exterminated the more costly, because energy operated through money 13. Brooks Adams, he Law of Civilization and Decay. An Essay on History, with an introduction by Charles A. Beard (New York 1951), 59-60 (reproduces the text from the New York 1896 edition). 14. Ibid., 62. 17 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space strongly enough to cause free economic competition; nor is the evidence upon which this conclusion rests to be drawn from books alone. Coinage and architecture, sculpture and painting tell the tale with equal precision.15 he above quotation hints at the second interesting topic introduced by Adams, namely the idea that historical changes are pervasive and occur in various aspects of life, in particular art and literature. A comprehensive approach to historical phenomena thereby involved both a reconstruction and a relection of universal history. Each aspect could be traced to a deep core in which the historical change was concentrated. Adams’ relection on history left out America, whose image as a continent too young to have a history – typical of the entire period from the 16th to the 19th century – persisted.16 History was European history, in particular that of the Mediterranean and Western Europe, and it excluded all other civilizations. During the same period, others were attempting to move beyond the strictly European context of Adams by making synthetic considerations from a philosophy-of-history perspective and with limited use of empirical material. In 1911, Flinders Petrie, an extremely active archaeologist in Egypt and Palestine in the 19th and 20th century and the irst professor with a chair in Egyptology, published a short paper on he Revolutions of Civilization,17 which focused on ive civilizations: Egyptian, Mycenaean, classical, Arab and European. An analysis of each led Petrie to determine the average duration of the civilizations and the peak moment of their ability to progress. his in turn led Petrie to predict the decline and collapse of the contemporary European civilization according to the principle whereby “he easier life is rendered, the more easy is decay and degradation,” which he argued could be remedied with a eugenic policy of forbidding mixing between races in order to strengthen the vital force that European civilization could not otherwise sustain for much longer. A broader view originally supported by those with a research interest in the history of exploration but inspired by a reading of Petrie is epitomized by that of Irish native Frederick Teggart, who moved to California at the beginning of the 20th century after having begun his studies in Ireland. Teggart’s he Processes of History, published in early 1918, indicates the need to consider the consequences of World War I and the involvement of populations from all continents in that conlict. Teggart believed one had to study the processes of history not to justify the superiority of one race over another but to explain “how man everywhere has come to be as he is.”18 As Teggart maintained, “Our vision is still focussed upon Europe and the 15. Ibid., 102. 16. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World. The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 (Pittsburgh, 2000). 17. (London and New York, 1911), 126 and 131. On Petrie, see Kathleen L. Sheppard, “Flinders Petrie and Eugenics,” at UCLA, Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 20, 1 (May 2010), 16-29, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bha.20103. 18. Frederick J. Teggart, he Processes of History (New Haven, 1918), 5. 18 edoardo tortarolo doings of Europeans, and while we look with a kindly interest at ‘the map of the world as known to Herodotus’, we seem unable to appreciate the fact that relatively the scope of our own historical inquiries is less extensive than his.”19 he purpose of Teggart’s book was to raise the study of history to a scientiic level as Darwin had done with the principle of biological evolution.20 Teggart polemicized the concept of the progress of European historiography by arguing that history was neither unitary nor exhausted in European history but was rather “pluralistic” and could not be understood solely through a narrative that ignored the diversity of the history of various civilizations. For Teggart, the purpose of analyzing the human past was to improve the wellbeing of the human race. For this reason, he believed that historians had to recognize the failure of narration as the only method available to them and to try something new. hey therefore had to focus their research on comparing diferent civilizations and identifying what was common to humankind everywhere.21 Euro-Asiatic history had to be studied as one unit by overcoming the artiicial separators imposed during the 19th century. Despite this willingness to study world history based on a rejection of narrow Eurocentrism, Teggart operated from an interpretative perspective aimed at understanding how human societies had passed from a life organized on a hereditary basis to one that was “politically” organized. his transition was crucial for explaining a contemporary reality that mainly corresponded to the world of the great EuroAmerican powers. As Teggart explained, “Most signiicant of all, the central feature of transition is not merely the substitution of territory for blood-relationship as the basis of unity in human groups, but the emergence of individuality and of personal self-assertion, and hence it follows that human advance rests ultimately upon the foundation of individual initiative and activity.”22 he birth of the modern world marked the endpoint of his relection, which was signiicant both for Teggart’s intolerance towards the racist theories of the century that had just ended and for his use of William James’ psychology to lend social relevance to an updated, not solely narrativist study of humankind’s overall past. Two universal histories from the period between the world wars accomplished the major efort of overcoming the limits of a history strongly, if not exclusively, focused on Europe. Unlike Teggart’s booklet, they were both remarkably successful among the US public despite the fact that neither one devoted any special attention to American history. Both A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee and Der Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler were published after World War I (H.G. Wells’ he Outline of History was also 19. Frederick J. Teggart, he Processes of History (New Haven, 1918), 36. 20. Carl Becker was very critical of this aspect in his review of Teggart’s book in the American Historical Review, 24, 2 (1919), 266-268. 21. Ibid., 33 and 42. 22. Ibid., 98. 19 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space started in 1918 and published just two years later).23 heir success can be attributed to the disorientation caused by the outcome of the war and the rather clear perception of a change in the balance of world powers that had also led to a revision of how historians viewed the past. However, neither text was the immediate result of World War I but rather of projects started either before the war had broken out or during the war itself. Spengler ended his ride through the cultures and civilizations before the war, revised the entire thing during the war and wrote the introduction in December 1917, when German victory seemed within reach. Der Untergang des Abendlandes was published before the armistice, in the summer of 1918, essentially coinciding with the publication of Teggart’s booklet in April of the same year. Toynbee had started to relect on a model of historical cyclicality starting with hucydides during the war and had developed his own system of interpretation after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. He wrote throughout the 1920s into the early 1930s, and the inaugural volume of the series of twelve was released in 1934.24 he translation of Spengler’s work by Charles Francis Atkinson in two volumes in 1926 and 1928 enjoyed considerable success in America. Spengler considered the civilizations (Kultur) of Western Europe and America to be homogeneous and both involved in the transition from full fruition to decay. Despite the many factual inaccuracies and probably thanks to Spengler’s overtly intuition-based, metaphysical approach, the book was received with great interest and was even esteemed by some academics, as shown by the reviews praising it as one of the few great books published in those years. Spengler illed an interpretative void with two innovations that took readers by surprise. he irst consisted of linking diagnosis and prophecy with a degree of clarity rarely theretofore expressed. Spengler’s assertion in his introduction that his was the irst attempt ever made to “predict history” (Geschichte vorauszubestimmen) could not have left readers indiferent. Spengler relied on the principle whereby the West, unlike other civilizations, had an exceptional historical sensitivity that could be applied to the historical course of events. he second innovation was Spengler’s adoption of a morphological system that replaced the essentially linear, progressive approach traditionally used, based on presumed pragmatic cause-and-efect relationships. Like Teggart, Spengler wanted to distance himself from a chronologically ordered narration, though the similarities end there. In Spengler’s book analogy was considered the proper cognitive tool for understanding living forms that are repeated according to the more profound typology of the surface appearance to which they belong. he notion of culture (Kultur) acquired the characteristics of an organism that is born, grows and dies after going through the civilization phase (Zivilisation). Against the backdrop of universal history and 23. Michael Sherborne, H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (London, 2010); David C. Smith, H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven, 1986). 24. William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee. A Life, (New York-Oxford, 1989), 94-95. 20 edoardo tortarolo confronted by the tragedy of war, the destiny of European culture was clear. Spengler was obviously inluenced by Nietzsche, from whom he drew the idea of interpreting history through symbolic formulations similar to those created by the German philosopher using the concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. With the idea of moving beyond Nietzsche, Spengler applied the morphological method to the entire historical context, thus attempting to demonstrate the dynamics of transformations using conceptual pairings of opposing principles, the recurring clashes of which had given rise to human cultures. Indeed, the tension between dynamic, spontaneous and passionate principles on the one hand and abstract, rational and scientiic ones on the other represents the cornerstone of Spengler’s theory. He drew his interpretative model from Goethe’s idea of contemplating the eternal becoming, thus refusing to crystallize the historical vision in the separation between cause and efect. Although Spengler had the ambition to build a morphological system that included all the civilizations, he ended up identifying three basic forms of culture – Western, Magian (corresponding to Arab culture) and classical antiquity – as well as three forms that perform a secondary role – Egyptian, Indian and Chinese. He considered the Babylonian and Mexican cultures to be entirely marginal and the Russian culture to be still at the incipient stage. he wealth of information provided by Spengler was organized to demonstrate the lack of progress in history and the possibility to intuit (certainly not analytically explain) the decline of Western Civilization. His outlook on the future of the West in the 20th century was dramatic, based on the creation of proletarian masses in the world’s big cities from which a new primitivism would emerge. Blood would defeat money, and the cost would be terrible. According to Spengler’s pessimistic determinism, little room had been left for individual decision-making. Spengler’s book drew avid criticism in both German and European academic circles from scholars like Brandeburger, Gooch and Collingwood, whose reservations and objections reveal an interest in the challenge of using historical morphology as an instrument to describe the imminent fate of the West. he most ambitious attempt at a universal history started in America in this period – that of Will Durant – began with a rejection of Spengler’s concept of culture.25 Despite the reservations put forward by, among others, Hans Werner Weigert, who was highly sensitive to the similarities between the intuitionism of Spengler, “the greatest of the modern prophets of doom” and Nazi culture,26 we must recognize that, as Stuart Hughes wrote, “Spengler’s work won an increasing number of converts.”27 A bridge between Spengler and American ethnology was created by Alfred Kroeber in Conigurations of Culture Growth, published in 1944 25. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Our Oriental Heritage (New York, 1935). 26. Hans Weigert, “he Future in Retrospect: Oswald Spengler, Twenty-Five Years After,” Foreign Afairs, 21 (October 1942), 732-742. 27. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York, 1952), 90-104. 21 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space following extensive preparation throughout the 1930s.28 As a cultural anthropologist with strong historical interests, Kroeber had grown up in a family of German origin that spoke German everyday. His bilingualism brought him into close, up-to-date contact with German intellectual production, which had few parallels in the United States before the arrival of emigrants for political and racial reasons after 1933. In fact, he was familiar with Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt’s impressive ethnological work on the Kulturkreise, Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie and especially Splengler’s work. Despite radical diferences in education and starting points, Kroeber took a similar approach to Spengler by analyzing the formation, rise and fall of diferent cultures. Unlike Spengler, Kroeber focused on concentrations in time and space of aesthetically and intellectually reined high culture in order to identify any constants of evolution, without addressing the causes that had provoked the transformation of some cultures and not others. Kroeber’s basic intention was to be “behavioristically factual rather than explanatory.”29 hough universalist and encyclopedic, the descriptive and narrative nature of Kroeber’s discussion clearly diferentiated his study of culture patterns from Spengler’s morphology. Nevertheless, there were enough signiicant points of similarity to warrant Kroeber’s efort to distance himself from his predecessor: Spengler’s contribution to history seems to be his recognition of the importance of the fundamental patterns of cultures. As against these qualitatively distinct patterns, the quantitative aspect of culture content and still more the personalized events of history are to him relatively insigniicant. his attitude implies that what is being sought is an understanding of history with emphasis upon culture as such, extricated from the web of biographic personalities and their individual acts in which the raw phenomena lie before us. With this attitude my own concurs: not as alone legitimate, but as valid and fruitful. Where we difer is that Spengler has attempted the diicult task of expressing the essential patterns themselves, which necessitates an intuitionally subjective approach; while I have set myself the more speciic problem of deining the time-space conigurations of parts of the patterns as they ind expression in their lorescences. […] Our point of view with regard to [individuals] as historic material is the same: essentially, persons are indicators of cultural phenomena.30 Spengler’s intuitive, and ultimately dogmatic, procedure is what most separated him from Kroeber. However, Spengler had made a concrete contribution by looking at the history of humanity across wide horizons of time and space and using cultural forms as organizational tools. As Kroeber wrote: he two Spenglerian principles with which this study is, then, in essential accord are, irst, the existence of certain fundamental patterns characteristic of each major culture, 28. Alfred Kroeber, Conigurations of Culture Growth (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1944). 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Ibid., 826. 22 edoardo tortarolo and second, that these occur in limited growths. he opinions at which I halt are three. he irst is that the basic patterns of each culture can necessarily be reduced to a single master or key pattern which controls the culture. he second is that the cultures necessarily develop through essential parallel stages; and the third, that they die of themselves. All three of these “necessarily’s” I hold to be legitimate problems, but wholly unproved, and diicult to investigate because it is diicult to evaluate the objective comparability of the facts.31 Of course, another careful reader of Spengler, as well as of Teggart, was Toynbee, who received the German edition of Spengler’s book from Lewis Namier in the summer of 1920 and was quite struck by it. Much later Toynbee would point out the diferences between his method and vision and those of Spengler.32 Toynbee, like Kroeber, viewed Spengler’s approach as dogmatic and positioned himself in opposition to this by describing himself as empirical. As Toynbee’s biographer William H. McNeill wrote, while this is always a questionable characterization for historians, it is certainly evident for Toynbee who conceptually operated on the level of myth and metaphor to organize the vast amount of material he had gradually collected over the years to complete A Study of History.33 In reality, Toynbee mentioned Spengler, sometimes to emphasize the distance between them and other times in clear agreement.34 In particular, in his chapter on “Diferentiation hrough Growth” (pp. 377-394) in the third volume, in which he laid out his “recurrent Challengeand-Response-and-Challenge” schema, Toynbee contested the radical, “dogmatic” relativism of Spengler who considered not only artistic style and historical thinking to be contingent and dependent on the type of society at hand (as did Toynbee), but also the ields of mathematics and the physical sciences. Toynbee felt an intellectual ainity for the perspective introduced by Spengler when he theorized the notion of “habitus” as trend and the willingness to express oneself, preferably through a style. As he explained, “his interpretation of the variety of social style as the outcome of a diferentiation in penchant or bent or trend or emphasis will carry conviction to the empirical student of history, because he will ind it borne out by actual examples in ‘real life’.”35 With his repeated claims of empiricism and his display of historical erudition Toynbee was able to convince readers of the soundness of his ordering system into twenty-one civilizations and the descriptive power of the network of explicative relationships that he found both to account for the relationships between diferent societies and to suggest reasons for the extreme variety of success and failure that touched each society within the very broad 31. Ibid., 828. 32. William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee. A Life (New York-Oxford, 1989), 98. 33. Ibid., 162. 34. Toynbee cites Spengler in A Study of History, I, 135 regarding the issue of societies dying out and being assimilated into others: “In Spengler’s terminology, a ‘culture’ means what, in this Study, is meant by a ‘civilization’, while Spengler’s ‘civilizations’ are the debris of dead cultures.” 35. A Study of History, III, 384. 23 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space spectrum he took under consideration. he reactions of academic historians had a different tone, and the polemics of Pieter Geyl and Hugh Trevor-Roper upon Toynbee’s completion of the twelfth and inal volume summarized the widespread distrust in university circles for his apparent prophetic traits and the intensiied religious vision of the second part of his text.36 he irst three volumes, published in 1934, met with modest public and critical success in the United States, where (as in Asian countries) Toynbee would only become extraordinarily popular after the war. Kroeber himself admitted in his 1944 book to having read the irst six volumes released between 1934 to 1939 only several years later, without being particularly struck by them. Spengler and Toynbee systematically developed a theme underlying both their works that seized on an element of early-20th-century culture, namely the separation from a Eurocentric theory of progress that was insensitive to and ignorant of all other historicalcultural realities in the world.37 In fact, Teggart had already addressed the subject of a truly universal history that corresponded to the widespread needs of a portion of the Euro-American public, though it should be observed that this was simpler to address from a historical-philosophical perspective than through a narrative presentation. Once the decision was made to take a chronological approach, the traditional universal history model was diicult to avoid. One interesting case is that of Glimpses of World History, which Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in the form of letters to his daughter Indira Gandhi from diferent prisons between 1930 and 1933.38 His essentially political culture of origin and his lack of access to a research library prevented Nehru from formulating an original interpretation of universal history. With several references to the politics of his time, Nehru recounted an explicitly non-national, and certainly not nationalist, world history in which the role of Asian nations, especially India and China, was properly recognized and valued in narrative terms. Nehru conveyed the unity of history through a chronological narration based on the European model, which he drew from Wells’Outline and his more or less accurate school memories and reconsidered in light of a humanitarian socialism, also of European origin. Universal history was an obvious ield for confrontation and political challenge. Liberal historian Veit Valentin, who emigrated from Germany in the summer of 1933, published 36. Alexander Hutton (2014) “‘A Belated Return for Christ?’: he Reception of Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History in a British Context, 1934-1961,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 21, 3 (2014), DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2014.915290. Peter Ghosh analyzes the reasons behind Trevor-Roper’s attack on Toynbee in “Hugh Trevor-Roper and the History of Ideas,” History of European Ideas, 37, 4 (2011), 483-505, DOI: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2010.12.006. 37. For an entirely Eurocentric world history, see Alexander Cartellieri, Grundzuege der Weltgeschichte. Zweite vermehrte und verbesserte Aulage (Leipzig, 1922, irst edition 1919). Cartellieri was a medievalist and professor of general history at the University of Jena. 38. Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History. Being Further Letters to his Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (Bombay, 1962) (with additions with respect to the irst two-volume edition of 1934). An abridged edition was edited after the war by Saul Padover. 24 edoardo tortarolo a Weltgeschichte in Amsterdam in 1939 and, like Nehru, interpreted universal history from a progressive (and explicitly anti-Spenglerian) perspective. Valentin believed history was driven by the struggle to possess the four basic commodities of religion, art, science and government. he idea of Valentin’s Weltgeschichte was to allow an increasing number of human beings to enjoy these commodities independently, along with the guarantee of satisfying economic and moral conditions. Valentin believed it was impossible to identify the laws that govern the rise and fall of civilizations, and that no similarities existed between the laws of the human organism and the regularities of world history, for which reason he viewed Spengler’s analogic system as lacking in foundation.39 he book’s publication in 1939 and Valentin’s death immediately afterwards prevented his Weltgeschichte from having a signiicant impact despite it being reprinted in 1959 for the German public, who had been unable to access the 1939 edition printed outside Germany. A broader and more challenging answer to Spengler (and implicitly also to Toynbee) came from inside Germany with two works from the 1930s and 1940s, together with the participation of Hans Freyer. Edited by Walter Goetz, the multi-volume Propyläen Weltgeschichte, whose irst installment was published in 1931,40 presented a chronological, encyclopedic survey of universal history. During the postwar period, it was republished and updated under the guidance of Golo Mann, reprinted several times and translated into Italian and Spanish. In the irst volume, an extensive historiographical essay by Freyer set out the topic of universal history in opposition to Spengler. Departing from the idea of Europe’s non-central position, Freyer maintained that world history represented a network of histories of contacts, clashes and fusions between diferent cultures that had materialized in European history. Being open to the rest of the world and committed to the challenge of bringing order to the chaos of events, the history of Europe thus coincided with the history of the world, which was therefore diferent from Ranke’s succession of igures or Spengler’s “aesthetic education” to be contemplated as a meaningless spectacle. In fact, history in general was, in Freyer’s view, a series of causes and efects that could be narrated. he Propyläen Weltgeschichte, introduced by Freyer and coordinated by Goetz, followed by the Weltgeschichte Europas – a narration Freyer drafted between 1939 and 1945 – showed that such a complete narration was possible, contrary to the beliefs of Spengler and his source of inspiration Nietzsche. With its Christian-conservative approach, Freyer’s Weltgeschichte Europas was the polemical answer to Nazi world historiography, which was based on the principle of race. An example of the latter was Heinrich Wolf’s Angewandte Rassenkunde: Weltgeschichte 39. Richard H. Bauer, “Veit Valentin 1885-1947,” in Essays on Eminent Europeans. Some 20th Century Historians, edited by S. William Halperin (Chicago and London, 1961), 103-141. 40. Propylaen-Weltgeschichte, herausgegeben von Walter Goetz. Der Werdegang der Menschheit in Gesellschaft und Staat, Wirtschaft und Geistesleben, 10 Baende, Propylaen Verlag s.a. 25 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space auf biologischer Grundlage, the ifth volume of his Angewandte Geschichte, irst published in 1927 and reprinted until 1943.41 In the United States, the historians interested in world history were those who had some contact with European culture. he success of Spengler’s translation has already been mentioned. American histories of humanity nevertheless followed other models and were intended as teaching guides containing very little theory. Neither Spengler nor Toynbee was the guiding force behind these histories of mankind. Although Carl Lotus Becker was the point of reference for the modernist American interested in 18th-century history, he was also very interested in world history and believed historians held a moral responsibility. He reviewed Teggart’s book and in the 1930s reread Adams’ he Law of Civilization and Decay, after which he wrote to Charles Beard, who had written a long introduction for the latter, about his mistrust of universal histories that were too philosophical: Fortunately for the physicist, the electron cannot acquire a knowledge of physics. If it could, every law of the electron discovered by the physicist up to date could be used by the electron to modify its behavior, in the future, and so dish all laws of physics. his subject matter of the sociologist, which is man, can do just that. What the sociologist learns about the behavior of his subject matter in the past, his subject matter can learn, and this learning can use to modify his behavior in the future. his is why I think all attempts to discover laws of history by following the methods of the natural sciences are futile.42 Becker wrote his bestselling Modern History as an essential history of human progress that was liberal, humanistic, and clearly secular and areligious.43 In his attempt to write a broad history of humanity, Becker viewed his work as a form of resistance to the authoritarian tendencies prevalent in Europe. Deeply hostile to the various forms of fascism and a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, Becker was sensitive to the political implications of historical practice, especially the grand works of synthesis. In one of his best-known books, Everyman His Own Historian, Becker referred favorably to Wells’ An Outline of History: “It may be that Mr. Wells has read the past too close to the desire of his heart. But there are worse things. We may hope at least that the future will be as he thinks. If it should turn out so, Mr. Wells’s book will have been more than a history, even if it is not history; it will have been an action that has helped to make history.”44 41. Uwe Puschner, “Voelkische Geschichtsschreibung: hemen, Autoren und Wirkungen voelkischer Geschichtsideologie,” in Geschichte fuer Leser. Populaere Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert, herausgegeben von Wolfgang Hardtwig und Erhard Schuetz (Stuttgart, 2005), 287-307; Reinhart Koselleck, “Wozu noch Historie?,” Historische Zeitschrift, 212 (1971), 1-18. 42. “What Is the Good of History?,” Letter to Charles Beard, 10 May 1943, in Selected Letters of Carl L. Becker, 1900-1945, edited, with an introduction, by Michael Kammen (Ithaca and London, 1973), 302-303. 43. Carl L. Becker, Modern History (New York, 1931) (7 reprints). See Charlotte Watkins Smith, Carl Becker: On History and the Climate of Opinion (Ithaca, NY., 1956), 206. 44. Carl L. Becker, “Mr Wells and the New History,” in Everyman His Own Historian. Essays in History and Politics (New York, 1935), 189-190. 26 edoardo tortarolo Becker’s teachings at Cornell University were inluential in two ways. Not only did they fuel an interest in the history of civilization as a narrative history of human progress (Louis Gottschalk was his student, as was Robert Palmer) that inluenced the universalist historiography of the 1940s and 1950s,45 but it also sparked an appreciation for the usefulness of general historical knowledge for American politics. In late 1943 and early 1944, Becker met with other historians in Washington (coordinated by Gottschalk) to discuss perspectives they could develop to shorten the war in Europe and ensure stability in the postwar period. Besides Becker and Gottschalk, the Committee of Historians to Analyze and Appraise Current Conditions and Prospective Developments in Germany, created by the US Air Force, also included Henry Steele Commager, Edward Mead Earle and Bernadotte Schmitt. Gottschalk continued this commitment to universal history and the political coordination of historians by editing the UNESCO universal history in the 1950s.46 At the heart of the collaboration between historians and the US military was the Oice of Strategic Services (OSS). Historians who got their start in the OSS went on to enjoy successful academic careers in American universities. he war efort also resulted in a lasting interest in world history on the part of American historians, though certainly in a diferent form than those of Becker, Teggart and Adams. William Langer could be considered the point of reference for this interest that came out of international history and area studies. he irst evidence of this interest was the adaptation for an American audience of Carl Ploetz’s Auszug aus der alten, mittleren und neueren Geschichte, which was originally published in Germany in 1863 as a historical atlas. he English translation by William Tillinghast, Epitome of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History, was published by Houghton Milin in 1883. With subsequent adaptations and additions, a version entitled A Handbook of Universal History was published in 1915. After the war Harry Elmer Barnes revised the entire text, added new parts and updated the section covering the period 1883-1923, leaving its GrecoRoman, medieval and early-modern core, and published it as A Manual of Universal History in 1925. William Langer was asked to update it in the late 1930s and the resulting version was published in 1940, with several editions gradually updated in the early postwar period. In the introduction to the editions he edited, Langer made sure to consider the acceleration of 20th-century history and the increase of Europe’s sphere of inluence on the world. As he explained, western expansion had touched “the entire globe and, as a result, there is now a much greater need to know something of the past of non-European countries and cultures, and a much livelier interest in 45. A representative part of his correspondence (with Gottschalk, among others) is in Detachment and the Writing of History. Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker, edited by Phil L. Snyder (Ithaca, NY , 1958). 46. William Halperin, “Some 20th Century Historians; Poul Duedahl, Selling Mankind: UNESCO and the Invention of Global History, 1945-1976,” Journal of World History, 22 (2011). 27 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space formerly neglected ields.”47 Langer specialized in international relations and had a sound knowledge of German historiography, which he read in the original language. He participated in the Research and Analysis branch of the OSS, reporting directly to William J. Donovan, and led it himself starting in 1942, going on to transform the OSS into the CIA after the war.48 In addition to his organizational commitments, he continued writing, arguing for a broad vision that could bring complex knowledge of history to the public. he textbook he edited entitled World History, which was published in 1942, was an example of this secularized, Eurocentric vision of global history.49 It presented an optimistic and moralistic vision of progress, attributing successes and failures to diferent degrees of accountability and individual initiative. His Eurocentric approach highlighted his withdrawal from the great breadth of Spengler and Toynbee’s – albeit irrational – visions. However, he also introduced the innovation of area studies – tested out in the research work for the OSS – for which single blocks of countries, identiied on the basis of common characteristics, were studied in an integrated, interdisciplinary way. Area studies sought to carefully describe diferent features of the cultures against which American foreign policy was pitted and to look for the links between these diferent features in order to develop efective policy. his aspect was especially emphasized by Langer’s successor at the Research and Analysis branch of the OSS, Sherman Kent, a historian of modern Europe at Yale University. For Kent, historical research had to be used as a political tool both during and after the war. In Writing History of 1941 and Strategic Intelligence of 1949, Kent explained why he believed that historical knowledge played such a central role. As he wrote in the second book, “it maintains a bridge between the descriptive and what I have called the speculative-evaluative elements – a bridge between the past and the future,”50 as long as it is accompanied by a cognitive strategy. Historical knowledge of a country or a set of homogeneous countries was collected to avoid unexpected events that could endanger American global policy, and this had to be done according to a systematic, continually updated plan. Kent had a clear picture of this descriptive, speculative kind of world history and how it should be written and used to stabilize world politics under the control of the United States and guarantee a “dynamic defense.” His model was a work that has yet to be carefully analyzed: the Peace Handbook prepared by the British Foreign Oice for use by delegates at the 1919 Peace Conference.51 47. An Encyclopedia of World History. Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged, compiled and edited by William L. Langer (revised edition, Boston, 1948, 1st ed., 1940), vi. 48. Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown. Scholars in America’s Secret War (London, 1987), 70-82. 49. World History, by Arthur E. R. Boak, Preston Slosson, Howard R. Anderson, editor, William L. Langer, (Cambridge, 1942). 50. Strategic Intelligence, 38. 51. Ibid., 25. 28 edoardo tortarolo Published the same year as the conference, each of the hundred and eighty-six booklets either concentrates on an area of the world or addresses a speciic subject, thereby presenting important information on each area, however small. Kent believed the US Congress should have entrusted the compilation of a similar “handbook of peacetime” to the American universities. But they were unwilling to take on this task, and for this and other reasons the CIA became increasingly hostile towards the academic world of historiography. In the 1930s and 1940s, American historiographical culture freed itself from its contradictory vision of US history and laid the foundations for an integration of the American past into a broad global narration, which through William H. McNeill’s he Rise of the West led to a collaboration with area studies in the 1960s and 1970s and the success of world history. European historiographies sufered from the loss of power and international signiicance that followed the end of World War II. Even Toynbee, the most important universal historian from the 1930s to the 1950s, signiicantly changed his approach. In the postwar period, Fernand Braudel would be the one to propose a new universal history of the civilizations that managed to express the French and European perspective and attract worldwide interest in a vision of universal history that could interact with the American academic world. 29 Is here Such a hing as a European Perspective on American History? Maurizio Vaudagna Old World Americanist Historiography and “European” American History Writing1 Writing a history of European Americanist historians and their works necessarily involves addressing the tension between their national, regional, ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds on the one hand, and the place of American public life in the world and in the transatlantic relationship on the other. Are there visions and interpretations of the American past that we can call “European”? he answer to that question depends irst on what we mean by “Europe.” Scholars (including Old World Americanists) and the general public primarily understand this term in a spatial sense, referring to the approximately ifty nations that form the peninsula of Asia that we call “Europe” and that we Eurocentrically refer to as a “continent” while relegating India or Southeast Asia to the category of “subcontinent.” his particular use of the notion of Europe stresses its nature as a “geographical expression,” as Klemens von Metternich said of Italy during the Risorgimento. For centuries, until as late as the early 20th century, the term “concert of Europe” was used to refer to this group of various national entities and imperial powers that had more of a dominant position in the world in common than any cultural-historical trait. After the Enlightenment, however, a cultural-historical conversation about Europe 1. he opinions advanced in this essay result from my reconsideration of formerly published material. In the last four years some of my older ideas have found fertile ground for renewal, enrichment and reinement within the Europe-wide “We, the People” research group on Americanist historiography in Europe. Under the academic leadership of the University of Oxford and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, the scholarly output of this network appeared in Historians Across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA., 2014). I would like to express my deep gratitude to the network coordinators and editors of the book – Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck and Cécil Vidal – for their astute leadership, as well as to the network’s members and founders for the precious opportunity to participate in a irst-rate cultural conversation and to develop valuable scholarly and personal contacts. his paper, which follows the “We, the People” example, has no pretension to be complete, much less exhaustive. Its main purpose is to discuss some of the criteria that should condition any search for pan-European visions of American history between the late 19th century and the mid-1970s. Other historiographical developments like the application of global and transnational history to the American past are only dealt with in passing. 31 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space as an identity and an idea started developing, thus lending the word a deeper, shared meaning and helping to form a social, political and cultural geography as well as a value orientation that was thought to permeate its individual nations and the lives of its peoples. his efort was doubled in commitment and speed after World War II when it joined with a process of political and institutional uniication. he question of whether there is such a thing as a European perspective on North American history takes on a deeper meaning when we adopt this historical-cultural understanding of the word “Europe.” he Search for “European” Americanist History Writing: an “Entirely New Subject”2 and the Inluence of the Old World Historical Context he quest to historically reconstruct potential Europe-wide points of view on American history by Old World Americanist scholars and narrators is still in its early stages. It is easier to ind books on the Americanist historiographies of speciic nations than it is to ind those that take a pan-European perspective on the subject, which however do tend to list national cases side by side, with little or no efort to compare or contrast them. In each case, the word “Europe” is used purely as a spatial expression. However, if we wish to consider Europe as an “imagined community,” the recent Historians Across Borders: American History in a Global Age,3 which presents the work of twenty-four historians of the United States from western and central-eastern Europe, is really the irst conscious attempt to deal with this subject, notwithstanding preliminary steps taken by Rob Kroes, Sylvia Hilton and Cornelis van Minnen in Europe and Lewis Hanke in America.4 Historians Across Borders not only provides an enormous amount of new information on Old World Americanist historiography, but it also suggests approaches, concepts and periodizations through which to explore the topic well beyond the limits of earlier literature. We must therefore view this book not as the last word on the subject but, on the contrary, as the start of a new research avenue containing suggestions for what remains to be done. Moreover, as shown by the literature on over three centuries of Euro-American cultural and intellectual exchanges, “America,” and the United States in particular, has never been 2. he expression is cited in “Preface: Location and History” by Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck and Cécil Vidal, the editors of Historians Across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age, 20, which to this author’s knowledge is the irst systematic treatise entirely devoted to the deining features of pan-European visions of the American past across time and space. 3. Rob Kroes, “America and the European Sense of History,” Journal of American History, 86, 3 (Dec. 1999), 1135-1155; Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future (Amsterdam, 2007); Lewis Hanke, Guide to the Study of United States History Outside the U.S., 1945-1980, 5 vols. (White Plains, NY., 1985). 4. Barreyre, Heale, Tuck, Vidal, eds., Historians Across Borders. A forum on the same subject entitled “AHR Roundtable: You, the People” was published in the Summer 2014 issue of the American Historical Review, 119, 3 (June 2014), 741-823. 32 maurizio vaudagna “just another country,” a distant, neutral, “cold” subject in the European conversation (nor has Europe been considered as such in America). From its inception until the 1970s, the United States represented a charged hub of fears and desires, imitations and rejections, loves and biases that to some extent also permeated the ways Old World Americanists wrote about the American past. By implication, contextual issues related to the national, local, regional or Europe-wide environments of these scholars have usually been more important for understanding their historiography than the speciics of specialized, professional historical methods and procedures. As the editors of Historians Across Borders explained, this is why “European writing about the United States and its antecedents remains distinctive, even at a time of increased academic globalization.”5 In December 1986, Michael Heale surveyed British writings on American history and held that “there is today probably no peculiarly British view of American History. British scholars would give diferent answers to the question of how they approach the history of the United States. Several would insist that the history they write is no different from that of American scholars…Other British scholars take the view that their approach to American history is conditioned by their British environment.”6 Because of the obvious cultural-historical similarities, intense academic exchanges and closely intertwined publication networks, it was mainly scholars from Great Britain rather than continental Europe who insisted that Americanist historians writing on the eastern side of the Atlantic were no diferent from their US-based colleagues and should therefore be absorbed in the swollen ranks of the powerful American community of United States historians. As distinguished Cambridge Americanist Tony Badger said, “I… imagined myself to be a historian who happened to be British but who was working on a theme in domestic American history in the context of a clearly deined American historiographical problem.”7 here is no doubt that British Americanists became “scholars-in-between” the two sides of the Atlantic earlier than their continental counterparts, who until the 1970s mainly addressed their own national audiences and public lives, and mostly in their own language. However, as Heale pointed out, many British scholars “seem to take the view that distance can be a virtue.”8 5. Barreyre, Heale, Tuck, Vidal, eds., Historians Across Borders, XI. he purpose of this paper is to suggest a few guidelines that may help shed light on and interpret signiicant bodies of European American historiography based on the premise that contextual reasons have prevailed over specialized professional trends or that professional approaches and methods have often translated the needs and stimuli of public life and individual or collective value preferences into specialized terms. 6. Michael J. Heale, “American History: he View from Britain,” Reviews in American History (Dec. 1986), 501. 7. Tony Badger, “Confessions of a British Americanist,” he Journal of American History, 79, 2 (Sept. 1992), 517. his issue of the journal is entitled “Toward the Internationalization of American History.” Professor Badger’s work has often been cited as the epitome of the “going native” opinion. 8. Heale, “American History: he View from Britain,” 501. 33 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Regardless of Badger’s self-description as an Americanist “who happened to live elsewhere,”9 it is the principle of this paper that location does count and that, at least until the 1970s, European Americanists neither “went native” nor were they mostly “in between” scholars addressing both sides of the ocean. According to Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal, the issue is “how the embeddedness of scholars in particular contexts can shape-by both constraining and providing opportunities-their scholarship.” hey went on to explain that “European historians need to ind something in the American experience that touches a chord with domestic audiences, something that demonstrates relevance.”10 As a result, Old World Americanists have basically responded to European needs, trends and events and have brought them to bear on their American history writings in many ways, albeit in diferent versions and degrees depending on how American history has been contextualized within European cultural, historical and public space. he History of Old World Americanist Historiography as European History After witnessing the dawn of the 20th century as the dominant power in the world, the European “continent” faced the agonies of the “European tragedy,” the “European civil war,” the “European decline,” the “division of Europe,” the diicult postwar attempts to redeine its place in the world through European uniication, and, inally, the post1989 reappearance of a new Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. European historians can hardly avoid looking at themselves and others through the prism of these stormy developments, especially considering the evolution of the United States from “distant magnet” on the periphery of the Atlantic world for most of the 19th century to “European power” for most of the 20th as well as the establishment of Western Europe as the “second pillar” within the postwar “Atlantic Community” during what became “the American Century.”11 his tortured historical process is the primary context in which to appraise how Old World Americanists have talked about the American past. Most scholars who have written about European historiography of the United States have neglected to fully analyze Old World historical environments as the primary contexts of such writing. Instead, they have consciously or de facto seen this work as another (minor) episode in United States history writing, which is mainly published in the United States and is dominated by the ideas and methods of the powerful community of US-based historians. However, the Old World context does not mean that Europeanist historians 9. Tibor Frank, Martin Klimke and Stephen Tuck, “Using the American Past for the Present: European Historians and the Relevance of Writing American History,” in Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal, Historians Across Borders, 52. 10. Barreyre, Heale, Tuck, Vidal, Historians Across Borders, XVI, XIV-XV. 11. On “the American Century,” see R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., he American Century in Europe (Ithaca, NY., 2003). 34 maurizio vaudagna (especially historians of European culture, politics and ideas) and historical methodologists are any less capable of writing the history of Americanist historiography in Europe than their colleagues who specialize in US history. We would also do well to reevaluate the legacy of “non-pure” Americanists in various eastern and western countries of Europe who were some of the irst to familiarize their scholarly and public communities with the American past. When H. Hale Bellot came to occupy the irst British chair in American History in 1930, he had never been to the United States. Giorgio Spini, who launched the study of American history in Italy in the 1960s, was a historian of the Reformation. And in the USSR Aleksei Eimov, the “patriarch of Soviet historians,”12 launched Russian American studies during the interwar years. During the early postwar period, many European students of American foreign relations “had a background as historians of the foreign afairs of their own countries or of the international system.”13 Between the 1950s and the early 1990s, however, Americanists seeking academic space and scholarly recognition in European universities argued in favor of “pure” Americanist historians who dealt exclusively with US history. While these multifaceted forerunners were often criticized for their Eurocentric tendency to view the American past as a secondary branch of European history, their legacy of multiple, interdependent historical specializations ofer a lesson for today’s “pure” Americanists. While the former looked at the American experience in the context of broader international scenarios, the latter have often limited themselves to national boundaries. Reconsidered within today’s “post-European decline” environment in which European pretensions would sound close to ridiculous, the wideranging expertise that these earlier scholars applied to American history can be pondered as a forerunner via-à-vis the present context of transnational and global history. he Diicult Debate over the Idea of Europe and European identity, and American History Writing in a European Context If the history of Americanist historiography in the Old World is largely a matter of European history, and Europe is to be understood not only as a spatial expression but also as “a community of shared values” or a common “civic identity,”14 then the relevant 12. Ivan Kurilla, “Relections on Russia,” in Barreyre, Heale, Tuck, Vidal, Historians Across Borders,174. 13. Hans Krabbendam, Pauline Peretz, Mario Del Pero and Helle Porsdam, “American Foreign Relations in European Perspectives: Geopolitics and the Writing of History,” in Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal, Historians Across Borders, 120. On Bellot, see Michael Heale, Sylvia Hilton, Halina Paraianowicz, Paul Schor and Maurizio Vaudagna, “Watersheds in Time and Place: Writing American History in Europe,” in Barreyre, Heale, Tuck, Vidal, Historians Across Borders, 9. On Eimov, see Ivan Kurilla, “Relections on Russia,” 174, in the same book. 14. he term is drawn from Léonce Bekeman’s forthcoming article “he Idea of Europe: Identity-Building from a Historical Perspective,” University of Padua, 1, 8. 35 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space contextual literature is that which presents the debate over the history and current state of the idea of Europe, the progress and failures of the European uniication process and, more importantly, the nature of European identity, if such a thing exists at all.15 According to Belgian Europeanist Léonce Bekemans, “identity is related to the way individuals reach certain self-awareness in relation to their family, social and ethnic group, language, culture, religious ailiation and political commitment. It is often expressed by the idea of ‘belonging’.”16 Identity in general, and European identity in particular, can be analyzed by looking at both its conceptual, cultural and historical content, and “the external dimension of identity, i.e. Europe’s place and responsibility in the international landscape.”17 While the contours of the latter dimension are relatively clear, and the history of the idea of Europe and of European institutions or economics has fairly distinct boundaries and developments, when it comes to the cultural-historical nature of European identity, the whole ield becomes fuzzy, multifaceted and controversial. Following Bekemans, European identity building or identity “in the making” has been the subject of three main interpretations. he “communitarian view” approaches Europe as a family of nations anchored in a common history and culture. he “liberal and republican view” argues for “a common political culture, i.e. a civic identity, based on universal principles… that are expressed in the framework of a common public sphere and political participation (or ‘constitutional patriotism’).” Finally, “constructivists” stress that a European identity will emerge from “common political and civic practices of citizens sharing the same political and civic values, while at the same time adhering to diferent cultural practices.”18 Regardless of which interpretation is preferred, most of those who have studied the Old World sense of self agree that the European identity is a weak one, and that in identiication processes the “Europe of the nation-state” continues to prevail over both the “community of shared values” and “constitutional patriotism.” As summarized by Bekemans, “the nationstate continues to be the predominant reference for European citizens despite growing Europeanization of identity-building. he Eurobarometer surveys show that EU citizens continue to identify irst of all with their own country. A relatively low political participation and weak attachment pose of course a legitimacy problem to the EU.”19 While early 15. he concept of “identity” is both widely used and widely controversial. Critics argue that it emphasizes exclusion as much as inclusion and often tends to espouse social and cultural hierarchies. Luisa Passerini and Hartmut Kaelble have suggested the alternative notions of “European subjectivity” and “European conscience,” respectively. Similar to Americanists’ ambiguous use of the word “America” when referring to the United States, which is normally adopted more for its widespread use than for its rigorous meaning, the same is true for the use in this essay of the word “identity,” which both Passerini and Kaelble end up using despite their criticism. See Passerini, “Introduzione,” 3-4, and Kaelble, “Periodizzazione e tipologia,” 29-32, both in Luisa Passerini, Identità culturale europea. Idee, sentimenti, relazioni (Florence, 1998). 16. Bekemans, “he Idea of Europe,” 7. 17. Ibidem, 11. 18. Ibidem, 8. 19. Ibidem, 9. 36 maurizio vaudagna postwar builders of European uniication had other more urgent matters to address, in the 1970s this weakness started to concern the European Community leadership and in December 1973 the Copenhagen Declaration on European Identity tried to press the point for the irst time. However, it showed that the weak sense of European belonging of “European peoples” could be a symptom of the shaky European loyalties upon which the European Union was being built, as indicated by the popular referendums in France and the Netherlands that turned down the Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Drawing on his experience in contact with many European historians of the United States, Eric Foner once remarked that there was nothing particularly “European” about the way they were writing American history. he fact that European Americanists writing about Old World historiography of the United States have mostly dealt with national cases is not because of any particular lack on their part; nor is it due solely to their familiarity with their own country’s scholarly works appearing in their own idiom as part of their own university system. heir choice has also responded to the fact that the “Europe of the nation-state” has continued to prevail over the “Europe of citizens” and the “Europe of shared values.” hey have a much better idea of who Germans, Poles or Italians are, and why they feel the way they do, than of who “Europeans” are. In spite of recent eforts to familiarize Old World Americanists with the broader scenario of Europe-wide writings in American history, such awareness tends not to be part of the basic historical patrimony with which they are equipped. While normally well informed of trends among US-based Americanist historians and their own national colleagues, they tend to lack a European perspective on the ield. Where Europe begins and ends in geographical, geo-cultural and geopolitical terms and what cultural, civic and historical experiences and features deine European identity and diferentiate it from other regions and populations of the world are controversial, confusing matters about which there is little agreement. he diiculty in answering the titular question of this paper has more to do with the complicated nature of European cultural-political history and alleged European shared values and identities than with any sort of shortcoming on the part of European historians of the United States. National and even regional or local contexts are therefore often more itting for the writing of American history within the geographical space of Europe. Unlike the world of soccer in which national fans are increasingly familiar with the European scene, oft-cited obstacles to a common perspective on Old World American historiography – like difering idioms, narrative styles, academic structures,20 publishing markets and readers – seem 20. In this respect, the collaboration between the twenty-four European Americanists, myself included, who contributed to the oft-cited book Historians Across Borders was an instructive and extraordinary experience. Most members started of familiar with the historiography of their own countries and that of the US, but the intense exchange of information and ideas “Europeanized” us all. his is relected in the book, which nevertheless moves between a pan-European perspective and separate national cases. It also shows how much work remains to be done to fully reconstruct, contextualize and interpret the history of European Americanist historiography. 37 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space insurmountable because of the weakness of Europe’s identity, which has caused few trends to develop and few eforts to be put in place to overcome such obstacles. While the subject of European identity makes it hard for an Americanist to ind common Old World visions of the American past, approaching identity in terms of the relationship with the “Other” provides European historians of the United States with a rich and promising ield of research. British sociologist Gerard Delanty, who wrote Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality in 1995, has argued that when Islam stopped posing a threat in the late 16th century “America, not the Orient … became the prime dominant theme of European self-representation.”21 A western course of cultural comparison and connection was thus launched in which “America” became the main “Other” of the European selfportrait. hereafter, beyond national diferences and contrasts, when the Enlightenment made Europe not only a continent but also an “imagined community,” Europe’s hegemonic power in the world gave “the concert of Europe,” its national members, its elites and its peoples a sense of civilizational superiority vis-à-vis “the Rest,” including America. Predictably, this comparison started out by setting the (European) “civilized” against the (American) “primitive.” According to Hartmut Kaelble, a historian of European life and identity, the dismantling of Europe’s “superiority complex” started in the late 19th century and was completed by the 1960s with the rise of the non-European bipolar world and the crumbling of the European empires. he erosion began when non-European world powers came to the fore. Japan was obviously one of these, after its surprising victory over the Russian empire in 1904-1905, though one might ask whether Russia was even part of Europe in the irst place – an issue that has never stopped haunting the entire debate over Europe’s nature.22 More importantly, the rise of the United States to world power status became the primary symptom of the incipient downsizing of Europe’s place in the world. he transatlantic giant started competing with Europe (and later overtaking it) as an economic power, an international player, a cradle of democracy, a liberal society and a model of modernity. he traditional European “dispute of the New World”23 grew, its concepts were updated and it became United-States-centered. A new lood of books on the “stars and stripes” republic by travelers, observers, economists, constitutionalists, policymakers and professional scholars, including historians, tried to make sense of this new international protagonist that had moved from the periphery of the world system to its center. As Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal have argued, “In modern times few countries have been more observed than the United States, and few countries have 21. Gerard Delanty, “L’identità europea come costruzione sociale,” in Passerini, ed., Identità culturale europea. Idee, sentimenti, relazioni, 52; see his Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London, 1995). 22. On the Russian question, see, among many, Krzysztof Pomian, L’Europa e le nazioni (Milano, 1990), 137-141, 221-229 [original, L’Europe et ses nations (Paris, 1990)]. 23. he phrase comes from the title of Antonello Gerbi’s book he Dispute of the New World (Pittsburgh, 2010); Italian original, La disputa del Nuovo Mondo (Milan, 1955). 38 maurizio vaudagna sent more observers there than those in Europe.”24 Although for many European elites the United States came to embody the very idea of the present vis-à-vis “Old Europe,” historical texts on various aspects of American life nevertheless appeared. Many of these featured a historicist type of analysis to determine the changes over time that had led the United States to arrive at its current position. Even the two much publicized continentwide turn-of-the-century visits of the mammoth – for European standards – circus of Bufalo Bill elicited controversial questions about what America really was and how it had gotten there. Interaction with the United States was strategic throughout the historical process of “decentering” the Old World. he rationalization and narration of the European tragedies of the irst half of the 20th century, the “European Civil War,” the decades of dictatorship, the triumph of the “murderous ideas” of racial superiority, and the advancement of the “European decline” paralleled and contrasted the American “victory tale.” As the United States became the “irst pillar” of the 20th-century transatlantic relationship, Old World Eurocentric public and cultural voices tried rescuing “European honor,” sometimes by encompassing the American experience within the idea of a historic “Greater Europe” based on the Old World planet-wide diaspora; other times by building an Athens-Rome kind of link in which Athens/Europe provided cultural tradition and production to the new “big brother” across the ocean. Similarly, in the wake of the early conceptualizations of a transatlantic, western world, many narrators of the “Atlantic Community” framed the idea of a common Atlantic identity that involved Europe providing the past and the United States acting as guarantor of the present and model of the future.25 However, historian of European identity Luisa Passerini highlighted what was altogether the most important geopolitical, cultural attempt to reverse the rise/decline trend of the transatlantic relationship in the age of the “European tragedy” when she argued that “the very idea of a united Europe was kidnapped by Nazis and Fascists in the interwar years.”26 he spirit of European superiority was reinstated within a vision of an Old World-centered fascist millennium to counter decadent Anglo-Saxon liberal plutocracies, a process that culminated in the early years of World War II when a Nazi victory seemed imminent and the emerging geopolitics heralded a German-led European continent aligned against 24. Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal, Historians Across Borders, IX. 25. On the intellectual foundations of the Atlantic Community, see Marco Mariano, “he U.S. Discovers Europe: Life Magazine and the Invention of the ‘Atlantic Community’ in the 1940s,” in Maurizio Vaudagna, ed., he Place of Europe in American History: 20th Century Perspectives (Turin, 2007), 161-185; and Marco Mariano, “America as a Transatlantic Nation: Henry Luce, Life and the West in the 1940s,” in Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna and Rafaella Baritono, Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective (Turin, 2013). 26. Luisa Passerini, “Introduzione. Dalle ironie dell’identità alle identità dell’ironia,” in Passerini, Identità culturale europea, 1. Passerini has dealt with the imaginary and sentimental dimension of European identity. See Luisa Passerini, L’Europa e l’Amore Immaginario e politica tra le due guerre (Milano, 1999). 39 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space the British Empire and the Western Hemisphere. Some well-known travellers, journalists and professional Americanists tried to substantiate this fascist vision of transatlantic relations through consequent readings of the American present and the American past.27 he wartime defeat of this nightmare of racist despotism rang the inal death knell for any remaining sense of European cultural-historical primacy. As Kaelble argued, by the time the “European conscience” was able to recover a solid sense of self in the 1960s with the political and institutional establishment of the European Union – which he believed was the source, not the result, of a European identity free of Eurocentrism – the United States had clearly become the “free world colossus” in the place of a divided, weakened Europe. By the end of World War II, the driver of the Wilsonian dream of democracy and prosperity within a liberal modernity had clearly immigrated to American shores. he United States could therefore aford the luxury of supporting the European uniication process, in contrast with other past and present examples of identity building carried out not with encouragement but in opposition to dominant outside powers.28 Because the communist East never portrayed itself as a “European” project, at the end of World War II the only available vision of a united Europe was the western, transatlantic project of a liberal, prosperous, democratic Old World, which was very similar to the “American Way,” even with its larger dose of social and governmental welfare state.29 European socialists in the 1950s and communists into the 1970s opposed uniication as a function of American hegemonic power. In the 1950s America’s support for a potentially united Europe even convinced British Americanist Malcolm Bradbury that the United States superpower had “invented” Europe because it needed a solid, cohesive Old World. 27. On Friedrich Schoenemann, who was both a founder of American studies in interwar Germany and later a distinguished Nazi Americanist, see Phillip Gassert, “he Study of US. History in Germany,” in Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future, 123-125. On Bernard Faÿ in Vichy France, see Antoine Compagnon, Le cas Bernard Faÿ: du College de France a l’ indignité nationale (Paris, 2009); and John L. Harvey, “Conservative Crossings: Bernard Faÿ and the Rise of American Studies in hird-Republic France,” Historical Relections, 36, 1 (2010), 95-124. On the case of Italian fascism, see my essays on “National Fall and Revival in Roosevelt’s and Mussolini’s Public Addresses,” and “New Deal and Fascist Corporatism in the Italian Political and Economic Journals of the Early 1930s,” both in Maurizio Vaudagna, he New Deal and the American Welfare State: Essays from a Transatlantic Perspective (1933-1945) (Turin, 2014), 161-176, 177-203. 28. Hartmut Kaelble, “Periodizzazione e tipologia,” in Passerini, Identità culturale europea, 36, 42-43. Kaelble is well known for his notion of the historic convergence of European societies. See Hartmut Kaelble, Auf dem Weg zu einer europaischen Gesellschaft. Eine Sozialgeschichte Westeuropas, 1880-1980 (Muenchen, 1987). On the American support of the European Union, see Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe (London, 2000). On modernity and the transatlantic relationship, see David Ellwood, he Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford, 2012). 29. In the interwar years Europe’s leading role in public social security and planning led to a rising Old World inluence in the United States as American thinkers, policy planners, leaders, scholars and public observers rushed to the Old World to examine and draw inspiration from the guidelines of European social policies, as reconstructed in the masterful book by Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 40 maurizio vaudagna T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, said in 1978 that Henry James had undergone a miraculous sort of personal transformation as an American who had become not a Briton but an actual “European” – something neither an Old World native nor a member of a European nation could ever become.30 In Germany and Italy, where people were busy reconstructing their democratic institutions and cultures, American constitutional history (mostly publicized by US-based Americanists and supported by the resources of United States cultural diplomacy) became an exemplar and a source of inspiration. In Britain, a number of Americanists agreed with H.C. Allen’s assertion that “the history of Anglo-American relations [was] … the most important [topic], as well as the most relevant, to the future of Western civilization.”31 Against the historic backdrop of transatlantic interactions, EuropeanAmerican “connection history” – which in the past was often criticized as the sign of a restrictive approach to American history by a weak Old World Americanist profession as compared to the more “mature” history writing on exclusively American topics – responded to a deep need produced by the European historical condition. “Connection history” is understood by European Americanists in terms of the mainly “bilateral relationships between their home countries and the United States... Colonial expansion, migration, diplomatic relations, wars, trade, and transatlantic cultural interactions are all topics susceptible to scholarly research in European archives and have often been seen as European history.”32 he heyday for connection history and “bilateral relations history” is the 1950s to the early 1970s, after which topics became more varied and “pure” American subjects loomed larger than before. However, studies of American-European or bilateral relations continued to thrive even later as a relection of the relative weight of the New World and the Old World in the transatlantic relationship within the larger global context. In the last couple of decades in particular, the interpretative focus has centered on the issue of agency. As Hans Krabbendam, Pauline Peretz, Mario Del Pero and Helle Porsdam argued, in US foreign policy and American-European diplomatic relations studies, “many historians in Europe have been moved to emphasize European agency.”33 Ever since Dutch historian and sociologist Rob Kroes published studies in the late 1990s on the history of “Americanization” – an area in which the supremacy of the United States in exporting 30. Delanty, “L’Identità europea,” 48-49. On the socialist and communist opposition, see Marcello Verga, “Europa. Costruzione dell’identità dell’Europa,” Dizionario di Storia (Roma, 2010), http://www.treccani. it/enciclopedia/europa-costruzione-dell-identita-dell-europa_altro, 2. 31. Heale et al., “Watersheds in Time and Place,” 13. 32. Ibidem, 4. 33. Hans Krabbendam, Pauline Peretz, Mario Del Pero and Helle Porsdam, “American Foreign Relations in European Perspectives: Geopolitics and the Writing of History,” in Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal, Historians Across Borders, 127. For a recent history of the 20th-century transatlantic relationship that stresses European autonomy and agency, see Mary Nolan, he Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (New York, 2012). 41 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space popular culture, consumer items and lifestyles seemed absolute – European scholars have stressed the importance of examining the receiving end of this inluence, highlighting how Europeans have selected, transformed, adapted and appropriated commercial and media messages from the United States for their own uses.34 In writing the history of European Americanist historiography, the history of over a century of transatlantic interactions has also led to issues of periodization and determining what kind of American past and what sort of narrators researchers should be looking for. After World War II the place of the United States in Europe grew very rapidly and an interest in the American past increased among Europeanist historians as new chairs in American history were installed in European universities. At the same time, the division of the Old World severed cultural relations between western and east-central Europe. As a result, until recently most American history writing in the Old World has taken place in western European countries under the aegis of the rationale of the Atlantic Community and the Cold War. he fact that the American wartime rescue of Europe from its own vices correlated with the rise of professional American history writing in western European academia mainly after 1945 was often used to explain the starting date and the geocultural space of most writing on “he Academic Study of U.S. History in Europe,” as Cornelis van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton titled their introduction to an early book on the subject.35 Old World Americanist historiography therefore coincided with the goal of gathering and re-democratizing all of Western Europe around the value of liberal democracy following the interbellum peak of European dictatorships and crimes against humanity, and it has often, albeit sometimes unconsciously, embraced the “free world” side of the East-West Cold War competition. If we wish to determine whether there have been continent-wide points of view on American history in the European “imagined community,” we need to address more than just professional, academic Americanists and their styles of historical narration. In fact, we should use as our model the quest to establish the role the US past played in the “dispute of the New World” that marks countless analyses and tales of America narrated by European intellectuals, scholars and writers, as well as public commentators, politicians, journalists and policy planners, mainly in response to European needs, trends and events. We also need to determine what kinds of narrators have built “high” or “low” historical images of the United States and what styles and plots they have adopted. he purpose is to explore how past references and roots have been used to explain all things American to Europeans (and possibly to Americans as well), to understand not only how European Americanist specialists have reconstructed the American historical past, but also how 34. Rob Kroes, If You Have Seen One, You Have Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana and Chicago, 1996). 35. van Minnen and Hilton, Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future, 7-45. 42 maurizio vaudagna various narrators have applied a historicist kind of argumentation and reasoning to interpret the United States. With this in mind, the best starting date in the modern version of the “dispute of the New World” is the end of the 19th century when the EuropeanAmerican interaction was essentially redeined (for example with the Cuban War of 1898 and the resulting defeat of a European imperial power), the United States rose to the status of world actor and the Old World started hearing the rumblings of an approaching “European decline.” Moreover, the post-1945 periodization of the history of Americanist historiography in a western, liberal, prosperous Atlanticist Europe has sanitized European historical narrations of America with respect to the tortured itinerary of 20th-century European history. Indeed, it conveniently avoids the question of whether the “European tragedy” and the “division of Europe” contaminated the ways Old World Americanist observers and scholars – who operated in, and were often inluenced by, the environments of despotic monarchical, fascist or communist Europe – narrated the American past and American public life. We are slowly rediscovering pre-1945 Americanists who either used the political ideologies of their dictatorial countries to frame authoritarian interpretations of the American past – like Friedrich Schoenemann in Nazi Germany, Gennaro Mondaini in Fascist Italy and Bernard Fay in Vichy, France – or paid dearly for opposing such approaches, like the Russian Maxsim M. Kovalevski who lost his job at the University of Moscow in 1887 after publishing a liberal, multivolume constitutional history of the United States.36 In the Cold War years, the Soviet version of United States history was a complicated authoritarian story. Historians Tibor Frank, Martin Klimke and Stephen Tuck have noted that “during the early Cold War, even the name of the United States was anathema in a thoroughly Sovietized Eastern Europe. here was little historical scholarship on the United States outside a rigid Marxist-Leninist framework, much of it politicized and tendentious.”37 However, in the same book Russian Americanist Ivan Kurilla also stressed that with the onset of the Cold War the number of Russian Americanists, mostly specializing in the history of US foreign policy and US-USSR bilateral relations, multiplied: “Russia for many years now has had a large contingent of American history specialists... thus making the Soviet case paradoxically closer to that of the US ally Great Britain than to that of continental Europe.” “Even though the whole ield was used as an arena of ideological struggle,” added Kurilla, stressing the relevance of “enemy studies” in the USSR and the historicist core of Russian Marxism, “the state could not aford to hire poorly equipped scholars... the stress on conlict rather than consensus helped Soviet Americanists produce good works on black slavery and the working class movement in 36. Heale at al., “Watersheds in Time and Place,” 7-9. 37. Tibor Frank, Martin Klimke and Stephen Tuck, “Using the American Past for the Present: European Historians and the Relevance of Writing American History,” in Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal, Historians Across Borders, 43. 43 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space the United States before American revisionist historians reinvented those themes in their writings.”38 In light of the notion that unfree history is “junk history,” scholars who have studied US historiography in Europe have avoided many diicult questions about how Europeans narrated America throughout the 20th century. he American history produced by expounders of fascist, soviet and earlier monarchical despotisms was based on ideological biases and political instrumentalism. It also lacked a foundation in primary sources and therefore was not history in any accurate sense. However, accuracy and scientiic rigor are not the only dimensions of a narration of the past that are worth studying, especially when it comes to the American past. How did the authors of these books manage to relect the ideological cornerstones of their political orders? Did they succeed in creating widely shared images of the United States and shaping public attitudes towards it? Or did they, conversely, incite the spread of alternative, unoicial narratives of the United States and the American past? A study of European Americanist historiography that starts in 1945 portrays a badly truncated 20th-century history of the Old World whose sorrows are invisible. Other, earlier narratives of American history also circulated in 20th-century Europe, even if some of these may run counter to our European pride. Building a Geo-Cultural and Geo-Historical Map of European Americanist Historiography “Whether a kind of pan-European perspective will emerge in this scholarship to temper the multiple local perspectives that have thus far characterized it remains to be seen.”39 his quasi-closing sentence written by the authors of the long historiographical essay that opens the irst part of Historians Across Borders seems to mirror the uncertain nature of European identities. Such lack of clarity also impacts this essay. Up to this point, we have explored the plural contexts of European identities and nations within which Old World-based American history has been written. Now, however, we will focus on the existing fragments of common, Europe-wide interpretations of the US past formulated by Old World Americanists in books and essays, with the understanding that a inal answer to the question in the title of this paper must remain entirely preliminary and tentative. One of the most oft-cited features of the idea of Europe and European identity is the tension between diversity and similarity, between variety and homogeneity; a tension related to languages, historical experiences, cultural and political values, social habits and public-intellectual contexts. Kaelble has stressed the “national, regional, religious 38. Ivan Kurilla, “Relections from Russia,” in Barreyre, Heale, Tuck and Vidal, Historians Across Borders, 176-177. 39. Heale et al., “Watersheds in Time and Place,” 32-33. 44 maurizio vaudagna and ethnic plurality of European civilizations and identities.” As he argued, “plurality is often considered an important European speciicity, much less homogeneous and uniform than other ancient or recent civilizations like India, China or the United States.”40 he diiculty of coordinating variety and convergence has haunted the eforts of the builders of European uniication for over half a century. Asking whether there are pan-European visions of the American past – if Europe is understood as an “imagined community” – largely means doing the same thing, i.e., coordinating the diversity found in the American history writing of diferent nations, regions and areas of Europe, on the one hand, with the features that seem to be shared by the whole continent, on the other. Books and articles on Americanist historiography in speciic European nations and regions have produced a wealth of information on the former aspect. However, to identify uniied Europe-wide interpretations of the American past one would need to cohesively arrange such information within an interdependent geo-cultural, geo-historical map of American historiography in the diferent nations and parts of Europe, something that to this author’s knowledge has never been done. Such a map would be very changeable in terms of space, time, topics and methods. National or regional sections may vary for diferent reasons, as is the case with the political and international factors that caused Marxist-Leninist “enemy studies” to explode in the Soviet Union, while scholars who were more independent found refuge from censorship in “safe” topics like colonial history. At the same time, in the Soviet Union in the 1950s information on the American past for universities and learned readers was limited to a rigidly ideological multivolume history of the world with chapters on the United States, which was equally orthodox reading in satellite East-Central European countries. Other Old World Americanist regionalisms may result from cultural, linguistic and historical proximity or contrast, like those of Great Britain and Spain/Portugal. In Britain an interest in the American past emerged earlier than elsewhere in Europe, there are more Americanist historians, topics are more diverse and opinions stressing the homogeneity of Americanists on both sides of the Atlantic are voiced more often – even if research subjects inspired by the “special relationship” still elicit a lot of interest. he case of Britain is in mirror-like contrast with those of Spain and Portugal where, because of their geopolitical and cultural history, “America” is irst and foremost what we call “Latin America” and the use of the word to refer exclusively to the United States is resented. Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, who teaches American history at the Complutense University in Madrid, adopted the wording “USAmerica” and “USAmerican” in their article on the academic study of American history in Europe to take that criticism in account.41 A geo-cultural map of American historiography in Europe would also have to identify prevalent scholarly interests in certain periods and subjects of United States history that 40. Kaelble, “Periodizzazione e tipologia,” 33. 41. Van Minnen and Hilton, “he Academic Study of U.S. History in Europe,” all throughout the book. 45 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space emerged out of the historical experiences of diferent European nations and regions. A good example is the interest of British, Spanish, French and Russian Americanists in colonial history, partly encouraged by the recent explosion of early modern Atlantic history that has driven Spanish, French and Russian scholars to rescue the story of nonEnglish-speaking white North America from oblivion. US constitutional history, with its political and individual liberties and its pluralist institutions, loomed large as a model and a source of inspiration for Americanists in countries emerging out of dictatorial regimes like Germany and Italy after World War II, Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, and the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. here has also been a recent crop of western European studies in US women’s history that however seem to have few counterparts in formerly socialist countries. hese examples represent the beginning of research that largely remains to be done. However, as mentioned earlier, if we wish to ind common European interpretations of American history we must irst frame a changeable, interactive geopolitical, geo-cultural and geo-historical map of the many Europes that have variously interpreted the “dispute of the New World” in response to their own needs and events; one that would translate all the diverse, irrepressible European nationalities, lifestyles and identities in terms of Americanist history writing in the Old World. Fragments of a “Pan-European” Perspective on American History Despite the distances and diversity that characterize it, Europe represents a tortured yet ongoing process of the coming together of diferent peoples whose lifestyles are becoming gradually more alike and whose private and public lives are increasingly afected by the same supranational institutions. Historian of the European Union Desmond Dinand said in reference to the postwar period, “‘Ordinary Europeans often seemed left out. Europeans were always ambivalent about their singular political experiment.”42 At the same time, the end of Eurocentrism, the “European decline” and the awareness that Europe is no longer the ambiguous “master of the world” and is now required to draw a sense of self from comparisons with other peoples and continents have encouraged “Homo Europaeus” – to borrow the expression of French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry – to ponder what the “Europe of Citizens” has in common. Often, European speakers vindicate the wisdom of their opinions based not on what has gone right in Europe but on the lessons learnt because of what has gone wrong. On the other hand, Europe has also truly been recast since 1989 with the disappearance of the Iron Curtain dividing the Old World in two. European geography once again stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals and expressions like “Mitteleuropa” – customary until voided by the postwar East-West divide – have resurfaced. he end of the ideological, geopolitical struggle between competing value 42. Desmond Dinand, Europe Recast: A History of European Union (London, 2004), 324. 46 maurizio vaudagna systems and socio-economic orders that marked the history of 20th-century Europe led to the disappearance of some of the basic contextual factors that conditioned European Americanist historiography from the end of the 19th century onwards. With the attraction of the communist world having shrunk drastically by the mid-1970s, the United States stopped being the object of worship or demonization and became a European “Other” in less controversial terms. Once America and Western Europe no longer needed to be closely associated and homogeneous in the face of an eastern “enemy,” observers started noticing a “Widening Atlantic” between the New World and the Old World.43 hese developments eventually inluenced European scholars to carry out what was the opposite of American history writing inspired by European diversity. he evolution of migration studies is a good example of this. Until some twenty-ive years ago European scholars (and most American scholars, for that matter) were accustomed to talking in terms of Polish, Russian, Scandinavian or Italian immigration to America. Almost no one referred to “European migrants.” However, with the establishment and blossoming of studies on East Asian, South Indian, Caribbean and Mexican migration, European Americanist migrationists have started using just this term in their search for common features (in family structures and practices, for example). For all the aforementioned reasons, the mid-1970s appear as another watershed moment for American history writing in Europe. We could consider it the closing date of a near-century that began in the 1890s and maintained some basic features regarding the changing reciprocal weight of America and Europe in the world, and the way the Old World had looked at the New World, despite the many turning points of European and transatlantic history throughout the 20th century. While we may have a very preliminary idea, it is still too early to say what the Americanist vision of the “New Europe” or the “Coming Europe” will be. We would be wiser simply to ask what fragmented legacies of pan-European visions of the American past can be drawn from the complicated Old World of the 20th century. Migration history is a good example of a set of American historical topics that can really be considered “European” because they have never ceased to interest Old World Americanists of various nations beyond the East-West European divide. Historians throughout Europe have been strongly interested in the “connections” between the two sides of the ocean, migration, Euro-American and bilateral relations, American foreign policy and, more recently, the media and popular culture. Since the 1950s the Euro-American historiography of the “Age of Democratic Revolutions” has exempliied, frequently in Eurocentric terms, the comparative and relational writings on the American, French, British and Russian revolutions that have appeared without interruption – albeit with diferent reconstructions and value implications – throughout European and 43. On this issue, see Maurizio Vaudagna, “Citizenship, Welfare and the State in the Controversy over ‘he Widening Atlantic’,” in Gorazd Kovacic ed., Discussing the Transatlantic Gap: the Future of Euro-American Relations (Lubljana, Slovenia, 2005). 47 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space American historiography.44 European Americanists have consistently treated the American Revolution as a cradle of modern human and citizenship rights; the American Civil War as a component of the great 19th-century nation-building trend; American economic and industrial development as part of the historical theme of industrialization; the Great Depression and the New Deal as all-important episodes in the history of modern capitalism and the 20th-century welfare state; the rise of the United States to the status of world power in the late 19th century; and World War II and the Cold War as fundamental steps in building the 20th century international order (or disorder). hese subjects are part of larger, transnational historical issues that must be ascribed to the history of industrialized countries in general, not just that of Europe and America. Historians from all European nations have addressed the history of black America, earlier as a matter of transatlantic freedom, democracy and social justice, and more recently also as a relection on Europe as a multicultural destination for immigrants.45 American federalism has also been dealt with in two diferent ways. While most European Americanists living in rather centralized national states have basically ignored it, intellectuals and historians closely linked to EU building eforts have given it a great deal of attention and have searched for historical examples that could merge variety with unity. hese subjects have loomed large not only in European Americanist scholarship but also in descriptions of the American past by non-academic, non-professional narrators in the media and in public life, thereby demonstrating the interdependence of the diferent Americanist styles whose reconstruction is the ultimate goal in the search for a “European” way to talk about American history. his insight also echoes another theme unifying all European Americanist historians, independent of country, political order or region. All teachers of American history in European schools and universities know very well that if they want their message to reach their students – and the same could be said of readers or television viewers – they must somehow come to grips with the deep-rooted heritage of positive and negative American myths already in students’ minds that have created robust images of what the United States is or has been. Teachers have reacted in diferent ways to this constraint, with some considering it pure distortion to be discarded and others using it as a springboard for reaching a more accurate understanding of the American republic. Whatever the response, this is certainly a common condition of Americanist teachers 44. On the notion of a “Greater Europe,” see Tiziano Bonazzi, “Constructing and Reconstructing Europe: Torture of an American Prometheus or Punishment of a New World Sisyphus?,” in Maurizio Vaudagna, ed., he Place of Europe in American History: 20th Century Perspectives (Turin, 2007), 11-26. 45. he masterful book by Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: he Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944) is a very good example of a non-historian narrator of America who made extensive use of historical and historicist subjects to ground his argument. More recently, French Americanist Pap Ndiaye explicitly used the example of black American history, which he examined in his book Les Noirs américaines. En marche pour l’ égalité (Paris, 2009), to support his argument on the black condition in France: Pap Ndiaye, La condition noire. Essai sur une minorité francaise (Paris, 2008). Similar examples could be cited for other European countries. 48 maurizio vaudagna and writers throughout Europe. It also brings with it another Europe-wide consequence in terms of popular writings on American history. Pop culture books, pamphlets, tracts and TV series about American history are fairly numerous, often very well known and relatively important in shaping a widespread vision of the American past. hese texts and programs usually fall somewhere between scholarship and myth, either because they meritoriously manage to popularize accurate historical reconstructions, or because they do nothing more than use alleged historical language to narrate the exceptionalist, nationalist mythology of the American past. We might well wonder whether the American myth can remain salient as the United States becomes less of a controversial “Other” in Europe.46 he theme of the American myth brings to mind the pan-European issue of using “American exceptionalism” to approach American history and America’s place in the world. he “European tragedy” of war and dictatorship in the irst half of the 20th century to some extent vaccinated Europeans (though not all of them unfortunately) against the evils of nationalism. A large majority of European Americanists have been opposed to the notion of “American exceptionalism,” one that has loomed large not only in the history of US-based American history writing, especially in the 1950s, but even more so in the American public conversation. As Daniel T. Rodgers has pointed out, “Diference in American national culture has meant better: the superiority of the American way.”47 Not all European Americanists have been anti-exceptionalist. Some, convinced of its important lessons for Europeans, have even enthusiastically subscribed to the exceptionalist reconstruction of American history, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the prevalent European opposition derives from more than just the fact that exceptionalism implies the civilizational primacy of the United States over other peoples and regions of the world. Old World Americanist historians also feel that the concept brings with it the germs of nationalism that caused so much drama in 20th-century European history. Nationalism often tries to legitimize itself via an imagined, mythical history used to ground pretended supremacy. In the case of the United States, historical mythology may concentrate on either the worship of the positive American model or the demonization of the imperialist “big brother.” As a result, most European Americanists have agreed with Cornelis van Minnen and Sylvia Hilton who believe that “exceptionalist model-myth discourses and radical manifestations of anti-USAmericanism could be considered as the two sides of the same coin. hey both express highly judgmental evaluations of national character and policies, maintaining them in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary.”48 46. he immensely popular Alistair Cooke’s America (New York, 1973), which sold two million copies in Britain and was the companion to Cooke’s equally popular 13-part TV series America: A Personal History of the United States, is a good case in point. 47. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” paper prepared for the conference on he State of Historical Writing in North America, sponsored by the Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici, University of San Marino, and the Department of History of Brown University, San Marino, June 6-11, 1995, 2. 48. Hilton and van Minnen, “he Academic Study of American History in Europe,” 11. 49 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space In conclusion, both academic and public commentators have observed that the 1970s witnessed the exhaustion of the 20th-century public agenda, thereafter rewritten and transformed with new issues and protagonists in Europe, America and the rest of the world. One of the most important causes of this change was rapid internationalization and globalization that required all the major axes of power of the former global scenario, including the transatlantic relationship, to be re-contextualized and redeined. Before this turning point, most European Americanist historians were inluenced by their European and national contexts and spoke to their national publics, students or otherwise, in their national language. he worldwide expansion of English and books published in English, the growing, “normalized” presence of the United States in our daily life (through market goods, media, ilm, images, politics and policies), have all caused cultural and geographic distances to shrink. he same can be said of history writing. he transatlantic and global circulation of historical methods have caused the gaps between national historical schools to close and the diference between Americanists based in the United States, Britain or France (or even Japan for that matter) to greatly decrease. hese days non-US-based Americanists often publish in English, spend signiicant amounts of time researching and/or teaching in the United States, communicate just as much with their counterparts in America as they do with members of their own academe, and diferentiate their language and style depending on the public they wish to address. Since the 1970s European Americanist historians have become “scholars in between” whose work must consider input from both sides of the ocean. Until recently, European Americanists were accustomed to relating exclusively to their US-based colleagues and rarely interacted among themselves. Now, however, eastern and western European Americanists have inally come together, and systematic exchanges between Old World American historians have started developing. A solid community of Americanist historians is also now thriving in Japan and another one is developing in China, which begs a new and diicult question for those searching for pan-European visions of the American past: in what respects are European approaches distinctive from those adopted by other communities of Americanist “observers from the outside?” he recent trend in transnational and global American history writing has helped underscore a kind of scholarship that not only is aware of public and professional developments in the United States, but also takes advantage of an outside perspective on the American past, relates that past to worldwide developments and allows “global Americanists” to count on the public and scholarly traditions of their national, cultural and continental origins. Even once all these globalizing trends have been considered, however, we still cannot say that historians of the United States are part of a single supranational, cosmopolitan community of scholars. Location still counts, if in diferent and weaker terms than 50 maurizio vaudagna in the past, and variety assigns new tasks to diferent communities of Americanist historians. One of these tasks for European Americanists seems especially urgent to this writer. Until the 1970s both American and European scholars thought of the transatlantic link as the central backbone of the international order, the main axis of power of the world scene. Now, however, important new texts are focusing on connections between the United States and Asian or Latin American nations. Even President Barack Obama stressed the global origins of the American republic in his famous Cairo speech. It therefore seems that the next major undertaking for European Americanists is to reconsider their historical interpretations of the transatlantic relationship within the context of the new global scenario and with a post-western-centric approach. 51 “he West”, “the Atlantic Community”, and the Place of Europe in American History. Conceptualizations and Historiography Marco Mariano Europe has long been deined by its relationship with the global arena. Its identity, contours and role in the world have resulted from a relational process in which cultural, political and economic connections with other world regions have played a major role, especially in modern times. Views “from the outside in” have been at least as inluential as those “from the inside out”. Since the wave of European expansion and the “discovery” of the Americas in the 16th century, transatlantic relations have shaped Europe’s perception of itself. Europe became the “Old World” in opposition to the “New World” with which it was also enmeshed within the imperial networks spreading across the Atlantic.1 However, in the second half of the 19th century, as both sides of the Atlantic started sharing strategic and economic interests, the transatlantic balance between dichotomy and integration started gradually tilting towards the latter. Exchanges in goods, capital, technologies, imperial policies, culture and ideas made the North Atlantic a distinct unit within the shrinking world of the Second Industrial Revolution. At the turn of the century, the notion of “the West” came into widespread use to signify a sense of “we-ness,” of shared values and interests between the peoples and nations of Northwestern Europe and North America. Another cultural construct – “the Atlantic Community” – came of age in the aftermath of World War II to epitomize the institutional, cultural-historical and strategic dimensions of transatlantic relations. Unsurprisingly, both notions gained common currency during the 1. J. H. Elliot, he Old World and the New 1492-1650 (Cambridge, 1970); Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del nuovo mondo. Storia di una polemica, 1750-1900 (Milano, 1955). On changing European identities, see Federico Chabod, Storia dell’ idea di Europa, eds. E. Sestan and A. Saitta, (Bari, 1961); Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Basingstoke, 1995); Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, L’ idée d’Europe dans l’ histoire (Paris, 1965); Denis Hay, Europe: he Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh, 1957); Tony Judt, “he Rediscovery of Central Europe,” Daedalus, 199, 1 (Winter 1990), 23-54; and Vera Zamagni, “L’idea di Europa,” il Mulino, 1 (1995), 139-47. 53 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space so-called “Age of Imperialism” and the rise of the Cold War – two turning points for relations between Europe and the United States and between them and other world regions. his essay discusses “the West” and “the Atlantic Community” as culturally constructed notions that are crucial for recasting Europe’s place in American history within a global context. In the process, it also sheds light on the role of historians in shaping European identity, since both of these notions took shape in the public sphere before becoming tools of historical analysis, and professional historians were instrumental in their invention and dissemination. Finally, this essay will briely touch upon the present state of the literature on Euro-American relations in light of the rise of Atlantic history and its transnational turn. “he West” and Post-Cold War Transatlantic Relations Since the 1990s “Western Civilization” has been at the center of a heated debate over multicultural education and the quest for pedagogical reform in ethnically diverse societies. It originated in the United States and quickly crossed the Atlantic, spreading to European countries with a signiicant imperial past and a growing inlux of non-European immigrants.2 In the meantime, as economic and cultural globalization shrunk the world to an unprecedented extent and the end of post-Cold War triumphalism paved the way for a new, troubled phase in international afairs, “the West” became a ubiquitous term in public discourse, usually associated with or opposed to “the Rest.” he term also ceased to refer to an ahistorical entity whose content was to be taken for granted and became a legitimate object of inquiry for scholars of history, cultural studies and the social sciences. Four major approaches are summarized here. First, many studies discuss “the West” in the context of the public and scholarly scrutiny of the state of transatlantic relations since the events triggered by 9/11, which caused a rift between the United States and its traditional European allies. Much of this literature discusses whether this is just another episode in a long history of family quarrels or a traumatic symptom of the “end of the West,” i.e., a collapse of the post-World War II order within what is a totally transformed international environment.3 his debate has also led scholars to enquire more deeply into what has come to be portrayed as a 2. Johnnella Butler and John Walter (eds.), Transforming the Curriculum: Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies (Albany, 1991); Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (eds.), he Politics of Liberal Education (Durham, 1992); and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., he Disuniting of America: Relections on a Multicultural Society (New York, 1992). 3. See, among others, Jefrey Anderson, G. John Ickenberry and homas Risse (eds.), he End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order (Ithaca, 2008); Michael Cox, “Beyond the West? Terror in Transatlantia,” European Journal of International Relations, 11, 2 (2005), 203-33; Charles Kupchan, “he End of the West,” Atlantic Monthly (November 2002), 42-4; David Marquand, “Goodbye the West,” Prospect 54 marco mariano fundamental divergence between the United States and Western Europe in domestic and international policies, long-term historical trajectories, and fundamental secular and religious values. Works by Robert Kagan and Jürgen Habermas exemplify symmetrical views of the widening gulf between the “two Wests.”4 At the same time, a second, relatively small but inluential current of texts, mostly by commentators and public intellectuals, has built on the preexisting literature on nonwestern deinitions of the West and has recast the old dichotomy between “the West and the Rest” in light of the civilizational tensions ignited by 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. In this vein, views of the West “from the outside in” are invariably hostile and prejudiced, shaped as they are by ill-informed, distorted views that illustrate deep-rooted stereotypes about an allegedly soulless, godless, materialistic and imperialist western ethos. Far from envisioning a divided West, this approach highlights fundamental commonalities between the United States and its (mostly European) allies and reinforces Samuel Huntington’s well-known “clash of civilizations” paradigm, which in the 1990s introduced the notion of the West to the academic ield of international relations.5 A third approach has been that of trying to rescue the long-term history of Western Civilization – from its ancient roots to its contemporary developments – from allegedly distorted interpretations and appropriations within the transatlantic world. Since the idea of the West is not only a staple of geopolitical narratives, but also a cultural marker encompassing a broad range of domestic issues, its appropriation is crucial in debates over critical issues like education. In From Plato to NATO, for example, David Gress questions how that notion was used in the context of 20th-century liberal America as the foundation of “Western Civ” courses. Gress maintains that the American understanding of “the West” downplayed its Roman and Germanic origins and overemphasized its liberal roots.6 Such reassessments deal with contemporary uses of the West but seem mostly concerned with setting the record straight and providing a “true” depiction. In fact, they end up reinforcing (August 2004); and Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time (London, 2004). 4. Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003); and Jürgen Habermas, he Divided West (Cambridge, 2006). See also Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna (eds.), Democracy and Social Rights in the “Two Wests” (Turin, 2009). 5. Ian Buruma and Avitai Margalith, Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism (New York, 2004); Roger Scruton, he West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist hreat (London, 2003); and Samuel Huntington, he Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York, 1996). See also Victor David Hanson, “Occidentalism: the False West,” National Review, 10 (May 2002). 6. David Gress, From Plato to NATO: he Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York, 1998). See also J. M. Roberts, he Triumph of the West. he Origins, Rise and Legacy of Western Civilization (London, 1985). Other accounts of the Western Civilization paradigm in the United States include Gilbert Allardyce, “Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” American Historical Review, 87, 3 (June 1982), 695-725; and Eugen Weber, “Western Civilization,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (eds.), Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, 1998). 55 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space an essentialist approach that reiterates the ideological function of the West without shedding light on its multifaceted, luid and culturally constructed nature. he fourth approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the constructed character of the West and related notions like Western Civilization or culture, and exposes how they have both relected and legitimized imperialist, racist assumptions and policies. hese studies share a post-modern sensibility and are indebted to the cultural turn famously exempliied by Edward Said’s classical work on Orientalism. However, they also follow rather diferent routes in their deconstruction of the West, which is seen, respectively, as either a relatively recent invention of European historians and public intellectuals; the outcome of arbitrary uses of geography meant to naturalize what is in fact an artiicial construct; or the product of non-western critics who opposed European, and later EuroAmerican, hegemonic designs in what is now referred to as the “global South.”7 Each of these four interpretations of the West suggests diferent understandings of transatlantic relations. he fourth – emphasizing its culturally constructed nature, the inluence of deinitions “from the outside in” and the ideological implications of its public and scholarly use – can also help shed some critical light on the place of Europe in American history and the role of transatlantic relations in the global context. “he West:” a Historiographical Geneaology he modern notion of “the West” originated in absolutist, economically backwards and scarcely secularized 19th-century Russia. As intellectuals debated over “progress” and its impact on Russian identity, a soul-less and artiicial imaginary West was pitted against pillars of Russian tradition and self-image like the pre-modern village commune and the sense of spiritual harmony rooted in Orthodox Christianity. In the second half of the 19th century, advocates of pan-Slavism added an assertively nationalist tinge, envisioning a rising Slavic world prevailing over the declining Latin-Germanic world. hese uses of “West” and “westernization” allowed nationalists, traditionalists and Slavophiles to reinforce Russian identity by means of an opposition to a European “Other,” without 7. Seminal works include Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); and Stuart Hall, “he West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” in Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (eds.), Formations of Modernity (Cambridge, 1992), 275-317. See also Sophie Bessis, Western Supremacy. he Triumph of an Idea? (London, 2003); Alastair Bonnett, he Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (Basingstoke, 2004); Christopher Browning, Marko Lehti (eds.), he Struggle for the West: A Divided and Contested Legacy (London-New York, 2010); Silvia Federici (ed.), Enduring Western Civilization: he Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its “Others” (Westport, 1995); Carla Pasquinelli (ed.), Occidentalismi (Roma, 2005); Chris GoGwilt, he Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford, 1995); Martin Lewis, Karen Wigen, he Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, 1997); and Larry Wolf, Inventing Eastern Europe: he Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994). 56 marco mariano explicitly challenging the ambiguous European-ness of Russia. his longitudinal, East v. West cleavage its neatly with the Russophobia spreading through Northwestern Europe at roughly the same time. Orientalist images of a mysterious, archaic and threatening Russia set up against the Christian, liberal and modern values of Latin-Germanic Europe found a respectable intellectual foundation in the works of German historian Leopold Von Ranke and were reinforced by the Crimean War.8 hus, notions of the West and westernization became part and parcel of the dispute over Europe’s identity and its historical mission and role in the world before the late-19thcentury imperial turn extended and reinforced the hold of western powers over Africa and Southern Asia. However, it was only from the 1880s to the 1920s that “the West” developed into a polysemous term to refer not only to a civilizational bloc and a sense of cultural kinship, but also to a geopolitical unit, the idea of a discrete historical stage in world history, eventually becoming a category of analysis for the study of history and, in Arnold Toynbee’s words, “an intelligible ield of study.” he term acquired these multiple meanings and wider circulation just as several developments threw into question deep-rooted assumptions about the identity of Europe and its place in the world, including the rhetoric and jingoistic propaganda of British New Imperialism; the rise of the US as the leader of the industrial world and a major global power; the collapse of the Russian autocracy and the Revolution of 1917; and, inally, the spread of anti-colonial sentiments and movements across Asia, Africa and Latin America. What ensued was a reconceptualization of Europe, split along an East-West axis and challenged by the Global South. At the same time, Europe’s Northwestern regions were recast within a transatlantic framework that included the United States – that North American “Other” against which the European Self was deined (while Central and South America’s place in the West was luid and ambiguous).9 We cannot fully understand changing ideas about Europe at the turn of the 20th century if we overlook the centrality of the idea of the Orient. As Said noted: Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called “the idea of Europe,” a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans against all ‘those’ non Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made 8. Chris GoGwilt, “True West: he Changing Idea of the West from the 1880s to the 1920s,” in Federici, Enduring Western Civilization, 44-9; Lewis and Wigen, he Myth of Continents, 55-62; and Riccardo Bavaj, “ ‘he West’: A Conceptual Exploration,” European History Online, http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/crossroads/ political-spaces/political-ideas-of-regional-order/riccardo-bavaj-the-west-a-conceptual-exploration, (retrieved 15 October 2014). 9. On the metageographical dimension of the transformation in transatlantic relations at the turn of the century, see David Meinig, he Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. III Transcontinental America 1850-1915 (New Haven, 1998); Marco Mariano, L’America nell’Occidente. Storia della dottrina Monroe 1823-1963 (Roma, 2013); and Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny. American Expansionism and the Empire of Right, (New York, 1995). 57 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison to all the non-European peoples and cultures.10 However, by focusing too narrowly on such a dichotomy we also risk reducing the complexity and dynamic nature of the idea of Europe, which at that juncture was being redeined by its connections to the Atlantic world at least as much as by its opposition to the Orient.11 In the late 19th century, when the Atlantic was less of a barrier and more of a bridge between the Old World and the New, the emergence of the West in public discourse relected the anxieties and opportunities arising from the increasing integration and changing power relations between America and Europe. At the same time, its emergence in academia illustrated how deinitions of European-ness and American-ness were inluencing each other in a signiicantly diferent way than had occurred with the oppositional pattern of the past. While scattered references to the West can be found in several deining works of the 19th century, from Hegel to Marx, one of the irst to conceptualize it as a tool for understanding the contemporary world was Benjamin Kidd, a British-civil-servant-turned-socialscientist whose work was widely circulated in turn-of-the-century Britain and the US. In Social Evolution (1894), he Control of the Tropics (1898) and he Principles of Western Civilization (1902) he outlined “our Western Civilization” in bio-political terms as the outcome of “a single continuous growth, endowed with a principle of life, subject to law, and passing, like many other organisms, through certain orderly stages of development.” hough by no means an original or sophisticated thinker, Kidd was able to synthesize and popularize “a blend of popular Darwinism, sociology, and idealist philosophy [that] produced a fascinating it between the political enthusiasm for the ‘new imperialism’ and in-de-siècle anxieties about cultural and racial degeneration.” When he wrote in 1902 that “we are par excellence the military peoples, not only of the entire world, but of the evolutionary process itself,” he was not only linking “Western Civilization” to imperialism and Anglo-Saxon models of racial hierarchy, he was also extending the principles of social evolutionism from the struggle among individuals to the struggle between civilizations throughout world history. While he lacked the intellectual depth of the major thinkers of his age, he anticipated insights later developed by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, whose work was crucial in turning “the West” into a ield of historical inquiry, with relevant consequences for the reconiguration of the idea of Europe in a transatlantic context.12 10. Said, Orientalism, 7. 11. For a critical reconsideration of Said’s orientalist paradigm, see Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley, 2001). 12. GoGwilt, “he Changing Idea of the West,” 52-3; Bonnett, he Idea of the West, 29-30; and Ixel Quesada Vargas, “Los origenes de la presencia cultural de Estados Unidos en Centroamerica: fundamentos ideològicos y Usos politicos del debate sobre los tropicos (1900-1943),” in Benedetta Calandra, Marina Franco (eds.), La guerra frìa cultural en Amèrica Latina. Desafìos y limites para una nueva Mirada de las relaciones interamericanas (Buenos Aires, 2012), 67-78. 58 marco mariano Spengler’s he Decline of the West built on Kidd’s evolutionary view of the West and recast it into a coherent, comprehensive interpretation of world history. Conceived and written amidst the traumatic events of World War I and the Russian Revolution, it was published in two volumes between 1918 and 1923 in Germany. And while it met with both skepticism and outright hostility among historians, it had sold about 100,000 copies in Germany alone by 1926. In an ambitious attempt to reconceptualize world history, Spengler replaced the traditional, epoch-based linear structure with one based on eight cultures – Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/ Roman), Arabian and Western or European-American – each evolving according to the life-cycle of a living organism. Behind this attempt was a critique of 19th-century parochialism and Eurocentrism: hanks to the subdivision of history into Ancient, Medieval and Modern – an incredibly meaningless and jejune scheme which has, however, dominated historical thinking – we have failed to perceive the true position in the general history of higher mankind, of the little part-world which has developed on Western-European soil from the time of the German-Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance and above all to estimate its direction.13 Spengler’s long view of history and his gloomy, pessimistic outlook relected both the recent collapse of imperial Germany and deep-rooted tensions over the idea of Europe that between the late 1910s and the early 1920s were being ampliied by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, he appropriated arguments of 19th-century Russian Slavophiles to undermine the very notion of Europe as a reliable tool of historical analysis and to expose it as an empty abstraction: he word Europe ought to be stuck out of history. here is historically no European type … It is thanks to this word Europe alone, and the complex ideas resulting from it, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity – a mere abstraction derived from the reading of books – that has led to immense real consequences. In the shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsiied the historical tendencies of a primitive human mass for two centuries, whereas the Russian spirit has very truly and fundamentally divided ‘Europe’ from ‘Mother Russia’ with the hostility that we can see embodied in Tolstoi, Aksakov, Dostoyevsky. “East” and “West” are notions that contain real history, whereas “Europe” is an empty sound.14 Spengler’s civilizational approach remained quite isolated within the historical profession, and his support of autocratic regimes as the most suitable form of government for the West in the declining phase of its life cycle made him a controversial public igure. However, “Spenglerism” became a buzzword in European intellectual circles just as the 13. Quoted in GoGwilt, “he Changing Idea of the West,” 51. 14. Ibidem, 50. 59 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space “European tragedy” of total war and totalitarianism was calling into question the very idea of Europe and undermining the primacy of “Western Civilization”. his sense of impending crisis also served as the backdrop for the most ambitious attempt ever made to conceptualize the place of “the West” in world history. Arnold Toynbee’s 12-volume A Study of History (1934-1961) is a sweeping account of the rise and fall of approximately thirty “civilizations” seen as discrete units deined mostly by a common religion and a textual literary tradition whose life cycle is the outcome of the ability of “creative minorities” (i.e. the political and intellectual elites) to respond to natural and social challenges. As a British intelligence oicer during World War I and a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Toynbee was a close observer of and participant in the major international events of his time. Like Spengler, he saw the Russian Revolution as proof of an intraEuropean civilizational divide. He also warned against the double threat of the “internal and external proletariat” – the disafected Western and non-Western masses motivated not by economic self-interest but rather “a consciousness – and the resentment which this consciousness inspires – of being disinherited from [their] ancestral place in Society and being unwanted in a community that is [their] rightful home.” He also questioned the heuristic value of the idea of Europe, which he saw as a “misnomer” artiicially bundling the West together with Eastern Orthodoxy. In fact, he went even further to expose the geographic determinism inherent in the distinction between Europe and Asia, which he dismissed as devoid of historical signiicance: “he historian cannot lay his inger on any period at all, however brief, in which there was any signiicant cultural diversity between ‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ occupants of the all but contiguous opposite banks of a tenuous inland waterway.” Finally, he echoed Spengler in his efort to provincialize the West, which he saw as just one among many civilizational blocs in world history. In fact, he explicitly challenged the Hegelian principle of the “unity of history” that postulated a singular and linear process culminating in 19th-century Western Europe. In his view, this was a misconception “to be explained by the persistence of three other misconceptions: the ego-centric illusion, the catchword of the ‘unchanging East,’ and the misconception of growth as a movement in a straight line.”15 Unlike Spengler, however, Toynbee also outlined a dynamic, forward-looking idea of the West that was devoid of any racialized connotation, emphasized interaction with other world regions and was based on cultural and moral progress. In his view, Western culture’s open-ended, inclusive character allowed it to create a multicultural synthesis that signaled both its triumph and its extinction: he past histories of our vociferous, and sometimes vituperative, living contemporaries – the Chinese and the Japanese, the Hindus and the Muslims, and our elder bothers the Orthodox Christians – are going to become a part of our Western past history in a 15. Quoted in Lewis and Wigen, he Myth of Continents, 43, 127. 60 marco mariano future world which will be neither Western nor non-Western but will integrate all the cultures which we Westerners have now brewed together in a single crucible… By making history we have transcended our own history.16 Ironically, this monumental work, intended as a critique of parochial Eurocentric views of history, only wound up reinforcing the essentialist narrative of the rise of the West that had started taking shape in the late 19th century. After World War II, the text became part of Cold War ideology and signiicantly afected the teaching and writing of history, especially in the United States. Although Toynbee’s work has now lost favor among scholars of world history, in the aftermath of World War II his fame both inside and outside academia was remarkable. In America, 300,000 copies were sold of an abridged version of the irst six volumes of A Study of History published in 1947 and 7,000 copies of the 10-volume set had been sold by 1955. He achieved instant celebrity status in the press while lecturing in American colleges. In March 1947, he made the cover of Time magazine, which marketed his opus as “the most provocative work of historical theory written in England since Karl Marx’s Capital” in a cover story that received about 14,000 requests for reprints. he following year, Life magazine celebrated the text as “one of the most ambitious chores the human brain has ever undertaken.”17 he enthusiasm of Henry Luce’s magazines and the interest of the American public in the ponderous, not very accessible volumes of A Study of History were in many ways a result of the Cold War. Toynbee’s American tour took place just as the Truman Administration announced its intervention to replace struggling British forces in Greece and Turkey. he outbreak of the Cold War provided a very hospitable climate for a long-term, quasi-scientiic explanation of world history that was global in scope, methodologically anti-Marxist, based on civilizational blocs built around religious traditions and the result of a challenge-response mechanism led by “creative” elites. he Time story, written by Communist-turned-Catholic-conservative Whittaker Chambers who within a year had risen to national fame for accusing State Department oicial Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy, was published just as the Truman Doctrine was being proclaimed. Indeed, Chambers linked Toynbee’s work to the international crisis underway in the Eastern Mediterranean, which he portrayed in characteristically apocalyptic terms as no merely political or military crisis, it was a crisis in Western Civilization itself. It meant that the United States must take over from Britain the job of trying to solve the problem of contemporary history. he United States must, in Britain’s place, consciously become what she has been, in 16. Quoted in Bonnett, he Idea of the West, 33. 17. Time, 17 March 1947; Life, 23 February 1948. On the inluence of Toynbee in early Cold War America, see Richard Crockatt, “Challenge and Response. Arnold Toynbee and the United States in the Cold War,” in Dale Carter, Robin Clifton (eds.), War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy, 1942-1962 (New York, 2002), 108-129; and Stephen Whitield, he Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), 55. See also George Kennan, “he History of Arnold Toynbee,” he New York Review of Books, 1 (June 1989). 61 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space reluctant fact, since the beginning of World War II: the champion of the remnant of Christian civilization against the forces that threatened it.18 While the public use of Toynbee’s work was obviously instrumental to Cold War domestic ideological warfare, his civilizational outlook struck deeper chords with American historians. he notion that America was the leader of a larger, western/Christian world region encompassing parts of Europe – and that the connections between the two shores of the North Atlantic should therefore be a major focus of historical research – resonated among these scholars and is partly what led to the reconsideration of Europe’s place in American history. In fact, in the aftermath of World War I American historians of Europe started making the case for a closer look at transatlantic connections and transnational civilizational units. In 1922, the medievalist Charles Homer Haskins said in his AHA presidential address: European history is of profound importance. We may at times appear more mindful of Europe’s material indebtedness to us than of our spiritual indebtedness to Europe… Whether we look at Europe genetically as a source of our civilization, or pragmatically as a large part of the world in which we live, we cannot ignore the vital connections between Europe and America, their histories ultimately being one.19 It is no accident that before World War I Haskins had played a major role at Harvard in structuring the “Western Civilization” course, which in the interwar years was included in the curriculum of other elite institutions like Columbia and the University of Chicago and after World War II became a staple in the teaching of history on American campuses.20 he rise of the “Western Civ.” paradigm undoubtedly carried exceptionalist and nationalist connotations. Indeed, it was instrumental in depicting post-World War II American global power as the natural, inevitable outcome of a meta-historical trajectory originating in the Mediterranean during the Classical Age and later developing in Western Europe. American world historian William H. McNeill captured this teleological and nationalistic view of history when he wrote that Humanity has fumbled through the centuries toward truth and freedom as expressed in modern science and democracy, American style …Meaningful history is the record of the progress of freedom and liberty; and the place where it happened was Greece, Rome, Western Europe and latterly the United States.21 18. Quoted in Crockatt, “Challenge and Response,” 113. 19. Quoted in Volker Berghahn and Charles Maier, “Modern Europe in American Historical Writing,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood (eds.), Imagined Histories. American Historians Interpret heir Past (Princeton, 1998), 395-6. For the full text of Haskins address, “European History and American Scholarship,” see http://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/ charles-homer-haskins. 20. Eugene Weber, “Western Civilization,” in Molho and Wood, Imagined Histories, 207-8; Peter Novick, hat Noble Dream. he Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 310-14. 21. Quoted in Novick, hat Noble Dream, 313. 62 marco mariano At the same time, the stress on transatlantic connections and continuity, rather than opposition, vis-à-vis the legacy of European history ran counter to established historiographical traditions that either postulated an oppositional relationship between the United States and Europe or emphasized the self-suicient, insular character of American history and downplayed its international and transnational ties. In sum, the West as a category of historical analysis was by and large a European invention that crossed the Atlantic and was adopted in the American historical profession at a time when two world wars not only stressed the geopolitical relevance of Europe for American national security but also revealed insular historiographical approaches and parochial grand narratives of the American past. “he Atlantic Community” and Atlantic History, Old and New During the interwar years, the notion of an “Atlantic community” was also forged to make sense of the changing dynamics of transatlantic relations and their role in a global arena transformed by total war. Like “the West,” it originated in the public arena and was later adopted by historians and, to a lesser extent, political scientists. It is also a narrated concept because it encompasses two notions that have multiple, contested meanings. he term “community” does not imply an institutional framework the way similar terms like “partnership,” “association” or “alliance” do. Instead, it conveys the idea that there are organic, identitarian ties between its members, as exempliied by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’ classic deinition of a close-knit, traditional Gemeinschaft versus a loose, secular Gesellschaft. However, the same term has diferent connotations in other languages, and the way in which it is commonly used does not necessarily relect the scholarly deinition of “community” as opposed to “society.” Similarly, the term “Atlantic” is subject to diferent uses and interpretations, loosely deining both a geographic region and a set of cultural-historical, socio-economic and strategic assumptions usually associated with “the West.” It evokes an “imagined geography” as part of an “imagined community” that performs “a legitimizing function for institutions, political movements, and asymmetric power relations operating within the transatlantic relationship.”22 However, while “the West” is no longer a useful tool of historical analysis for professional historians due to its highly charged ideological implications, the epistemological status of “the Atlantic Community” is somewhat more ambiguous. In the aftermath of World War II in both the United States and Western Europe several historians from diferent sub-disciplines focused on the long-term origins and constituent features of what was 22. Valèrie Aubourg and Giles Scott-Smith, “he Transatlantic Imaginary: Constructing the Atlantic Community during the Early Cold War,” in Valèrie Aubourg, Gérard Bossuat, and Giles Scott-Smith (eds.), European Community, Atlantic Community? (Paris, 2008), 14. 63 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space being referred to in the public discourse as the “Atlantic Community,” thus providing it with scholarly credibility. In the last twenty years, the emergence of a new Atlantic history paradigm has dismissed the Atlantic Community notion as a Cold War by-product. On the other hand, it has also raised new questions about the long-term trajectory, spatial contours and global connections of the early modern Atlantic world. In so doing, it has also spurred a new approach to the 19th- and 20th-century Atlantic. In fact, references to the Atlantic world, space, basin, corridor or system are common currency among scholars of early modern, modern and contemporary history alike.23 It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine whether the Atlantic Community is a purely ideological construction, a useless product of “NATO history,” or a legitimate tool/object of historical inquiry for scholars investigating transatlantic connections in the contemporary world. What matters here is how the literature that adopted or contested the Atlantic Community concept helped problematize the early modern Atlantic as a distinct geo-historical unit and, consequently, reinstated Europe in American history. From this vantage point, the commonalities of old and new Atlantic history are at least as relevant as their diferences. What follows is an attempt to shed light on these shared traits, which have been relatively overlooked, rather than to reiterate the obvious differences. Doing so helps problematize the quest for an Atlantic approach to 19th- and 20th-century transatlantic relations, as the closing remarks will show. Atlantic history took shape at a time when both historiographical currents and historical events spurred a reconceptualization of transatlantic relations. As British historian of the early modern Atlantic world William O’Reilly wrote: Clearly there is something cohesive about the Atlantic zone. he Columbian exchange and resultant exchanges are strikingly diferent to anything seen in the Arab and Chinese trade in the Indian Ocean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In observing centralizing themes in history, we often think of three principal categories: the state, the economy and the culture. All three have been the core of ‘Atlantic’ studies and all three can be seen to bind parts of the Atlantic together in interconnective webs. he premise of 23. For useful discussions on the origins, state of the art and new directions of Atlantic history, see David Armitage, “hree Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), he British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002); Bernard Bailyn, “he Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario, 20 (1996), 19-44, later expanded in Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, 2005); Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies, 1, 1 (2004); Allison Games, “Atlantic History: Deinitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review, 111, 3 (June 2006), 743-44; Jack P. Greene, Philip D. Morgan, “Introduction,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal (Oxford, 2008); Wiliam O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies 1, 1 (2004), 66-84; Emma Rothschild, “Late Atlantic History,” in Nicholas Canny, Philip Morgan (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World 1450-1850 (Oxford, 2011); Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, “L’histoire atlantique aux États-Unis: la périphérie au centre,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, [on line] Workshops, online since 19 September 2008; and Marco Mariano and Federica Morelli (eds.), “European Perspectives on a Longer Atlantic World,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, [online] Colloques, online since 27 June 2012. 64 marco mariano Atlantic history, then, can be accepted for those reasons which an ‘Atlantic community’, to use Walter Lippmann’s phrase of 1917, shared after 1492 … Atlantic history is rooted, by many supporters, in the world of the 1920s and after and in the writings of Walter Lippmann, Fernand Braudel, Jacques Godechot and of Robert Palmer.24 Lippmann’s 1917 evocation of an Atlantic Community with common roots and vital interests made its grand entrance in the historical profession in 1945, when AHA President Carlton Hayes used his presidential address to make a case for an Atlantic approach to American history as a much needed remedy for the “intellectual isolationism” that he saw as “the result of ignorance, of self-centered absorption in local or sectional concerns, and of nationalist propaganda.” In his view, the prevailing historiographical framework that “detached Eastern and Western Hemispheres” was “unrealistic, contrary to basic historical facts, and highly dangerous for our country at the present and in the future.” Lamenting the decades-long “tendency to turn away from European themes and to concentrate upon strictly American” ones, and the “narrowing specialized training of our universities” resulting from “intellectual isolationism,” Hayes dared to call into question the impact of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” on American historiography, as indicated in the provocative title of his address “he American Frontier – Frontier of What?” For Hayes, a scholar of European nationalism, the answer was obvious: the American West was not the “western frontier of the eastern United States” but rather the frontier of European civilization, which had informed “the Atlantic Community” and diferentiated it from other civilizations. “Of such an Atlantic community and the European civilization basic to it,” he argued, “we Americans are co-heirs and codevelopers, and probably in the future the leaders.”25 At the same time, the rejection of narrow parochialism implied situating the national past within a speciic world region, rather than in a spaceless global context. For Hayes there was no such thing as a “world civilization,” and recasting the relations between America and the world in these terms, which had “already passed from the ictional titles of high school textbooks to the solemn pronouncements of statesmen,” amounted to “a leap from myopic nationalism to starry-eyed universalism.” Echoes of nationalism and presentism were evident in Hayes’ address. His call for an Atlantic historiographical outlook relected current disputes among advocates of Atlanticism, globalism, and hemispherism/isolationism over the place of the United States 24. O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” 69-70. 25. Carlton Hayes, “he American Frontier-Frontier of What?,” he American Historical Review, 50, 2 (January 1946), 198-216. On Hayes, see Bailyn, Atlantic History, 12-4; Carter Jeferson, “Carlton Hayes,” in Hans A. Schmitt ed., Historians of Modern Europe (Baton Rouge, 1971), 15-34. On the importance of religion to pre-Cold War Atlanticism, see Emiliano Alessandri, “he Atlantic Community as Christendom: Some Relections on Christian Atlanticism in America, circa 1900-1950,” in Marco Mariano (ed.), Deining the Atlantic Community. Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (New York-London, 2010), 47-70. 65 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space in the postwar world order.26 Furthermore, his outlook was clearly the expression of a Eurocentric view of American history that marginalized those groups who were not part of the “Western Civilization canon” like non-white immigrants and blacks. “We used to know that we were Europeans as well as Americans, that we were not Indians or a people miraculously sprung from virgin forests like the primitive Germans described by Tacitus, but modern Europeans living in America on a frontier of Europe. All our white ancestors on this continent knew they came from Europe,” wrote Hayes with some sarcasm regarding the exceptionalist and somewhat Europhobic tendencies stemming from the frontier thesis. On the one hand, his narrative of (white) America as a fragment of a “Greater Europe” rejected American pre-war “nationalism” understood as an exclusive concern with all things American with an emphasis on the American sonderweg. On the other hand, it also wholeheartedly embraced the rising nationalist outlook that called for the global projection of America’s power in the aftermath of World War II. Finally, Hayes’ approach to history considered the nation-state as the major unit of historical analysis while sidelining social forces and non-state actors. However, for all its shortcomings characteristic of its time, Hayes’ attempt to reinstate Europe in American history was also part of a larger efort to de-provincialize and internationalize American history that was not limited to scholars of European history. When Columbia University historian and journalist Allan Nevins wrote that a “nationalistic” interpretation was being replaced by an “international view, treating America as part of a great historical civilization with the Atlantic at its center, as the Mediterranean was the center of the ancient world,” he captured a moment in which, according to Peter Novick, “both Americanists and Europeanists joined in arguing that ‘the Atlantic community’ was the appropriate framework for both American and Western European history.”27 Hayes concluded his 1945 address by urging American historians to embrace three major research paths: “cultural history,” seen as that which “most profoundly afects American relationships with the world;” a focus on the “continuity of history” as a much needed counterweight to the obsession over “newness and uniqueness of the New World and our nation;” and, inally, “comparative history” seen as a tool for broadening American historians’ grasp of the past as well as “the surest means of diminishing racial, political, religious, and national prejudices.” All three of these motives informed another classic Atlantic studies text, Robert Palmer’s he Age of Democratic Revolution, a two-volume comparative study of the American and French revolutions focusing on their shared ideological features. Palmer insisted that both revolutions had to be set against the backdrop of the “ idées maitresses” of the Atlantic civilization encompassing the triangular space 26. Marco Mariano, “Remapping America. Continentalism, Globalism, and the Rise of the Atlantic Community, 1939-1949,” in Mariano, Deining the Atlantic Community, 71-87. 27. Novick, hat Noble Dream, 311. 66 marco mariano of Europe and the Americas, and that they were both informed by an understanding of “freedom” that was characteristic of the Enlightenment.28 Palmer’s imposing text is now relatively forgotten in the historiographical literature on revolutions. To the extent that it ofered mostly broad, synthetic overviews of wellknown political events and intellectual currents, it is safe to say it was hardly innovative even in its own day. His contemporaries were also less than enthusiastic about his work in general. In the climate of the early Cold War years, he was often charged with providing scholarly ammunition for the Atlantic Alliance. At the 1955 Tenth International History Congress in Rome, Palmer presented a paper on “Le problème de l’Atlantique” with Jacques Godechot, a French scholar and the author of Histoire de l’Atlantique (1947) who had just spent one year as a visiting scholar at Princeton. heir efort to historicize the Atlantic Community was based on a detailed analysis of the inner dynamics and constituent elements of the early modern Atlantic world (trade routes and communications, the structure and inluence of the British Empire) as well as on the East-West binary. In fact, they argued that in the second half of the 18th century the Atlantic was one civilization because it had been “able to create a society more liberal and dynamic than that of the East of the old continent.”29 The more hostile reactions to the paper were prompted by ideological and methodological motives. Eric Hobsbawm, a young Marxist historian, attacked it for ignoring the economic and social dimension of historical change and quipped that the Atlantic world might as well be deined as the place where “witches were systematically persecuted and burned.” However, the generally cold reception to Palmer and Godechot among both European and American historians should not be dismissed as ideological warfare pure and simple. In fact, it had deeper roots in the respective intellectual landscapes and historiographical traditions of both sides of the Atlantic. On the one hand, Palmer’s concern with transatlantic connections and his focus on the Atlantic as a shared revolutionary space challenged the inluential Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution as the peculiar, indeed exceptional, event that had triggered not only the fall of the Ancien Régime, but also the rise of the social classes that would eventually lead to the Revolution of 1917. On the other hand, Palmer also questioned liberal views by pitting the revolutions that took place in Britain and North America between the late 17th century and the late 18th century against the Revolution of 1789. As he argued, the former laid the foundations for the rise of democratic institutions, constitutional orders and the rule of law, while the latter paved the way to social and political radicalism and, ultimately, to a cycle of violent changes and autocratic reactions. Finally, Palmer’s Atlantic Community framework 28. Robert R. Palmer, he Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton, 1959-1964). 29. Bailyn, Atlantic History, 26. 67 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space also challenged American exceptionalism. Historians of the inluential “consensus school” have regularly portrayed the American Revolution as a peculiar, quintessentially American event based on ideological, not class-based, motives; an event whose trajectory testiies to the unique relationship between America and “democracy,” as if the latter were incompatible with the European model of nation building. At the other end of the academic spectrum, radical historians have more recently lamented the un-revolutionary character of the social forces and interests that prevailed in 1776 and have tried to rescue from oblivion forgotten, dissenting currents of the Revolutionary Era and the Early Republic.30 In sum, Palmer’s attempt to overcome national divisions met with widespread skepticism not only because it was labeled “NATO history,” but also because it challenged prevailing exceptionalist, nation-centered views on both sides of Atlantic. In doing so, however, his work also sparked numerous studies in Atlantic history that paved the way for a new generation of Atlanticists in two respects, both of which have been somewhat overlooked.31 First, his comparative approach to revolutions in the modern world and his emphasis on the ideological commonalities between France and North America in the broader context of revolutionary socio-economic change spanning from the shores of the Atlantic to the Ottoman Empire, China and Japan, stimulated further inquiry into the tension between the Atlantic and the global scale. Second, by grounding his idea of an “Atlantic Civilization” on the shared political culture of the Enlightenment, Palmer set its demise in the early 19th century when the homogeneity of the Atlantic world as he knew it had come to an end. Interestingly, this periodization was reinforced by scholars of the new Atlantic history in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, the International Center for the History of the Atlantic World founded by Bernard Bailyn at Harvard in 1995 focuses on the period between 1500 and 1825. Moreover, the online discussion list H-Atlantic was built around a similar periodization and most works in this subield rarely deal with the 19th century. In sum, the “old” Atlantic history that built on the “Atlantic Community” concept during the early postwar years and the “new” Atlantic history that has challenged it since the 1980s share signiicant commonalities in space and time. First, they both originated mostly in American academe as an attempt to de-provincialize American history and situate it within a larger space centered on the Atlantic. Second, they both placed the rise and fall of the Atlantic world within the trajectory of early modern history. hese observations prompt a few closing remarks on the current state of the study of transatlantic relations in the modern and contemporary world. 30. Simone Neri Serneri, “Le rivoluzioni di Palmer,” and Peter Onuf, “Democrazie, rivoluzione e storiograia nel mondo contemporaneo,” Contemporanea, 10, 1 (2007). 31. Bailyn, “he Idea of Atlantic History;” O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History.” 68 marco mariano he History of the Atlantic World after the “Atlantic Community” Scholars of Atlantic history new and old have helped in signiicant, if very diferent, ways to reinstate Europe in colonial and early modern American history. At the same time, they have been unable or unwilling to investigate the peculiar dynamics, constituent elements and spatial contours of the Atlantic world in the 19th and 20th century. It is as if the methodological or ideological rejection of the idea of the Atlantic Community as a tool for studying transatlantic relations prevented the modern and contemporary Atlantic from being recognized as a distinctive unit of historical analysis. In fact, 19th-century history has been reframed within a global, not Atlantic, context. Studies in the history of economic globalization have singled out the 1820s and 1830s as the starting point of an era in which the so-called transportation revolution laid the foundations for the 20th-century integration of world markets. Seminal works by Christopher Bayly, Jürgen Osterhammel and Emily Rosenberg have stressed the worldwide reach of economic, social, cultural and political connections, thus reinforcing the assumption that the rise of globalization in the modern world led to the decline of the peculiarities and strength of transatlantic connections.32 To be sure, works focusing on American history from a transnational perspective have illuminated the resilience of transatlantic links and lows. homas Bender’s A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006) and Ian Tyrrell’s Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (2007) show how Europe came to play a very signiicant role in the making of America throughout the 19th century as a crucial trading and inancial partner; the source of mass migration lows that provided cheap labor and spread dissenting political ideas; and, inally, as a model of empire-building that was both feared and imitated. In this light, the Old World was both a threat and a resource for the New. Far from a relic of a distant colonial past, Europe’s place in American history has been reassessed as a major driving force behind the rise of the United States as a global power. However, this reinterpretation has been driven more by an impulse to transcend the national framework and write a history “beyond borders” typical of the transnational turn than by the desire to deliberately reconigure American history in the Atlantic context in terms of space.33 32. Kevin H. O’Rourke, Jefrey G. Williamson, “When Did Globalization Begin?,” European Review of Economic History, 6 (2002), 23-50; Christopher Bayly, he Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons 1780-1914 (Oxford, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München, 2009); and Emily Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870 1945 (Cambridge, 2012). 33. See also, among others, Sam Haynes, Uninished Revolution: the Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville, 2010); Timothy Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville, 2009); and Jay Sexton, he Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in NineteenthCentury America (New York, 2011). 69 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Finally, important texts have recently shed light on aspects of Euro-American relations from the late 19th century onwards like social and economic policies, technological and managerial models, popular culture and entertainment, social reform, and intellectual networks. However, as homas Bender has noted, “the U.S. academy may admire but does not recognize as Atlantic history the Atlantic studies of Mary Nolan, Victoria De Grazia, Volker Berghahn” and others.34 Only in very recent years has the reconsideration of the spatial and chronological contours of Atlantic history led to the quest for “a long Atlantic in a wider world,” that is, a reconceptualization of Atlantic studies that takes into account both the increasing relevance of the northern over the southern Atlantic throughout the 19th century after the demise of slavery and the slave trade, and the growing interconnectedness between the Atlantic space and other world regions that is peculiar to the contemporary world.35 While empirical research on this long, globally connected Atlantic is thriving, a corresponding theoretical paradigm is still in the making. Two modest suggestions in this regard are ofered here by way of a conclusion. First, scholars of 19th- and 20th-century Atlantic history need to come to terms with two subields that have been largely ignored if not deliberately contested: political and diplomatic history. Far from being the topdown approaches almost entirely focused on institutions, decision makers and white men that they once were, these ields have been dramatically updated in their own way over the last two decades and can hardly be left out of the picture. Second, fears that conceptualizing and researching the contemporary Atlantic as a speciic geo-historical unit – whose relationship to the early modern Atlantic world is deined by long-term continuities and pivotal breaks – amounts to writing “NATO history” should be overcome once and for all by a new generation of historians unencumbered by the ideological legacy of the 20th century. 34. homas Bender, “Positionality, Ambidexterity, and Global Frames,” in Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal (eds.), Historians Across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2014), 172. See also, among others, Volker Berghahn, American Big Business in Britain and Germany: A Comparative History of Two “Special Relationships” in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2014); Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005); David Ellwood, he Shock of America: Europe and Challenge of the Century (Oxford, 2012); James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American hought: 1870-1920 (Oxford, 1986); Mary Nolan, he Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (Cambridge, 2012); and Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998). 35. Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World.” 70 Rethinking the Historiography of Transatlantic Relations in the Cold War Years: the United States, Europe and the Process of European Integration Alessandra Bitumi In his keynote lecture at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna in 2009, Stanley Hofman cited French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère to introduce the subject of Euro-American relations: “Tout est dit et l’on vient trop tard.” 1 [Everything has been said and I come too late.] Indeed, the abundance of literature on the topic might imply there is little room left for innovation. he Atlantic world has also progressively lost its central position in both the public and scholarly debate, for several reasons. First, a perceived obsolescence of the transatlantic relationship has shifted the focus elsewhere. he fallacious tendency to read the past in light of the present, thus exposing the seemingly growing irrelevance of Europe vis-à-vis the United States, has decentralized the transatlantic connection. Such alleged irrelevance is partly related to the state of the Atlantic Alliance, which is more secure and established than ever before, and therefore less controversial. It is also partly a consequence of the shifting interests of the US and Europe, which are increasingly framed in global terms, albeit in diferent ways. Essentially, studying transatlantic relations appears not to ofer useful tools for understanding the most pressing challenges of the present. As far as the Cold War years are concerned, even from a historical perspective the transatlantic dimension has been partially overshadowed by research trends pointing in other directions. Particularly in the realm of Cold War historiography, Europe has been increasingly “provincialized” as a result of “an epistemic necessity for global and international history,” as Federico Romero argued in his recent state-of-the-art assessment.2 he waning of the Euro-Atlantic focus subsumed within the needs of a broader, more heterogeneous 1. Jean de La Bruyère quoted in S. Hofman, “Obstinate or Obsolete? he Future of the Transatlantic Relationship,” Europe, the United States and the Next American President Conference, International Relations Seminar Series at Johns Hopkins University (Bologna, 2009) (http://www.jhubc.it/DOCUMENTS/Hofmann. pdf, last accessed May 18, 2015). 2. Federico Romero, “Cold War Historiography at the Crossroads,” Cold War History, 14 (2014), 685-703. 71 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space understanding of the Cold War has paved the way for a vast amount of works adopting a global approach.3 While the latter enormously enhances our understanding of the bipolar conlict, it is nonetheless questionable in its scope and implications. As Romero contended, relativizing the European theater “is hardly a scholarly strategy applicable to the Cold War, a conlict spawned in and about Europe, pivoted on the continent’s destiny, and eventually solved where it had its deepest and more relevant roots.”4 Indeed, it is suggested here that Europe’s role in the global Cold War, along with its origins, development and resolution, need to be revisited. Europe’s central position reinforces the signiicance of the transatlantic relationship whose study is far from being exhausted and should be further developed using multiple innovative approaches. his essay ofers a historiographical relection on US-European relations during the Cold War years that speciically incorporates the closely interconnected dimension of the European integration process and its relevant historiography. Following a brief methodological introduction, the main historiographical issues will be addressed according to a conventional, widely accepted periodization that considers 1945-1969 as the irst phase and 1969-1989 as the second phase. As will be demonstrated, recent works have provided original answers to old, fundamental questions as well as raised new ones and opened space for discussion. Multiple Approaches to the History of Transatlantic Relations Over the last few decades the study of transatlantic relations has undergone several profound transformations, consistent with broader historiographical trends. Speciically, scholars have increasingly sought to move beyond the traditional diplomatic focus in order to encompass the cultural and the transnational as well. A primary consequence of this new attention to culture has been the attempt to rescue the agency of a wider range of actors. What used to be a state-centered narrative almost exclusively focusing on the leading players has gradually become a polyphonic history of transnational actors, non-governmental organizations, public and private networks, and linguistic constructs. he ield has expanded to move beyond security and diplomacy and include original, heretofore-neglected subjects. his “cultural turn” has also challenged the deinition of 3. See the pioneering work by Odd Arne Westad, he Global Cold War: hird World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (Cambridge, 2005). See also, among the many examples, Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, eds., he End of the Cold War and the hird World: New Perspectives on Regional Conlicts (London-New York, 2011); Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, (Chapel Hill, 2011); Ryan M. Irwin, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (New York, 2012); Jefrey J. Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: From the Algerian Front of the hird World’s Cold War (New York, 2014). 4. Romero, “Cold War Historiography,” 18. 72 alessandra bitumi “power,” thus fostering a greater appreciation for the role of ideas, ideologies and individual or collective perceptions as vehicles of “hegemony.”5 Similarly, the “transnational turn” has helped scholars transcend traditional barriers and forced them to rethink the transatlantic space and relationship. Historical research is now increasingly framed to interpret domestic developments in light of transnational contexts. 6 Recent works have therefore cast transatlantic history within the global frame of the multifaceted connections that came to characterize the 20th century, particularly in the Cold War era. he matter at hand is not only the study of Euro-American relations, but also the other “networks, circuits of exchange and areas of the world they should be studied in relation to.”7 Mary Nolan aptly describes this challenge as fundamental for a more sophisticated understanding of transatlantic relations and their importance with respect to other interactions and cross-national lows during the early Cold War decades. However, this approach is also instrumental to a complex appreciation of the Atlantic Community; the distinctive, if not conlicting, interests of its constituent parts; and how it has reckoned with and encountered the rest of the world. Nolan accordingly identiies two relevant dimensions: the protean connections within and across both Eastern and Western Europe, and Europe’s relations with the hird World.8 he fact that a crucial issue like the contextualization of the Atlantic Community within the global world is 5. On the “cultural turn,” see Robert Griith, “he Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies,” Reviews in American History, 29 (2001), 150-57; David Reynolds, “International History, the Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch,” Cultural and Social History, 3 (Jan. 2006), 75-91; Andrew Rotter, “Foreign Relations Biography and the Cultural Turn,” Diplomatic History, 32 (Nov. 2008), 773-78; and Susan Smulyan, “he Cultural Turn in U.S. Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History, 33 (June 2009), 539-42. On the role of ideas and the links between interests and identity, see Volker Depkat, “Cultural Approaches to International Relations: A Challenge?,” Culture & International History, eds., Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher (New York, 2004), 175-97; Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, 1972); Joseph Nye, Soft Power: he Means to Success in World Politics (New York, 2004); and homas Risse-Kappen, “Introduction,” in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions, ed. homas Risse-Kappen (Cambridge, 1995). 6. Ian Tyrell ofers a short, compelling relection on transnational history. See the excerpt from a paper he gave at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in January 2007: Ian Tyrell, “What is transnational history?” (https://iantyrrell.wordpress.com/what-is-transnational-history/, last accessed May 18, 2105). See also Patricia Clavin, “Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts,” European History Quarterly, 4 (2010), 624-40. Other excellent examples include Nick Cullather, he Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Akira Iriye, ed., Global Interdependence: he World After 1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2014); John Robert McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Washington DC-New York, 2010); and Sarah B. Snyder, “Bringing the Transnational In: Writing Human Rights into the International History of the Cold War,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, 25 (2013), 100-16. 7. See Mary Nolan, “Rethinking Transatlantic Relations in the irst Cold War Decades,” in More Atlantic Crossings? European Voices in the Postwar Atlantic Community, eds. Jan Logemann and Mary Nolan, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Supplement 10 (2014), 32. 8. Ibid. 73 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space being raised shows how the historiographical debate in this ield has evolved by integrating the aforementioned trends. In this regard, a third relevant transformation deserves consideration. Scholars have recently tried to integrate narratives of transatlantic relations in an innovative way by bridging the gap between the historiography on the Cold War and that on European integration, two ields still often considered separately and between which there is rarely a dialogue. As Piers Ludlow argued in the Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), more often than not, “European integration and the Cold War have been studied in near total isolation from one another, and have represented the primary interest of two distinct groups of scholars who have rarely exchanged ideas. But the interaction between the evolution of the Cold War and the gradual development of the EC/EU was so intimate that it is important, indeed vital, for historians to break down the barriers between the two ields.”9 his cross-fertilization is crucial for transcending the limits of both historiographies. On the one hand, the integration of Western Europe is often subsumed within the broader framework of the bipolar confrontation and is therefore essentially regarded as its byproduct, receiving less attention as the focus becomes more global. On the other hand, the origins and development of the European Communities are frequently treated as independent, separate processes, loosely tied to a broader understanding of international, Cold War and contemporary European history. Undeniably, a major shortcoming in the traditional scholarship on the EC/EU has been the inability to challenge the institutional tale of an inevitable, linear, progressive trend towards supranationalism. Much of the orthodox historiography, as Mark Gilbert noted in his review of the subject, “has its foundations in a progressive rather than protean interpretation of Europe’s contemporary history. he very word ‘process’, which is, after all, a metaphor of sorts, conveys a notion of inevitability, or, at any rate, of predictability. here is an air of almost Victorian certainty about much European integration scholarship.”10 Yet, the study of history should be primarily aimed at unveiling complexities, ambiguities, and stops and starts. A revision of this interpretative paradigm has allowed for a more comprehensive, balanced study of the integration process, whose understanding clearly requires its contextualization within the histories of the Cold War conlict and postwar Europe, as brilliantly demonstrated by Tony Judt.11 Against this backdrop, transatlantic relations represent very fertile ground for research. By proiting from the transformations in diferent yet tangential historiographical ields and integrating a variety of approaches, the writing on Euro-American relations can now develop along original trajectories and help open new avenues of research. It is clearly beyond the scope of this essay to comprehensively examine 9. Piers Ludlow, “European Integration and the Cold War,” in he Cambridge History of the Cold War, eds. Melvyn P. Leler and Odd Arne Westad, vol. 2: Crises and Détente (Cambridge, Eng., 2012), 179. 10. Mark Gilbert, “Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European Integration,” he Journal of Common Market Studies, 46 (2008), 642. 11. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005). 74 alessandra bitumi the vast scholarship on this topic. he aim is rather to address what are in this author’s opinion the most hotly debated issues and to try and disentangle some historiographical knots. he irst overarching theme to be addressed concerns the framework of postwar transatlantic relations, namely the political, intellectual, cultural, economic, social, diplomatic and military ground on which they developed. Speciically, how do we conceptualize and investigate the Atlantic Community in an international context characterized by the EastWest conlict? On which pillars was it established? How was it constructed, and what actors, discourses and networks made it possible? How did it relate to its American and Western European constituent parts? One text that tackles all these questions and provides useful tools for moving through the labyrinth is Marco Mariano’s efort to “deine the Atlantic Community.”12 Addressing these issues leads one to investigate closely related concepts and realities, including irst and foremost the nature and manifestation of American hegemony, together with its reception, rejection and/or adaptation overseas. Scholars are increasingly framing their studies around the notion of competing visions of social and economic modernity and cultural and political power within the Euro-Atlantic postwar order. he seminal studies of David Ellwood and Mary Nolan are excellent examples. Similarly pivotal for understanding the Atlantic Community is an appreciation of how it was transformed by the crisis of the 1970s and the long-term legacy of that transformation. he multiple connections between domestic developments in the US and Europe and international changes ofer several interesting viewpoints for a critical evaluation, as does the shift from the East-West axis to the North-South one. How did Atlanticism survive the turmoil of that decade? On what pillars were transatlantic relations based and developed throughout the 1980s? he second major theme revolves around the development of the European integration narrative within the framework of the Atlantic Community. How do we interpret the creation and development of the European Community within this scheme? Have the two processes reinforced, competed against or been independent of one another? Charles Maier already avowedly posed this structural dilemma in 1989 and it has constantly resonated ever since.13 A collective volume edited by Valérie Aubourg, Gérard Bossuat and Giles Scott-Smith gives it center stage in their compelling analysis “of the geopolitical upheavals and reorganizations that occurred in Europe as a result of the Second World War and the Cold War.”14 he title of their work, European Community, Atlantic Community?, speaks for itself. he same tension runs through the recent volume by Kiran Klaus Patel 12. Marco Mariano, “Introduction,” in Deining the Atlantic Community: Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century, ed. Marco Mariano (New York, London, 2010), 1-12. his issue is central to many of the essays collected in the volume. 13. Charles Maier, “Alliance and Autonomy: European Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives in the Truman Years,” in he Truman Presidency, ed. Michael James Lacey (New York, 1989), 274. 14. Valérie Auburg, Gérard Bossuat and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., European Community, Atlantic Community? he Atlantic Community and Europe (Paris, 2008). 75 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space and Kenneth Weisbrode, with diferent chronologies accounting for the diversity in the responses.15 In fact, the latter focuses on the 1980s and investigates the interconnectedness between the Atlantic Community and the European Community within a bipolar order on the verge of collapse. he turning point in the history of transatlantic relations came in the 1970s – a watershed moment whose signiicance will be discussed below. he periodization of this review relects the broad historiographical consensus on this relevance. his paper will explore how the major issues have been addressed and what avenues of research they have opened in relation to two phases: the early decades of the Cold War, and the period stretching from the “long seventies” to 1989. On United States-European Relations, 1945-1969. he reorganization of the postwar western order pivoted on the construction of a solid Euro-Atlantic system resting upon a shared institutional framework and a speciic set of rules and principles. Within the overarching structure of the bipolar conlict, the US and Western Europe established and invariably buttressed a liberal, democratic, prosperous and secure area centered on four main pillars. he irst, political, pillar united unyielding anti-communism with democratic stabilization and informed the development of an ever-stronger interdependence between the restructured political regimes. A broad transatlantic consensus was forged by the pervasive inluence of Cold War liberalism, containment of the USSR and inescapable, irreducible antagonism to the Soviet enemy.16 On this ground, the Atlantic Community came to deine itself primarily in terms of opposition to “the Other,” namely the USSR and its satellites. his dichotomy was most evident in the economic realm, which represents the second linchpin of the post-1945 western order. Under an uncontested US leadership, a new institutional framework was tasked with managing the global economy. With the 15. Kiran Klaus Patel, Kenneth Weisbrode, eds., European Integration and the Atlantic Community in the 1980s (New York, 2013). 16. On the mutually exclusive character of the superpowers’ vision and their antagonism, see Michael Cox, “From the Truman Doctrine to the Second Superpower Detente: he Rise and Fall of the Cold War,” Journal of Peace Research, 27 (1990), 25-41; Odd Arne Westad, he Global Cold War; and David C. Engerman, “Ideology and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1962,” in he Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1: Origins, 20-44. More broadly, the irst volume of he Cambridge History of the Cold War ofers comprehensive analyses on the origins of the conlict and the European settlement. Federico Romero provides a remarkable explanation of the “political” linchpin of the Atlantic Community in Storia della Guerra Fredda. L’ultimo conlitto per l’Europa (Turin, 2009). See also the newly published work by Mark Gilbert, Cold War Europe: he Politics of a Contested Continent (London, 2014). Mary Nolan presents the pillars of the Atlantic Community in the introduction to her book he Transatlantic Century: Europe and the United States, 18902010 (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). 76 alessandra bitumi International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreements on Tarifs and Trade (GATT) as its keystones, what became improperly known as the “Bretton Woods System” not only contributed to near unprecedented growth and stability during the period at hand, but it also characterized the path to growth in a distinctive way that coalesced the Atlantic allies under US leadership. In a system of “embedded liberalism”17 that enabled states to enact controls on capital lows while maintaining ixed exchange rates and expansionary domestic policies, the US stood out by projecting its own vision of modernity deined by unparalleled productivity and high wages, mass consumption, technological innovation and Fordist production. he third pillar was represented by unchallenged conventional and nuclear American military might. he establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization signiied the ultimate departure from a policy of “no entangling alliances” and permanently tied US security to that of Western Europe.18 A fourth, crucial dimension in the transatlantic postwar order was the discourse underpinning the entire structure: the inclusive rhetoric of Cold War liberalism and Atlanticism, and the attractiveness of the American model and its successful projection beyond the borders of the nation. All four of these factors buttressed an Atlantic Community that was obviously grounded on a strong American hegemony. Indeed, the United States succeeded in negotiating a speciic international order that was sustained by a general domestic consensus, widely accepted by European counterparts and maintained for the most part without coercion. Several tools were also used to promote and reinforce American hegemony in the economic, cultural, military and political realms. his multidimensional manifestation made it all the more pervasive, enduring and ultimately efective. he historiographical debate on the nature, multiple forms and implications of this hegemony is particularly rich. he irst issue concerns the essence of the American model. What were its most prominent features? What made it unique, distinctive and reproducible? For Charles Maier, the mantra of productivity, which emerged as a US organizing principle for the postwar economic order, took center stage. In his groundbreaking essay “he Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II,”19 he argued that “American blueprints for international monetary order, policy towards trade unions and the intervention of occupation authorities in West Germany and Japan 17. On the original coinage and understanding of the concept, see John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization, 36 (Spring 1982). 18. On the military dimension of the Atlantic Alliance, see Lawrence S. Kaplan, NATO Divided: NATO United: he Evolution of An Alliance (Westport, 2004). 19. Charles Maier, “he Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II,” International Organization, 31 (Autumn 1977), 607-633. 77 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space sought to transform political issues into problems of output, to adjourn class conlicts for a consensus on growth.” he move from scarcity to abundance, or what Ellwood deined as “the politics of growth,” was fundamental for the adjournment of distributive struggles and stood as a pillar of the new order.20 his framework was based on mass production, consumption, rational organization of labor, advanced technology and free trade, and it promoted the stabilized-growth capitalism of “the West.” According to Marie-Laure Djelic, on the other hand, the essence of the model transferred from the United States to Western Europe was multidivisional, rationalized corporate capitalism, operating under the constraints of antitrust legislation and competing in oligopolistic markets.21 Other scholars have adopted a somewhat diferent approach to the deinition of the American model, with its predominant tenet being the large-scale promotion of mass consumption. In this case, the global inluence of the US is primarily understood in terms of an “imperial market.” From this perspective, Victoria De Grazia’s Irresistible Empire ofers a remarkable, captivating look at the impact of American consumer culture on transatlantic relations. Building on the extensive literature on the peculiar nature of US imperialism, De Grazia explores the imperial nature of US dominance in Europe by investigating the expansion of American commercial and business interests, the creation of brand names and the success of corporate advertising, chain variety stores, Rotary Clubs and the ilm industry. he quest for hegemony is interpreted here in terms of a challenge to “old consumer culture” in favor of the centrality of the “consumer-citizen.”22 Woodrow Wilson allegedly designed the path for dominance, advising his fellow citizens to “go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and happier, and convert them to the principles of America.” he upshot, according to De Grazia’s famous image, was the emergence of “a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium.” A similar interpretative lens has been used by other scholars investigating this subject within bilateral frameworks, including Richard Kuisel, Volker Berghahn and Reinhold Wagnleitner who have written excellent analyses on the French, German and Austrian cases, respectively.23 Whatever the predominant feature of the “American model,” the basic characteristic seems to be its inherent ability to generate consensus or, better, to construct hegemony. All 20. David Ellwood, “he Marshall Plan and the Politics of Growth,” in Shaping Postwar Europe: European Unity and Disunity, 1945-1957, Peter M. Stirk and David Willis, eds., (London, 1991), 15-26. 21. Marie-Laure Djelic, Exporting the American Model: the Postwar Transformation of European Business (New York, 1998). Mary Nolan also argues that these two visions of the “American model” are largely relevant in her historiographical review, “Rethinking Transatlantic Relations in the First Cold War Decades.” 22. A remarkable study on this issue is Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic: he Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). 23. Illustrative examples include Volker Berghahn, he Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: he Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993) as well as his latest publication, he French Way: How France embraced and Rejected American Values and Powers (Princeton, 2011); and Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: he Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (Chapell Hill, 1994). 78 alessandra bitumi the aforementioned studies address how the US deployed its undisputable soft power to forge the postwar order within the Atlantic space. hough highly successful, the politics of productivity did not result in an outright export of the model to Europe. Far from a unilateral imposition, it was a trend the Americans supported within a consensual framework. he social basis for its implementation was already in place in Western Europe, as was a strong political convergence in favor of postwar growth matched by severe fatigue with ideological conlict.24 his fertile ground for the politics of productivity and the payofs of the system enabled the establishment of what Maier deines as American “consensual hegemony.” As he claims, “consensual can be used because European leaders accepted Washington’s leadership in view of their needs for economic and security assistance. Hegemony derives from Washington’s ability to establish policy guidelines binding on the West.” From the outset, a crucial underpinning of the long lasting ‘Pax Americana’ was indeed the ability of the US to manage the complex “structure of coordination across national boundaries.”25 his coordination promoted both a speciic economic pattern of development and a lasting US political involvement in Europe. It encouraged European leaders who shared certain political objectives while isolating those who did not. he domination was pervasive yet noncoercive, enabled by the popular acceptance of “shared values and a common commitment to transnational ideas that motivate political behavior.”26 he very notion of “irresistibility” used by De Grazia also suggests a power that was ultimately accepted and even solicited. Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad has gone even further by speaking of an “empire by invitation.”27 In his renowned essay of 1986 opposing the revisionist interpretation of a purposive US imperial design, he described American dominance in Europe as fundamentally peculiar, more of a response to the requests of the Old Continent than the consequence of imperial reach. In the economic realm, the unquestionable need for assistance translated into the creation of the European Recovery Program (ERP), otherwise known as the Marshall Plan. he pressure for greater US military involvement was enormous and led to the historical entanglement of national sovereignties under the NATO umbrella. As Lundestad concludes, the European public similarly advanced a request for American presence, albeit with signiicant national diferences.28 24. Maier, “he Politics of Productivity,” 630. 25. Maier, “Alliance and Autonomy,” 274. 26. Ibid. 27. Geir Lundestad, “Empire by invitation? he United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952,” Journal of Peace Research, 3 (Sept. 1986), 263-277; and Geir Lundestad, “Empire” by integration: the United States and European Integration 1945-1997 (Oxford, 1998). Lundestad also later included this argument in his monograph on the subject, he United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From “Empire” by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford, 2005). 28. “Little indicates that the European political leaders did not receive the tacit or even stronger support of their peoples when they brought their countries into closer economic, political and military cooperation with the United States,” Geir Lundestad, “Empire by invitation?,” 273. 79 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space As debatable as it may be in its ahistorical rigidity, the notion of “invitation” has greatly inluenced the interpretation of a US rise to predominance in Europe. John Lewis Gaddis’ understanding of the American empire as essentially “reluctant” is explicitly based on this idea.29 he diplomatic forms through which European “encouragement” was articulated are the objects of a rich, vast literature. Archival-based studies ofer detailed accounts of the complex negotiations between the US government and its European counterparts for defense arrangements and economic plans for Europe’s reconstruction, which was dependent on American aid. he most studied case is obviously the Marshall Plan – the complex US response to the emergence of the need to rebuild the Old Continent.30 How Europeans reacted to this challenge is a fascinating story that reveals the ambiguities, multiple meanings, reception and adaptation of the Plan. However, it is clear that it was widely welcomed when not urgently requested. It also represents an interesting case study for examining the construction of US hegemony in Europe and actually complicates the notion of “invitation.” he Marshall Plan has been extensively examined and reexamined, and has been at the center of a sophisticated, intense historiographical debate focusing primarily on the US side of the story. Scholars like Michael Hogan have transformed it from a story of foreign aid into a narrative of “ideological and practical connections, welfare capitalism, representations of interest and economic growth.”31 here is therefore a panoply of research angles from which to approach this subject. Aside from its actual economic accomplishment,32 the “master narrative” function it performed is particularly relevant with respect to its impact on European societies. While European interest in 29. See John Lewis Gaddis, he United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (Oxford, 1992); and idem, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997). 30. As David Ellwood wrote, “how the Europeans dealt with—even resisted—this challenge is another story. But for sure they had no alternative discourse of their own, and they were more than happy to accept a form of conditional dependence as long as the program kept functioning.” See David Ellwood, “What Winning Stories Teach: he Marshall Plan and Atlanticism as Enduring Narratives,” in Deining the Atlantic Community, 114. 31. See Michael J. Hogan, he Marshall Plan, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). For an excellent, synthetic review of Hogan’s work, see Charles Maier, “American Visions and British Interests: Hogan’s Marshall Plan,” Reviews in American History, 18 (March 1990), 102-11. 32. Scholarship from the time of the Marshall Plan and the subsequent period credited it with the reconstruction of the western European economy, which included restoring decent food supplies, opening supply bottlenecks in industry and regenerating capital equipment and housing stocks. Later scholars have disagreed with this straightforward narrative and ofered more sophisticated, complex views. Among the many excellent historical analyses in which the legacy of the Plan has been reassessed, see Michael J. Hogan, he Marshall Plan, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952; and Alan Milward, he Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951 (London, 1984). For studies that focus on speciic countries, see Pier-Paolo D’Attorre, “ERP Aid and the Politics of Productivity in Italy during the 1950s,” European University Working Papers, 159 (1985); Chiarella Esposito, America’s Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy, 1948-1950 (Westport, 1994); Carlo Spagnolo, La stabilizzazione incompiuta: Il piano Marshall in Italia (1947-1952) (Rome, 2001); Mauro Campus, L’Italia, gli Stati Uniti e il Piano Marshall, 1947-1951 (Rome, 2008); and Francesca Fauri, Il Piano Marshall e l’Italia (Bologna, 2010). 80 alessandra bitumi American economic aid certainly existed, the particular form it took and its long-term consequences all hint at a deliberate efort on the part of the US to reshape the European economic and political order. As Hogan claims, the overall intention was to remake the Old World in the image of the New. In his seminal works on the topic, David Ellwood skillfully explains the preeminent feature and ultimate success of the Marshall Plan: “as a narrative of modernization, the Plan played a major role in introducing the concept, the language, and the techniques of economic growth to European political culture – an ever-expanding prosperity for an ever-expanding majority – and demonstrated its roots in constantly increasing productivity across and within Europe’s economic systems. As a speciic geopolitical narrative, the ERP launched the concept and practice of ‘European economic integration’ on its distinguished contemporary career.”33 In this sense, the ERP performed as the channel for the propagation and reiication of the American vision of the postwar economic order. It acted, in a word, as a vehicle of US hegemony. But how was this hegemony sustained and deepened in a broader sense? What channels were used? What actors were involved? Eforts to answer these questions have prompted fruitful historical research. Referring to the transmission of the key concepts mentioned above – productivity, scientiic management and a single-market Europe – Elllwood wrote: “In each country there were specialized publications on these subjects, joint committees, trips by European leaders to inspect American factories, conferences, and eventually, in some places, even ‘productivity villages’ where model factories and workers’ communities could be seen in action.”34 In this sense, studies on public and cultural diplomacy, stretching beyond the porous border with psychological warfare, become crucial for exploring the multifaceted dynamics of US hegemony in Europe and how it unfolded. Navigating the historiography of the “cultural Cold War” is challenging. After 1945, virtually everything, from paintings and space travel to sports and ballet, assumed political signiicance and was deployed to shape a favorable cultural landscape as a backdrop for diplomatic and military actions. he amount of interesting scholarship on the subject is copious.35 As Tony Shaw has argued, Scott Lucas’ Freedom War and Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper? 36 have added “signiicantly to our understanding of how 33. David Ellwood, “What Winning Stories Teach: he Marshall Plan and Atlanticism as Enduring Narratives,” in Deining the Atlantic Community, 114. 34. Ibid., 113. 35. See, among others, Richard Arndt, he First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington DC, 2005); Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam, eds., he Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945-1960 (London, 2003); Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, eds., Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London, 2004); Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, 2001); and Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology and European Users (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). 36. Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: he American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York, 1999); and Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: he CIA and the Cultural Cold War (New York, 1999). 81 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space foreign policy making, domestic politics, propaganda and culture intersected during the conlict.”37 In particular, Saunders elucidated the dual-track strategy followed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Europe. On the one hand, the CIA actively pursed a selective promotion of literary publications. Disillusioned ex-communists like Gide, Koestler and Silone received considerable support together with social scientists and philosophers – including Berlin, Bell and Milosz – who preached the virtues of western freedom and intellectual independence within an anti-communist, pro-US framework. On the other hand, “popular art” became heavily subsidized. he CIA promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, jazz and opera to neutralize anti-American sentiment and foster appreciation for US culture and government. As an antidote to art forms with a social content, the CIA also worked with the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to promote Abstract Expressionism.38 he increasing ubiquity of American popular culture, coupled with CIA-sponsored initiatives, made the battle for hearts and minds in Europe very efective.39 Nicholas Cull’s work on the USIA (United States Information Agency) also provides a brilliant account of how “America’s story was told to the world.”40 US public diplomacy used a wide-ranging international information campaign that included broadcasting and exchange programs to project the nation’s image abroad. he achievements and laws of this policy in the European theater are the subjects of the seminal works of Giles Scott-Smith. Presenting the case of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Scott-Smith developed a sophisticated understanding of the intimate relationship between public diplomacy and American hegemony. In the author’s words, “the Congress is (…) understood here (as it was by its founding personnel) as the cultural-intellectual equivalent to the political economy of the Marshall Plan, its goals in the sphere of culture and ideas being complementary with the European Recovery Program’s socio-economic and political aims.”41 ScottSmith’s investigation into the multiple channels of US inluence has also led him into the realm of exchange programs, another complex subject of analysis. In his famous Networks of Empire, he discusses the development and goals of the State Department’s Foreign Leader Program under which journalists, politicians, academics and business elites were invited to travel to the United States to have a irst-hand experience of the 37. Tony Shaw, “he Politics of Cold War Culture,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 3 (Fall 2001), 59-76. 38. See Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? his connection between the CIA and the activities of the MOMA was already being discussed in the 1970s. See Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” in Artforum, 15 (June 1974), 39-41. See also Hugh Wilford, he Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). 39. See Shaw, “he Politics of Cold War Culture.” 40. Nicholas J. Cull, he Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). 41. Giles Scott-Smith, he Politics of Apolitical Culture: he Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and PostWar American Hegemony (New York, 2002), 11. 82 alessandra bitumi country and potentially develop a sympathetic view.42 To explore how American hegemony was exercised in diferent ways, historical research has revealed new and highly interesting actors, namely transnational elites. heir historical relevance in this respect is masterfully expressed by Maier in his deinition of “empire” as “a form of political organization in which the social elements that rule in the dominant state – ‘the mother country’ or the ‘metropole’ – create a network of allied elites in regions abroad who accept subordination in international afairs in return for security of their position in their own administrative unit (the “colony” or, in spatial terms, the “periphery”).”43 In his understanding of the United States as imperial, Maier points to the nurturing of a transnational political elite as one of its linchpins.44 European elites acquiesced in Washington’s military and socio-economic leadership, in turn propagating American economic structures and importing adapted versions of the Fordist methods of production. Studies of the diferent networks of people who traveled across the Atlantic relect this appreciation for the role played by elites in shaping American hegemony and the Atlantic compromise. Research in this ield is often criticized for its dubious ability to draw viable conclusions. It is indeed very diicult, if not impossible, to measure the actual impact of exchanges, networks and cultural programs on policy.45 For instance, how can we assess the efectiveness of the Fulbright Program in terms of Atlantic integration?46 Nonetheless, they are precious tools for investigating the discourse, ideas, values and norms that circulated and forged the postwar transatlantic consensus. Moreover, this is crucial for understanding the foundations of the Atlantic Community. Research on this topic has addressed key questions, such as those expressed well by Kenneth Weisbrode: “What was at the root of a common regional consciousness that went by the name of Atlanticism? What sustained it? What counteracted it? And why?”47 While his study on the “Atlantic Century” focused on the diplomats in the State Department’s Europe Bureau, other works have investigated the roles played by cultural institutions, foundations, journals and intellectuals in its deinition and spread. 42. Giles Scott-Smith, Networks of Empire: he US State Department’s Foreign Leader Program in the Netherlands, France and Britain 1950-1970 (Brussels, 2008). See also Giles Scott-Smith, “Building a Community around the Pax Americana: he US Government and Exchange Programs in the 1950s,” in he US Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War: he State-Private Network, eds. H. Laville & H. Wilford (London, 2006). 43. Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). 44. With the other two being the coordination of the economy and the spread of US culture. 45. For an excellent relection on the diiculties of measuring the impact, see Giles Scott-Smith, “he Problems of Evaluation,” in Networks of Empire, ed. Giles Scott-Smith and, by the same author, “Mapping the Undeinable: Some houghts on the Relevance of Exchange Programs within International Relations heory,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 606 (March 2008). 46. A question raised by Richard Arndt and D. Lee Rubin, in he Fulbright Diference, 1948-1992 (New Brunswick, 1993) 47. Kenneth Weisbrode, “he Political and Cultural Underpinnings of Atlanticism’s Crisis in the 1960s,” in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 44. 83 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Studies on the circulation of people, ideas and commodities have been at the core of a substantial, indeed pivotal, revision in the historiography of transatlantic relations. Traditionally, they have tended to reduce transatlantic power relations to the inevitable triumph of the US vision of modernity. he interpretation of the 20th century as an eminently “American Century” clearly rested on the acknowledgment of an unrivaled US dominance looming over Europe. Recently, however, a new wave of scholarship has described a more nuanced, contradictory history of cooperation, inluence and interchange between the two sides of the Atlantic, one that challenges the prevailing narrative of a dominant “Americanization of Europe.”48 Without questioning the validity of this narrative, the new literature juxtaposes complementary discourses by foregrounding a partial “Europeanization of America” in its analysis. Daniel Rodgers is to be credited for pioneering the understanding of the transatlantic dialogue as the product of multiple voices and “Atlantic crossings” rather than a unilateral transfer process from the United States to Europe.49 By adopting the same transnational perspective, which Rodgers conined to the Progressive Era, scholars have investigated the interconnections and two-way low of exchanges that have shaped the postwar Atlantic Community. Nolan’s Transatlantic Century brilliantly challenges the traditional straightforward narrative of “Americanization.” In her view, the pervasiveness of US models of modernity was tempered by the selective European adoption and creative imitation of such models. he embracing of Fordism and Taylorism was itself mediated by local concerns over labor divisions, mass standardization and trade union claims. Consumption habits were shaped by native tastes and necessities resulting in a hybridization of the original model. Notably, the European iltration of the American vision of modernity is only one side of the story. he other conveys the impact of the transatlantic circulatory low on the United States. How have European ideas, policies, goods and people penetrated the US and helped shape its very dominant model? What was the European imprint? An increasing number of scholars are engaged in a vivid, fruitful dialogue to explore the inroads that Europeans made into American 48. he historiographical debate on the “westernization” of postwar Germany is illustrative in this regard. See, among others, Holder Nehring, “‘Westernization’: A New Paradigm for Interpreting West European History in a Cold War Context,” Cold War History, 4 (2004), 175-191; Volker R. Berghahn, “he Debate on “Americanization” among Economic and Cultural Historians,” Cold War History, 10 (Febr. 2010), 107-130. See also Giovanni Bernardini, “Westernization vs. Americanization after World War II: Still a Debate Issue? An Overview of the Historiography Dispute over Shapes and Times of US Inluence over Postwar Germany,” in Democracy and Diference: the US in Multidisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives. Papers from the 21st AISNA Conference, eds. G. Covi, L. Marchi, 145 (2012), 41-48. See also Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (New York 1997); and Rob Kroes, “Americanization and Anti-Americanism,” American Quarterly, 58 (June 2006), 503-15, as well as his groundbreaking If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall (Champaign, 1996). Broad but acute observations on the projection, reception and rejection of America in Europe are to be found in David Ellwood, he Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (New York, 2012) and Nolan, he Transatlantic Century. 49. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 84 alessandra bitumi society. he investigation of these multiple intersections promotes constant dialogue between diferent historical subields. Works on transnational institutions and networks complement the diplomatic approach. Histories of the social sciences contribute just as much to an understanding of competing visions of modernity as intellectual histories of European migrations and transfers of ideas. Similarly, urban and business historians ofer important perspectives on shifting power relations. he 2012 workshop More Atlantic Crossings? Europe’s Role in an Entangled History of the Atlantic World, organized by Jan Logemann, Nolan and Rodgers at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC brought together young scholars currently tackling these controversial issues. From Quinn Slobodian’s work on Swiss-German economist Wilhelm Röpke to Phillip Wagner’s focus on the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning, the panels mapped the various aforementioned trajectories.50 he resulting publication is a very useful tool for navigating the multiple, interconnected layers of postwar transatlantic relations.51 his revision of the traditional “Americanization” paradigm also entails a repositioning of Europe within the transatlantic framework. Notwithstanding the indisputable asymmetry of the US-European relationship, it does seem important to shift the historical focus to the role played by Western Europe in shaping its content and form. his efort is visible, for instance, in the research aimed at relating “Atlanticism” to “Europeanism,” however elusive the deinitions of both might be. he speciicities of postwar European developments are properly integrated into a narrative that becomes more complex as a result. Intertwined with the overarching structure of the Atlantic Community is, indeed, the creation of the European Community, complete with its own political dynamics and identity discourse. How do we conceptualize the relationship between these two communities? What tensions and dilemmas does it pose? Several scholars have addressed these complex issues. In the early Cold War years, one of the key elements of containment was consistent US encouragement of the process of European integration.52 his supportive attitude stemmed from strategic, economic and political considerations. First, a united, stable Europe was valued as a more efective bulwark against the Soviet threat than a loose-knit cohort of potentially rival nations. Second, it was believed that the establishment of a customs union – modeled after the American federal example – would speed up European recovery and economic growth, close the dollar gap and free the US from a long-term direct inancial commitment. Finally, the integration of European markets would favor a 50. he workshop’s aims and results are published on the webpage of the German Historical Institute: http:// www.ghidc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1223&Itemid=1067, last accessed May 18, 2015. 51. Logemann and Nolan, “More Atlantic Crossings?”. 52. See Charles Maier, “Hegemony and Autonomy within the Western Alliance,” in Origins of the Cold War: An International History, eds. Melvyn P. Leler and David S. Painter (New York, 2005), 154-174. 85 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space structural interdependence across the Atlantic. In answer to the question “Why does the United States support the Common Market?,” Deputy Assistant Secretary for Atlantic Afairs J. Robert Schaetzel stated: “American policy on European integration and the broad support this policy enjoys in the United States is perhaps easier to deine and to explain than almost any other aspect of our foreign policy. In a word, this support rests on the solid base of what we conceive to be enlightened American self-interest.”53 In 1949, American economist Gottfried Haberler maintained that “the idea of a European political and economic union is taken more seriously in the United States than in Europe.”54 his was especially the case in the political realm, according to the most recent historiography.55 Despite Europeans failing to form a federalist union along the lines of the American example and even refusing to comply with the “integration corollary” of the ERP, US oicials unambiguously supported their irst cooperative undertakings: the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Defense Community and, albeit slightly more reluctantly, the Common Market. However, as soon as the process of continental uniication gained momentum, the US acknowledged the existence of a structural dilemma: how could European autonomy and Atlantic alliance be mutually supportive?56 As early as 1952, US NATO oicial heodore Achilles claimed: “A Europe united outside the framework of the Atlantic Community would not be in our interest (…). A Europe united within a developing Atlantic unity may or may not be in our national interest (…) As Atlantic unity develops, we may ind a six-nation knot within it an unnecessary and possibly harmful complication.”57 Alan Milward and Federico Romero have persuasively shown how US attitudes towards the European Economic 53. US Department of State Bulletin, “he United States and the Common Market,” ed. Robert J. Schaetzel (3 Sept. 1962), in JRS Papers, Eisenhower Library, Kansas, (JRS), Series I, box. 4. 54. Quoted in Asle Toje, America, the EU and Strategic Culture: Renegotiating the Transatlantic Bargain (New York and London, 2008), 23. 55. While traditional historiography tends to emphasize the European commitment to creating “an ever closer union” along seemingly federalist lines, symbolically embodied by the pronouncement of the Schuman Declaration, “Milwardian” approaches contest this interpretation and point in a diferent direction. As Victor Gavin suggests, Americans were the ones who favored a much more profound form of continental integration, based on the American example, not the other way around. He even claims that “Ultimately, no concurrence of interests ever existed between the US government and European governments on the need to reorganize the Old Continent politically. From the US government’s standpoint, Europe’s devastation after World War II presented a golden opportunity for Europe to transform itself into a United States of Europe. he US was ready and willing to support and, to a large extent, provide the necessary funding for Europe to do so. For its part, Europe needed US support in every aspect and so was prepared to tell Washington, temporarily, whatever it wanted to hear without abandoning the nation-state as a cornerstone of its internal ediice of rules.” See Victor Gavin, “Were the Interests Really Parallel? he United States, Western Europe and the Early Years of the European Integration Project,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 8 (March 2010), 32-43. 56. Maier, “Alliance and Autonomy.” his is also the core issue addressed in Valérie Aubourg, Gérard Bossuat and Giles Scott-Smith (eds.), European Community, Atlantic Community (Paris, 2013). 57. Quoted in John L Harper, American Visions of Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). 86 alessandra bitumi Community (EEC) hardened as early as 1958.58 During the Eisenhower administration, and much more frequently during the Kennedy and Johnson years, concern with the evolution of the European integration process became explicit when the latter was at odds with US visions.59 In fact, Lundestad deines the literature on transatlantic relations as “crisis-oriented,” considering the countless moments of tension between the allies.60 Between 1945 and the late 1960s, several episodes strained that relationship. Scholars have extensively engaged with the crisis over the pace and forms of German rearmament, culminating in the failure of the European Defense Community (EDC) project.61 hey have also paid similar attention to the Suez Crisis and the lessons learned by the actors involved.62 As a pivotal moment in the history of European integration, the legacy of this crisis has been explored from multiples perspectives, including as a kick-start of EC institutional development and in terms of the tension between the ambitions of postcolonial Europe and the continent’s past. Interestingly, the way Western Europe came to terms with the process of decolonization has progressively emerged as a fascinating ield of inquiry. he literature on EC policies towards former colonies and, later, towards the so-called ACP countries is vast. From a transatlantic perspective, the dialectics between US and European development programs and visions of modernity is of great relevance. Although they sometimes converged, especially when it came to the preeminence granted to the Cold War imperative of security, they diverged in their ambitions and guidelines. In the mid-1960s, EC policies towards “the South” were still undeined and ambivalent, 58. See Federico Romero, “Interdependence and Integration in American Eyes: From the Marshall Plan to Currency Convertibility,” in he Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and heory 1945-1992, ed. Alan Milward (London, 1993). 59. See Pascaline Winand, Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe (New York, 1996); Piers Ludlow, “Transatlantic Relations in the Johnson and Nixon Eras: he Crisis hat Didn’t Happen – and What It Suggests about the One hat Did,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 8 (2010), 44-55; homas Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); and M. Guderzo, Interesse nazionale e responsabilità globale. Gli Stati Uniti, l’alleanza atlantica e l’integrazione europea negli anni di Johnson, 1963-1969 (Firenze, 2000). 60. Geir Lundestad, ed., No End to Atlantic Alliance: he United States and Western Europe: Past, Present and Future (Houndmill, 1998), 221-42. Barbara Zanchetta makes the same argument in “Introduction: Community of Values or Conlict of Interests? Transatlantic Relations in Perspective,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 8 (March 2010), 1-5. 61. For a reconstruction of the European Defense Community, its framework and its implications, see Michael Cresswell and Marc Trachtenberg, “France and the German Question, 1945-1955,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 5 (2003), 5-28; and Antonio Varsori, “Italy between Atlantic Alliance and EDC, 1948-55,” in Power in Europe?: Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy and the Origins of the EEC, 1952-1957, vol. 2, ed. Ennio di Nolfo (Berlin, 1992), 260-300. See also Ralph Dietl, “‘Sole Master of the Western Nuclear Strength’? he United States, Western Europe and the Elusiveness of a European Defence Identity 1959-1964,” in Europe, Cold War and Co-existence, 1953-1965, ed. Wilfried Loth (London, 2004), 132-72. he most recent contributions are Linda Risso, Divided We Stand: he French and Italian Political Parties and the Rearmament of Western Germany, 1949-1955 (Newcastle, 2007); and Michel Dumoulin, ed., La Communauté Européenne de Défense, leçons pour demain? (Brussels, 2000). 62. For a short, incisive description, see Tony Judt, Postwar, 297-302. 87 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space swaying between conlicting aspirations. On the one hand, they tried to promote a peculiar sort of “European modernization” to transform the economic structures of developing countries through an embryonic EC development and cooperation policy. On the other hand, they betrayed the persistence of a colonial legacy that embedded Euro-African relations within colonial patterns of dependency.63 hough certainly not a universal model, European modernization nevertheless began to ofer an alternative to the American archetype, which fully emerged in the mid-1970s in the diferent responses to the New International Economic Order.64 Tensions in the hird World area were matched by conlicts produced within the framework of the GATT. Soon after the establishment of the common market, the top priority of the US was to harmonize the EC with the general promotion of multilateral trade to avoid the danger of large-scale discrimination against American goods, particularly in the agricultural ield. As the US balance of payments deicit grew, Washington started pressing its allies and transatlantic disputes took center stage.65 Coupled with economic tensions, political, strategic and monetary concerns loomed large in the Atlantic Community after Charles De Gaulle promptly challenged Kennedy’s “Grand Design.”66 he French general’s demands for nuclear independence, withdrawal from the NATO command structure, attacks on the Bretton Woods system, strengthening of the Franco-German bond and outright objection to United Kingdom membership, all led to an even more strained relationship with the US.67 Despite mounting reciprocal criticism, however, no major crisis shattered the foundations of the Atlantic Community in the 1960s. his had a lot to do with both the American stance on the Euro-American relationship and the current conditions in 63. Guia Migani articulates this argument in her monograph La France et l’Afrique sub-saharienne, 19571963. Histoire d’une décolonisation entre idéaux euroafricains et politique de puissance (Bruxelles, 2008). 64. On this subject, see Gérard Bossuat and Marie-hérèse Bitsch, L’Europe unie et l’Afrique: de l’idée d’Eurafrique à la convention de Lomé I (Bruxelles, 2005); and Giuliano Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South, trans. Richard R. Nybakken (New York, 2012). he parallel emergence of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), a term coined in a debate that began in UNESCO in the late 1970s, represents a related and little explored avenue of research. 65. he aforementioned literature on transatlantic relations ofers accounts of commercial disputes between the US and Western Europe inside and outside the framework of the GATT. An excellent example is Lucia Coppolaro’s “US Policy on European Integration during the GATT Kennedy Round Negotiations (1963-67): the Last Hurrah of America’s Europeanists,” he International History Review, 33 (2011), 409-429. See also “he European Economic Community in the GATT Negotiations of the Kennedy Round (1964-1967): Global and Regional Trade” in Inside the European Community: Actors and Policies in the European Integration, A. Varsori, ed., (Baden-Baden/Bruxelles, 2006), 347-368. 66. Illustrative examples are provided by Frédéric Bozo, Two Strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States and the Atlantic Alliance, trans. Susan Emanuel (Oxford, 2001); and Eric Mahan, Kennedy, De Gaulle and Western Europe, (Basingstoke, 2002). See also Maurice Vaisse, La Grandeur. La politique étrangère du général de Gaulle (Paris, 1998). 67. For a comprehensive narrative, see Geir Lundestad, he United States and Western Europe Since 1945. See also Mary Nolan, he Transatlantic Century. 88 alessandra bitumi Western Europe under which no serious political threat came from the EC since no form of signiicant political unity had hitherto appeared.68 However, in 1969 members of the European Community individually and collectively started attempting to reshape their approach to the Cold War. his change ran parallel to the beginning of a transition on the part of the US to a new phase and form of hegemony that was strikingly less Atlantic-centered.69 On United States-European Relations, 1969-1989 he pillars of the Atlantic Community remained rock-solid until the 1970s. henceforth, however, changes in both domestic and international scenarios shattered this framework and depleted its legitimacy.70 Outstanding historical analyses have been carried out on the transformation of American power, a subject under increasing scrutiny.71 Vis-à-vis Europe, the erosion of US hegemonic power appeared in multiple forms. Economically, the “empire of production” declined with the simple decline in the ability of the US to drive global growth through domestic consumption, investments and aid. Intra-capitalist competition also contributed to the declining competitiveness of the US manufacturing and industrial sector. Although the shape of the post-Fordist, post-industrial society was not yet clear, the crisis of the traditional sources of growth and innovation was manifest. he American share of world trade declined considerably in the 1970s and economic tensions coupled with growing monetary tensions. As the dollar lost credibility and the Bretton Woods System came to an end after Nixon’s unilateral decision to suspend the 68. his is well illustrated in Ludlow, “Transatlantic Relations in the Johnson and Nixon Eras,” 44-55. 69. See Giovanni Arrighi, he Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time (London, New York, 2002). Bruce Cumings develops the same argument in his book Dominion from Sea to Sea: Paciic Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, 2009). Another notable example is Une incertaine alliance, Pierre Mélandri, ed., (Paris, 1988). he shift towards the Paciic is also discussed in Kenneth Weisbrode, he Atlantic Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2009) and Stephen Gill, ed., Atlantic Relations: Beyond the Reagan Era (New York, 1989). 70. One of the most comprehensive studies on transatlantic relations in the 1970s is the collective volume edited by Mahias Schulz and homas A. Schwartz: he Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations From Nixon to Carter (New York, 2010). See subsequent notes for contributions on speciic aspects. 71. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, 2010); Jeferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: he 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York, 2010); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); and homas Borstelmann, he 1970s: A New Global History (Princeton, 2012). On the various factors that have contributed to the transformation, see Jean Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilization in Global Politics (Philadelphia, 2009); Samuel Moyn, he Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2012); and Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: he Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass., 2014). On the dollar, see Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: the Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (New York, 2011); and Eric Helleiner and Jonathan Kirshner, he Future of the Dollar (Ithaca, 2009). 89 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space convertibility of the dollar into gold, the second main pillar of US hegemony collapsed.72 With its “New Economic Policy,” the United States moved temporarily away from embedded postwar liberalism and the European Community attempted to react with the creation of the “snake” – a joint currency loat mechanism that may have failed but did pave the way for the slow process of monetary uniication that eventually took place.73 he signing of the SALT I and ABM treaties – i.e. the institutionalization of a strategy of mutual assured destruction – and the almost-attained strategic parity between the superpowers also seemed to dismantle, or at least severely challenge, the very premise upon which the transatlantic structure had been built: uncontested US military supremacy. Lastly, the rhetoric of Atlanticism became less and less binding. Consensus on foreign policy choices and the supportive inclusive liberal international discourse waned. Fragmentation and polarization within the US were matched by growing hostility abroad. he contestation of American hegemony not only materialized in conlicts over economic and strategic issues, but it also translated into open opposition to US politics and culture. As the “soft power” of the US diminished, because of the Vietnam War among other things, the Atlantic divide grew. However, as historians of European integration have widely shown, the declining strength of the Atlantic compromise was also cause and consequence of the increased dynamism of the EC that progressively materialized, albeit in vague and contradictory forms, after the Hague Conference of 1969 – a turning point in the history of the European integration process.74 Both domestic and international forces triggered a signiicant change at the Community level that allowed the aims of integration to be reconigured as not just economic but also political. he results were contradictory. EC member states failed to meet the challenge of political uniication and responded in incoherent, ineicient ways to critical issues. As Daniel Mockli has shown in his remarkable study on the slow rise and quick fall of the European Political Cooperation (EPC), its trajectory – always strictly intergovernmental – was neither straight nor long, since it basically declined after 1975.75 Neither 72. See, among others, Barry J. Eichengreen, Global Imbalances and the Lesson of Bretton Woods (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Duccio Basosi, “he Transatlantic Relationship and the End of Bretton Woods, 1969-71,” in Euratlantic, or Europe-America? he Atlantic Community and the European Idea from Kennedy to Nixon, eds. Giles Scott-Smith and Valérie Aubourg (Paris, 2011), 468-85. Daniel Sargent ofers a particularly thorough contribution with A Superpower Transformed: the Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford, 2015). 73. Both articles on the issue by Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol are excellent: “Les banquier centraux du l’échec du plan Werner à la creation du SME, 1974-1979,” Histoire, économie et société, 4 (2011), 39-46; and “Integrating an International Political Economy Dimension into European Integration History: the Challenges of the 1970s,” Journal of European Integration History, 17 (2011), 335-41. 74. J. Van der Harst, ed., Journal of European Integration, 2 (2003); and Pierre Chassaigne, Les années 1970. Fin d’un monde et origine de nostre modernité (Paris, 2008). 75. For a diferent interpretation of the EPC in which the prevailing idea of a post-1975 decline is contested, see Aurélie Elisa Gfeller, Building a European Identity: France, the United States, and the Oil Shock, 1973-74 90 alessandra bitumi had the ambitious goal of monetary uniication been reached by the end of the decade.76 Overall, coordination proved shaky and ultimately weak in the ield of foreign policy, as in the monetary-economic domain, with the rising price of oil further complicating the mediation of interests among the EC member states. Nevertheless, remarkable successes were achieved and should not be underestimated. Even skeptical analyses, which label the period from 1973 to 1983 as a “stagnant decade,” do not fail to appreciate its contribution to the enhancement of the process of European integration, which is easier to perceive from a long-term perspective. “he substantial progress toward the European uniication achieved later, from 1985 to 1992,” Keith Middlemas argues, “was the result of an accumulation of long-planned strategies at diferent levels within the Community.”77 Most of these strategies were rooted in the transformations of the 1970s and can be summarized in the sloganistic expression of a Europe inally willing to “speak with one voice.” Beneiting from the economic achievements of the 1950s/60s, western European countries agreed to (try and) translate their economic prowess into political agency by pursuing far-reaching initiatives and projects to support collective action in international afairs. As early as 1973, the European Community participated as a single actor at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), whose inal act ratiied the European interpretation of détente as a transformative rather than stabilizing process.78 While the US considered détente as “simply another way to manage and discipline bipolarism and not a process designed to bring it to an end,”79 many western European governments, particularly those led by social democratic forces, hoped to use it to transcend the Cold War. he crafting of Ostpolitik and the diferent readings of the Soviet threat lie at the core of this fundamental transatlantic divergence and helped inform the EC’s distinctive self-representation as a world actor. By fostering economic, diplomatic and cultural connections between Western Europe and the Soviet bloc, intraEuropean détente enveloped key eastern regimes in a pan-European web of trade relations and inancial interdependencies that ultimately challenged the USSR and its empire and consolidated an “international framework of cooperation that eventually allowed (New York, 2012). 76. Daniel Mockli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War: Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the Dream of a Political Unity (London, 2009). 77. Keith Middlemas, cit. in he Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations From Nixon to Carter, eds. Mahias Schulz and homas A. Schwartz, 11. 78. See Angela Romano, From Détente in Europe to European Détente: How the West Shaped the Helsinki CSCE (Brussels, 2009). On the “diferential détente,” see the observations by Mario Del Pero in he Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, 2009); Raimond L. Garthof, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, 1985); and Wilfred Loth and Georges-Henri Soutou, eds., he Making of Détente: Eastern and Western Europe in the Cold War, 1965-1975 (London, 2008). 79. Mario Del Pero, he Eccentric Realist, 94. 91 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space for, or at least facilitated, the peaceful conclusion” of the Soviet experience.80 Diferent approaches to détente deined US-European relations in the 1970s as much as difering views on the Middle East. EC member states were indeed actively engaged in the search for peace in the region and issued the 1973 November Declaration – a milestone of the EC/EU policy towards the area.81 Both the Euro-Arab and the North-South Dialogue followed.82 Confronting Kissinger’s strategy in the stabilization of southern Europe, the EC and other western European countries also prevailed in negotiating an “integrative” solution that would act primarily through the inclusion of Spain and Portugal within the system of western European economic, political and institutional interdependence by granting them EC membership.83 his outward dynamism of the Community was sustained by an embryonic relection on an allegedly speciic, “exceptional” European identity. A year later, prompted by Kissinger’s failed call for “a new Atlantic Charter,” the member states even formulated a declaration of their common identity.84 As recent works have revealed, within a broader conceptualization of the link between external relations and common identity, the heads of state and government singled out the Atlantic partnership as the main channel for the acknowledgment of this identity.85 In 80. Federico Romero, “Cold War Historiography,” 17. his argument is central to Romero’s interpretation of the end of the Cold War. 81. Joint Statement by the EEC Governments, 6 November 1973, source available at http://www.cvce.eu/ obj/Joint_statement_by_the_Governments_of_the_EEC_6_November_1973-en-a08b36bc-6d29-475caadb-0f71c59dbc3e.html, last accessed 18 May, 2015. 82. See Guia Migani, “La Communauté économique européenne et la Commission économique pour l’Afrique de l’ONU: la diicile convergence de deux projets de développement pour le continent africain (1958-1963),” Journal of European Integration History, 1 (2007), 133-46; and Guia Migani, “Les accords de Lomé et les relations eurafricaines: du dialogue nord-sud aux droits de l’homme,” in L’Afrique indépendante dans le système internationale, eds. E. Robin-Hivert, G.-H. Soutou (Paris, 2012), 149-65. On the Euro-Arab dialogue, see Aurélie Élisa Gfeller, Building a European Identity: France, the United States, and the Oil Shock, 1973-74 (New York, 2014). See also Muhamad Hasrul Zakariah, “he Euro-Arab Dialogue 1973-1978: Britain Reinsurance Policy in the Middle East Conlict,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 20 (2013), 95-115; and Silvia Pietrantonio, “he Year that Never Was: 1973 and the Crisis between the United States and the European Community,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 8 (2010). 83. For a good overview, see Antonio Varsori, “Crisis and Stabilization in Southern Europe during the 1970s: Western Strategy, European Instruments,” Journal of European Integration History, 15, (2009). Mario Del Pero explores the Portuguese case in the same issue with “A European Solution for a European Crisis: he International Implications of Portugal’s Revolution,” 15-35. See also Mario Del Pero, Fernando Guirao and Antonio Varsori, eds, Democrazie. L’Europa meridionale e la ine delle dittature (Milano, 2011). 84. hose exploring identity – a central issue in today’s scholarship – have progressively recovered the signiicance of the declaration made in Copenhagen in 1973, which entered the historiographical debate in the late 1990s. Luisa Passerini’s article on the issue was groundbreaking: “From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony,” in he idea of Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, Eng., 2002). A similar argument had previously been made in Marie-hérèse Bitsch, Wilfrid Loth, Raymond Poidevin, eds., Institutions européennes et identités européennes (Bruxelles, 1998). 85. On the European identity, see René Girault, Gérard Bossuat, eds., Les Europe des Européens (Paris, 1993), Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Houndsmills, 1995); and Bo Stráth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Bruxelles, 2000). On the role of alterity of the US, see Gfeller, Building 92 alessandra bitumi this context, the US has served as a counter-image with an identity-creating function for Europe herself. Politically, the rising European consciousness included opposition to the American hegemony, and this translated into a contestation of Europe’s limited role within the Atlantic Community. he upshot, from a long-term perspective, was an unrestrained challenge to the Atlantic compromise that – connected as it was to the transformation of US hegemony – progressively led to the demise of the Communitas as it was interpreted and managed during the early years of the Cold War. hroughout the “long seventies,” the discourse of Cold War Atlanticism became less powerful in both Europe and the US In the latter, support for a global foreign policy was frequently mobilized through a powerful nationalist discourse that often turned openly against Europe and represented a radical departure from the old inclusive Atlantic discourse of the early Cold War years. his shift is relected in the speeches of key igures like Senator Henry Jackson and President Ronald Reagan, marked by a rhetoric that anticipated more recent relections, with the most popular and controversial of these being Robert Kagan’s duality between Martial/masculine America and Venusian/feminine Europe. In reference to the 1980s, mainstream historiography has largely ofered a critical narrative of US-European relations. Trade and monetary disputes between the EC and Washington grew signiicantly. Research on the various G7 meetings, especially those that took place between 1981 (Ottawa) and 1985 (Bonn), is particularly telling in this regard.86 In his attack of the Federal Reserve Board, Western German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once exclaimed that the interest rate at the time was “the highest … since Jesus Christ.”87 he US-European relationship was repeatedly strained by the multiple crises ignited by the Euromissiles afair, the reaction to the Strategic Defense Initiative and the European construction of the Soviet pipeline.88 he response to the Polish Crisis and the Moscow Olympics boycott also produced issions a European Identity; and Maria Gainar, Aux Origines de la Diplomatie Européenne. Les Neuf et la Coopération politique européenne de 1973 à 1980, (Bruxelles, 2012). 86. A relection on the G7 and the European Community’s role is ofered by Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Federico Romero, eds., International Summitry and Global Governance: he Rise of the G7 and the European Council, 1974-1991 (Abingdon and New York, 2014). 87. Helmut Schmidt quoted in he Politics of Inlation and Economic Stagnation: heoretical Approaches, eds. Leon N. Lindberg, Charles S. Maier (Washington DC., 1985), 273. 88. he scholarship of the 1980s, including examples mentioned here, was already well developed. On the Euromissiles Crisis, see the recent volume edited by Leopoldo Nuti, Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey and Bernd Rother, he Euromissiles Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Redwood City, 2015). he same authors have published extensively on the topic. On the impact of the Strategic Defense Initiative on US-European relations, see Sean Kalic, “Reagan’s SDI Announcement and the European Reaction: Diplomacy in the Last Decade of the Cold War,” in he Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975-1985, ed. Leopoldo Nuti, (Abingdon, 2009). On the Soviet pipeline, see Ksenia Demidova’s very well researched essay: “he Deal of the Century: he Reagan Administration and the Soviet Pipeline,” in European Integration and Atlantic Community, eds. Patel and Weisbrode, 59-81. A traditional in-depth study on this subject is Anthony Blinken’s Ally vs. Ally (New York, 1987). 93 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space and tensions.89 However, this picture does not capture the ambiguities and contradictions of the time. It tells only one story among many. hanks to new archival sources only recently made available, historians are now engaged in investigating the decade, often blurring the standard chronology to encompass the late 1970s and the early 1990s. Understandably, there is a long way to go, but the ground is fertile for new work. At present, compelling questions are emerging about the legacy of the 1970s regarding the tension between Atlanticism and Europeanism. How have these been transformed by the “shock of the global?”90 How have they interplayed with the airmation of transnational forces like energy, human rights and the environment? For the US, has Atlanticism been permanently diluted within a more global vision within which Europe is increasingly peripheral? Or has it survived and even reshaped its relation with Europeanism, resembling more “symbiotic than contending” doctrines”? his is the argument made by Patel and Weisbrode in their latest book, which collects eleven essays addressing the aforementioned issues. Looking at transatlantic relations from a variety of perspectives, the book challenges interpretations of US-European relations in the years considered as disruptive. A powerful example is ofered by Duccio Basosi’s relection on the European Community’s response to international Reaganomics. In his introduction to the subject, he briely mentions the contrasting interpretations of leading scholars. For some, “antipathetic feelings profoundly shaped the relaunch of European integration (…) crowned by the entry into force of the Single European Act in July 1987.” For others, “several microeconomic features of Reaganomics – such as deregulation, privatization, and inancialization – progressively gained ground in Western Europe in those same years, both at the national and at the EC level: hence, they have reached the conclusion that Western European governments eventually opted to bandwagon with international Reaganomics instead of resisting its tide.” After assessing the matter, Basosi concludes that “not only did criticism from Western Europe vary in intensity throughout the years in question, but (…) there never emerged a truly cohesive Western European position.”91 89. On the Polish crisis, see the recent publication by Andrea Chiampan, “‘hose European Chicken Littles’: Reagan, NATO, and the Polish Crisis, 1981-2,” he International History Review, http://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2014.980299?abstract?ai=1ex&af=R&mi=46r472&journalCode=rinh20#. VVqbu1V_Okom, last accessed May 18, 2015. See also Gregory F. Domber, “Transatlantic Relations, Human Rights and Power Politics,” in Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and he Cold War, 1965-1985, eds. Poul Villame and Odd Arne Westad, (Copenhagen, 2010). On the Olympic Boycott, see Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (New York, 2011). See also Kevin Jefreys, “Britain and the Boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics,” Sport in History, 32 (2012). 90. Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier and Erez Manela, he Shock of the Global: he 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). 91. Duccio Basosi, “he European Community and International Reaganomics, 1981-1985,” in European Integration and the Atlantic Community, eds. Patel and Weisbrode, 134. 94 alessandra bitumi From Basosi’s perspective, the Atlantic is not as wide as suggested elsewhere. His interpretation collides with Nolan’s, who goes so far as to mention the existence of a truly “transatlantic social policy gap” that “has widened consistently from the 1980s onward as the US (and Britain) embraced neoliberalism and launched a full-scale assault on social rights. Diferent conceptualizations of the social and of social rights as well as distinctive social policy regimes were indeed integral parts of Europe’s own, peculiar, varieties of capitalism and version of modernity.”92 However, has this “version of modernity” actually shaped European policies? Or has it mainly nurtured images and self-representations somewhat distant from reality, produced to satisfy domestic public opinions and intellectual elites? Can we identify two wholly diferent approaches – American and European – to the relationship between the state and the economy? While the US has embraced neoliberalism both in practice and in rhetoric, Europe seems to be struggling to reconcile its discourse on the alleged diversity of the “European social model” – the pillar of a EU/ European exceptionalist narrative – with actual political choices made in a world economy that seems to limit options and possibilities. he question remains open. And this historiographical knot can and should be further entangled. It represents a new frontier of research that is crucial for understanding the economic, political and social history of both sides of the Atlantic. It is also a key element in the interpretation of contemporary transatlantic relations. Indeed, the larger issue of American and European identities and self-representations revolves around the appreciation of the seemingly dissimilar conception of capitalism. Since 1989, the idea that major diferences separate the United States and Europe has been embraced in an increasingly manichean way, especially in the public debate. Selfdeinition has rested frequently on opposition to “the Other.” In 2009, Peter Baldwin published an interesting book entitled he Narcissism of Minor Diferences in which he suggests that the divergences are not as great as commonly thought.93 While a inal judgment on the issue has to be postponed for now, historians of transatlantic relations would do well to investigate how such discourses have been shaped, how reciprocal images have been constructed and how stereotypes of Europe and the US have mirrored each other, thus helping to shape such images and representations. Understandably, for archival reasons studies on transatlantic relations cannot be stretched too far, but as of now there are many interesting avenues of research to follow. Europe’s role in the end of the Cold War, the ambiguous airmation of a “whole and free” Europe in a multipolar international context and the impact of the Yugoslav wars on transatlantic cohesion all spark complex questions that are bound to dictate future research. 92. Nolan, he Transatlantic Century, 6. 93. Peter Baldwin, he Narcissism of Minor Diferences: How America and Europe are Alike (New York, 2009). 95 he Prophet, the Priest and the Philosopher of Democracy: Albion Small and the Transatlantic Origins of American Social Science Giovanni Borgognone Studying Euro-American “transfers of culture” or “Atlantic crossings” (to use the popular term introduced by Daniel Rodgers), which began after the American Civil War and were crucial in forming Progressive Era political culture, is instrumental for reconstructing the origins and developments of the American social sciences in the 19th and 20th century. Taking this approach allows us to focus on the main objective of US social scientists from around 1880 onwards: the theoretical revision of the role and functions of the American state.1 In this context, they shifted their attention from constitutional issues to administration and overcame former mental barriers to view German universities as a privileged destination for higher education. In fact, social science scholars started going to Germany in increasing numbers, for example to attend an economics seminar by Johannes Conrad in Halle; to learn the research methodology of Gustav Schmoller, a leading exponent of the Verein für Sozialpolitik; or to attend a class in Berlin with Adolph Wagner in which the theoretical and ethical fallacies of classical economics were passionately argued.2 In its search for ways to remedy the malfunctions of private capitalism and the tendency of industrialization and the efects of mass society to destroy social harmony, US political culture was abandoning its former optimism about American “exceptionalism,” at least partly, and beginning to absorb theories and interpretations from Europe. In the 1887 1. Jürgen Herbst, he German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, 1965). Robert Adcock recently took a similar approach to arrive at his valuable synthesis of the 19th-century scenario. In Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science: A Transatlantic Tale (Oxford-New York, 2014), Adcock focuses on the beginnings of political science in the US with Francis Lieber, the Prussia-born scholar who became Chair of History and Political Science at Columbia College in New York in 1857. In fact, it is because of Lieber that European political science, in primis German, started exerting a strong inluence on the development of US political science. 2. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1998), 54, 62. 97 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space essay “he Study of Administration,” future president Woodrow Wilson, then a young and brilliant political science scholar, signiicantly observed that the limited government system conceived by the Founding Fathers was no longer suitable for modern conditions, which required a wider range of action on the part of the administration. Wilson therefore believed the US should model itself after Europe in this respect. At the time, the science of administration – a recent fruit of political science developed by French and German professors – was still considered “foreign.” Americans had yet to develop this science because their country had not experienced the absolutist phase of power undergone by countries on the Old Continent. Now that democracy had been fully established, however, they had no reason to fear the expansion of state powers in the hands of a class of experts. As Wilson argued, they just needed to “Americanize” the science of administration. In a quasi-Hegelian way (and indeed he was inluenced by German sociologist and jurist Lorenz von Stein’s Hegelian concept of administration), Wilson ultimately legitimized the rise to power of an administrative bureaucracy understood as a “universal class” devoted to an “unpartisan” function.3 he irst part of this essay starts from the conviction that the theoretical development of the social sciences represents a key observation point for building a history of 20th-century US political culture. As we will see, having an education marked by contaminationpermeation between European and American political cultures helped US social scientists reconceptualize the role and range of action of the central state, the government and their enactments, thus moving beyond the ideological opposition, rooted in exceptionalism, between American constitutional liberalism and European authoritarianism-centralism. On these bases, these scholars also legitimized the political function of the social sciences, thereby attempting to establish a crucial link between “intelligence” and “power” with a view to progress.4 he second part of this essay will focus on Albion W. Small (1854-1926), one of the most prestigious American academics of the 19th and 20th century who founded the irst Department of Sociology in the US in Chicago in 1892. As observed by his biographer George Christakes, he “served as a conduit through which many European ideas – particularly German – were introduced” to US social and political thought.5 Small con3. Woodrow Wilson, “he Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly, 2 (June 1887), 197-222; Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: he American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston, 1997), 127, 370; Robert D. Miewald, “he Origins of Wilson’s hought: he German Tradition and the Organic State,” in Politics and Administration: Woodrow Wilson and American Public Administration, eds. Jack Rabin and James S. Bowman (New York, 1984), 17-30. 4. An overview of the development of political science from a transatlantic perspective is presented in Giorgio Sola, “Da sponda a sponda: il travagliato viaggio della scienza politica tra l’Europa e gli Stati Uniti,” in Teoria, società e storia: scritti in onore di Filippo Barbano, eds. Carlo Marletti, Emanuele Bruzzone (Milano, 2000), 363-383. See also the Rafaella Baritono recent essay, which focuses the way the social sciences have revised the role of public power: “Ripensare lo Stato: scienze sociali e crisi politica negli Stati Uniti tra Otto e Novecento,” Ricerche di storia politica, 16, 3 (December 2013), 301-317. 5. George Christakes, Albion W. Small (Boston, 1978), 9. 98 giovanni borgognone sidered his experience studying in Leipzig and Berlin as an unavoidable point of reference for his own ideas about how the social sciences should function in America. Signiicantly, one of his most important works was a history of the Cameralists – 17th- and 18th-century German scholars whom he recognized as pioneers in the science of public administration. Small presented this history against the backdrop of a dirigiste idea of the state and an organicist concept of society, something that he too defended based on his belief in the usefulness of “vital analogies.” For Small the Cameralists also represented a model of intellectual engaged in both the speculative sphere and the practical application of social and political skills.6 As mentioned earlier, this kind of justiication of expertise in connection with the expansion of state power proved central to the political-cultural project of late-19th- and early-20th-century American social scientists of whom the Chicago sociologist was one of the most authoritative exponents.7 Social Science, Bureaucratism and Technocracy from a Transatlantic Perspective As many historians have noted, the US social and political order that followed the Civil War (1861-65) caused a partial decline in the exceptionalist ideology, which hinges on a belief in the ethical, political and civil superiority of the US over other countries, particularly those in Europe, “the mother of obstinate, incorrigible vices.”8 Even today the exceptionalist view remains remarkably inluential on the national collective imagination. However, as shown especially by Daniel Rodgers in his aforementioned Atlantic Crossings (1998), in the last decades of the 19th century American intellectual elites started realizing that their country had the same problems as other major industrialized nations like France, England and Germany.9 hey consequently became convinced of the need for solutions like those found in Europe, in view of an expansion of central state powers through the rationalization of society and organizational eiciency. At the same time, the technological and industrial developments of the Reconstruction Era and the so-called Golden Age were causing the economy to transform in a “corporate” sense, with the classic proprietary structure of businesses replaced by a structure based on “management” 6. Albion W. Small, he Cameralists. he Pioneers of German Social Polity (New York, 1909). 7. Herman and Julia Schwendinger’s interpretation of the origins of the US social sciences similarly hinges on the exaltation of a “technocratic professionalism” within the framework of a “technocratic conception of democracy” in he Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology 1883-1922 (New York, 1974). 8. Tiziano Bonazzi, “Europa, Zeus e Minosse, ovvero il labirinto dei rapporti euro-americani,” Ricerche di storia politica, 7, 1 (April 2004), 3-24; Massimo L. Salvadori, L’Europa degli americani. Dai Padri fondatori a Roosevelt (Roma-Bari, 2005). 9. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 50-51. 99 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space and a “board of directors.” In many ways, this articulation of the functions within large companies became a model for reorganizing power within government and public administration and inspired projects of public-private synergy for governance and the planning of the national economy.10 Social scientists and political theorists responded to this important change of scenario by making a similar move towards European political culture. In addition to the inluence of French and English social positivism, the role of the German concept of Geisteswissenschaften was central to this transatlantic network. American social scientists were thus persuaded to revise the exceptionalist concept of American democracy that had dominated public discourse for three quarters of a century. French sociologists and German academics revealed the philosophical-political inadequacy of the old individualism and the economic incapacity of laissez-faire to respond to the challenges posed by the complex industrial society and the corporate economy. he need for the state administration, the government and even corporations to rationalize and nationally regulate social and economic life became increasingly clear. From this perspective, the role assigned to a well-prepared, eicient bureaucracy and the skills of an “educated class” consequently proved central to the Euro-American political culture of the day.11 his was the theoretical framework within which the US social sciences in some ways turned away from Jefersonian idealism (which had cultivated an image of America as virtuous because it was based on a vast amount of free land and an absence of oligarchies) to reclaim some aspects of the Hamiltonian paradigm (the plan for industrial modernization assisted by federal power and, in general, an “elitist” idea of power), which they updated on the “scientistic,” “sophocratic” and “technocratic” bases implicit in some of the more inluential currents of contemporary European political culture. Two of the most important texts read by American scholars at the turn of the century were written by Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. Saint-Simon presented a “scientiic” conception of politics (the French philosopher had in fact redeined politics as the “science of production,” i.e. a science “whose purpose is the order of things most favorable to all types of production”12 and an organicist vision of society as a “large factory,” 10. Howard Brick, Trascending Capitalism. Visions of a New Society in Modern American hought (Ithaca and London, 2006). On the conluence of elitism and corporatism in the political-theoretical context of the US, characterized by the overlapping models of the citoyen and of the “economic man,” see José Luis Orozco, “Per una valutazione storico-teorica dell’elitismo corporatista negli Usa,” in Elitismo e democrazia nella cultura politica del Nord-America (Stati Uniti-Canada-Messico), ed. Ettore A. Albertoni (Milano, 1989), 145-214. 11. R. Jefrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: he Origins of Modern American Political heory, 1890-1920 (Berkeley, 1982); Giuliana Gemelli, Le élites della competenza: scienziati sociali, istituzioni e cultura della democrazia industriale in Francia, 1880-1945 (Bologna, 1995); Nancy Cohen, he Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill, 2002). 12. Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, L’industrie, ou discussions politiques, morales et philosophiques. Dans l’intérêt de tous les hommes livres à des travaux utiles et indépendans (1817-18), in Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et 100 giovanni borgognone a collective body in which all the members work to achieve a common productive goal (which is why Saint-Simon believed society had to be “an authentic organized machine in which all the parts contribute in distinct ways to the movement of the whole”13). On these bases, Saint-Simon theorized that traditional government functions would be exhausted, belonging as they did to an age lacking a common social goal, and substituted with “administrative” functions.14 US social scientists mainly drew from Comte the idea that the future of scientiicindustrial societies required rigorous management – a duty that sociology (a term coined by Comte himself) could perform because of its scientiic foundations. his led Comte to introduce the term “sociocracy” to indicate a new social system governed by savants and industriels (referring to those who govern and manage trade and industry).15 he positivist French philosopher also imparted some important arguments against classical political economics and criticized the “anarchic” conception of the industrial economy, centered on a dogmatic absence of any regulatory intervention.16 Similarly inluential was Comte’s criticism of constitutions as inconsistent and incapable of resisting the ravages of time. According to Comte, the only possible outcome of a pure and simple constitutional policy was immobilism, i.e. a stationary policy.17 he insuiciency of such an approach would also become a recurrent issue in US political theory from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Finally, Comte was an early proponent of the social importance of engineers in the context of the transformation of modern industry from an individualist prospect into a collective enterprise. All these Comptian ideas would become central issues in America, especially with the emergence of the Taylorist doctrines and the political thought of horstein Veblen.18 he inluence of Hegelianism had arrived even earlier, thus signaling a clear shift away from the individualistic paradigm theretofore dominating American political culture. In fact, Hegel’s philosophy had inspired a holistic approach to the study of politics, society and the economy centered on exaltation of the “universality” of the state in which d’Enfantin, publiées par les membres du Conseil institué par Enfantin pour l’exécution de ses dernières volontés (Paris, 1877-78), xviii, 188-189. 13. Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, De la physiologie sociale (1825), in Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, xxxix, 177. 14. Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, L’Organisateur (1819-20), in Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, xx, 101-102. 15. Cristina Cassina, “Per un lessico del pensiero politico: la ‘sociocrazia’ di Auguste Comte,” Storia del pensiero politico, 1, 2 (2014), 213-237. 16. Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris, 1830-1842), iv, 143-144. 17. Ibid., 56. 18. Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive (Paris, 1851-54), iii, 521; iv, 174; horstein Veblen, he Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1921); Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientiic Management (Madison, 1980). 101 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space divergent individual desires are reconciled. John W. Burgess in particular helped import this model to America after having studied in Göttingen and Berlin, when he became convinced that an American political science could develop out of the foundations laid by the German Staatswissenschaft. While his research plans were opposed by his colleagues in the department where he taught at Amherst College, they were accepted at Columbia in New York.19 Signiicantly, Burgess dedicated his masterpiece, Political Science and Comparative Law (1890), to the memory of his teacher Johann Gustav Droysen, a student of Hegel and a leading exponent of the German Historical School. In Germany, the philosophical enthusiasm for science had led to the development of a methodological system for the so-called spiritual sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Accordingly, just as the “natural sciences” (Naturwissenschaften) had an object of observation and a method, so too did the “spiritual” sciences have history as their ield of observation and “critical reason” as their method. History therefore had to be studied “scientiically” and the historian had to be considered a “specialist” with as much authority as any scientist. With empirical research thus becoming possible for the Geisteswissenschaften as well, humanity could fully enter the “age of science.”20 Droysen’s Grundrisse der Historik (1868), devoted to historical methodology and translated as Outline of the Principles of History, became a sort of sacred text for American students.21 One of Burgess’ premises for his conception of political science, whereby history was meant to “scientiically” justify the theory of government and provide it with the research data from which to start, clearly came from Droysen and the German Historical School. Burgess took a Hegelian approach by presenting the state as the product of 19. John W. Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar: he Beginnings of Columbia University (New York, 1934); Albert Somit, Joseph Tanenhaus, he Development of American Political Science: From Burgess to Behavioralism (Boston, 1967). Burgess is usually credited with being the irst to institutionalize political science in American Academia with the foundation of the School of Political Science at Columbia College in 1880. However, three years earlier Herbert Baxter Adams had already created the Johns Hopkins Historical and Political Science Association. he School of Politics directed by Charles Kendall Adams at the University of Michigan followed in 1881. In all these cases, the teaching models and disciplines subjects were clearly and explicitly inspired by European experiences. 20. W. Stull Holt, “he Idea of Scientiic History in America,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (June 1940), 352-362; Herbst, he German Historical School, 57. he distinction between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften was central to the later relections of post-Hegelian German philosopher-psychologist Wilhelm Dilthey, who in turn laid the premises for William James’ American Pragmatism. According to Dilthey, philosophy had the right to exist in the realm of the spiritual sciences only insofar as it could produce “efects on life.” he suitability of a theory therefore had to be tested in practice in the context of a speciic historical age. James’ philosophical system borrowed from Dilthey the acknowledged supremacy of the social dimension of ideas. On this point, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory. Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American hought, 1870-1920 (New York-Oxford, 1986), 149-152. 21. Johann Gustav Droysen, 1893, Outline of the Principles of History (German edition 1868, Boston, 1893); Edward N. Saveth, Historians and European Immigrants 1875-1925 (New York, 1948). 102 giovanni borgognone reason’s progressive revelation through history, and sovereignty – the state’s fundamental feature – as the only way to guarantee personal freedom. Accordingly, he believed it was the task of political science, which was becoming for all practical purposes a profession that had to be understood as a science of government and sovereignty, to mold legislation and institutions in the direction of social progress.22 He also described the nation as a “unique and exclusive sovereignty” – a “whole” superior to any of its parts and endowed with its own “organs.”23 A comparison with biology was important for the forging of American political theory from a perspective marked by “scientistic” ambitions, which even led to a racial imprint on the “science of the State.”24 In this respect, the ideas of Swiss jurist Johann Caspar Bluntschli, who taught law at the universities of Zurich and Heidelberg, served as a point of reference.25 Bluntschli had theorized the innate superiority of “Arian” peoples and Burgess started from the same assumption, recognizing the three branches of the “Arian race” as the “Teutons,” the “Greeks” and the “Romans”; and viewing American Indians, Africans and Asians as incapable of conceiving modern political institutions and ideals.26 Burgess also believed that only Teutonic nations, including the US, possessed the kind of political psychology and cultural heritage needed to approach the ideal state. In his opinion, the national state was actually a creation of the “Teutonic genius” and Teutonic nations were therefore nations par excellence. On the other hand, the idea of local autonomy derived from the Greek tradition, and Latin peoples had inherited the imperial Roman tendency towards universality – two tendencies that clearly contradicted the Teutonic idea of a national state.27 Nicholas Murray Butler, who became the rector of Columbia University in 1902, also studied in Germany at Burgess’ suggestion. In True and False Democracy (1907) Butler 22. John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (Boston, 1890); Id., “Political Science and History,” he American Historical Review, 2, 3 (April 1897), 401-408, 404; Id., he Foundations of Political Science (New York, 1933), 53-57; Bernard E. Brown, American Conservatives: he Political hought of Francis Lieber and John W. Burgess (New York, 1967). 23. John W. Burgess, “he American Commonwealth: Changes in its Relation to the Nation,” Political Science Quarterly, 1, 1 (March 1886), 9-35, 35. 24. Herbst, he German Historical School, 120. 25. Bluntschli’s Allgemeines Staatsrecht (1851-52), translated in English as he heory of the State (Oxford, 1885), was one of the most popular textbooks for educating political scientists in American universities in the late 19th and early 20th century. 26. John W. Burgess, “he Ideal of the American Commonwealth,” Political Science Quarterly, 10, 3 (September 1895), 404-425, 406. 27. John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (2 vols., Boston,1890), I, 39; Id., he Foundations of Political Science, 35-38; James Farr, “From Modern Republic to Administrative State: American Political Science in the Nineteenth Century,” in Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the Development of Political Science, eds. David Easton, John G. Gunnell, Michael B. Stein (Ann Arbor, 1995), 131-167. 103 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space contended that democracy in its actual, modern form could not disregard the role of public opinion. However, “the people,” in his opinion, could also potentially be “the mob.” he demagogue addressed the latter, while the true statist had to know how to address the former. If the democratic ideal was therefore represented by a “Platonic” people of “philosophergovernors,” the actual need was above all to educate and form public opinion, which Butler believed was the duty of a true aristocracy focused on “intellect” and “service.” Upon inal analysis, actual democracy was unthinkable without the decisive contribution of an elite recruited on the basis of talent and skills placed at the disposal of public wellbeing.28 Contemporary US economists took a similar approach, and once again the cultural contribution of the Germans proved decisive. he “historical school of economics” (led by Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies and Bruno Hildebrand) contrasted the natural-rational laws of classical economics with an inductive method focused on the concrete development of the entire social order, with state intervention in the economy thus viewed as positive and necessary. “Abstractions” of classical economics were therefore set up against an organicist model of Nationalökonomie, which was presented by one of its leading exponents, Gustav Schmoller (a major igure in the second generation of the “historical school”), as a “social organism” whose life transcends that of single individuals. Opponents deined Schmoller and other great German academics like Lujo Brentano, Adolf Held and Adolph Wagner as Kathedersozialisten because of their critique of classical economic “naturalism” and laissez-faire, which was based on the conviction that bringing order to the economy had to start from the state and the development of a complete, eicient bureaucracy. he American Economic Association founded in 1885 was modeled after the Verein für Sozialpolitik, the academic association of the Kathedersozialisten founded in 1873, and was conceived with the same function – a sort of pressure agency to persuade government powers to reorganize the economy through the contribution of expertise.29 Along similar lines, major US economist Richard T. Ely, who got his Ph.D. in Heidelberg under Karl Knies, believed the work of corporations had to be regulated to ensure it served the national wellbeing. To this end, and to bring order to society in general, Ely argued that the state had to attract the most qualiied experts. Of course, these positions were informed by the central 19th-century debate over the need for civil service reform to move away from the spoils system introduced during President Andrew Jackson’s time towards a recruitment system based on “merit” and “skill.” Ely considered the German model of bureaucracy unavoidable in this regard, though obviously he separated it from its counterpart formed by the autocratic power in force in Germany to use it instead as an efective tool for carrying out the will of the people.30 28. Nicholas M. Butler, True and False Democracy (New York-London, 1907). 29. Antonio Roversi, Il magistero della scienza: storia del Verein für Sozialpolitik dal 1872 al 1888 (Milano, 1984), 12-13; Vitantonio Gioia, Gustav Schmoller: la scienza economica e la storia (Galatina, 1990), 121-123. 30. Richard T. Ely, Socialism and Social Reform (New York-Boston, 1894); Id., Monopolies and Trusts (New York-London, 1900). 104 giovanni borgognone John Bates Clark, another student of Karl Knies in Heidelberg who taught at Columbia University and was a leading exponent of contemporary American economic theory, also adopted the German teacher’s argument against laissez-faire. In his book he Philosophy of Wealth (1886) Clark proposed to stem the danger of social conlict, which was increasingly evident in complex industrial societies like that of the US, by searching for harmonious solutions formulated by experts. With the similar goals of planning order and reorganizing the national economy, his colleague Henry Carter Adams, who had studied for two years in Germany before launching his academic career in America, laid the foundations for a US-based “science of inance,” with the intention of inserting German statism into the Anglo-American tradition.31 While the well-known inluence of Darwinism on coeval American sociology inspired the anti-statist arguments of William Graham Sumner, among other things, the convergence of Darwinism and Comtian positivism also led to the development of theories like Lester Frank Ward’s “sociocracy.” In fact, Sumner and Ward were both convinced that complex modern industrial societies required a “scientiic” approach. However, while Sumner believed that knowing the laws of sociology would quash any harmful “sentimental” ideas about government-led reform, Ward sought to superimpose Comte’s idea of rational order on Darwin’s idea of evolution, which he considered a valid explanation for the “spontaneous” origin of society, accordingly developing his own “sociocratic” plan based on the role of social scientists in rationalizing and harmonizing the nation.32 Sociologist Brooks Adams (1848-1927), the brother of historian Henry Adams and the grandson and great-grandson of two American presidents, took a similar approach in America’s Economic Supremacy (1900) and he heory of Social Revolutions (1913), in which he contended that “civilization” was synonymous with “order” and therefore required “organization” and “administration.” Adams argued that, despite the material gains derived from the strength of its capitalism, the American social system could only fully express its international primacy if it also developed greater organizational skills. He also pointed out the potential opportunities ofered by permeation and symbiosis between corporations and the state.33 he theories developed in these terms by US social scientists left an indelible mark on progressive political culture and later, albeit partially, on that of Roosevelt’s New Deal. he philosophy of pragmatism also emerged and developed in this cultural context. In fact, one of its premises was the “revolt against formalism” described so efectively by 31. John B. Clark, he Philosophy of Wealth: Economic Principles Newly Formulated (Boston, 1886); Henry C. Adams, Public Debts: An Essay in the Science of Finance (New York, 1887). 32. William G. Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (irst ed. 1883, Caldwell, 1961); Lester F. Ward, Dynamic Sociology (2 vols., New York, 1883); Dorothy Ross, he Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991), 86-97. he term sociocratie already appeared in the writings of Auguste Comte, starting with the Système de politique positive, 1, 403. 33. Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New York, 1900); Id., he heory of Social Revolutions (New York, 1913). 105 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Morton White in 1949.34 Walter Lippmann took the same approach by theorizing the public function of the social sciences. Lippmann was yet another scholar whose cultural education betrayed fundamental contributions from European philosophical and political thought – from Nietzscheanism to the social application of Freudian ideas. However, like many progressive intellectuals of the time, the European political movement that most inspired his theories was British Fabianism, what was in many ways the most successful version of European “sopho-technocratic” socialism in early 20th-century America. he Fabians (Herbert G. Wells, husband and wife Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw) too believed that classic “individualistic” capitalism had fatally entered a gradual, inexorable phase of decline, and that a “socialization” of the economic system – a transformation in a collectivistic sense – was underway. On these bases, they cultivated the plan to replace the disorder of 19th-century capitalism with a socialism focused on state measures of social engineering and planning, conceived and put into action by “experts.” hese theories obviously converged with prevailing trends in the American social sciences of the late 19th and early 20th century and the political culture of the Progressive Era.35 he political thought of the Webbs – two of the most admired Fabians in the US – was focused on the opposition between, on the one hand, the talent and culture of the educated elites, to which they obviously felt they belonged, and, on the other, the unpreparedness of the public. In their opinion, the functional diferentiation occurring in industry at the time was also appropriate for politics. Although they accepted the principle of popular control, they believed that the contribution of “specialists” and “impartial administrators” was crucial for the governance of society and the economy and was the only way to free an “industrial democracy” from the danger of anarchic wars between factory managers and workers.36 Lippmann’s direct contact with Graham Wallas – a Fabian political science professor at the London School of Economics who wrote Human Nature in Politics (1908), a book especially loved by many American social scientists – would prove decisive. Wallas believed the gravest danger in democratic theory was the intellectualist fallacy whereby all motives 34. Morton G. White, Social hought in America: he Revolt against Formalism (New York, 1949). 35. Fabian Essays in Socialism, ed. G.B. Shaw (Gloucester, Mass., 1967); Willard Wolfe From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrine, 1881-1889 (New Haven, 1975); Brick, Transcending Capitalism, 26-27. 36. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (London, 1902); Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 271. Inspired by the theory of the inadequacy of the old laissez-faire, H.G. Wells took a similar approach in his essays and novels to celebrate the role of the state and its experts in terms of social eiciency. H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London, 1905); William J. Hyde, “he Socialism of H.G. Wells in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 17, 2 (April 1956), 217-234; John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis: he Political hought of H.G. Wells (Burlington, Vt., 2000); Simon J. James, Maps of Utopia: H.G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (New York, 2012). 106 giovanni borgognone for human action derived from the idea of some pre-established desire. he empirical art of politics, on the other hand, showed how subconscious, non-rational inferences could be deliberately harnessed in the creation of public opinion. Accordingly, the world of politics, just like the commercial world, was characterized by “persuasion” carried out through forms of “manipulation” achieved by mixing up facts, instincts and emotions to stimulate a particular organization of thought.37 Along similar lines, Lippmann repeatedly claimed in his early works that the basic error of political philosophy was talking about politics without paying enough attention to the power of studying human nature from a scientiic perspective. his led him to introduce in A Preface to Politics (1913) some of the main subjects he would go on to develop in later works: his argument against the 19th-century American political tradition, the centrality of political leadership, the manipulation of the public and the public function of social science. he motivation for Lippman’s work derived from the widespread indiference to politics. Despite understanding the reasons for such indiference, he stressed the importance of politics in people’s lives and believed the problem lay with how politics related to national interests. He therefore believed a new attitude towards politics was needed, and that a major distinction between “routiners” and “inventors” would be useful for this purpose. he irst category included those who conceived of politics as a machine that simply needed to be turned on. “Inventors,” on the other hand, were those who considered each social organization as a tool and political systems and institutions as having value only insofar as they served people’s goals. In other words, the “inventor” had no faith in mechanical governments, since he placed “the deliberate, conscious, willing individual at the center of his philosophy.”38 Lippmann was quick to attack the Constitution – that inviolable American political totem – as a clear example of the idea of government as machine. “What other explanation is there,” he asked, “for the naïve faith of the Fathers in the ‘symmetry’ of executive, legislature and judiciary; in the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with vetoes and checks?”39 Lippman contrasted a politics understood as a mechanized balancing of powers with a politics based on human leadership and therefore meant to extol actual sovereignty, i.e. the kind exercised by presidents like heodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who caused the purely “routiner” conception of politics to lose ground. At this point, based on Freud’s suggestions, the author introduced the notion of “taboo,” describing it as a method “as naïve as barbarism, as ancient as human failure.” 37. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London, 1908), xi, 23-25, 59-97; Martin J. Wiener, Between Two Worlds: he Political hought of Graham Wallas (Oxford, 1971). In his preface, Wallas declared his indebtedness to William James whose Principles of Psychology inspired him to look at politics from a psychological perspective. 38. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York and London, 1913), 9. 39. Ibid., 14. 107 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space his involved abolishing human instincts and repressing social change, thus prohibiting it. In his opinion, this was the method adopted by the “routiner” political person in the face of fear. On this basis, for example, one could try ighting troublesome drunkenness by legally forcing bars to close. But Lippmann proposed another method, based on the study of human nature. “We must study our failures,” he argued. “Gambling and drink produce much misery. But what reformers have to learn is that men don’t gamble just for the sake of violating the law. hey do so because something within them is satisied by betting and drinking.” One could therefore escape taboos by “redirecting” impulses rather than cursing them. Lippmann considered the theories of Graham Wallas precious to this regard. Wallas had identiied the tendency to talk about institutions and ignore human nature as the major problem of political science. However, a new role for political science had loomed into view, and now it had to prove itself capable of showing political leaders how “to develop, train and nurture men’s impulses.”40 As Lippmann contended, the statesman “must be aware of the condition of the people. […] Realizing how men and women feel at all levels and at diferent places, he must speak their discontent and project their hopes.” To control such dynamics, political leaders therefore needed “much expert knowledge.” his did not mean that leaders had to be specialists themselves; they just had to be “expert in choosing experts.”41 hus, Preface to Politics centers on Lippmann’s argument against traditional political formalism and the liberal, 19th-century conception of politics and government based on the classic system of vetoes and checks, which he contrasted with the power of a new kind of statist surrounded by experts. In this respect, the author particularly praised Woodrow Wilson, who as president had in fact demonstrated how to take recommendations from specialists before making decisions with acumen.42 he role of both the leadership and the “sopho-technocratic” elite in molding public opinion thus took center stage in Lippmann’s work. He even drew on Georges Sorel’s theories of the “social myth” as a tool for mobilizing the masses. While Lippmann observed that Sorel’s doctrine – whereby the masses had to believe in something illusory, i.e. a “myth” – would inevitably provoke scandal and prejudice, he also believed it contained an element of great importance, namely that, “in a world so full of ignorance and mistake, error itself is worthy of study.”43 Lippmann took the same approach nine years later in 40. Ibid., 35, 40, 49-50, 80. Lippmann attended a seminar with Wallas at Harvard in 1910. In 1914 the British Fabian dedicated his new book he Great Society (London, 1914) to his US admirer, and hoped that his theories therein would push Lippmann to build on the results of A Preface to Politics (Graham Wallas, he Great Society, v). 41. Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 97-98. 42. Ibid., 102; Hari N. Dam, 1973, he Intellectual Odyssey of Walter Lippmann: A Study of His Protean hought 1910-1960 (New York, 1973). 43. Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 232; Georges Sorel, Relexions sur la violence (Paris, 1908). Sorel’s notion of “myth” inspired the idea that consensus to the “political order” was largely based on a jumble of unrealistic 108 giovanni borgognone Public Opinion, in which he sought to unmask the rationalistic self-deception of the modern informed democratic citizen and thus discredit the myth of public opinion. He argued that individuals in a complex society had no access to truth; all they had was the news created by newspapers, which were certainly not neutral institutions. Ultimately, the actions and opinions of citizens did not derive from a direct knowledge of the world but rather from a “pseudo-environment” built on stereotypes and patterns of interpretation. Common people were therefore incapable of making “scientiic” decisions about anything. In other words, he developed a theory of the incompetence of the masses.44 According to Lippmann, the work of “experts” was needed to remedy the situation, and the fact that they were constantly being called on by industries and the government made their importance increasingly clear. hus began the age of the “social scientists” who by reining their methodologies demonstrated the need to interpose a form of specialized competence between private citizens and the incredibly vast environment in which they were immersed. Lippmann resumed the critique of democracy launched in Public Opinion in his next work, he Phantom Public (1925), by explicitly declaring that the active public of democratic theory was only a “ghost” and that popular sovereignty had been reduced to approving or disapproving decisions taken by minorities. Maybe in a simple society like a small rural community anyone could have direct knowledge of reality, he explained, but certainly in a large complex society political decisions were too numerous, complicated and obscure in their efects to be the constant object of public opinion. For this reason, given the impossibility of governing society using a “naïve” democratic method, Lippmann returned to the corrective of “experts” to carry out a rational subdivision of tasks.45 Albion Small: the Sociologist and the Functional Society In the same year that he Phantom Public came out, Charles Merriam, the founder of the Chicago School of Political Science, published one of his greatest works, New Aspects of Politics, in which he expressed with the utmost clarity the close connection he believed one could make between “science” and “democracy.” Merriam assigned political science assumptions expressed in a realistic rationale. Several scholars came to share this theory, including Harold Lasswell, the leading exponent of the Chicago School of Political Science, and James Burnham, who placed the French philosopher alongside the “neo-Machiavellian” writers (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels), whom he viewed as the creators of a “scientiic” approach to politics. See Harold D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York, 1935) and James Burnham, he Machiavellians. Defenders of Freedom (New York, 1943). 44. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York, 1922), 15; Heinz Eulau, “From Public Opinion to Public Philosophy: Walter Lippmann’s Classic Reexamined,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 15, 4 (July 1956), 439-451. 45. Walter Lippmann, he Phantom Public (New York, 1925). 109 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space the task of understanding and controlling the evolution of society using scientiic methods and concepts, with the achievement of “scientiic democracy” as the ultimate goal. Much like Lippmann, Merriam correspondingly identiied psychology as an auxiliary science that would allow the meaning of modern democracy to be reconsidered in a disenchanted way. Although he never used the same terms as Lippmann, Merriam corrected what he believed was a naïve faith in the teachability of the people and stressed the indispensability, in the face of extra-rational factors, of efective scientiic techniques through which political leaders, in consultation with experts, could understand, guide and mold the masses.46 Continuing along these lines, Merriam’s most important pupil, Harold Lasswell, also started from the democratic orthodoxy formulated by Lippmann in the 1910s and 1920s. Lasswell moved beyond a purely negative opinion of the citizen as ignorant and inadequate for democratic life by promoting an active role for the public, whose mobilization he argued had to become the basic practical duty of political science. By taking on the function of policy orientation, political science would emerge as a “policy science for democracy.” In many ways this formed the conceptual horizon of Lasswell’s important 1941 book Democracy through Public Opinion, in which he stressed how crucial it was, when confronted by “enemies of democracy,” to investigate the correct role of public opinion. In his view, it must not be directed at raising levels of discontent, which would thus contribute to the gravity and violence of social crises rather than social harmony. To this end, public opinion had to be based on “intelligence,” which in turn depended largely on the number of people “specialized in intelligence.”47 Euro-American political culture also inluenced the theoretical system of the Chicago School. One of Merriam’s professors at the University of Berlin had been Otto von Gierke, whose juridical thought, especially his four-volume magnum opus, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (1868-1913, he German Law of Associations,) inspired a vision of society and the state as fruits of a long, complex, organic and functional chain of groups and associations.48 he work of “elite theorists” Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert 46. Charles E. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics (Chicago, 1925); Bernard Crick, he American Science of Politics. Its Origins and Conditions (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1959); Somit Tanenhaus, he Development of American Political Science; David Ricci, he Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven, Conn., 1984); Ross, he Origins of American Social Science, 452-453. 47. Harold D. Lasswell, “he Phantom Public. By Walter Lippmann,” American Journal of Sociology, 31, 4 (January 1926), 533-535; Id., Democracy hrough Public Opinion (Menasha, Wis., 1941), 1, 14, 21, 27; Matteo Battistini, “Harold Lasswell, the ‘Problem of World Order’ and the Historic Mission of the American Middle Class,” in Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective, eds. Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, Rafaella Baritono (Torino, 2013), 225-254, 227. 48. Merriam explicitly acknowledged his debt to Gierke. See, in particular, Charles E. Merriam, History of the heory of Sovereignty since Rousseau (New York, 1900), 114-120. Gierke explained to American readers which features he believed the “Teutonic states” of US and Germany had in common, based on their “federal organization of the state power,” which in many ways characterized them both as “corporate” structures (Otto Gierke, “German Constitutional Law and Its Relation to the American Constitution,” Harvard Law Review, 23, 4 (February 1920), 273-290). 110 giovanni borgognone Michels would prove equally important, especially for Lasswell.49 However, in Chicago, it was Albion W. Small who served as an inescapable point of reference for Merriam and Lasswell. Small’s sociological texts were essentially focused on the relationship between theoretical formulation and the efects of this on concrete political practice, on which basis he outlined a sophocratic and functional order for democratic American society. He also theorized that social science and psychology had to be closely interrelated to achieve such goals. Small, too, constantly and systematically confronted European political culture, which played a key role in his education. In fact, he spent two academic years, from the fall of 1879 to the summer of 1881, at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, taking courses in history, economics and political science. In Berlin he was particularly inluenced by the economic-social theories of Wagner and Schmoller. He then got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore where the ideas of Richard T. Ely aroused his interest. His doctoral thesis, which was published in 1890 as part of the university’s series of historical and political studies and entitled he Beginnings of American Nationality: he Constitutional Relations between the Continental Congress and the Colonies and States from 1774 to 1789, started from a critique of the traditional view of the history of the nation’s development. Whereas someone like Daniel Webster, for example, had seemed to view the nation as “born in a day,” Small’s work focused on the “growth of institutions,” thus revealing a clear debt to his European, and especially German, education.50 As mentioned earlier, Small founded the irst sociology department in the US in Chicago in 1892. Two years later he co-authored the irst important American sociology textbook, An Introduction to the Study of Society, with philosopher George E. Vincent. he following year he helped found the American Journal of Sociology, through which, as editor-in-chief, he greatly inluenced sociological thought for the next thirty years. In fact, the Chicago School of Sociology soon became one of the main research centers in the 49. See above all Harold D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York-London, 1935) and Id., Politics, Who Gets What, When, How (New York-London, 1936). Michels’ Soziologie (1911) was translated and published as Political Parties (New York, 1915) far in advance of the main works by Pareto and Mosca (the American edition of Pareto’s Trattato di sociologia generale was published as he Mind and Society in 1935 and Mosca’s Elementi di scienza politica was published as he Ruling Class in 1939). However, Albion Small had already reviewed the German edition of Michels’ book, recommending it to all American students of social psychology, and stressing in particular the theory whereby “democracy leads to oligarchy; indeed it consists in an oligarchy” (Albion Small, “Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie,” American Journal of Sociology, 17, 3 (November 1911), 408-409). In the 1920s Robert Michels had direct ties with the Chicago social scientists and even summarized their main points in the American Political Science Review (Robert Michels, “Some Relections on the Sociological Character of Political Parties,” American Political Science Review, 21 (November 1927), 753-772). On exchanges between Michels and Merriam, see Barry D. Karl, Charles Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, 1974), 175-178. 50. Christakes, Albion W. Small, 17; homas W. Goodspeed, “Albion Woodbury Small,” American Journal of Sociology, 1, 32 (July 1926), 1-14; Albion W. Small, he Beginnings of American Nationality. he Constitutional Relations between the Continental Congress and the Colonies and States from 1774 to 1789 (Baltimore, 1890), 7-9. 111 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space country.51 In 1905 Small even became a founding partner of the American Sociological Society, which he presided over in 1912-13. While his direct participation in progressivist plans of social reform was minor, he played a central role as a cultural organizer, especially in the preparations for the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences of 1904, for which he traveled to Europe and recruited many distinguished European social scientists. he congress was an excellent opportunity in which to reinforce the idea of sociology as the theoretical basis of social reformism, a view proudly supported by Small.52 In addition to his academic and teaching duties and his organizing commitments, Small also found the time to write. During his years in Chicago he published six sociological texts, including the fundamental General Sociology of 1905, a novel (Between Eras, 1913) and over a hundred articles. At the same time, he also committed himself to publicizing German political and social thought, for example by presenting his American colleagues with Georg Simmel’s studies on interrelationships within small groups. And he often used the pages of the American Journal of Sociology to publish translations of texts by authoritative exponents of the most recent social science developments in Germany. Not even during the war years did Small stop admiring the German model while at the same time criticizing American “individualism.” Sometimes he reprimanded his transoceanic colleagues for having lost their intellectual integrity and allowed themselves to be sucked in by nationalist aggression, which he believed was the result of a militarist attitude rooted in the German mentality. Yet German thought would always remain for him a precious source of ideas for building a scientiic, objective study of society. After thirty-three years of service Small ended his academic career in 1925 and died the following year at seventy-one years of age.53 From as early as his Introduction to the Study of Society and his establishment of the American Journal of Sociology, Small’s scholarly output was clearly inspired by his exaltation of sociology’s function as both a theoretical discipline for teaching and a tool for promoting social progress. As he and Vincent contended in their 1894 text, especially towards the end, the goal of studying society was to alert people to the power of “human 51. Christakes, Albion W. Small, 21; Daria Frezza, Il leader, la folla, la democrazia nel discorso pubblico americano 1880-1941 (Roma, 2001), 42. On sociology in Chicago, see also Martin Bulmer, he Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago, 1984). 52. More than 300 scholars participated in the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences, one of the major American cultural events of the day, whose participants were mostly Americans (including well known igures like Ely and Ward) but about forty came from Germany. See the eight-volume Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, ed. Howard J. Rogers (Boston-New York, 1905-1907). 53. Christakes, Albion W. Small, 22-23, 103-107; Georg Simmel, “he Persistence of Social Groups,” American Journal of Sociology, 3, 5 (March 1898), 662-698; “What Is Americanism?,” American Journal of Sociology, 4, 20 (January 1915), 433-486; Albion W. Small, “Americans and the World Crisis,” he University of Chicago War Papers, No.2, (Chicago, 1918). One of the most famous coeval interpretations of Germany’s Janus-face quality – its organizational eiciency versus its medieval militarism – was outlined by horstein Veblen in Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1915). 112 giovanni borgognone control” in the achievement and preservation of social wellbeing. However, as the authors explained, no science could be considered an end in itself; its immediate objective was organization in view of action. his was especially the case with sociology, which therefore had to reject the sterility of the microscopic description of detail in favor of connecting single facts to render the social process intelligible in its entirety.54 In Introduction, which presents basic notions about the discipline for beginners, Small and Vincent started out by connecting the ability to have an “objective knowledge” of society to the scientiic phase at which sociology had arrived. For them the “Father” of the discipline was unquestionably Auguste Comte, who had argued that sociology was crucial for avoiding chaos and building social order. Accordingly, the authors reconsidered the ambitious European social plans of the 19th century – from those of Charles Fourier and Robert Owen to the “systematic socialism” that had culminated in Marxist thought.55 he arrival point of this historical-theoretical reconstruction of the development of sociological thought was ultimately Ward’s American texts, which the authors considered far superior to those of British Social Darwinism, for two reasons. First, because Herbert Spencer had thought of sociology as purely descriptive whereas for Ward it had also been teleological and aimed at the “organization of happiness;” and second, because for the Englishman social evolution had merely led back to evolution in general, whereas the American had also seen therein a “psychic product” dependent on human intelligence.56 On these bases, and referring to the theories of the German social science “teachers” of the late 19th century, Small and Vincent presented two basic objectives of sociology: to synthesize what could be learned about society, and to modify society through the exercise of human will. By comparing certain aspects of sociology to engineering and thus drawing on Comte’s formulation, they explained the distinction between a “static” and a “dynamic” of social science. he irst generated conclusions on the “waste” in existing social operations. he second proposed to inquire how to use available social resources to expand human wellbeing as much as possible57. After devoting the second part of the book to the tendency of social life to move towards progressive integration, interdependence and specialization, Small and Vincent focused the third part on the centrality 54. Albion W. Small, George E. Vincent, An Introduction to the Study of Society (New York-Cincinnati-Chicago, 1894), 374; Id., “he Subject-Matter of Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 10, 3 (November 1904), 281-298. 55. Small, Vincent, An Introduction to the Study of Society, 24, 40-42. 56. Ibid., 50-51. 57. In Cours de philosophie positive, Comte referred “social statics” and “social dynamics” – the two lenses used by “social physics” or “sociology” to study social phenomena (IV, 408) – back to the two basic concepts of “order” and “progress.” In his opinion, statics investigates social harmony, i.e., the relationship among the various parts of the social system, and highlights its inadequacies. Dynamics, on the other hand, focuses on the conditions of a society’s development and transformation in terms of the close interrelationship between “prediction” and “action” (I, 63). 113 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space and importance of “systems of regulation” for systematically examining contemporary social structures. Accordingly, just as a company had a manager with assistants, so too did each form of organization need an analogous regulative system, in their opinion.58 here was therefore a clear emphasis on the issue of social control, developed from an elitist, sophocratic point of view. Like many US scholars of the time, Small’s remarks derived from a shift in emphasis in American political culture from the individual to a social environment in which diferent groups interacted. Small considered philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) a point of reference in this regard. Mead had spent most of his career right there in Chicago after studying, like Small, at the University of Leipzig, where he had followed the lessons of psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. By inserting what he had learned in Europe into the philosophical branch of pragmatism, Mead had helped build the foundations for a “social psychology.” In fact, he viewed the individual as a product of social interaction and thus intended to provisionally analyze those psychic aspects of individuality that were pertinent to the social sphere.59 Along similar lines, Small and Vincent followed a section on social “physiology” and “pathology” with a ifth section on social psychology, i.e. the study of phenomena resulting from the cognition, emotion and volition of associated individuals, which would prove crucial for the method adopted by the Chicago social scientists. Small and Vincent believed that the combined volition of single individuals, whose social product was diferent from the volition of each individual taken separately, was particularly indispensable for avoiding general chaos and destructive conlict in social life. he authors contended that a “super-psychology” was therefore required to deal with the formation of consciousness, feelings and “social” goodwill and their efects on individuals. However, this would not suice if unconscious factors were not considered. “Collective reason” could not avoid such factors in the presence of complex social conditions, which would otherwise produce indecision and anarchy. hus, an “ultra-psychology,” which was crucial for shaping various aspects of social life, was even emerging.60 Similarly, the “behavioral” political science cultivated by Merriam and Lasswell (and taught widely in American universities in the 1950s and 1960s) assigned scholars the task of using the power of consciousness made available by social psychology. Underlying this was the conviction that democracy, as it was traditionally understood, i.e. based solely on the simple idea of maximizing the participation of all citizens in public life, did not suiciently consider irrational behavior. As authentic “democratic realists,” the political scientists of the Chicago School based their work on redeining democracy as more a form of government “for the people” than 58. Small, Vincent, An Introduction to the Study of Society, 67, 70, 99, 169, 211-212. 59. See, in particular, George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society form the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago, 1934). 60. Small, Vincent, An Introduction to the Study of Society, 306, 310, 314, 319. 114 giovanni borgognone “of the people,” carried out by enlightened, responsible elites endowed with the cognitive tools to manipulate and steer public opinion. his framework included the basic objective of behavioralism: “citizen building” through education, symbols and political myths. From this perspective, the task of the social sciences, according not only to Small but also to Merriam and Lasswell, was to study and help mold the behaviors of complex social groups in the direction of social cohesion and eiciency.61 Small went on to present a fundamental historical and theoretical framework for sociology in his impressive General Sociology of 1905. As a leading member of the generation of US social scientists that, as we have seen, sought alternative social descriptions to those based on class conlict, he tried to show how the notion of “interest groups” – drawn from the theories of Austrian philosopher Gustav Ratzenhofer – was suited to the American social context as part of an organic and functional vision of society.62 Arthur F. Bentley, who was a pupil of Small’s though remained an outsider at the University of Chicago, conceived his book he Process of Government (1908) on these bases. Bentley’s basic idea was that the “interest group theory” ofered the best alternative to a Marxist analysis of class and that the engine of history resided in the plurality of interest groups.63 hough not particularly successful at the time, Bentley’s book was rediscovered and better appreciated in subsequent decades. According to Small and many of the late-19th- and early-20th-century American authors heretofore considered, the task of social scientists was in efect to resolve relationship conlicts among organized social groups and to harmonize diferent interests. To that end, Small also highlighted what he believed was the basic distinction between the European view of the state and the American one. He explained that on the Old Continent this view had been conceived in a “mystical” way and that society had been unable to free itself from the shackles of that mysticism. In the US, on the other hand, the state had the potential to be nothing more than the totality of government procedures implemented by public oicials in a direct relationship with citizens to guarantee harmonious cooperation between diferent associations and interest groups. In this respect, as mentioned earlier, 61. See, for example, Charles E. Merriam, “Human Nature and Science in City Government,” Journal of Social Forces, 1, 4 (May 1923), 459-462; Id., “he Signiicance of Psychology for the Study of Politics,” he American Political Science Review, 18, 3 (August 1924), 469-488; Harold D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York-London, 1935); Id., he Analysis of Political Behavior. An Empirical Approach (London, 1948). 62. Albion W. Small, General Sociology: An Exposition of the Main Developments in Sociological heory from Spencer to Ratzenhofer (Chicago, 1905), 189-195. Ratzenhofer had indicated, however, that the fundamental, exclusive task of sociology was precisely to uncover unifying, synthetic elements of human relationships, an imperative he viewed as coherent with the progressive growth of social complexity. In 1908 the Journal of Sociology presented Small’s translation of the introduction to Ratzenhofer’s book, which had been posthumously published the previous year, Soziologie: Positive Lehre von den Menschlichen Wechselbeziehungen (Albion W. Small, “Ratzenhofer’s Sociology,” Journal of Sociology, 13, 4 (January 1908), 433-438). 63. Arthur F. Bentley, he Process of Government. A Study of Social Pressures (Chicago, 1908). 115 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space progressive reformers tried to form an autonomous, non-partisan administrative apparatus essentially composed of experts.64 hroughout the course of the 19th-century sociological thought presented by Small in General Sociology, from Spencer to Ratzenhofer, the introduction of the concept of “function” was crucial. In this regard, Small seemed to be drawing on the meaning of the famous parabola by Saint-Simon about the truly essential members of society (France could do without owners, speculators and political leaders, but it would have been paralyzed had its best scientists, captains of industry and engineers suddenly disappeared).65 As Small wrote, “America would cease to be itself […] if any of the specialized persons who perform their particular work should suddenly stop doing their part. his specialization of persons is, in other words, a necessity in America. Life would be thrown out of harmony.”66 Small believed that society had to be considered as a whole composed of parts that operated together to achieve results. From this perspective, he drew on the theories of Albert Schäle, an Austrian economist and sociologist of the second half of the 19th century. In addition to proposing a scrupulous use of the organicist metaphor to describe social processes, Schäle also focused on the idea of society as “organization of work.” While the concept of “structure” came to the fore in the social mechanism described by writers like Spencer, that of “function” was essential to the organization outlined by Schäle.67 According to Small, Ratzenhofer had gone even further by focusing on different forms and purposes of human association, thus abandoning a monolithic notion of society. his context also included the evolution of the state from “conquest state” to “culture state” in which the specialization of social organization, though obviously unable to remove all potential chances for conlict, produced a greater concordance of interests between diferent social groups.68 Following a popular trend in the US social sciences of the irst half of the 20th century, Small tended to idealize a “corporatist” socio-economic order. In fact, as an alternative to both the classic capitalist model and the socialist one, he idealized a form of economic organization based on cooperation between workers and employers as well as organic 64. Frezza, Il leader, la folla, la democrazia nel discorso pubblico americano, 60-61. 65. Saint-Simon, L’Organisateur, xx, 17-19. 66. Small, General Sociology, ix, 136. 67. Small explicitly recognized some features of Schäle’s ideas that would prove crucial for the development of the social sciences in the US, especially the opposition to economic individualism and his replacing a purely theoretical approach with a sociological investigation of the actual organization of economic interests. Albion W. Small, “Some Contributions to the History of Sociology. Section XVII. he Attempt (1860-80) to Reconstruct Economic heory on a Sociological Basis,” Journal of Sociology, 30, 2 (September 1924), 177-194. 68. Small, General Sociology, 167, 184, 195. 116 giovanni borgognone harmony vis-à-vis the common goals of production and social wellbeing.69 Along these lines, Small described the historical evolution from a social stage of “struggle” to one of “cooperation” between which he believed there was in efect a “diference of degree” rather than of kind. As he explained, the type of life increasingly developed by civilization required precisely the kind of people who were endowed with the most intense, reined capacity to cooperate. On inal analysis, Small argued, the sign that someone is suited to the social environment is exactly the “ability to it into an ininitely reined and complex system of co-operation.”70 In many ways, Small thus laid the groundwork for the harmonious, functional vision of American society that would greatly inluence leading US sociologists like Talcott Parsons and Daniel Bell after World War II. hat vision mainly hinged on the ideological legitimization of a system and a social, political order centered on integration rather than conlict, framed by an idea of modernity as increasing complexity requiring an ever-closer collaboration between diferent specializations.71 Small had already pointed out to his students – in Introduction, along with Vincent – how important it was for the coexistence of diferentiation and interdependence in social organization that every element of the population carry out “his part in the whole system” in the best and most eicient way. At its heart, this perspective clearly followed the ideal of justice outlined in Plato’s Republic. In Small’s view, the additional function of control, regulation and coordination was absolutely essential for such cooperation to function correctly. From a perspective that combined Plato’s “philosopher-kings” approach with Ward’s sociocracy, he argued in his 1910 book he Meaning of Social Sciences that a perfectly harmonious society could only be achieved through “the consensus of councils of scientists.”72 Similarly, in his last book, Origins of Sociology (1924), Small maintained 69. Christakes, Albion W. Small, 84. In Small’s novel Between Eras, corporatism was part of a vision of society as an “interdependent whole,” was the basis of a plan of “economic democracy” focused on the cooperation of “labor” and “management,” and was regulated by a sort of technocratic governance of industrial production. Small was clearly outlining an alternative to both capitalism, in which proits wound up completely detached from the productivity-based organization of work, and socialism, that Small considered “mainly negative” because it was exclusively based on speculative assumptions about the ills of society, and, unlike sociology, lacked a positive scientiic plan. It was no case that Small likened socialism to astrology and sociology to astronomy. Small, Vincent, An Introduction to the Study of Society, 41, 76-77; Id., “Socialism in the Light of Social Science,” American Journal of Sociology, 17 (May 1912), 804-819; Albion W. Small, Between Eras: From Capitalism to Democracy (Chicago, 1913), 379-384. 70. Small, General Sociology, 357, 710. 71. In the US there is a huge number of political studies and sociological literature on this subject. In the present context, it is enough to recall some “classic” texts that outline a harmonious, functional vision of the modern American social system, interpreted as the most advanced form of industrial and post-industrial modernity. See Talcott Parsons, he Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 1951); Talcott Parsons, Neil J. Smelser, Economy and Society. A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social heory (London, 1956); Daniel Bell, he End of Ideology. On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), and Id., he Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York, 1973). 72. Small, Vincent, An Introduction to the Study of Society, 263-264; Albion W. Small, “What Is a Sociologist,” American Journal of Sociology, 8, 4 (January 1903), 468-477; Id., he Meaning of Social Science 117 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space in simplistically Hegelian terms that the antithesis between the “aristocracy of status” typical of the European hereditary tradition and the “aristocracy of wealth” typical of his own time would lead to an “aristocracy of function,” whose members should expect to have the power of social control because of their service to society.73 However, the author also distanced himself from a certain tendency among sociologists of his time to dogmatically consider Plato’s Republic as an insuperable theoretical model. According to Small, the sociologist was in fact one who in many ways studied society “with the spirit of a philosopher,” who however adapted that spirit to the passage from the age of metaphysical speculation to that of scientiic knowledge. While the Socratic-Platonic method was expected to arrive at truth simply through propositions and concepts, scientiic method allowed it to be discovered by observing the uniformity of causes and efects in the objective world. It was almost as though Small were directing Plato’s accusation against the ancient sophists back at the philosopher himself by pointing out that the arguments made in the Republic had remained at the level of “persuasion” and therefore neither assembled new knowledge from the real world nor penetrated the “unknown.” On inal analysis, Small contended, the problem with Plato’s work was that it was not the work of a modern sociologist.74 Rather than basing the “aristocrat of function” on the Platonic “philosopher-king,” he modeled it on both what he had learned from the Verein für Sozialpolitik and what he had admired in the “Wisconsin Idea” promoted by Governor Robert La Follette – a close experimental collaboration between state administration and academia that had also involved Richard T. Ely.75 Small’s General Sociology of 1905 featured an aspect that, as mentioned earlier, would prove fundamental to the approach of the Chicago scholars to the social sciences: the recognized centrality of psychology. Sociology had two general cases to consider from a psychological point of view: mass-valuations adopted by individuals and individual valuations communicated to the masses. In both cases there was an “appeal to interest” that needed to be investigated to understand how the social process functioned at the psychological level. Only on these bases could sociology move beyond the phases of “dilettantism” and “criticism” to become “constructive policy,” a phase in which cooperation between sociologists went from accidental and unconscious to conscious and founded on organization. Sociology thus became closely connected with the goals that give social activities their meaning: “the development, adjustment, and satisfaction (Chicago, 1910), 91. 73. Albion W. Small, Origins of Sociology (Chicago, 1924), 284-285. 74. Albion W. Small, “Sociology and Plato’s Republic. Part 1,” American Journal of Sociology, 30, 5 (March 1925), 513-533; Id., “Sociology and Plato’s Republic. Part 2,” American Journal of Sociology, 30, 6 (May 1925), 683-702. 75. Christakes, Albion W. Small, 31-32. 118 giovanni borgognone of the health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness desires.” 76 herefore, by stressing the centrality of the notion of “function” upon which he believed every “scientiic interpretation” was based, Small argued that even the social sciences should be evaluated from this perspective. As he explained, they are supposed to bring out “the meaning of human experience” and thus reject the opinions whereby no center of orientation existed to allow knowledge of such meaning.77 his also formed the theoretical premise for two of Small’s important historical texts, one on Adam Smith and the other, mentioned earlier, on the Cameralists. Signiicantly, Small’s main theory in the irst, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology (1907), is that Smith’s famous masterpiece he Wealth of Nations was actually more of a sociological investigation than a text on political economics. As Small wrote, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher had mainly valued economic activities for how they afected consumption and wellbeing. Much more like a union boss than a big capitalist, Smith had taken a sympathetic attitude towards work. His problem had been how to organize it technically to best share resources at the social level. Small contended that, on inal analysis, the main question posed by he Wealth of Nations was “frankly technological.” In fact, he observed that the emphasis placed by classical economists on Smith’s economic theory had often been arbitrary, whereas the 19th-century German economic tradition was much closer to Smith in spirit than it irst appeared.78 Small’s “sociological rehabilitation” of Adam Smith converged with his 1909 study he Cameralists: he Pioneers of German Social Polity. As suggested by the title, the author’s main contention was that through the ideas and practices of the Cameralists, US readers could better understand some important aspects of German political and administrative culture, which he believed had much to teach America. he central scientiic issue for Cameralist authors like Veit Ludwig von Seckendorf, Johann Joachim Becher, Wilhelm Freyherr von Schröder, Julius Bernhard von Rohr and Johann von Justi involved the “iscal needs of the prince” and therefore the wellbeing of the state. hey had thus “developed a coherent civic theory, corresponding with the German system of administration at the same time in course of evolution.”79 Lacking the philosophical 76. Small, General Sociology, 642-643, 705-707. 77. Albion W. Small, “he Sociological Stage in the Evolution of the Social Sciences,” American Journal of Sociology, 15, 5 (May 1910), 681-697. 78. Albion W. Small, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology. A Study in the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Chicago, 1907), 7-8, 10. 79. Albion W. Small, he Cameralists. he Pioneers of German Social Polity (Chicago-London, 1909), viii, 6. Seckendorf (1626-1692) was the hojunker of the Duke of Gotha and later the Duke of Saxe-Zeitz, as well as the author of Deutscher Fürstenstaat (1656), a sort of political science treatise in defense of the paternalist absolutism that was popular at the time in German territories. In Politischer Diskurs (1668) Becher (1635-1682) outlined a framework for the regulation of national economic life from a mercantilist perspective. A similar system also characterizes the masterpiece of Schröder (1640-1688), a Cameralist for Emperor Leopold I in Vienna, Fürstliche Schatz- und Rentkammer (1686), the eighth edition of which came out in 1835. Rohr 119 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space ambitions of Adam Smith, they had essentially been “theoretical or practical administrators.” “heir works contain in embryo everything which has made the German system today the most efective economizer of national energy in the world,” Small maintained.80 His intention was not to glorify German bureaucracy by contrasting it with American republicanism. Instead, it could be said that he believed in quasi-Hegelian terms that those two political systems should try to complement one another; that “collectivist” and “individualist” political conduct were not actually mutually exclusive; and that every state could be the result of both factors. From Small’s perspective, by demonstrating the power of the comprehensive management of a community through an organized, correlated state system, Cameralism certainly represented a model of “administrative technology” from which to draw.81 In a more general sense, Small identiied this “constructive” trait as what he considered to be in many ways the essential feature of social science, that from which on inal analysis it drew its deepest meaning. In he Meaning of Social Science the author explained how “evaluation,” which social science reached after having passed through the “descriptive” and “analytical” phases, was closely tied to “construction.” In his opinion, the German Verein für Sozialpolitik represented a paradigmatic model of that connection82 because it had carried out “the primary work of planting valuations in the minds of the Germans.”83 However, a scientiic trajectory was not truly complete until it had undergone the “test of experiment.” For this reason, moving beyond purely descriptive, analytical and evaluative approaches did not mean leaving science behind but rather complementing it at the experimental level. Small also believed it was a mistake to assign social science a merely pedagogical goal. his “would be little more than mental gymnastics for adolescents if its pedagogical uses contained its chief value,” he warned. It therefore had to retain its main trait as an “adult function.” “Social ediication is the task of maturing men,” Small explained, “and social science is the methodology of that task.”84 (1688-1742), a natural scientist and a Cameralist for the Duke of Saxe-Merseburg, was the author of several legal/political works, including Einleitung zur Staatsklugheit (1718) and Haushaltungsrecht (1732). Finally, Justi (1720-1771), a professor of “Cameral sciences” in Vienna and later a Prussian high oicial (who wound up in jail for inancial wrongdoings), focused his works – including Staatswirtschaft oder systematische Abhandlung aller oekonomischen- und Cameralwissenschaften die zu Regierung eines Laudes erfordert werden (1755) – on the need for economic reform, and on the relationship between economic wellbeing and diferent forms of government. On the Cameralists, see also Andre Wakeield, he Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago, 2009). 80. Ibid., xv, 105. 81. Ibid., 392, 587, 591. 82. Small explained that “he primary purpose of the movement was to create and to crystallize public opinion in Germany in the direction of certain fundamental valuations held by the promoters. he ultimate purpose was to make this public opinion efective in molding civic and economic policies of Germany.” Small, he Meaning of Social Science, 252. 83. Ibid., 253. 84. Ibid., 256, 283, 287. 120 giovanni borgognone On the last pages of his 1910 text, drawing on some observations made by University of Chicago President William R. Harper about the function of the academic world, Small reconciled the results of his own relections with the general issue of social science’s role in modern democracy, and his words can be used to synthesize the cultural scenario thus far described. As he explained, democracy had only just begun to understand itself. Confronted by the danger that its next step might be the wrong one, it therefore needed “philosophers” who urged it to know itself; it needed “priests” to serve as mediators of the democratic religion; it needed, inally, “prophets” to outline the great democratic ideals. From this perspective, “the prophet, the priest, and the philosopher of democracy” was, precisely, the social scientist, called to continue working until a “puriied and exalted democracy” became a universal achievement.85 85. Ibid., 297-299. 121 Middle Class, Classe Moyenne, Mittelstand: History and the Social Sciences in the Atlantic World Matteo Battistini In the history of the United States, the term “middle class” appears more rarely than one might expect in light of 20th-century historiography. Although in the irst half of the 19th century the term was used to indicate an industrious and wealthy class that mirrored the social and economic relations based on trade and monetary exchange introduced by the so-called market revolution,1 it entered the American vocabulary quite late compared to what happened in Europe. Early American dictionaries did not even list the term “middle class,” but rather “middle rank” or “middling sort.” hese words recalled the English meaning of those who were “equally distant from the extremes” – i.e., the aristocracy and the working class. Even when mentioned in dictionaries or encyclopedias of the late 19th century the term was not distinguished in any way as American. he entry in he Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1899-1911), for example, explained that such a class distinction did not even exist in the United States. By the early 1930s, however, the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences proposed a positive deinition that was, on the contrary, speciically American.2 Published between 1930 and 1935 under the direction of Edwin Seligman – an important American economist – and Alvin Johnson – editor of the progressive magazine he New Republic and director of the New School for Social Research in New York – the encyclopedia was initiated by some of the major foundations and academic associations in the ield of the social sciences. At the time, prominent American and European scholars were involved in a scientiic endeavor that witnessed the establishment of the 1. Charles Sellers, he Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991). 2. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (2 vols., New York, 1828); Dictionary of Americanisms, edited by J. Russell Bartlett (New York, 1848); he Encyclopedic Dictionary, edited by R. Hunter, C. Morris (New York, 1896); and he Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia with a New Atlas of the World (12 vols., New York, 1889-1911). See Stuart M. Blumin, “he Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America. A Critique and Some Proposals,” he American Historical Review, 2 (Apr. 1985), 299-338. 123 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space social sciences in US universities and a growing tendency towards a multidisciplinary, international approach. Drafted by the German scholar Alfred Meusel, the entry under “Middle Class” clariied the American meaning of the term in light of European historical and conceptual developments, with particular reference to the English literature from which the deinition of “lower middle class” had derived and the German social sciences (Verein für Sozialwissenschaft and Weimar Sociology) that had introduced the concept of the “new middle class” (neuer Mittelstand). he history of the American middle class was thus analyzed by making a distinction between “old middle class” and “new middle class.” he irst term included 19th-century members of liberal professions, small agricultural entrepreneurs, merchants, artisans and manufacturers. Such individuals had been economically independent because they had owned property and controlled their own work, both of which had distinguished them from the working class and had allowed them to sustain the progress of industrialization and political democratization in a similar way to their counterparts in Europe. he “new middle class,” on the other hand, referred to a new group of salaried employees that had emerged in the United States and Europe in the late 19th century following the Second Industrial Revolution and the emergence of big business, trusts and corporations in which decision-making, control and managerial functions had been entrusted to employed assistants. he new administrative proile assumed by the American state during the Progressive Era after having overcome the laissez-faire policies of the preceding liberal period had been essential to the emergence of big business capitalism. Composed mostly of white-collar workers in the public and private sectors, this new middle class, despite being dependent on the sale of their work, could be distinguished from wage earners because their work was non-manual and considered “brain work” or “intellectual work” due to their secondary, professional and higher education. Independence was no longer equated with the possession of property or self-employment and adequate levels of income and education were now seen as that which guaranteed a high standard of living.3 his was the social physiognomy of the American middle class presented in the 1944 Dictionary of Sociology and again in the 1959 Dictionary of Social Science.4 his middle class was also the new protagonist of American national history. After World War II, the term “middle class” no longer had a negative connotation. On the contrary, the so-called “consensus school” of US history writing – like the social and political sciences of the Cold War period – even declared that America’s radical diference from Europe consisted 3. Alfred Meusel, “Middle class,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin R.A. Seligman (8 vols., New York, 1934), 9, 407-415. See Giuliana Gemelli, “Enciclopedie e scienze sociali negli Stati Uniti fra l’età di Hoover e la Guerra fredda,” Passato e Presente, 32 (1994), 33-67. On the Progressive-Era American state, see Stephen Skowroneck, Building a New American State. he Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge, 1982). 4. Dictionary of Sociology, edited by Henry Pratt Fairchild (Westport, CN., 1944); and Dictionary of Social Science, edited by John T. Zadrozny (Washington, DC, 1959). 124 matteo battistini in its positive deinition of the middle class as an original subject that was linear in its evolution and constant in its values. American historians thus ascribed to the middle class the progressive footprint of US national history and the political success of its liberal tradition. hey also consolidated the exceptionalist interpretation whereby America and Europe had followed radically separate trajectories from the revolutionary origins of the US onwards. Furthermore, later historical studies considered the biographies of professionals, employees, managers and technicians as exemplary of the peculiar characteristics of the American nation – professionalism, the work ethic, the scientiic organization of production, the corporate form of business, the managerial revolution, the conquest of a consumer society that gradually integrated broad segments of skilled and unionized workers along with ethnic and racial minorities – that were seen as conirming Henry Luce’s forecast of the “American Century.” he term “middle class” therefore became a key part of the national vocabulary not only among academics, but also in the everyday language of the public. To this day the term is used in the public conversation to understand economic crises, the transformations of global capitalism, and the new economic and geopolitical developments that challenge American hegemony.5 Taking a closer look at conceptual and historical constructions of the American middle class is not within the scope of this essay. Instead, the intention is to contribute to its exploration by demonstrating how the historical understanding of the middle class as a key category of the American nation and its “exceptional” nationalism was shaped by the transnational scientiic, political and intellectual networks that developed from the late 19th century through the interwar period. he irst step of this reconstruction requires 5. On consensus historiography, see Louis Hartz, he Liberal Tradition in America: an Interpretation of American Political hought since the Revolution (New York, 1955); Richard Hofstadter, he Age of Reform, from Bryan to F.D.R (New York, 1955); and David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and American Character (Chicago, 1955). On the social and political sciences, see Max Lerner, America as a Civilization: Life and hought in the United States Today (New York, 1957); and Seymour M. Lipset, he First New Nation: the United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York, 1963). Among the later historical research, see Rober H. Wiebe, he Search for Order 1877-1920 (London, 1967); Id., Self-Rule: a Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago, 1995); Burton J. Bledstein, he Culture of Professionalism. he Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976); Alfred D. Chandler Jr., he Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate 1870-1920 (Chicago, 1990); Id., Why the American Century (Chicago, 1998); Stuart M. Blumin, he Emergence of the Middle Class. Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Burton J. Bledstein, Robert D. Johnston (eds.), he Middling Sorts. Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (New York, 2001); and Marina Moskowitz, “Aren’t We All? Aspiration, Acquisition, and the American Middle Class,” in A. Ricardo Lopez, Barbara Weinstein (eds.), he Making of the Middle Class. Toward a Transnational History (Durham, 2012), 1-28. On the “American Century” and the middle class, see Emily S. Rosenberg, “Consuming the American Century,” in Andrew J. Bacevich (ed.), he Short American Century. A Postmortem (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 38-58. On current public and historiographical debates about the American middle class, A. Ricardo Lopez, Barbara Weinstein, “Introduction. We Shall Be All: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class,” in Lopez, Weinstein (eds.), he Making of the Middle Class, 1-28. 125 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space us to expand our vision to include the European middle classes. While 19th-century American dictionaries borrowed the term from the English vocabulary and adapted it to, or denied its relevance for, American political culture, the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences highlighted how the American middle class had come to be considered within the broad framework of historical and conceptual developments that crisscrossed both Europe and America. In other words, the term “middle class” took on a peculiarly American sense within the evolving social and political context of the Atlantic world. At the turn of the century, a number of occurrences made it possible for nation states and societies to become interconnected. First of all, similar social processes were taking place on both sides of the ocean: the move towards economic concentration (grossindustrie, grande industrie, big business); the separation of property from the control of business; the expansion of business-related bureaucracy; the development of the tertiary sector; the birth of mass distribution; and the increase in consumer goods. hese trends were shaping an interdependent world characterized by greater economic competition, growing inequality and the arrival of bitter class conlicts. In light of the rising “social question,” the various national experiences were characterized by analogous institutional tendencies. he end of the liberal era in the late 19th century coincided with the emergence of experimental policies that, at diferent times and in diferent ways, intervened in the market via regulatory-redistributive tools and organizational-administrative apparatuses meant to mediate social conlict. his made the new (American) and old (European) worlds almost indistinguishable. he transnational development of economic forces made way for a new Atlantic world oriented along unprecedented social and political coordinates that were quite diferent from those that had marked its modern formation in the 17th and 18th century.6 his convergence between politics and the economy emerged from, and then fed, an intellectual, scientiic debate that redeined liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the various groups had diferent names (Progressive, New Liberal, réformateur social, solidariste, sozialliberalen), intellectuals, politicians and activists expressed a new liberal vocation throughout the Atlantic world. At its heart was the social issue of integrating it into a context that would allow national and international markets to develop while also neutralizing “radicalism” in both politics and society, and the social sciences contributed to this debate. Getting a foothold as an academic discipline led to educational and research networks that fuelled the transnational circulation of new methods, empirical knowledge and socio-political thinking. Deductive principles were cast of to allow for an analytic, empirical approach that shifted the focus from the abstract individual of 6. David T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Mary Nolan, he Transatlantic Century. Europe and America, 1890-2010 (Cambridge, Mass., 2012). On the historiography of the early Atlantic world, see Matteo Battistini, “Un mondo in disordine. Le diverse storie dell’Atlantico,” Ricerche di Storia Politica, 2 (2012), 173-188. 126 matteo battistini classical liberalism towards society, groups and classes. he objective was to historicize economic processes, identify causes and consequences of social conlict, and propose solutions to re-establish harmony and consensus in both society and politics. Consequently, the social sciences were considered useful for political planning. In both Europe and the United States they took on a speciic governmental function by contributing to policy development, claiming the impartiality and objectivity of their scientiic methods that were lacking from the decision-making characterized by conlicts among political parties and social classes.7 he transnational circulation of a familiarity with the social sciences allowed a social and political vocabulary to emerge that crossed national borders. Among its key terms was “middle class.” As we will see, while in the 19th century the middle classes had been deined in light of the national processes of industrialization and democratization, by the end of the century the Second Industrial Revolution had ignited a socio-political debate over the concept of the middle class that would unite the two sides of the Atlantic. From this standpoint, this essay aims not to present a comparative history of the American and European middle classes but rather to shed light on the common historical and conceptual dynamics implicated by the rise of the American middle class by arguing for the adoption of a transnational point of view to understand the origins of a concept considered essential to the “American Century.” he (Lower) English Middle Class In the 19th and 20th century, English liberals and Whig historians depicted earlymodern England as the birthplace of the middle class. While it was certainly not the only European society with a notable presence of merchants, artisans and manufacturers, these social groups played a uniquely deining role in British national history. he existence of the middle class explained the country’s early entrance into the modern economy and politics because it had fuelled the Industrial Revolution and sustained the political reforms that, from the Glorious Revolution onwards, had allowed the United Kingdom to carry out a process of democratization that, unlike in France, had prevented the constitutional 7. Immanuel Wallerstein, he Modern World-System. IV. Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914 (London, 2011); James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American hought, 1870-1920 (Oxford, 1986); Robert Kelley, he Transatlantic Persuasion. he Liberal Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969); Jörn Leonhard, “Progressive Politics and the Dilemma of Reform: German and American Liberalism in Comparison, 1880-1920,” in Maurizio Vaudagna (ed.), he Place of Europe in American History. Twentieth-Century Perspectives (Torino, 2007), 115-132; Tiziano Bonazzi (ed.), Potere e nuova razionalità. Alle origini delle scienze della società e dello stato in Germania e negli Stati Uniti (Bologna, 1982); Pierangelo Schiera, Il laboratorio borghese: scienza e politica nella Germania dell’Ottocento (Bologna, 1987); and Rafaella Baritono, Oltre la politica: la crisi politico-istituzionale negli Stati Uniti fra Otto e Novecento (Bologna, 1993). 127 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space framework from breaking down. his role of the middle class was mentioned in the works of homas B. Macaulay (1848-1855) and in George M. Trevelyan’s History of England (1926), which deined the liberal code of the Whig interpretation of history. he same thing happened again at the end of the 20th century when “the making of the English middle class” deined the historical reconstruction that served as an alternative to the thriving research on the formation of the English working class.8 hough introduced at the end of the 18th century under the entry “class” to explain the economic and social transformations that were revolutionizing the rigid hierarchy of rank or order,9 the term “middle class” only became popular with the rise of economic and political liberalism, the Manchester School and utilitarianism. While the “invisible hand” of the market was conirmed by the rise of the middle class, individualism, the theory of representative government and the appeal to public opinion paved the way for a political debate that strengthened faith among middle class people in the old English Constitution and allowed a political reform to develop that could avoid working class insurrections. Making reference to the middle class kept diverse social groups together, including northern manufacturers, merchants and inanciers in large urban centers like London, and professionals tied to universities, the government and local institutions, all of whom were seen as having helped create the national wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution. Notably, by this time the term “gentleman” signiied not only a noble proprietor, but also anyone with a solid social position due to their business or profession. Moreover, reference to the middle class was made to enhance the political voice of a subject upon whom the conquest of free trade and the expansion of sufrage were seen to depend. In 1823, James Mill wrote that the middle class was “the wisest and most virtuous part of the community” and that it “will guide the poorer classes.” In 1859, John Stuart Mill stated that the middle class embodied public opinion. In his view, since the middle class claimed the support of the working class, political and economic reforms institutionalized the proprietorial and entrepreneurial ideal within the constitutional framework. While the Reform Act of 1832 denied the working class the right to vote, thus creating the possibility of a middle-class government, the withdrawal of the Corn Laws (1846-1949) aided the economic interests of the manufacturing groups. he conservative Reform Act 8. Peter Earle, he Making of the English Middle Class. Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (Berkeley, 1989); Asa Briggs, he Age of Improvement (London, 1959); Harold Perkin, he Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London, 1969); David Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven, 1998); and Simon Gunn, “Between Modernity and Backwardness. he Case of the English Middle Class,” in A. Ricardo Lopez, Barbara Weinstein (eds.), he Making of the Middle Class. Toward a Transnational History, (Durham, 2012), 58-74. 9. For an early sociological analysis, see John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes (London, 1833). See John Seed, “From ‘Middling Sort’ to Middle Class in Late Eighteenth and Early NineteenthCentury England,” in M.L. Bush, Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500 (Manchester, 1992), 114-135; Steven Wallech, “Class Versus Rank: he Transformation of English Social Terms and heories of Production,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1986), 409-431. 128 matteo battistini of 1867 extended sufrage to “householders,” and the liberal governments of William Gladstone later approved a series of laws that better served consumers and producers. As airmed by Walter Bagehot in he English Constitution (1867), “he middle classes are today the despotic power of England.”10 For most of the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution and democratization conirmed the conviction that the Victorian era had witnessed the triumph of a middle class as the political bulwark against aristocratic privilege, the radical tendencies of class conlict and the revolutionary excesses of the nations across the Channel. Indeed, the middle class was portrayed as the fulcrum of British political culture. his view was also evident in the literature of the time. However, this narrative overlooked not only the voice of the working class that had emerged in the Chartist Movement after 1832, but also the inancial wealth concentrated in London, which was much greater than the fortunes accumulated in the manufacturing areas of the North. hese interpretative limitations made it possible to overturn the liberal cornerstone of Whig historiography that had associated the middle class with the triumph of political and economic liberalism. Instead of portraying the middle class as the main coherent subject of civilization, this interpretation viewed 19thcentury political and economic reforms as representing a crucial factor linking together social groups that would otherwise be separated by hierarchies determined by the market. To understand the historical and conceptual formation of the English middle class it is therefore important to see how its political representation foundered at the end of the 19th century as one of the profound social consequences of the Second Industrial Revolution.11 10. Walter Bagehot, he English Constitution. No. VIII. he Prerequisites of Cabinet Government, and the Peculiar Form Which hey Have Assumed in England (London, 1967), URL: http://www.gutenberg.org/ iles/4351/4351-h/4351-h.htm; James Mill, “Essay on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the Press, Education, and Prisons and Prison Discipline” (London, 1823), in Jack Lively, John Rees (eds.), Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Oxford, 1978), 93-94; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1878), 50, URL: https:// archive.org/stream/onliberty09millgoog#page/n8/mode/2up; Alfred Marshall, “he Future of the Working Classes” (1873), in Memorials of Alfred Marshall (London, 1925), 101-118. Jürgen Habermas, he Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, 1992). For an early sociological analysis, see John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes (London, 1833). See John Seed, “From ‘Middling Sort’ to Middle Class in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century England,” in M.L. Bush, Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500 (Manchester, 1992), 114135; Steven Wallech, “Class Versus Rank: he Transformation of English Social Terms and heories of Production,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1986), 409-431; Asa Briggs, “he Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” in Asa Briggs, John Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (New York, 1967), 43-73; and Eric J. Hobsbawn, “La classe media inglese. 1780-1920,” in Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Borghesie europee dell’Ottocento, (Venezia, 1989), 100-106. 11. Simon Gunn, “Class, Identity and the Urban: the Middle Class in England, c. 1790-1950,” Urban History, 1 (2004), 29-47; Simon Gunn, Rachel Bell, Middle Classes. Their Rise and Sprawl (London, 2002); and Dror Wahrman, Inventing the Middle Class. The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge, 1995). On the public presence of the working class through Chartism, see Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1972), Vol. 8, 342-350, http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me08/me08_342.htm; and Marx, Engels, he Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno Bauer and Co, 1845, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch02.htm; F. Engels, Letters from London, 1843, 129 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space he growth of professionals, managers, oicials, industrial and inancial employees, department store sales representatives and civil servants changed the 19th-century social physiognomy of the middle class. It was composed less and less of merchants, manufacturers and capitalists, and more of clerks and black-coated and white-collar workers, mostly concentrated in cities like London, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol. hese social groups embodied a middle class identiied in its relation to other social classes rather than according to proprietorial or entrepreneurial criteria. Although its position was marginal compared to the “upper class” – negatively deined as a “plutocracy” – of big industrialists and inanciers, its members distinguished themselves from wage earners by claiming a superior social position because of their specialized education, their non-manual or “brain” work based on technical and professional skills, their higher levels of consumption, and a lifestyle based in suburban, residential areas that contrasted with the poor urban conditions of the working class. Charles Booth – a philanthropist and the author of pioneering studies on poverty – wrote in 1896 that the “the average undiferentiated human labour power – upon which Karl Marx bases his gigantic fallacy – does not exist anywhere […], but at least of all, […] is it to be found among clerks.”12 Ten years later, however, it would have been a bit harder to draw such a conclusion. Although white-collar workers shared the values of the capitalistic economy and the liberal political culture, they sufered from changes in the labor market. he hierarchical complexity of private and public bureaucracies frustrated their career ambitions, economic concentration limited their chances of social mobility, and work became more standardized and impersonal, and less reliant on qualiications. he English middle class was therefore pulled into a cultural and political paradox. While on the one hand it continued to be deined in opposition to the working class, on the other hand the decline of the proprietorial ideal was highlighting the presence of a group deined as “lower middle class.” As a result, without the middle class having ever been thought of as a single, homogeneous subject, commentators began to speak of “middle classes” – i.e., a plural middle class. Furthermore, the addition of the word “lower” denied the political representation of the middle class as central to national history and was symptomatic of the failure of Victorian aspirations.13 in Marx Engels Collected Works (London, 1975), Vol. 3, 387. See G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class. Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983). 12. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (London, 1903, I ed. 1896), 277. See David Lockwood, he Blackcoated Worker. A Study in Class Consciousness (Oxford, 1958); Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), 46-47; Harold Perkin, he Rise of Professional Society (London, 1989); and Maria Malatesta, Professional Men, Professional Women: the European Professions from the Nineteenth Century until Today (Los Angeles, 2011). 13. Geofrey Crossick, “he Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: A Discussion,” in Geofrey Crossick, he Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914 (London, 1977), 11-88, in part. 46-47; Arno Mayer, 130 matteo battistini his change became particularly clear when intellectual critics of William Gladstone’s liberal leadership, such as Toynbee Hall and the Rainbow Circle, innovated ideal liberal cornerstones in light of the social question. he “New Liberalism” abandoned the dogma of free trade, shifting the focus from production to distribution, a ield in which government intervention was considered acceptable. Scholars, economists and sociologists like John Hobson and John Hobhouse, radical journalists like John Hammond (editor of he Speaker from 1899 to 1906) and Henry Massingham (editor of Nation from 1907 to 1923), and politicians like Richard Haldane believed social reform was needed for “a higher standard of living achieved for the whole people, largely by the regulative and persuasive action of the State.” his would help forge a “prosperous, comfortable middle class as large as you can by absorbing into it as rapidly as you are able to all the best of the sad and sufering section beneath it.”14 his political attempt gave rise to a “middleclass liberalism” that turned the lower middle class into a catalyst for social reform. Accordingly, while the old 19th-century liberalism with its negative idea of liberty had fuelled the battle of the “entrepreneurial” middle classes to remove the nobility from power, the “New Liberalism” was the expression of a new, “professional” middle class that laid claim to a positive conception of liberty and applied scientiic method to the art of government. In the early 1920s, however, the decline of the Liberal Party and the rise of the Labour Party were the clearest signs that, although liberalism had been reconceived, it was still unable to take political advantage of the transformations of the middle class. In 1922, journalist and liberal politician Charles Masterman published England after War, which contained an investigation that had begun in 1909 with he Condition of England. Following the book’s release, the situation of the middle class declined even further. Inlation and unemployment transferred wealth from debtors to creditors and decreasing incomes further separated low-skill and low-income salaried employees from those with higher positions in public and private bureaucracies (oicials, administators, managers). Finally, the “new poverty” brought about a considerable decline in consumption (especially in education and recreational, cultural and sporting activities), which had once assured the middle class a superior social position with respect to industrial workers. In Masterman’s opinion, the interwar period became the peak of “the slow disintegration and decay of this whole standard of civilisation of Middle Class England.” While this and other journalistic and scholarly works provided precious empirical knowledge, they “he Lower Middle Class as a Historical Problem,” Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975), 409-411; Eric Hobsbawn, “La classe media inglese. 1780-1920,” 108-118; and Simon Gunn, “he ‘Failure’ of the Victorian Middle Class: A Critique,” in John Seed, Janet Wolf (eds.), he Culture of Capital (Manchester, 1988), 17-43. 14. “From Old to New Liberalism,” Nation, August 20, 1910; Richard B. Haldane, “he Liberal Creed,” he Contemporary Review, 54 (1888), 465-469, 470-474. See Michael Freeden, he New Liberalism. An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978), 151-158; and Paul Adelman, Victorian Radicalism. he Middle-Class Experience 1830-1914 (London, 1984), 120-145. 131 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space did not succeed in successfully creating a shared political discourse that would allow the middle classes to have an impact on public opinion and the government and its policies. On the contrary, Masterman realized that the “New Liberalism” had not taken root in suburban areas, where irritation at social legislation and relatively higher tax rates led to increased support for the Tories. In essence, literature and public opinion no longer celebrated the “triumph” of the middle class but rather emphasized its weakness with respect to the opposing forces of capital and organized labor. Deprived of the “channels of communication” through which capitalists and workers exercised their inluence, the middle class remained silent or unheard because it “lacked organization, strength and ideas.”15 Such organizational problems were at the center of socialist and Labour concerns. In the 1910s, in “Socialism and the Middle Classes” – a series of articles published in 1906 in the Fortnightly Review – George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells explained that middle-class families that had fallen into deprivation would have to abandon market individualism and make common cause with the working class. hese ideas were widely shared within the Fabian Society thanks to its founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb. In “Can the Middle Class Be Organized?,” published in early 1920 in he New Commonwealth, Sidney Webb declared that managers, engineers, superintendents, foremen, shop assistants, electricians, chemists, teachers, professors, oicials and civil servants produced a great deal of the national wealth. However, this “large army of the salariat” – characterized by a sober character and a moderate income – lacked a common public voice that would allow them to challenge their political dependence on businessmen. he organizational problem therefore had to be resolved by looking at the associative forms of manual workers. In fact, while the middle classes had been politically divided between conservatism and liberalism up until the beginning of the century, by the 1920s it seemed possible to involve them in Labour’s political project, as presented in Labour and the New Social Order (1918). However, although they had unionized, most of the associations that united professionals and employees remained attached to the idea of using gentlemanly respectability to distinguish themselves from the working class. heir meager participation in the strike of 1926 and, even more telling, their involvement in the massive volunteer efort that guaranteed essential services during the strike clariied their distance from industrial workers, as did their electoral preference for the Tories when salaries and consumption started rising again. Only at the beginning of the next decade, following the economic crisis of 1929, did communist intellectuals propose a new political vision of “the fate of the middle classes” 15. Charles F.G. Masterman, England after the War (London, 1922), 57-59, 66, 70-81. See also his he Condition of England (London, 1909), 68-71, 80-85. D. Caradog Jones, “he Cost of Living of a Sample of Middle-Class Families,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 4 (1928), 463-518. On the decline of the Liberal Party in connection with the middle class, see Ray Lewis, Angus Maude, he English Middle Classes (London, 1953, I ed. 1949), 42-50. 132 matteo battistini and publish economic and sociological analyses that foresaw their eventual complete proletarianization.16 In sum, from century’s end through the interwar years the public and political debate contradicted the 19th-century narrative of a triumphant middle class. In fact, the English middle class now seemed to be coming undone in a reverse process of social and political decline that prevented the new century from inheriting classical liberalism’s belief in the centrality of this class. Within liberal and Labour ranks there emerged the image of a plural middle class that was economically insecure, socially inarticulate, and culturally and politically disoriented vis-à-vis the opposing forces of capital and labor. During the 19th century reference to the middle class had been necessary to pave the way, or win support, for the shared political project of classical liberalism. However, under the growing weight of social conlict, the middle class was marked by divisions and tensions that the New Liberalism and Labour were unable to address. Although associations like the Middle Class Defence Organization (1906) and the Middle Classes Union (1919), which in 1921 became the National Citizen Union, did exist, they failed to recreate the middle-class “public opinion” theorized by Stuart Mill. To use the words of Bagehot, the middle class was no longer the “despotic power” of the English nation. Reasons for this decline included the disruptive economic changes that tended to polarize wealth, the rise of aggressive unionism that mobilized even the least skilled workers and the emergence of Labour’s independent political force. Even more important was the lack of a speciic, scientiic relection on the middle class that could not only describe its precarious social standing, but also shape a common political vocabulary to advance and unify the diverse aspirations of its members. In fact, the weak academic development of the social sciences in Britain was relevant in this respect. his is not the place to explore the historiographical discussion on the absence of a British sociology, one that underestimates the contribution of scientiic associations like the National Association of Social Science.17 However, unlike what was happening on the continent, 16. Sidney Webb, “Can the Middle Class Be Organized?,” he New Commonwealth (January 9, 1920). H.G. Wells, “Socialism and the Middle Classes,” Fortnightly Review (November 1906). See also G.B. Shaw, Socialism and Superior Brains (1894); Fabian Tract 69 (1896); and Fabian Tract 146 (1909). Sidney Webb, he Works Manager To-day (London, 1917). Eric J. Hobsbawm, “he Fabians Reconsidered,” in Eric J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964), 255-271; and “La classe media inglese. 1780-1920,” 122-123; and Raphael Samuel, “he Middle Class between Wars,” New Socialist, 1 (1983). On communist interest in the middle class during the 1930s, see F.D. Klingender, he Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain (London, 1935); and Alec Brown, he Fate of the Middle Classes (London, 1936). On the political behavior of the English middle classes, see John Bonham, he Middle Class Vote (London, 1954); and Jürgen Kocka, Impiegati tra fascismo e democrazia. Una storia sociale-politica degli impiegati: America e Germania, 1890-1940 (Napoli, 1982, I ed. 1977), 413-415. 17. Lawrence Goldman, “he Social Science Association, 1857-1886: A Context for Mid-Victorian Liberalism,” he English Historical Review, 101 (1986), 95-134; “A Peculiarity of the English? he Social Science Association and the Absence of Sociology in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Past & Present, 114 (1987), 133 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space the British narrative of the middle class lacked an adequate scientiic foundation that would increase its authority and allow it to shape British political culture. “Middle class” had become an undeined, ambiguous signiier and would not assume a conceptual centrality – through scientiic and academic works that borrowed its meaning from the American social sciences – until after World War II.18 he Bourgeoisie and the Classe Moyenne Unlike the Anglo-American case, in continental Europe the middle class emerged through a complex relationship with the “Bourgeoisie.” Between the late 18th and early 19th century, when the bourgeoisie began assuming the traits of a national class, merchants, artisans, entrepreneurs, bankers and professionals shared a stance against the aristocracy. hen, under the pressure of the rising labor movement, a new line of social demarcation was consolidated throughout the 19th century with the diferent sectors of the petite and haute bourgeoisie and their economic (wirtschaftbürgentum) and intellectual (bildungsbürgentum) versions united by a growing hostility towards the “proletariat.” he bourgeoisie was therefore kept together by the twofold desire to abolish aristocratic privileges and titles of nobility and also to protect the formation of the new liberal order from the disturbances coming from below. At the same time, as shown by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s invective against the “nouvelle féodalitè” and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, reference to the bourgeoisie became highly controversial. In this context, the French term “classe moyenne” was introduced to indicate a social subject that, while similar to the bourgeoisie, was broader and more permeable and therefore lacked the rigid hierarchical signiicance attached to the latter term.19 Although the term “classe moyenne” had already featured in the constitutional debates of the revolutionary era as a concept derived from Aristotle’s Politique, it only came into popular use in the 1830s thanks to the liberal constitutionalists. François Guizot in particular vested the middle class with the historic mission of ixing the character and direction of French people who were neither forced into manual work nor depended on 133-171; and Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain. he Social Science Association 1857-1886 (Cambridge, 2004). 18. George D.H. Cole, “he Conception of the Middle Classes,” Studies in Class Structure (London, 1955), 78-100. See Peter N. Stears, “he Middle Class: Toward a Precise Deinition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 3 (1979), 377-396. 19. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1864, De la capacité politique des classes ouvriéres (Paris, 1924); and De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité ou Principes d’organisation politique (Paris, 1843). On the historical and conceptual relationship between the middle class and the bourgeoisie, see Jürgen Kocka, “he Middle Class in Europe,” he Journal of Modern History, 4 (1995), 783-806, part. 783-784; and Rafaele Romanelli, “Borghesia/ Burgentum/Bourgeoisie. Itinerari europei di un concetto,” in Kocka (ed.), Borghesie europee dell’Ottocento, (Venezia, 1989), 69-94. 134 matteo battistini a wage and could thus dedicate their time to public afairs. Consequently, in the period between parliamentary monarchy (1830) and the Second Republic (1848-1851) a political notion of the middle class emerged with a meaning coextensive with that of the bourgeoisie. “Middle class” was therefore understood to identify and unite all the forces that opposed the nobility while also preventing the nation from ending up in the hands of the working class – a meaning that was consolidated after the Paris Commune of 1871. To speak of a “classe moyenne” meant cleansing the political debate of the strong polemical tone that the term “bourgeoisie” had assumed in socialist and communist literature. As presented overseas in an article entitled “Middle-Class Life in France” published in he North American Review in 1893, this change in terminology did not mean that the bourgeoisie no longer existed. he term still identiied those tied to a craft, a trade or a profession and intent on saving and accumulating money. However, “now that everybody may become a gentleman, as the English say, we have no more nobles, no more bourgeoisie.”20 As in England, the historic vision of the middle class in France was shaped by political afairs. “Classe moyenne” did not identify a social group so much as a political notion meant to legitimize a liberal order that continually moved away from the progressive vision of French history. he rise of the middle class was therefore central to the narrative of the emergence of French democracy between the Revolution and the irst half of the 20th century, one that overlooked the other story of the “classe moyenne,” especially that presented by Karl Marx in 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Marx emphasized that the French middle class had abdicated its own political emancipation and consigned its power to Napoleon III to guarantee a “bourgeois order” otherwise threatened by the forces of the working class. As he wrote, “industry and commerce, hence the business afairs of the middle class, are to prosper in hothouse fashion under the strong government.” While for Guizot the bourgeoisie and the “classe moyenne” converged at the heart of a progressive national history, for Marx the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune revealed that the middle class had given up on its own political power. he term “classe moyenne” did not stress the modernization of the nation or the democratization of the republic but rather the political end of the bourgeoisie, that is, the fulillment of its historical function.21 20. Lola de San Carlos, “Middle-Class Life in France,” he North American Review, 156 (1893), 478-484. François Guizot, Storia della civiltà in Francia (Torino, 1974), 171-172. See Klaus-Peter Sick, “Le concept de classes moyennes. Notion sociologique ou slogan politique?,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’ histoire, 37 (1993), 14-16. 21. Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Chapter VII, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm; and La Guerra civile in Francia, (Napoli, 1975), 130-136. On the French middle class in historiography, see David homson, Democracy in France: he hird and Fourth Republics (London, 1952); Leonore O’Noyle, “he Middle Class in Western Europe, 1815-1848,” he American Historical Review, 3 (1966), 826-845; Alfred Cobban, “he Middle Class in France, 1815-1848,” French 135 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space At end of the 19th century, given the rising social question, it was clear that the bourgeoisie was unable to understand how its liberal vision of the state and society was no longer suited to the social and political transformations imposed by the Second Industrial Revolution. hese changes afected the composition of a middle class that now consisted of a few proprietors and independent businessmen (isolés, according to the irst oicial census of the late 19th century), many state oicials, professionals and employees of the departments of the grosse industrie, and managers and salaried workers (cadres and employée) of the distribution sector that depended on the market in ways not unlike those of wage earners (salarié). While in the 19th century “classe moyenne” had initially intended to include the entire bourgeoisie and to embody the liberal ideal of the rational conquest of civil and political liberty, by the end of the century the term no longer had a shared, consistent deinition identifying a subject capable of interpreting and governing social changes. he growing tension between the meanings of “bourgeoisie” and “classe moyenne” relected the end of the liberal era, which involved both the decline of the bourgeoisie and the failure of a liberal political culture with laissez-faire individualism as its ideological foundation.22 It was in this context – which is also what distinguished France from Britain – that the social sciences attached a speciic scientiic meaning to the term “classe moyenne.” Inspired by the French scholar and reformer Pierre-Guillaume-Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882) and his social catholicism, French and Belgian sociologists and economists like Maurice Dufourmantelle, Etienne Martin Saint-Léon, Georges Blondel, Victor Brants and Hector Lambrechts distanced themselves from classical liberalism and its individualistic dogmas and carried out new empirical research and studies (published in La Réforme Sociale) on social groups and classes, which mainly looked at the petite bourgeoisie of traders, artisans, farmers and liberal professionals. heir aim was both scientiic and political. Forging the scholarly category of “classe moyenne” meant, on the one hand, diagnosing the evils of industrial society and prescribing the cure, and, on the other, mobilizing middle-class individuals to defend a social and political order marked by socialism and rising class conlict. hese conservative scholars were active in the Institut Internationale des Classes Moyennes – a research and documentation center founded in 1903 in Brussels dedicated exclusively to the study of the middle classes – which published the Bullettin de l’Institut International pour l’Etude du Problème des Classes Moyennes. he most important of their works were those of Victor Brants, a Belgian economist and sociologist who Historical Studies, 1 (1967), 41-52; and Pamela Pilbeam, he Making of the Middle Class? he Middle Classes in Europe, 1789-1914: France, Germany, Italy and Russia (Chicago, 1990). 22. Simon R.S. Szreter, “he Oicial Representation of Social Classes in Britain, the United States, and France: he Professional Model and Les Cadres,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (1993), 285-317, part. 305-313. On the French crisis at the end of 19th century, see Luisa Mangoni, Una crisi di ine secolo. La cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e Novecento (Torino, 1985); and La terza repubblica e la sociologia di Durkheim (Bologna, 1988), 231-252. 136 matteo battistini was very inluential in the French academic debate for having translated the category of “neuer Mittelstand” coined by Gustav von Schmoller into the expression “nouvelles couches de classe moyenne.” 23 In La petite industrie contemporaine (1902) Brants explained that the mechanization of work and the concentration of managerial functions were causing artisans to disappear and new igures to emerge. hough these engineers, managers, oicials and employees were still “dependent,” they were not considered “proletaire sans phrase” – according to the Marxist deinition – because their income made them autonomous. Brants thus seized upon the presence of a “middle class in transformation” from “classe moyenne vrai” to “classes moyennes du revenus.” Notably, not only did he use the term in the plural but he also moved beyond proprietorial and entrepreneurial criteria. Income deined an unprecedented, distinct trait of the middle class because it provided a variable social standard, which allowed social changes in the distribution of wealth and consumer habits to be shaped and understood. his was also the sense of the distinction introduced by Etienne Martin Saint-Léon in 1910 between “classe moyenne indépendante” and “classe moyenne dependant.” 24 Brants’ work, like that of many others, was not devoid of political value. Indeed, he invited scholars, intellectuals and politicians to shift their focus from the working class to the middle class because – in his opinion – the possibility of deining the general interest of nations and thus insuring the political stability of the entire continent depended on the middle class. his sociological approach made it possible to both endorse the restoration of small business values threatened by the social transformations engendered by the Second Industrial Revolution, and to declare – in deiance of the socialist and communist literature – that the middle class was in fact expanding, not shrinking, due to the growing 23. Geofrey Crossick, “Formation ou invention des classes moyennes? Une analyse comparée: BelgiqueFrance-Grande Bretagne 1880-1914,” BTNG-RBHC, 3-4 (1996), 105-138; and Crossick, “Al di là della metafora: studi recenti sui ceti medi inferiori in Europa prima del 1914,” Quaderni storici, 56 (1984), 573-612. On the Institute International des classes moyennes, see Hector Lambrechts, Contribution à l’histoire de l’Institute international des classes moyennes (Dison 1935). For the Italian contribution to the International Institute, see Elisabetta Caroppo, Per la pace sociale: l’Istituto internazionale per le classi medie nel primo Novecento (Galatina, 2013). 24. Victor Brants, La petit industrie contemporaine (Paris, 1902), 1-20, 109. Etienne Martin Saint-Léon, “L’organization corporative des classes moyennes,” in Saint-Léon, Classes moyennes industrielles et commerciales (Paris, 1910), 166-175. he historical transformation of the middle class and the growing gap between an independent middle class and a dependent one were also described by Italian political scientist Roberto Michels: “Sulla scadenza della classe media industriale antica e sul sorgere di una classe media industriale moderna nei paesi di economia spiccatamente capitalistica,” Giornale degli economisti, XXXVIII (1909), 85-103. In the following decades, the question of how to deine the new categories of the middle class remained open: Hector Lambrechts, Le probléme des classes moyennes (Dison, 1927); and Léo Moulin, Luc Aërt, “Les classes moyennes. Essai de bibliographie critique d’une deinition,” Revue d’Histoire éeconomique et social, 32 (1954), 168-181. See also François Gresle, “La notion de classe moyenne indépendante. Un bilan des travaux,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’ histoire, 37 (1993), 35-44. 137 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space concentration of wealth. “Classe moyenne” therefore expressed the potential harmony of a society characterized by class conlict, and it was used in this vein in political debates to win consensus. his was the goal of the “middle class movement” that was emerging on the continent and included the Association de Défense des Classes Moyennes, founded in 1908 in Paris; the German and Belgian organizations founded in the early 20th century; and the Congrès International des Classes Moyennes held since 1903 in various European cities (Brussels, Vienna, Monaco and Liège, among others). At the international congress in Liège, Saint-Léon and other French scholars even declared that hird Republic France was “the country of the middle class.”25 After World War I, this belief deteriorated. A series of essays and articles published in academic journals and daily newspapers shed light on “the great pity of the middle classes,” while alarmed sociologists and economists described how they had been afected by the war economy and inlation. he growing cost of living, indebtedness and the decline in consumption damaged the “optimism” and “moral dignity” of the middle class and cut dangerously into the “political and intellectual greatness” of the French nation. Not only had the growing distance between the residual, independent (proprietorial and entrepreneurial) middle class and its dependent, income-based counterpart become apparent, but there were clear inequalities within the dependent group as well. he income diferences among white-collar workers prevented them from sharing a common interest and fuelled – especially in the middle and lower cadres – the fear of being socially downgraded into the working class. his new literature revealed just how obsolete the 19th-century liberal representation of the middle class really was and asked an unsettling question: what would happen to the French Republic if faced with a “conscious and organized” working class, when “there is no middle class left?” (il n’y a plus de classe moyenne?)26 his was the burning question that loomed large during the Great Depression of the 1930s when, with an eye to the troubling expansion of anti-semitism and the rise of 25. Brants, La petit industrie contemporaine, 13. M. Louis Rivière, “La notion des classes moyennes,” Les classes moyennes dans le commerce et l’industrie, 29° congrès de la Société internationale de l’éeconomie sociale et des Unions de la paix, Société d’économie sociale (1910), 3-9; Saint-Léon, “Die Mittelstandsfrage in Frankreich,” in Internationaler Kongress des städtischen und ländlichen Mittelstandes (August, 1905), 1-2; and Lambrechts, Contribution à l’histoire de l’Institute international des classes moyennes, (Dison, 1935). See also Elisabetta Caroppo, Per la pace sociale: l’Istituto internazionale per le classi medie nel primo Novecento (Galatina, 2013); and Sick, Le concept de classes moyennes. Notion sociologique ou slogan politique?, 20-30. On French middleclass associationism, see Gilles Le Béguec, “Prélude à un syndacalisme bourgeois. L’association de défense des classes moyennes (1907-1939),” Vingtiéeme Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 37 (1993), 93-104. 26. J. Artur, “Le sort des classes moyennes dans l’état social actuel,” Revue internationale de sociologie, (1929), 401-410. See also Lucien de Chilly, La classe moyenne en France après la guerre 1918-1924 (Bourges, 1924); André Siegfried, Tableau des partis en France (Paris, 1930), 9-16; Etienne Fournol, Manuel de politique française (Paris, 1933), 60-99; Edmond Goblot, La barrière et le niveau: étude sociologique sur la bourgeoisie française moderne (Paris, 1925); and Charles Brun, “La grande pitié des classes moyennes,” La Réforme sociale (1929), 417-422. On French socialist literature, see Bruno Groppo, “Socialisme et classes moyennes,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 17 (1989), 1-3. 138 matteo battistini national socialism in Germany, French social and political scientists declared that the middle classes no longer embodied the Aristotelian “measure” that guaranteed the political stability of the Republic. On the contrary, they were associated with the crisis of the European democracies and the potential destruction of the international liberal order. We need not examine the works of scholars like Henry Laufenburger, Raymond Aron and Edmond Vermeil here. However, since such literature was developing in the wake of the sociology of the Weimar Republic, we may now shift our focus to the German context. As Maurice Halbwachs, a distinguished sociologist of the Durkheim school, has clariied, in France the scientiic problem of deining and identifying a strong and autonomous “classe moyenne” remained unresolved throughout the 1930s and 1940s. It was not until after World War II, under the inluence of the American social sciences, that the cadres – highly qualiied engineers, managers, accountants and employees of the private and public sectors – would be identiied as members of the middle class that had led the modernization of the French nation.27 Mittelstand and neuer Mittelstand In Germany, the adoption of the term “Mittelstand” coincided with the profound social transformations brought about by the Second Industrial Revolution. During the Wilhelmine period the decline in medium and small manufacturing and commercial industries coincided with a steep rise in employment not only in industry (especially among technicians), but also in trade, transport, banking, insurance, and public and private bureaucracies. As a result, a subject emerged that would progressively overshadow the traditional liberal image of the independent “Mittleklassen:” the private and public employee.28 his societal protagonist was at the heart of the German middle class movement that took of at the beginning of the 20th century like those of France and Belgium. However, in Germany, widespread mobilization allowed employees to win protection in the private and public spheres. Unlike factory workers and wage earners, middle class employees obtained contracts that guaranteed greater workplace security, reduced work hours and special prerogatives such as holidays and productivity bonuses. hese contractual 27. Henry Laufenburger, “Classes moyennes et national socialisme en Allemagne,” Revue politique et parlamentaire (Avril 1933), 46-60; Edmond Vermeil, “Essai sur les origines sociales de la révolution hitlérienne,” Annèe politique française et étrangère, 10 (1935), 41-78; and Raymond Aron, “Une révolution antiprolétarienne dans l’Allemagne entre les deux révolutions,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 9 (1937), 507-601. See also Maurice Halbwachs, Esquisse d’une psychologie des classes sociales, (Paris, 1955), irst published in 1938 with the title “Analyse des mobiles dominants qui orientent l’activité des individus dans la vie sociale” in Enquêtes sociologiques, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Institut de sociologie Solvay. On the rise of cadres in the second half of the 20th century, see Louis Boltanski, he Making of a Class. Cadres in French Society (Cambridge, 1987). 28. Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Berlin, 1955, I ed. 1910), 507-528. 139 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space guarantees were also conirmed by legislative acts that protected employees with insurance (for sickness, workplace accidents, maternity and old age). he Weimarer Reichsverfassung (1919) constitutionally recognized not only the igure of the manual worker, but also that of the private (Angestellte) and public (Beamten) employee and their right to be insured. he Weimar Basic Law also constitutionalized the social position of the “Selbständing Mittelstand.” he state was assigned the legislative and administrative task of promoting the independent proprietary middle class and protecting it from the danger of being absorbed into the lower classes. As a result, employees considered themselves as members of a professional stand rather than as manual workers, much less “proletarians.”29 Germany was distinguished from England and France by its state intervention, which followed a political, legal framework that helped overcome diferences in income and property and thus had the potential to build a uniied middle class actor that could not have existed in strict economic terms. Rather than being considered as strategic responses to class conlict, measures in favor of wage earners represented a political opportunity for skilled manual workers to overcome their proletarian condition and were therefore the institutional expression of the political efort to shape a mittelstandische society. However, the state was not the only actor involved. Widespread scientiic literature was also giving the term “Mittelstand” a strong public and political echo, especially in reference to the experience of the Verein für Sozialwissenschaft in the last quarter of the 19th century and its leading exponent, Gustav von Schmoller, who coined the term “neuer Mittelstand” and vested it with a dual social-political function. As a social subject that covered broad socio-economic ground, including the employees of private and public bureaucracies and the better-paid, skilled manual workers, the “neuer Mittelstand” acted as a mediator of class conlict. Furthermore, in light of the technical and administrative skills possessed by its members, it became a competent, qualiied political subject through which the state developed and carried out policies meant to improve social integration. As a result, Schmoller scientiically framed a conception of the middle class that would be essential in the transition from the Second Reich to the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.30 his vision of the nature and tasks of the German “neuer Mittelstand” was very clearly outlined in the works of Schmoller’s disciple Emil Lederer. His relections on the middle class took into account both its economic side, characterized by the widespread adoption of the Taylorist model of production, and the theoretical and political debate that was taking place within Marxist ranks and the German Social Democratic Party. From his earliest works on the employees of the Wilhelmine period, Lederer had been interested in 29. Kocka 1977, Impiegati tra fascismo e democrazia, 55-83, 115-117. 30. Maurizio Ricciardi, “Ascesa e crisi del costituzionalismo societario. Germania 1840-1900,” Ricerche di storia politica, 3 (2013), 283-300. On Schmoller and the Verein, see also Pierangelo Schiera, Friedrich Tenbruck (eds.), Gustav Schmoller e il suo tempo: la nascita delle scienze sociali in Germania e in Italia (Bologna, 1989); Vitantonio Gioia, Gustav Schmoller: la scienza economica e la storia (Galatina, 1990); and Antonio Roversi, Il magistero della scienza. Storia del Verein für Sozialpolitik dal 1872 al 1888 (Milano, 1984). 140 matteo battistini the consequences of Taylorism, more in terms of the “subjective” standpoint of how people psychologically and culturally perceived their own social position than the “objective” division of work and income distribution. His study of what he deined “mentality” caused a stir in the stagnant Marxist debate, which was occupied with a quarrel over the “destiny” of the new middle classes and witnessed the proposal of opposing political, revolutionary (Kautsky) and revisionist (Bernstein) theories. Lederer rejected the conceptual framework of historical materialism shared by both theories and believed that a diferent “historical path” was possible. He claimed that the rapid increase in the number of employees compared to manual workers and their longing for economic independence were evidence of an alternative historical tendency aimed at neutralizing “radicalism” in politics and business.31 As he became engaged in the socialist debate and acted as an economic consultant for the Social Democratic Party and union during the Weimar Republic, Lederer forged a middle-class theory similar to that of the Verein für Sozialwissenschaft. Nevertheless, in the late 1920s, white-collar workers did not seem to constitute an “independent group” capable of expressing its own autonomous social and political voice. As expounded in the works of Jacob Marschak, Fritz Croner and Lederer himself, the growing number of employees had not lead to the formation of a “neuer Mittelstand” that could act as a “bufer” between labor and capital. he war economy, with its rationalization, demonetization and inlation, caused a downward spiral in salaries and as Croner stated in he White Collar Movement in Germany since the Monetary Stabilization, “the insecurity of the salaried employee […] thus inlicted the inal blow at the initial goal of the middle-class program that aimed to incorporate them into the middle class.” he economic dynamics that followed World War I frustrated the theoretical and political eforts of those – like Schmoller, but also Lederer – who had planned a new, mittelstandische foundation of society. While even overseas there were echoes of “he Passing of the German Middle Class” – i.e., the degradation of the scientiic and professional skills that had assured German national greatness – social harmony now seemed to be a “utopic ideal, whose realization […] remains a pious desire.” hese words did more than just highlight the political stalemate of the scientiic project inaugurated by the Verein für Sozialwissenschaft. Even after having challenged the theoretical hypothesis of revolutionary Marxism with some success, the sociological study of the middle class had not freed history from class conlict. Most importantly, the political deadlock raised a new question: with employees resisting the trend towards intense proletarianization after the outbreak of the depression 31. Emil Lederer, “Il problema dell’impiegato moderno: le sue basi teoriche e statistiche,” in Mariuccia Salvati, Da Berlino a New York. Crisi della classe media e futuro della democrazia nelle scienze sociali degli anni trenta (Milano, 2000), 147-158. See also the introduction by Salvati in the same volume, 15-20; and Sergio Bologna, Per una antrolopologia del lavoratore autonomo, URL: http://www.lumhi.net/libri_centrale.htm. On the Marxist debate, see Kocka, “Marxist Social Analysis and the Problem of White Collar Employees,” State, Culture and Society. An International Journal of the Social, Cultural and Political Sciences, 2 (1982), 137-151. 141 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space in 1929 by embracing nationalistic and national-socialist positions, would the German middle class remain loyal to the liberal path of democracy?32 his question was raised by a widespread, expanding literature that also appeared in non-German publications and was inspired by the argument developed by heodor Geiger in his essay “Panik in der Mittelstand” (1930), published after the elections that witnessed the unprecedented electoral surge of national socialism. Inspired by Lederer, Geiger argued that the “Mittelstand” had not fulilled the “socially necessary, dual function” attributed to it by the sociological literature to serve as a “normative area” of mediation between labor and capital. On the contrary, the appearance of an intermediary stratum caused divisions and marginalization that were expressed by the growing separation of the “alt Mittelstand” (farmers, artisans and small merchants) from the “neuer Mittelstand” (salaried workers of the private sector, state oicials and technicians). Geiger’s conceptualization – which would be taken up by the American social science literature, as we saw with the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences – was not meant to deine either the “small-capitalist” nature of the old middle class or the “objectively proletarian” condition of the new one. It aimed, rather, to examine an “ideological confusion.” As Geiger put it, while on the one hand the old middle class ofered a “historically inadequate” ideology, since “liberal economic idealism” no longer had a foundation in the “impersonal organization of late capitalism,” the new middle class also expressed a “socially inadequate” ideology because the social position of white-collar workers was being crushed under the weight of the depression. In this situation, he wrote, “there is no doubt that National Socialism owes its electoral success essentially to the old and new middle class.” Ultimately, he concluded, the constitution of the “Mittelstand” as a normative area functional to social harmony had failed because it lacked an appropriate “collective ideology” that was suitable for its economic heterogeneity and coherent with democracy. he fear of losing their social position had pushed the middle class to embrace an “empty, national-socialistic program” with anti-elitist, anti-proletarian attacks and a call for a racial nation. hus, the history of the German “Mittelstand” ended with the brutal rupture of the 19th-century liberal link between the middle class and democracy, a break that would reverberate in the French, English and American academic and public debates.33 32. Emil Lederer, Jacob Marschak, “La nuova classe media” (1926); Fritz Croner, “Il movimento dei colletti bianchi in Germania dopo la stabilizzazione monetaria” (1928), in Salvati, Da Berlino a New York, 166-167; 171; 172-175, 179; and F. Alsworth Ross, “he Passing of the German Middle Class,” American Journal of Sociology, 5 (1924), 529-538. See Kocka, “he First World War and the Mittelstand: German Artisans and White Collar Workers,” Journal of Contemporary History, 8 (1973), 101-123; Kocka, Impiegati tra fascismo e democrazia, 85-91; and Sandra J. Coyner, “Class Consciousness and Consumption: the New Middle Class during the Weimar Republic,” Journal of Social History, 3 (1977), 310-317. 33. heodor Geiger, Panico nel ceto medio, in M. Salvati, Da Berlino a New York, 185-188, 190-192. See also Bologna, Per una antrolopologia del lavoratore autonomo, URL: http://www.lumhi.net/libri_centrale.htm. Important German works include: Siegfried Krakauer, Die Angestellten, 1930; Franz Borkenau, Zur Sociologie der Fascismus, (1932); Emil Lederer, Technischer Fortschritt und Arbeitslosigkeit, 1931; Carl Dreyfuss, Beruf 142 matteo battistini Across the Atlantic he year 1933, with the fall of democracy that followed Hitler’s rise to power, deinitively marked the failure of the political project based on the sociological study of the “Mittelstand.” hat same year, Geiger was forced to seek refuge in Denmark, while Lederer, Marschak and other protagonists of Weimar sociology emigrated overseas where they gave rise to the “University in Exile” (1933) within the New School for Social Research in New York. his sociological exile, which also involved the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung, contributed to the Atlantic transmission of methodologies, avenues of research, interpretative models and theoretical syntheses that focused on the European history of the middle class and its 19th-century rise, which had been linked to the national and international formation of the liberal order; its support for democratization; and its later social decline and political disassociation from democracy following the rise of nazism and fascism. In the United States, the spread of this scientiic and political knowledge took place both through informal channels of academic communication and exchange and as the result of speciic cultural policies. Between 1937 and 1939, the collaboration between the Department of Social Welfare of the State of New York, the Department of Social Sciences of Columbia University and the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt oversaw the translation of a series of mostly German monographs – including those analyzed in this essay – mainly dedicated to the study of white-collar workers and salaried employees.34 hus, the failure of the political program based on the sociological study of the “Mittelstand” did not lead to the disintegration of its scientiic framework. In fact, Weimar sociology transmitted more than just an explanation of the rise of national socialism across the Atlantic. It also spread a hypothesis of empirical and theoretical research to explain both the development (and crisis) of capitalism, and the formation (and disintegration) of the liberal, national and international order, in light of the transnational rise and fall of the middle class. According to this social-science-based notion, the rise of big business had coincided with economic crises and social, cultural and ideological changes that had not only radically questioned the liberal interdependence between the middle class and democracy on the European continent, but had also raised questions about the future und Ideologie der Angestellten, (1933); and Hans Speier, he Salaried Employee in Modern Society, (1934). For notable contributions to the Anglo-American literature, see Francis D. Klingender, he Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain, (1935); Harold D. Lasswell, “he Psychology of Hitlerism,” Political Quarterly, 4 (1933); Lewis Corey, he Crisis of the Middle Class, (1935); David J. Saposs, “he Role of the Middle Class in Social Development: Fascism, Populism Communism, Socialism,” in Economic Essays in Honor of W.C. Mitchell (New York, 1935); and Talcott Parsons, “Democracy and Social Structure in Pre-Nazi Germany,” in Parsons, Essays in Sociological heory (Glencoe Ill., 1954, I ed. 1942). See Kocka, Impiegati tra fascismo e democrazia, 85-91. 34. Salvati, Da Berlino a New York, 1-143, and “Esilio e scienze sociali negli Usa,” in L’Altronovecento. Comunismo eretico e pensiero critico, vol. 3, L’America del Nord (Milano, 2013). 143 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space of American democracy. his interpretation also implied a clear political instruction to not only explain the past, but also to claim – in Lederer’s words – an “opinion on the evolution” of capitalism, liberal society and democracy in light of the centrality acquired by the middle class in the Atlantic world. he central importance of this interpretation in the Atlantic crossing of the scientiic and political knowledge about the middle class is quite evident in Hans Speier’s essay, “he Salaried Employee in Modern Society.” Edited in Germany where the nazis blocked its publication, its abridged version appeared in January 1934 in the irst issue of Social Research, the oicial journal of the New School for Social Research in New York. he school’s director, Alvin Johnson, was also the editor, together with Edwin Seligman, of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences with which the present historical reconstruction began.35 By studying a UN International Labour Oice statistical report on Workers and Salaried Employees in Various Countries after the War, Speier identiied an “international tendency” consisting in the rise of white-collar workers who undermined the “sociological basis of political theories.” Although linked to the rate of economic development, social legislation, national union organization and political structures of each country, the formation of white-collar workers as a social class had fuelled an “international discussion” that had ultimately proved inadequate. he socialist interpretation – built upon Marxist class theory – that had deined the white-collar worker as the new proletariat was misleading because proletarianization illustrated the economic transformations of “capitalist society,” it did not justify “historical prophecies.” Nor could the concept of “false consciousness” explain why the majority of salaried employees had refused to embrace the ideas of socialism and communism as relevant to their social position. Even the theory whereby the formation of a new middle class was “a guaranty of the continuation of the ruling social order” was proved mistaken. Professionalism and technical-administrative skills no longer explained the “superiority [of the salaried employee] over the manual worker.” Most such employees carried out simple, minute parts of a divided work process and could be easily replaced. Moreover, “the reduction of the salary […] made the conditions of service of the white collar worker similar to those of the manual worker.” As Speier explained, in capitalistic industry planning, administrative and control functions “can today be performed by numerous relatively poorly paid and subordinate employees.” But he did not suggest rejecting the category of middle class; he simply wished to abandon an occupation-based deinition. While education, skill and income levels were useful criteria for economically classifying white-collar workers now that they no longer performed speciic (non-manual, intellectual) tasks, they were not adequate for understanding whitecollar work as a metaphor of the middle class. As Speier saw it, what identiied diferent 35. Alvin Johnson, “Foreword,” Social Research, 1 (1934), 1-2. he original version of Speier’s essay was published in Germany in 1977 thanks to Jürgen Kocka. See Kocka, Impiegati tra fascismo e democrazia, 46-49. 144 matteo battistini middle-class individuals was not their work but the voluntary acceptance and sharing of social values. Speier seemed to suggest that one was not inherently middle class but rather that one desired to be middle class. As a consequence, inspired by Geiger’s insights, Speier alluded to the possibility of formulating a middle-class theory (or a collective ideology) of social values that – as in the case of the 19th-century bourgeoisie – could allow the middle class to exercise “inluence and power within capitalist society.”36 his was the scientiic and political challenge that emerged from the brutal severance of the link between the middle class and democracy: the creation of a new vision of the middle class that made it a powerful social actor; illed the ideological void that had existed since the end of classical liberalism; and achieved what the New Liberalism – i.e. English Labour, the French social sciences and German sociology – had failed to develop. It was no accident that the conclusion to the entry “Middle Class” in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences – written by exiled German scholar Alfred Meusel who had emigrated to Great Britain – explicitly linked the liberal, democratic character of the future to the possibility that the American middle class would emerge from the depression as an autonomous subject, uninluenced by socialist, communist or nationalsocialist tendencies and capable of embedding society and politics into its values.37 While the proprietorial, entrepreneurial middle class had been described in the 19th century as a historical category that had sustained industrialization and democratization, by the end of the century the various national histories that had legitimized the liberal order based on the centrality of the middle class were contradicted by the economic transformations and social tensions that came with the Second Industrial Revolution. he crisis of legitimacy38 that marked the end of the liberal age coincided with both the changing social physiognomy of the middle class and the disintegration of its political representation. he middle class thus became a ield of public and academic scrutiny, largely due to the rise of the social sciences. Despite political polemics and controversial interpretations, it was the growth of national socialism that ultimately severed the liberal interdependence between the middle class and democracy. In the socio-political thought of the “University in Exile,” the middle class emerged as an undeined mass that included social groups with diferent, if not diverging, occupations, interests, mentalities and values. Nevertheless, the transatlantic transfer of scientiic and political analyses of the middle class provided rich methodological and conceptual tools and a broad archive of empirical research. American social sciences successfully used these analyses to build a vision of the middle class that was called to overcome the rigid theories and historical interpretations (economicism and historical materialism) of classical liberalism and 36. Hans Speier, “he Salaried Employee in Modern Society,” Social Resarch, 1 (1934), 111-133, partic. 111, 115-116, 122-129. 37. Alfred Meusel, “Middle class,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1934), 9, 407-415. 38. See Paolo Pombeni (ed.), Crisi, legittimazione, consenso (Bologna, 2003). 145 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Marxism. Many German scholars in exile became skeptical of the heuristic validity of the category of middle class and preferred the term “mass” to explain totalitarianism and denounce the anonymous, apathetic character of the consumer society. Still, American scholars like Robert and Helen Lynd, Alba Edwards, Harold D. Lasswell, W. Lloyd Warner and Arthur N. Holcombe updated and innovated the empirical and theoretical study of the middle class and its economic composition, social physiognomy, cultural propensity and political behavior. hrough a range of disciplinary approaches and points of view, the American social sciences successfully addressed the issues posed by the economic crisis of 1929. hey sketched a “larger middle class” whose rise depended not only on the expanding federal government fuelled by Roosevelt’s liberal reform and the prevalence of industrial corporate capitalism based on high productivity, high income and mass consumption, but also on unprecedented social and cultural aspects. he middle class was thus not deined according to the limited criteria of work (occupation) and was therefore more than just a class of salaried employees. As Lasswell wrote, coining a phrase that would become widely used in the scientiic and public literature, it was “a state of mind” that crossed the collar line, with white- and blue-collar workers linked together as one social subject that shared not only adequate levels of education, income and consumption, but also a lifestyle and an unquestioned acceptance of the liberal values of American democracy.39 As the last works of Weimar sociology suggested, the American social sciences created not only a fundamental analytical tool for understanding US society and politics after World War I, but also an “ideological category” with which to normalize social and political life, avoid radicalization in both politics and society, and prevent the institutional 39. War and the Middle Class. A radio discussion by Peter Drucker, Walter Johnson and Harold Lassswell. he University of Chicago Round Table, 278 (18 July 1943), 1-29, in Harold Dwight Lasswell Papers (MS 1043). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. BOX 109A. See Matteo Battistini, “Harold Lasswell, the Problem of World Order, and the Historic Mission of the American Middle Class,” in Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, Rafaella Baritono (eds.), Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective (Torino, 2013), 225-254; Robert S. Lynd, Helen M. Lynd, Middletown. A Study in Modern American Culture (New York, 1929), Id., Middletown in Transition. A Study in Cultural Conlicts (New York, 1937); Alba M. Edwards, “A Social-Economic Grouping of the Gainful Workers of the United States,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 28 (1933), 377-387; “he White-Collar Workers,” Monhtly Labor Review, 3 (1934), 501-505; “Composition of the Nation’s Labor Force,” he Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 10 (1936); Harold D. Lasswell, “he Psychology of Hitlerism,” Political Quarterly, 4 (1933), 373-384; “he Moral Vocation of the Middle-Income Skill Group,” International Journal of Ethics, 45 (1935), 127-137; Democracy through Public Opinion (Menasha, WI., 1941); W. Lloyd Warner, American Life. Dream and Reality (Chicago, 1953), Id., Yankee City (New Haven, 1963); and Arthur N. Holcombe, he Middle Classes in American Politics (Cambridge, 1940). On the use of the term “mass” by the German scholars in exile, see Salvati, Da Berlino a New York, 84-143. On the American social sciences and the middle class, see Charles H. Page, Class and American Sociology: From Ward to Ross (New York, 1940); Ferruccio Gambino, “he Signiicance of Socialism in the Post War United States,” in Jean Hefer, Jeanine Rovet (sous la direction de), Why is here No Socialism in the United States (Paris, 1988); Louis Wacquant, “Making Class: he Middle Class(es) in Social heory and Social Structures,” in Scott G. McNall, Rhonda F. Levine, Bringing Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspective (Westview, 1991), 39-58; and Olivier Zunz, “Class,” in Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, 6 vols. (London, 1996), I. 146 matteo battistini framework of liberal democracy from breaking down. As a result, the middle class became the protagonist of American national history and the cornerstone of the exceptionalist interpretation developed by consensus historians. Although this American vision of the middle class had its share of critics, by crossing the Atlantic the term “middle class” had taken on new scientiic foundations and a new ideological guise. While addressed to the present, the prevailing interpretation implied a positive view of its liberal origins and was coherent with a historical narration of the rational conquest of civil and political freedom, economic success, social mobility, and the progress of a pluralistic society and free public opinion. his rationale of the middle class became a universal category of the Atlantic West and was considered essential for deining the liberal, democratic, national and international order. Even now, and not only in the United States, this meaning of the middle class stands irmly at the heart of the debate over the social and political consequences of the global economic crisis.40 40. Critiques of the vision of the American middle class were advanced by Lewis Corey and Alfred Bingham in the 1930s and by Charles Wright Mills at the beginning of 1950s: Lewis Corey, he Crisis of the Middle Class (New York, 1935); Alfred Bingham, Insurgent America: Revolt of the Middle Classes (New York, 1935); and Charles Wright Mills, White Collar. he American Middle Classes (New York, 1951). On the controversy between Wright Mills and Hofstadter see also Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1-10. On the middle class as an ideological category, see Ferruccio Gambino, “La classe media come categoria della normalità nella sociologia statunitense,” in E. Paci (ed.), Tensioni e tendenze dell’America di Reagan (Padova, 1989), 63-87. On the current debate and its historical origins, see Matteo Battistini, “Il declino della classe media americana,” il Mulino, 3 (2015), 564-573. 147 Transatlantic Consumer Cultures: Italy and the United States in the Twentieth Century Simone Cinotto he subjects of consumption, consumer culture and consumer politics loom large on the analytical horizon of this volume – a “long” Atlantic history that acknowledges the permanence of dynamics of interdependence speciic to the Atlantic space, beyond the classic chronological boundaries of 1492-1800 and into the “global” 19th, 20th and 21st century.1 his essay, which is the preliminary result of a much broader future study on the Europeanization of 20th-century US consumer culture, is structured in two sections. he irst provides a short overview of the historiography on consumption as it relates to the transatlantic arena, as part of the history of consumption and globalization, and focuses on the historical narratives of the relations between Europe and the United States as articulated through the exchange of capital, goods, consumer cultures and consumer ideologies in the 20th century. (Herein, “consumer culture” refers to the array of meanings with which commercially-produced goods and leisure activities are associated). It is argued here that early-modern and modern transatlantic histories of consumption largely grew in mutual isolation. One result of this disconnection is the fact that while the multipolar, multi-actor and circulatory dynamics of early-modern transatlantic consumption were appreciated, 20th-century historical narratives disproportionately focused on the one-way transfer of American consumer patterns and institutions to Europe as a strategic factor in the Americanization of European societies in full display after 1945. As concluded in this irst section, the number and relevance of works by US and European historians who have studied the reverse dynamic of European inluences on the shaping of the US consumer landscape have been minimal. As suggested in the last part of this section, the case of Italy and US-Italian relations may be a particularly promising one as part of the aforementioned broader project to close the gap of analytical historical acknowledgment of the Europeanization of 20th-century US consumer culture and society. 1. Donna R. Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies, 1, 1 (2004), 1-27. 149 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space he second section of this essay builds on transatlantic historian Mary Nolan’s argument that US hegemony over international modern consumerism and popular culture did not exist prior to World War I. As she argued, the United States was in fact only one among many economic and cultural international powers; Americans were eager consumers of European products and culture; and consumer culture and its institutions developed to a great extent horizontally, in a shared rather than nationally compartmented transatlantic space.2 US consumerism was a strategic arm of US imperialism in two diferent ways: in terms of the commercial expansion and global exportation of its manufactured products – the aspect most familiar to historical scholarship; and the much less studied consumption of global products and cultural inluences, from French fashion to chinoiserie, which allowed American women and men to participate in a domestic imperialism of consumption, or imperial emporium, despite not having directly participated in travels of conquest and colonization, as best described by historian Kristin Hoganson.3 In this respect, a US imperialism centered on the Caribbean, Latin America and East Asia resembled, shared similar dynamics with and drew inspiration from European imperialisms then at their zenith, including the minor Italian strain centered on the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. As is argued in this section, US and Italian imperialisms were indeed interconnected incubators of transatlantic consumer cultures. (Herein, the notion of “imperialism” is understood as a strategy of imposing one country’s power over other lands and populations, not only through military force and colonialism, but also through a variety of cultural means, including the imperial-minded understanding, racialization and gendering of other people and places encountered in the deployment of imperialism). In sum, it is argued here that throughout the 20th century Italian consumer culture helped signiicantly diversify a society typically seen as promoting a global monoculture. As a result, Italian goods, popular culture artifacts and approaches to consumerism encountered other European consumer cultures (France and its products being especially popular discursive counterparts to Italy) that were equally determined to carve out their space in the US consumer market and imagination. Other consumer products, institutions and ideologies generically labeled “European” – from housing to the welfare state – have clearly had a similar impact on US consumer culture. A critical analysis of the Europeanization of the United States via consumerism in the 20th century is a necessary endeavor that has yet to be carried out by scholars. he collapse of conceptual boundaries and chronological ruptures between early-modern and modern historiographies of consumption and globalization appears to be the methodological prerequisite for achieving a balanced revision of the US-European relationship as deined by consumer culture. 2. Mary Nolan, he Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (New York, 2012). 3. Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: he Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007). 150 simone cinotto Transatlantic Consumption, the Americanization of Europe and the Place of Italy in the Consumer Atlantic Until recently, the history of consumption focused primarily on speciic “key” spaces and moments in time. Consumer history emerged in the 1980s as a distinct disciplinary branch with antecedents in the investigation of the material cultures of the Middle Ages and the early-modern era across the Mediterranean of the French Annales school; the pioneering studies of British subaltern and working class daily life of E.P. hompson and the History Workshop group; and the analysis of 19th-century European bourgeois culture and sociability on the part of German and French new social historians.4 In the 1980s, an early wave of consumer historians set out to debate when and where to locate the “birth” of a consumer society in which many goods, including unnecessary ones, are available to large portions of the population, and the selection, acquisition and owning of things signiicantly deines social relations and individual and collective identities. Earlier chronologies had focused on the “Roaring Twenties” in the United States and the 1950s economic boom in European societies as initial examples of such a society.5 Inspired by Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel’s relections on the symbolic igure of the lâneur or “urban stroller,” later historians identiied the origin of specialized places of consumption in the late-19th-century emergence in Europe and the United States of department stores – places that fetishized commodities and made shopping and its languages a task to which large sections of the populace dedicated time and energy.6 However, other historians of consumption soon placed the birth of modern consumerism as far back as the early 18th century, linking it to the developments of European capitalism and protestant world visions in England and the Netherlands – the countries that irst experienced a capitalist-oriented agricultural and industrial revolution in production. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb illustrated the emergence of modern consumer institutions such as advertising, shopping catalogs and store windows enticing consumers through the aestheticization of goods and a new consumerist language in 18th-century England. Simon Schama described the emergence of an acquisitive ethos and discriminating desire 4. Landmark works summarizing the research results of these diferent material-culture historical schools include Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New York, [1967] 1973); E.P. hompson, he Making of the British Working Class (New York, 1966); Jürgen Kocka and Allen Mitchell, eds., Bourgeois Society in 19th-Century Europe (New York, 1993); Phillippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., History of Private Life, Volume 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). 5. For a comprehensive overview, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York, 1993), 19-39. 6. Susan Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1987); Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-hieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1992); Michael B. Miller, he Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, N.J., 1994); William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1994). 151 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space among the 18th-century Dutch mercantile entrepreneurial class that reconciled protestant ideals of thriftiness, deferment of pleasure and self-control with the enjoyment of beauty and distinction through possession and display.7 he fact that some antecedents to 18th-century English and Dutch developments can be found in diferent parts of Asia and Europe, however, reveals the limits of a research agenda aimed at identifying a single time and place for the birth of consumerism. It is also indicative of a major shortcoming in the early historiography of consumption, namely its focus on place-speciic ruptures and turning points, rather than on continuities, difusions and hybridizations. In the 20th-century history of consumption this has translated especially into the dominant notion of Americanization and the “irresistible” soft power exercised by the United States, in particular on Cold War Europe via mass-produced goods, popular culture, marketing and patterns of public relations and advertising. According to this vision, the transatlantic market that allowed postwar western societies to enjoy unprecedented degrees of material prosperity was formed on a distinctive American matrix. While this Americanization-via-consumerism argument was most powerfully summarized by Victoria De Grazia in Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance hrough 20thCentury Europe of 2005, it has also been articulated in several books and essays focusing on diferent features and areas of Europe.8 More recently, however, historians have begun to dispute such time- and place-speciic, unidirectional approaches to the history of consumer culture. In his history of consumption in modern Europe, for example, Paolo Capuzzo has programmatically insisted on continuities over time and genealogies of technological innovations, market expansions, state interventions, cultural exchanges, borrowings and appropriations to describe the developments of modern consumer societies. According to Capuzzo, two broader, albeit irregular, long-durée processes reigned over the formation of European consumer societies: the creation and growth of a global economic system that supplied Europe with new products as it integrated the continent into dense networks of relations with the rest of the world; and the ongoing “democratization” of consumption, that is, the loosening and receding of a binding link between styles of consumption and social status, which in Europe had been codiied in the sumptuary laws of the Late Middle Ages. Within this 7. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, he Birth of a Consumer Society: Commercialization of 18th Century England (Bloomington, IN., 1982); Simon Schama, he Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley, Calif., 1987). 8. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance hrough 20th-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: he Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: he Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Bufalo Bill in Bologna: he Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago, 2005); David W. Ellwood, he Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (New York, 2012). 152 simone cinotto framework, under a new continuous light extending from the 16th century to World War I and beyond, Capuzzo revisits changes that the previous literature had attributed to historical turning points, twists and watershed developments. His history presents the spread of new products like sugar, cofee, cacao, tea and tobacco in Europe not as a mechanical side efect of Europe’s colonization of the world but rather as the slow incorporation of these commodities into the everyday life of diferent consumer subjects, and examines the meanings of this process. Capuzzo’s account of the developing relationship between social standing and styles of consumption describes a measured, nonlinear movement of consumerism, from a means to sanction social diferences to one that complicates them and even subverts them, as consumers empowered themselves, individually and collectively, to use goods in subjective and creative rather than prescriptive ways. Eighteenthcentury concerns about the emergence of consumption and the market as vital ways to deine social identities were thus relected in the 19th-century reconstruction of social divides based on taste and distinction. his is best exempliied in the private and public forms of bourgeois consumption, which combined thrift, sobriety and self-discipline with the enjoyment of aesthetic pleasure and material accumulation. he working class also responded to bourgeois claims of hegemony over taste by creating and endorsing a distinctive consumer culture that was in a constant state of tension and negotiation with middle-class consumer values and practices. Finally, Capuzzo looks at emerging modern structures, spaces and institutions of consumption not as neutral occurrences, but as the results of both entrepreneurial eforts and the response of consumers who, again, used consumer spaces not only or not necessarily for their prescribed shopping uses, but also for various other social practices and purposes.9 Recent criticism of time- and place-speciic, evenementiel histories of consumption have pointed both to the obscuration of continuities in previous literature and especially to the need to look at developments of consumer culture and consumer societies as global processes. In particular, historian Frank Trentmann has drawn attention to the disjuncture between the emphasis of early-modern historians of consumption on global connections, exchanges and circulations and the insistence of modern historians on Americanization and their selective concentration on speciic contexts of emerging consumerism. Furthermore, historians studying early-modern consumerism have predominantly chosen a culturalist perspective, insisting on the cultural production of desire and the entanglements between a new acquisitive ethos and religious dictates. hose working on 20th-century consumerism have instead mostly focused on the social and political dimensions of the fulillment of needs through increasing levels of consumption among a widening population of consumers.10 As Trentmann concludes, their indiference and isolation from each other led 9. Paolo Capuzzo, Culture del Consumo (Bologna, 2006). 10. Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History, 39, 3 (2004), 373-401. 153 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space these two historiographies, along with their respective chronologies and conceptual apparatuses, to miss out on “the dynamic interaction between diversity and standardization, gift-exchange and commodity-exchange, public engagement and private materialism across time [and space],” insisting instead on imaginary linear progressions from the former to the latter.11 According to Trentmann, bridging early-modern and 20th-century global histories of consumption with the relatively neglected early-19th and late-20th century would mean illuminating many forms, places and meanings of consumption that have been lost in the self-referentiality of the two most practiced historiographies. Consumption, with its economic, cultural, social and political implications, has been an indisputably vital factor in the formation of the modern world. In the irst place, the Atlantic world in particular was created by Europeans’ ventures across the ocean and South to West and Central Africa in search of goods to trade, particularly East Indian spices destined for the tables of Europe’s wealthiest. he Atlantic slave trade emerged in response to the massive demand of labor for the sugar (and later rice, tobacco, cotton and cofee) plantations established by European conquerors in the Caribbean, the eastern coast of Latin America and what is now the southern United States. As anthropologist Sidney Mintz argued in his classic global history of sugar, the calories provided by American sugar produced as a result of forced African labor and European colonial capitalism, together with “hunger-killing” American plants such as corn and potato, sustained the spectacular growth of the European population in the late 18th and 19th century, inextricably linking consumption with expansive capitalism, industrialization and transatlantic migration.12 At the same time, transatlantic trade revolutionized tastes, ideas of reinement and lifestyles. In other words, consumption deined the terms of European encounters with numerous other populations as well as the development of European transatlantic identities from their beginnings to today. Consumption is therefore signiicantly associated with the formation and deployment of empires, as demonstrated by a vast amount of historical literature on empires – literature that has convincingly portrayed the connection between the emergence of late-19th and early-20th-century modern consumer culture and the European subjugation, racialization and commodiication of colonial people.13 In the “Transatlantic Consumption” entry of the recent Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption edited by Trentmann, historian Michelle Craig McDonald critically 11. Frank Trentmann, “Crossing Divides: Consumption and Globalization in History,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 9, 2 (2009), 187-220. 12. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: he Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). 13. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995); Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Ann Arbor, MI., 2006); David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York, 2006). 154 simone cinotto summarizes the vital contribution of 16th-to-18th-century Atlantic history to the revision of the Euro-American-centric “birth of consumer society” paradigm. Firstly, as with other branches of modern history, Atlantic history extends the conines of the research on the history of consumption by transcending and superseding national boundaries in order to set out supranational, continental and global histories. Secondly, in more recent incarnations of Atlantic history, a shift from the history of trade in the Atlantic to the history of what was traded across the Atlantic – often following the travels of speciic commodities – has led to the incorporation of many previously neglected, invisible and silent consumer subjects such as African slaves, Native Americans, and women and men as gendered individuals into the Atlantic history of consumption. Finally, while continuing to embrace wide-ranging spatial and multicultural contexts, the most recent Atlantic history of consumption has coherently and harmoniously combined the measurement of human migrations, trade patterns and circulations of goods across the Atlantic and in three continents with an attention to the cultural determinants of consumer culture – taste, reinement, distinction, and the appropriation and creolization of goods and cultures.14 Early economic historians of the Atlantic found trade across the oceanic basin to be an even more important factor than national industries in the development of a modern capitalist system. Based on the research he carried out in the 1930s and 1940s on the fur and cod industries in Canada, Harold Innis articulated his core theory, arguing that specialization in the production and trade of a dominant commodity in the framework of a highly interconnected Atlantic economy determined the relatively successful development of diferent regions within the Atlantic world.15 In the 1970s, Ralph Davis was the irst to convincingly illustrate that “links between Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French commercial and colonial eforts created an Atlantic system that transcended the economies of individual nations or empires.”16 Like Innis, he did so by focusing on single commodities – notably sugar – and observing how places of production, output, capital, labor and consumption markets all luctuated within an integrated transatlantic system that must be considered in its entirety.17 While skillfully connecting local contexts of production and consumption on diferent shores with broad scenarios of supply-and-demand analysis, this mostly quantitative line of research largely overlooked the names, faces and motivations of individual consumers in every part of the Atlantic world. Arguably, the most important and critical human factor in the formation of the Atlantic world – slavery – was also one of the most crucial 14. Michelle Craig McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” in he Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (New York, 2012), 111-126. 15. Harold Innis, he Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (New Haven, CT., 1930); Harold Innis, he Cod Fisheries: he History of an International Economy (New Haven, CT., 1940). 16. McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” 114. 17. Ralph Davis, he Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973). 155 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space determinants in shifting the focus of research toward the subjective experience of consumption within the Atlantic history ield. he link between slavery and consumption is an especially sensitive one, not only because it involves fundamental ethical issues – for Europeans at the turn of 19th century, purchasing sugar from West Indian plantations meant expending the blood of slaves – but also because African slaves, in addition to being the most signiicant suppliers of labor, were “among the most proitable, and consistently demanded and consumed, goods of the Atlantic world.”18 Important statistical works, from Philip Curtin’s he Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census to David Eltis and David Richardson’s Routes to Slavery, have painstakingly reconstructed the numerical dimensions of the slave trade.19 Increasingly, other works are recognizing the crucial role of slaves as consumers by pointing to the development of industries that supplied slave owners with clothes and other commodities for slaves as well as to the goods that slaves managed to acquire and use within interstices of the wholly oppressive system to which they were subjected, thus expressing their own preferences, needs and tastes. Roderick McDonald explores this dimension by looking at the plantation economies in Jamaica and Louisiana, while Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor focuses on the signiicant independent economic activity that free and enslaved African American women in South Carolina and Rhode Island were able to carve out for themselves and conduct.20 he incorporation of enslaved people into the history of transatlantic consumption opened the door to considering other groups of consumers as well, namely Native Americans. Stressing the conlicting notions of the land and property of Native Americans and the British people they encountered in North America, James Cronon’s Changes in the Land ofered an example of the dialogic construction of consumer subjects across the Atlantic and national/cultural borders.21 More recently, Daniel Richter has insisted that Native Americans were active consumers who interacted and bartered with European newcomers, reinterpreting and using European goods for their own means and in accordance with their own values. Even when they discovered the original purpose of European goods, Native Americans continued to incorporate them in their own symbolic and social systems of meaning, while gift-giving remained a vital means for them to forge alliances, display power and reinforce status, both within Indian societies and in their 18. McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” 116. 19. Philip Curtin, he Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI., 1972); David Eltis and David Richardson, Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1997). 20. Roderick A. McDonald, he Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, LA., 1993); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “Collaborative Consumption and the Politics of Choice in Early American Port Cities,” in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830, eds. John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven, CT., 2006), 125-149. 21. James Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983). 156 simone cinotto interactions with British, French and Spanish colonizers.22 he history of consumption in the Atlantic world has also recently been consistently gendered. As historian Ann Smart Martin has argued, women in early colonial Virginia saw their agency as consumers (for example, in selecting home furnishings) erased because shopkeepers registered purchases made by women under the names of their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. Michael Zakim’s Ready-Made Democracy has described the 19th-century shift in men’s fashion, from homespun garments – symbols of the colonial democratic man’s self-reliance and independence – to ready-made clothing, which represented new ideals of democracy and masculinity embodied in capitalism and middle-class social mobility.23 In general, the signiicantly greater empowerment of diferent consumer groups brought about within the history of transatlantic consumption in recent years is part of a trend towards giving greater attention overall to the cultural dimensions of consumption – why people consumed what they did, what values they invested in the goods they consumed and why those goods were desirable to them. A cultural analysis of demand in transatlantic consumption developed in the mid-1980s with Sidney Mintz’s investigation of the transoceanic sugar routes and the contexts of production and consumption. However, it was more efectively theorized ten years later by Cary Carson in his essay “he Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?”24 Carson reviewed a vast and multifarious historical production, considering diferent aspects of the world of consumption in the 18th and early 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic – histories of material culture, religious and etiquette-based normative literature, art, architecture and so on. As Carson explained, “Each of these literatures very clearly outlined important changes in transatlantic consumption, [relecting] both a growing distinction between living standard (literally, how one lived) and lifestyle (a cohesive force uniting like-minded people to reairm their similarities), as well as a growing number of people who presented themselves and behaved in ways more class- than culture-bound.”25 his inding is very similar to what Capuzzo identiied as an overreaching process happening in Europe. Yet, Carson added two methodological approaches that have become nothing less than pillars of the Atlantic history ield: the combination of consumer culture studies with statistical-analysis-based social history and the strong emphasis on “the true internationalist character of consumer changes.” 22. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). 23. Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore, MD., 2008); Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago, 2006). 24. Cary Carson, “he Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?” in Of Consuming Interests: he Style of Life in the 18th Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hofman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA., 1994), 483-697. 25. McDonald, “Transatlantic Consumption,” 124. 157 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space As this review suggests, the application of Atlantic history’s varied approaches to and perspectives on the history of consumption after 1800 would help in transcending the national boundaries with which the existing historical scholarship on consumption in the modern and late-modern era still signiicantly conines itself; delineating the circulatory and systemic nature of the exchange of goods between diferent geographic and cultural contexts; and illuminating the role and agency of a very diverse array of consumers within it. As Trentmann proposes, fostering the mixing of categories and methodologies previously occupying the separate realms of early- and late-modern historians would better place the study of consumption within a wide-ranging framework of transatlantic relations involving a variety of subjects and agendas operating across state and imperial boundaries. Within the broader goal of utilizing new conceptualizations and periodizations in transatlantic history as the analytical toolbox for reconsidering the transatlantic relationship, notably as related to the history of consumption, the more modest purpose of this essay is in fact to begin rethinking and reframing the historical literature, which assigns a dominant role to the United States as the exporter of consumer goods, images, practices, institutions and ideologies to Europe throughout the 20th century but that largely skips over the reverse process – the material, cultural and intellectual inluence of European tastes and models of consumption on the shaping of US consumerism (and its occasional re-exportation to Europe). he narrative of the Americanization of Europe through consumer culture has been based on four tenets. he irst, since early in the 20th century, has been Fordism, understood as not only a comprehensive manufacturing model that “claimed to optimize all factors of production through mechanization, rationalization, standardization, and factory integration,” but also a promise of large-scale production of standardized consumer goods at prices so low even working families could enjoy high degrees of private material consumption.26 he second tenet is the notion of a “citizen consumer” living in a “consumers’ republic,” as deined by Lizabeth Cohen in her 2003 book of the same title. his tenet emerged in the 1930s as part of the New Deal, identifying consumption and the acquisition ethos as the ignition for a Keynesian machine running on expanding production, expanding proits for capital, expanding labor wages and the unprecedented presence of the state as a mediator, regulator and sometime-planner of the national economy and industrial relations.27 After World War II, the “citizen consumer” notion developed into “a new postwar ideal of the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously fulilled personal desire and civic obligation by consuming.” his was vital to the Cold War imperialism of peace, which represents the third tenet. Proceeding from the US aid programs of the Marshall Plan on, it promoted free market capitalism as the exclusive 26. Nolan, he Transatlantic Century, 86. 27. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: he Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). 158 simone cinotto pathway to democracy, which was to be exported to Western Europe and smuggled into Eastern Europe.28 According to De Grazia’s narrative, it was at this point that the Irresistible Empire of Hollywood ilms, self-service supermarkets, psychology-based marketing techniques, corporate advertising and other paraphernalia of modern US consumerism wiped out the old European regime of consumption dominated by “old bourgeois” taste and authority on desire, distinction and lifestyle and clearly bounded by class and nation. Finally, after the fall of the soviet empire and its political alternative to capitalist economy and ideology in 1989, the resulting accelerated globalization of trade and markets – i.e. the fourth tenet – was popularly presented not only as the result of deregulated, lexible US late capitalism, but also as the ultimate expression of US cultural imperialism bent on erasing resilient European cultural diferences and values, sometimes epitomized in the arrival of multinational fast-food restaurant chains on the Old Continent.29 In reality, as a growing body of historical literature has begun to acknowledge, the Americanization of Europe via Fordism, the “citizen consumer” concept, and lexible Cold War and free-market corporate consumerisms has been variously resisted, adopted and adapted in speciic European contexts, in turn producing original, if hybrid, European consumer cultures, consumer politics and consumer identities. Europeans looked at Fordism with both admiration and awe. As Sheryl Kroen details in her useful review of the most recent historiography on 20th-century politics of consumption, the generally enthusiastic adoption of Fordist rational production methods was paired with the concern, from both sides of the political spectrum, that mass consumption would dupe and demoralize European peoples. Perhaps more importantly, the Fordist promise was unable to deliver the high-level goods of private consumption and material comfort to most western Europeans before the 1950s. As Kroen underlines, the “citizen consumer” model found itself in competition with diferent ideas of democracy, citizenship and the marketplace, which in the 20th century translated into the diferent versions of the European democratic welfare state, socialism and fascism, as well as the speciicities of European consumer practices and institutions themselves – from labor and industrial relations to advertising, marketing, commodity cultures, consumer cooperation and activism – all rooted in long, distinctive pasts (and transatlantic and global dialogues). herefore, Kroen concludes, European societies retained their diversity, selectively incorporating US consumerist ideas and practices into their own consumer cultures, in areas such as housing, food, healthcare, higher education, fashion, popular music, leisure, tourism, and even advertising, marketing and corporate public relations. Even debates about consumerism have been more intense among continental western European observers 28. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 119. 29. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2007); Rick Fantasia, “Fast Food in France,” heory and Society, 24, 2 (1995), 201-243. 159 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space and critics than among the British.30 Heinz Haupt and other historians of consumption in Europe, working principally from a quantitative perspective, have noted how, in the face of strong exposure to US-branded consumerism, Italians and the French continued to buy most of their food at open markets and independent grocery stores rather than supermarkets well into the 1980s. German, British, French, Italian and Dutch tourists consistently showed diferent consumer preferences, choosing to spend their holidays abroad or in their own country and selecting speciic destinations over others according to national-speciic patterns. he professional sports most popular in the US – baseball, football and basketball – were only modestly so in Europe, where soccer, cycling, rugby and other spectator sports were overwhelmingly more entertaining and interesting to Europeans. American automobiles made very little inroads in European markets until very recently, while German cars were and still are generally recognized as ofering the highest standards of design, durability and performance. Alongside its kitchens, sofas, chairs and desks, Swedish store IKEA – by far the most important furniture company in Europe – also exports very distinct architectural designs and lifestyles globally, including to the United States.31 Indeed, the main assertion of this essay is that the material-cultural transfer between the two shores of the North Atlantic in the 20th century was never a one-way street but rather a continuous bidirectional low. As an example of the European inluences on US consumer culture in the “American Century,” this essay will speciically look into the case of Italy. he Italian case is particularly important because so much of the relationship between the US and Italy has been built upon the transfer of people, goods and ideas about acquisitiveness, taste, distinction and beauty. At the end of the 19th century, Italy was a newcomer imperialist state like the United States, one that based its claims as an upcoming imperial power less on its economic and military muscle than on its historical heritage as successor to the Roman Empire, its civilization and its civilizing prowess. As we will see in the second section of this essay, emerging modern consumer cultures and national projects in both countries were shaped in close connection to the encounter with, conquest of and fantasies about the racial and cultural colonial “Other.” By 1900, however, US and Italian understandings of empire intertwined with the fact that liberal Italy’s major export to the United States was people. Between 1890 and 1924, three million Italians migrated to the United States, representing the largest national group 30. Sheryl Kroen, “A Political History of the Consumer,” he Historical Journal, 47, 3 (2004), 709-736. 31. Heinz Gerhard Haupt, “he History of Consumption in Western Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Some Questions and Perspectives for Comparative Studies,” in he European Way: European Societies in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Hartmut Kaelble (New York, 2004), 161-185; Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (New York, 1997); Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, MI., 2001); Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, eds., he Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (New York, 2001). 160 simone cinotto in the massive “new immigration” of the turn of the 20th century. Overwhelmingly comprised of urbanized rural men and women from the southern part of the peninsula – i.e., some of the most economically backward areas in Europe – migration complicated the prevalent US image of Italy as the quintessential home of classical art, architecture, music and various Mediterranean delights. In turn-of-the-20th-century United States, the racist cultural categorization presiding over Euro-American imperialism applied to, and largely equated, southern European immigrants with colonized people in the world’s South and East.32 he irst comprehensive US immigration law, the racist 1924 Immigration Act, especially targeted Italians and resulted in the closing of mass immigration from Italy.33 However, the millions of migrants returning to Italy and the descendants of early-20th-century immigrants to the United States who maintained transnational relations with their diasporic home across the Atlantic would signiicantly inluence commercial and cultural relations between the United States and Italy for the rest of the century, during which time politics of consumption considerably inluenced US-Italy relations.34 Most of the Italian cultural inluences and goods enjoyed by early20th-century US imperial consumers were increasingly mediated by the massive presence in the large US cities of rural southern Italian immigrants, who were categorized as racially inferior. I explored this apparent paradox with the edited collection Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities by arguing that, contrary to the predominant historiography’s insistence on the United States as an exporting nation, immigrants played a tremendous role in securing a beachhead for the “Italianization” of US consumer culture, alongside their role as labor force for the expanding US economy.35 he consumer patterns of Italian immigrants centered on the articulation of their identity as Italians in America through the loyal consumption of Italian commodities (both imported from Italy and made in the United States by immigrant manufacturers possessing the necessary cultural capital) created an impressive transnational ethnic market, which eventually seduced and attracted millions of nonItalian US consumers and transformed the US consumer landscape as a whole. Wine is a case in point. As I have shown elsewhere, between 1900 and 1980 a small number of irst- and second-generation Italian immigrant winemakers almost singlehandedly transformed a niche product, mostly consumed in poor immigrant communities and stigmatized as an un-American alcoholic drink, into a lifestyle and a national industry, one that by the end of the century competed on equal footing with the best international 32. Matthew F. Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: he United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York, 2000). 33. Matthew F. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Diferent Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 34. Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle, 2000). 35. Simone Cinotto, ed., Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (New York, 2014). 161 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space high-quality wine producers in the global market.36 hrough their transnational ethnicinlected consumerism, Italian immigrants developed original, inherently working-class aesthetic styles and lifestyles that were later incorporated in the high-end “Made in Italy” products that grew increasingly popular in late-capitalist, postindustrial United States. For example, designer men’s suits by Armani, Versace, Valentino, Prada, Gucci, Zegna and Dolce & Gabbana, which became a distinctive status symbol for the upwardlymobile, urban and cosmopolitan American man between 1980 and 2000, paid homage to both the aggressive masculinity and rebellious elegance of the pinstriped suits worn by popular Italian-American singers and actors of the 1930s-1970s and to the skills of Italian immigrant tailors and garment workers, a historically overrepresented portion of the labor force in the US clothing industry. Overall, the Italian designer men’s suit and the other commodities that established the “Made in Italy” label – luxury clothing, shoes, furniture, appliances, motor scooters, specialty food and wine, auteur ilms, etc. – deinitively and successfully brought the two divergent Italies together, which had been problematic for early-20th-century US consumers and policy-makers to reconcile: the “white Italy” of ancient Roman and Renaissance art, opera music and stunning urban and pastoral landscapes, and the “black Italy” of immigrant superstition, primitivism and sensual danger. At any rate, consumer culture patterns and ideas about consumerism circulated between Italy and the United States throughout the 20th century. As detailed by the growing literature on the transatlantic formation of state social policies pioneered by Daniel T. Rodgers’ Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, in the 1930s, both the New Deal state and the corporatist fascist state aggressively addressed questions of consumption and citizenship, especially concerning women, sometimes looking to each other for inspiration.37 For a while, the dual fascist emphasis on belligerent modernity in imperial war, architecture and the moving image, on the one hand, and the 36. Simone Cinotto, Soft Soil, Black Grapes: the Birth of Italian Winemaking in California, trans. Michelle Tarnopolsky (New York, 2012). 37. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Maurizio Vaudagna, Corporativismo e New Deal: Integrazione e conlitto sociale negli Stati Uniti, 19331941 (Turin, 1981); John Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: he V iew f rom A merica (Princeton, N.J., 1972); Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Democracy and Social Rights in the Two Wests (Turin, 2009); Lizabeth Cohen, “he N ew D eal S tate a nd t he M aking o f C itizen C onsumers,” i n Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the 20th Century, eds. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (New York, 1998), 111-126; Meg Jacobs, “’Democracy’s Third Estate: New Deal Politics and the Construction of a ‘Consuming Public’,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 55 (1999), 27-51; Meg Jacobs, “The Politics of Plenty in the 20th-Century United States,” in The Politics of Consumption, eds. Daunton and Hilton, 223-239; Victoria de Grazia, “Nationalizing Women: the Competition between Fascist and Commercial Cultural Models in Mussolini’s Italy,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, eds. Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 337-358; Stephen Gundle, Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (New York, 2013); Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (New York, 2004). 162 simone cinotto promotion of local folklore and idealization of rural and family life, on the other, seemed capable of bringing together and resolving the “white” and “black” Italian identities embodied in Italy’s material and cultural production, which was diicult for US consumers confronting Italian immigrants in their midst to make sense of.38 After World War II, Italy’s strategic position in Cold War Europe, enhanced by its being home to the strongest communist party in the western world, made it one of the principal destinations of US material aid and propagandistic images of America as the land of plenty (relecting enthusiastic early-20th-century migrant narratives of “la Merica” and reinforced by letter-sending campaigns from Italian Americans to their Italian relatives before the landmark 1948 elections).39 Material assistance and cultural propaganda were the most important components of an all-inclusive diplomatic politics aimed at keeping the country on the democratic, capitalist side of a polarized world.40 Notwithstanding the importance of US intervention in Italy’s postwar reconstruction, US consumerism was received cautiously, if not reluctantly, even by the fervently anti-communist Christian Democratic Party, which ruled the country throughout the Cold War, and the powerful Catholic Church that supported it. Stephen Gundle and other historians of consumer culture in modern Italy have noted how criticism of and alternative philosophical approaches to the postwar US brand of consumer culture abounded in communist, catholic, post-fascist, and even social democratic and freemarket entrepreneurial circles. he Christian Democratic-dominated government, for example, imposed very strict limitations on TV commercials for mass-produced brandname products. Between 1957 and 1977, the only national TV channel, the state-owned RAI (Radio-Televisione Italiana), limited commercials to a popular short program called Carosello (Carousel), broadcasted before the evening news. he program featured short stories sponsored by manufacturing companies, which were allowed to mention the 38. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: he Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 2000); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001). 39. Marina Maccari Clayton, “Communists of the Stomach: Italian Migration and International Relations in the Cold War Era,” Studi Emigrazione, 41, 155 (2004), 327-336; Wendy I. Wall, “America’s ‘Best Propagandists’: Italian Americans and the 1948 ‘Letters to Italy’ Campaign,” in Cold War Constructions: he Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst, Mass., 2000), 89-109. 40. James Edward Miller, he United States and Italy, 1940-1950: he Politics of Diplomacy and Stabilization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986); John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945-1948 (New York, 1986); Elena Aga Rossi and Victor Zaslavsky, eds., Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War (Stanford, Calif., 2011); Kaeten Mistry, he United States, Italy and the Origins of the Cold War: Waging Political Warfare 1945-1950 (New York, 2014); Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaf, eds., Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture, and Society, 1948-1958 (Washington, D.C., 1995); Andrew Buchanan, “’Good Morning, Pupil!’ American Representations of Italianness and the Occupation of Italy, 1943-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 2 (2008), 217-240; Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America: he Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011). 163 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space name of their product – food, detergents, home appliances and the like – for a few seconds at the end of the story.41 he most original state- and private-capital venture in Cold War Italy – Enrico Mattei’s Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (National Fuel Trust) – ultimately aimed at providing the country with an independent, cheap and steady supply of energy for its economic development, even though that meant defying the oligopoly of the “Seven Sisters” dominating the mid-20th-century oil industry, negotiating oil concessions in the Middle East with Arab countries at odds with US international politics and signing trade agreements with the Soviet Union.42 he originality of postwar Italian consumer culture and its tendency to explore wide-ranging export markets were relected in the successful model of the “hird Italy,” represented by small irms and workshops collected in specialized production districts concentrated in the central and northeastern regions of the country. In the 1960s-1970s these businesses started anticipating some features of the Reagan-era, neoliberal consumer culture of the 1980s-1990s with their outsourcing, small-batch production, diversiication of product lines, emphasis on design and style, and aestheticization of the brand.43 In the mid-1950s, the cheap source of labor supplied by internal migration – from the countryside to the cities, and from the South to the North – started replacing international migration, and was put to the service of an economy based on dynamic entrepreneurship, reined craftsmanship and a distinctive taste for beauty and style meant to be exported under the “Made in Italy” label, to a signiicant extent, to the most important global market – the United States. 41. Stephen Gundle, “Visions of Prosperity: Consumerism and Popular Culture in Italy from the 1920s to the 1950s,” in hree Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western Europe 1918-1945, eds. Carl Levy and Mark Roseman, (New York, 1989), 151-172; Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: he Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-1991 (Durham, N.C., 2000); David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington, IN., 2007); Adam Arvidsson, “From Counterculture to Consumer Culture: Vespa and the Italian Youth Market, 1958-78,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 1, 1 (2001), 47-71; Natalie Fullwood, “Popular Italian Cinema, the Media, and the Economic Miracle: Rethinking Commedia all’Italiana,” Modern Italy, 18, 1 (2013), 19-39; Piero Dorles, Carosello (Bologna, 2011); Sarah Annunziato and Francesco Fiumara, “Targeting the Parents through the Children in the Golden Age of Italian Television Advertising: he Case of Carosello,” Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 3, 1-2 (2015), 11-26. 42. Elisabetta Bini, La Potente Benzina Italiana: Guerra Fredda e Consumi di Massa tra Italia, Stati Uniti e Terzo Mondo (1945-1973) (Florence, 2013). 43. Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (housand Oaks, Calif., 1994); David Harvey, he Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (New York, 1990); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC., 1991). On hird Italy see Arnaldo Bagnasco and Charles Sabel, eds., Small and Medium-Size Enterprises: Social Change in Western Europe (London, 1995); Arnaldo Bagnasco, Tre Italie: La Problematica Territoriale dello Sviluppo Italiano (Bologna, 1977); Michael H. Best, he New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Michael L. Blim, Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences (New York, 1990); Aldo Bonomi, Il Capitalismo Molecolare: La Società al Lavoro nel Nord Italia (Turin, 1997); Anna Bull and Paul Corner, From Peasant to Entrepreneur: he Survival of the Family Economy in Italy (Oxford, 1993); Sylvia Junko Yanaisako, Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy (Princeton, N.J., 2002). 164 simone cinotto United States and Italian Imperialisms as Incubators of Transatlantic Consumer Cultures, 1900-1914 he turn of the 20th century was an era of spectacular economic growth centered on the Euro-American North Atlantic. Technical innovations, progress in transportation, increasing volumes of international trade and investments, and mass labor migrations marked a watershed moment in economic world history and laid the foundations for 20th-century developments. he spread of economic growth and material progress across the Atlantic involved a number of diferent players. In 1900 there was still no deinitive sign of the United States’ forthcoming transformation into the leading global power after World War II. Great Britain was still the leader in international trade, investment and inance, though it had to face more than one competitor. With regards to industrial output capacity, Germany’s expanding industrial might rivaled the similarly impressive advancements of the US. Growth rates attest to the existence of a multipolar international economic system between 1900 and 1913. he United States and Germany experienced the highest average increases in GDP in absolute terms for the period, but with regards to GDP per capita, industrializing Italy and Denmark grew at the same average rate of 2 percent per annum as the United States; more than Germany and Russia (1.6 percent) and Great Britain’s modest 0.7 percent. European (notably German) multinationals and European (notably British) investments held signiicant shares of the US market. In other words, before World War I, the United States, with its very limited military power, was in every respect “a nation among nations” within a highly integrated international economic system.44 he unprecedented circulation and exchange of capital, goods and labor between Europe and North America, ushered in by the introduction of steamships, railroad building and canal openings, developed largely under the umbrella of the British Empire and its control of the global capitalist order. Indeed, the formal colonization of other parts of the world linked the many European and American imperialisms like never before or after. By 1900, Europe and the United States oicially ruled 90 percent of Africa, 57 percent of Asia, and 98 percent of Polynesia.45 Imperialism was a supranational phenomenon, connecting Euro-American empires via similar dynamics of domination, exploitation and cultural formulations about the relations between the metropole and the colonies, the citizens of the empire and the colonized “Other.” Historians have long argued that the links between European and American attitudes towards race were shaped through imperialism, as well as the mutually-inluenced production of ideologies, representations 44. Mira Wilkins, “European Multinationals in the United States: 1875-1914,” in Multinational Enterprise in Historical Perspective, eds. Alice Teichova, Maurice Lévy-Beboyer, and Helga Nussbaum (New York, 1986), 55-64; homas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006). 45. Nolan, Transatlantic Century, 43. 165 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space and aesthetics of the empire like the picturesque, an aesthetic ideal unifying European and American visions of the imperial landscape.46 At irst glance, similarities between US and Italian imperialisms are diicult to ind, apart from the fact that both the United States and Italy entered the colonial competition late in the game. In the 1896 battle of Adwa, the Italian army underwent what was at the time the most devastating defeat a European colonial power had ever sufered at the hands of non-Europeans. A tremendous blow to Italian national pride, Adwa marked the conclusion of the irst Italo-Ethiopian War, which secured Ethiopian sovereignty and halted for another four decades further Italian attempts to expand beyond their colonies in Eritrea and Somaliland and establish domination over the Horn of Africa.47 Italy would not add more territories or peoples to its colonial possessions until 1911 with the conquest of Libya and the Dodecanese Islands in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, two years after Adwa the United States easily defeated the troops of the modern era’s irst European empire in the Spanish-American War, thus driving that empire out of the Western Hemisphere for good. Consequent to the 1898 victory over Spain, by 1914 the United States occupied the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Samoa, Guam and the Panama Canal Zone. It also informally controlled Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Haiti, and, by expanding into the Caribbean and towards Asia, had established itself as both a Paciic and an Atlantic power. Italian imperialism, which mostly operated through military occupation and the repression of native uprisings, was motivated by not only a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis more powerful neighbors like France and Britain as a latecomer nation-state wishing to establish itself on the international scene, but also the embarrassment caused for Italian nationalism by the hundreds of thousands of migrants leaving the country annually at the turn of the century. Colonies were supposed to supply Italy with badly-needed commodities and cultivable land for turning would-be migrants into settlers. However, the plan never succeeded on either count, and for Italy’s rulers the true signiicance of the empire remained primarily political and symbolic.48 he principal drive behind early-20th-century US imperialism, on the other hand, was more commercial and economic than geopolitical. he US strain of imperialism was generally wary of assuming direct administration of native people 46. Eric Hobsbawm, he Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (New York, 1989); McClintock, Imperial Leather; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968); heodore W. Allen, he Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: he Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York, 1997); Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1993). 47. Alessandro Triulzi, “L’Africa come icona: rappresentazioni dell’alterità nell’immaginario coloniale italiano di ine ottocento,” in Adua: Le Ragioni di una Sconitta, ed. Angelo Del Boca (Bari, 1997), 255-281. 48. Richard J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 1860-1960 (New York, 1996); Mark I. Choate, “From Territorial to Ethnographic Colonies and Back Again: he Politics of Italian Expansion, 1890-1912,” Modern Italy, 8, 1 (2003), 65-75. 166 simone cinotto deemed as racially inferior, let alone incorporating them into the American nation and polity. It prided itself on being the deinition of an informal empire, launching a “dollar diplomacy” in the Caribbean and Central America that would represent US hegemony in the area, and even the occasional military intervention, as the deployment of a benign, soft power. he emissaries of US imperialism were bankers, businessmen, sales agents and missionaries, as well as soldiers, diplomats and administrators.49 If we turn our attention to the cultural and domestic realms, and in particular to the consumer cultures emerging in step with, and stemming from, the imperial experience, commonalities between US and Italian imperialisms become more evident. Furthermore, by focusing on domestic consumption, we can appreciate the fascination some images and identities of Italian imperialism held for US consumers and their imitation of Italian models as part of their own identity construction as imperial consumers. By the turn of the 20th century, a broader culture of imperialism linked North Atlantic metropoles with their colonies, and their empires with one another. Colonial images and issues pervaded Italian and US society, fundamentally shaping consumer culture in both countries. he penny press in the United States and Italy avidly followed the adventures of heodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in Cuba and Italian explorers and soldiers in eastern Africa, respectively, also capturing the attention of each other’s readers. US and Italian women and men widely read colonial travel narratives that mixed adventure, exoticism and eroticism while objectifying native cultures and commodifying colonial goods. National Geographic and other popular magazines provided US readers with images of the many diverse regions of the newly-acquired empire as paradises, markets available for commercial expansion and suppliers of a wealth of natural riches, while indigenous people were represented as either noble savages or wicked heathens.50 he Italian press never tired of providing travel accounts of the Italian adventurers and explorers who began to venture into interior regions of eastern and equatorial Africa in the late 1870s, spurring a craze for all things African among middle-class readers and fueling early imperialist claims for a colonial destiny of the kingdom. At the end of the century, popular papers like Illustrazione Italiana reached out to a broader, working-class readership, prompting the socialist journal Critica Sociale to note disapprovingly that “Africa is second only to macaroni in the list of the most popular things in Italy. […] Italians read very few books and papers, but when it comes to Africa, or the black continent as they call it, everybody 49. Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansionism (New York, 2009). 50. David Spurr, he Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C., 1993); Julie A. Tuason, “he Ideology of Empire in National Geographic Magazine’s Coverage of the Philippines, 1898-1908,” Geographical Review, 89, 1 (January 1999), 34-53; John D. Perivolaris, “’Porto Rico’: he View from National Geographic, 1899-1924,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 84, 2 (2007), 197-212; Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago, 1993). 167 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space eagerly pays the penny for the daily, and they want to know all.”51 Exotic novels similarly caught the interest of vast popular audiences. In Italy, the dime novels of Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) achieved immense popularity using the archetypical language of dramatic love, mystery, hate, loss and violence to articulate an orientalist narrative about the – sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes revolting – cultural and racial identity of a variety of “non-white” people all over the world.52 Domestic participants in imperialism contemporarily prepared colonial bodies and objects for consumption at world’s fairs and exhibitions in the US and Italy. Between 1898 and 1915, they hosted more international exhibitions than any other country, visited by millions of people: Turin (1898), Bufalo (1901), Charleston (1901-1902), Turin (1902), St. Louis (1904), Portland (1905), Milan (1906), Jamestown (1907), Seattle (1909), Turin (1911) and San Francisco (1915). On both sides of the Atlantic, colonial exhibitions, world’s fairs and commercial shows celebrating Euro-American progress and the bright future of imperial societies regularly displayed sub-Saharan African dancers, Polynesian villagers and replicas of Arabian souks for the ediication, entertainment and racialized voyeurism of white visitors.53 Yet, international expositions were primarily occasions for displaying the many new goods that imperial consumers in both the United States and Italy could, or at least hoped to, enjoy in the early 20th century. he industrialization of food production, processing and marketing ended the preindustrial Malthusian cycle of plenty and famine and the dependence of communities on local foodstuffs, climate and seasons. Mechanized farming, canning, industrial refrigeration and other new technologies shifted food production from the home to the factory and ushered in packaged, standardized, brand-name foods, some of them utterly new, like Coca-Cola, corn lakes, condensed milk, bouillon cubes, margarine and canned soups, meats and vegetables. With the introduction of the sewing machine, homemade clothes gave way to readymade, ready-to-wear, store-bought apparel. Electric lighting, gas stoves and elevators changed housing and urban life; mechanized public transportation, bicycles and cars revolutionized mobility; and the telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter, high-circulation 51. Francesco Surdich, “L’attenzione della ‘Gazzetta Piemontese’ per le prime iniziative di esplorazione ed espansione coloniale italiana in Africa (1880-1885),” Bollettino Storico-Bibliograico Subalpino, 78 (1980), 525-568; Paola Zagatti, “Colonialismo e razzismo: immagini dell’Africa nella pubblicistica postunitaria,” Italia Contemporanea, 170 (1988), 21-37; Francesco Surdich, “L’impatto dell’esplorazione dell’Africa sull’Italia di ine ottocento,” Materiali di Lavoro, 1, 2-3 (1992), 5-33. 52. Emy Beseghi, ed., La Valle della luna: avventura, esotismo, orientalismo nell’opera di Emilio Salgari (Florence, 1992). 53. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 2013); Robert W. Rydell, “’Darkest Africa’: African Shows at America’s World’s Fairs, 1893-1940,” in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington, IN., 2000), 135-155; Guido Abbattista, “Torino 1884: Africani in mostra,” Contemporanea, 7, 3 (2004), 369-410; Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in 19th-Century Britain (Chicago, 2011). 168 simone cinotto newspapers, nickelodeons and silent ilms radically changed how people communicated and spent their leisure time. he widely expanding accessibility of tropical goods like tea, cocoa, cofee, sugar, bananas, tobacco, rubber and cotton produced on plantations established and controlled by European and US companies exploiting colonial labor all around the equatorial belt ofered consumers on both sides of the Atlantic the practical proof that they were the beneiciaries of a global marketplace. Department stores, a consumer institution pioneered in Paris by Le Bon Marché in 1869, were ubiquitous in the major cities of the United States and Italy by the end of the century. hey ofered concentrations of commodities from every angle of the world in specialized, sanitized sites of consumption, transforming shopping from a necessity and a chore into leisure, spectacle and an activity that required expertise.54 Finally, yet another new element of consumer culture – modern advertising – established direct links between consumption and empire in both the United States and Italy. Caricatures of black igures consistently appeared in Italian and US advertisements, especially those for colonial products and former luxuries that were now an everyday presence in metropolitan lives like cofee, cocoa and tobacco products, thus relecting a broad fascination with an exotic “Other,” as well as the political economy of Euro-American colonialism and a widespread sense of racial identity and scientiically-supported racism. In the United States, the presence of black individuals in tobacco ads and the “mammy image” used to advertise pancake lours were obvious legacies of tobacco plantation slavery and African American women’s servile labor in their white masters’ kitchens. hese images subtly intertwined with a variety of commodiied images of the people of color being encountered and seized upon by representatives of US imperialism abroad, thus articulating a new commercial aesthetic of racial-cultural diference that inextricably linked the rise of modern advertising culture and the subjugation of colonized peoples.55 In Italy, igures of black women, men and children in advertising were, if possible, even more popular than in the United States as visual referents for Italy’s belated (due to its belated national uniication) but inborn imperialist vocation; the sensual exoticism of primitive Africans ready to be at once conquered (politically and sexually) and rescued by Italy’s high civilization; racial hierarchies; and advancing commercial modernity. he considerable black presence in early-20th-century Italian advertising was thus simultaneously a mark of the colonizer’s power, a relection of consumers’ narcissistic 54. Geofrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: he European Department Store, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, U.K., 1999); Michael B. Miller, he Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (London, 1981); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993); Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-hieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1992); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, N.J., 2000). 55. Jefrey Auerbach, “Art, Advertising, and the Legacy of Empire,” Journal of Popular Culture, 35, 4 (Spring 2002), 1-23. 169 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space interest in the exotic and a hint of the casual attitude towards racism that was instrumental to Italy’s often brutal rule in East Africa and Libya.56 In other words, before 1914 the shared experience of empire made nationality a relatively minor factor in shaping consumption patterns in metropolitan societies. Class, gender and race were signiicant determinants and dividers, but early-20th-century consumer cultures in Italy and the United States bore many resemblances. Upper-, middle- and – albeit within the rigid limits imposed by their income – even working-class Italians and Americans alike could see themselves as part of a multinational colonial project and could imagine that as consumers they had access to an amazing variety of exotic cultures. In fact, US and Italian consumers’ shared experience of images, visual tropes and ways of thinking about the world of turn-of-the-20th-century Euro-American imperialism helps explain the dynamics of the consumption of Italian things, identities and cultures in the United States before World War I. US middle-class consumer cosmopolitanism, spurred by the profusion of information about Europe and the non-European world as well as the will to participate in imperialism from the domestic sphere of consumption, avidly looked to and borrowed from European imperial societies on matters of taste – the framework for interpreting the value and meaning of things – that it felt it lacked and needed. his initial phase of US consumerist imperialism was largely imitative. American culture was less historically rooted and homogeneous than European national cultures and therefore more open to foreign inluences and imported goods, especially in the realm of high culture where many thought the US tradition was comparatively weakest.57 Among the material and cultural products that Italy had to ofer to the global marketplace, US consumers indulged in those they felt represented the Italian vocation to an imperialism ideally based on ancient Roman imperial roots, the cult of beauty and the global civilizing power of the arts. he cultural structure of Italian imperialism, made familiar by the common participation in turn-of-the-20th-century Euro-American consumer imperialism, was incorporated into US consumer culture, which in turn modiied consumer conigurations of taste and visions of the world. 56. Adam Arvidsson, “Between Fascism and the American Dream: Advertising in Interwar Italy,” Social Science History, 25, 2 (2001), 151-186; Gaia Giuliani, “L’Italiano Negro: he Politics of Colour in Early 20th-Century Italy,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16, 4 (2014), 572-587; Karen Pinkus, “Selling the Black Body: Advertising and the African Campaigns,” in Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis, 1995), 22-81; Karen Pinkus, “Shades of Black in Advertising and Popular Culture,” in Bodily Regimes, 134-153; Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Spotless Italy: Hygiene, Domesticity, and the Ubiquity of Whiteness in Fascist and Postwar Consumer Culture,” California Italian Studies, 2, 1 (2011); Loredana Polezzi, “Imperial Reproductions: he Circulation of Colonial Images across Popular Genres and Media in the 1920s and 1930s,” Modern Italy, 8, 1 (2003), 31-47; Lucia Re, “Italians and the Invention of Race: he Politics of Diference in Libya, 1890-1913,” California Italian Studies, 1, 1 (2010); Stephanie Malia Hom, “Empires of Tourism: Travel and Rhetoric in Italian Colonial Libya and Albania, 1911-1943,” Journal of Tourism History, 4, 3 (2012), 281-300. 57. Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: he Global Transformation of Desire (New York, 2001), 45. 170 simone cinotto United States art collectors, many of them wealthy industrialists and inanciers, put an astounding amount of energy and money into the acquisition of Italian art as part of a national project of cultural progress to overcome a perceived cultural gap and partake in the heritage of Western Civilization most powerfully embodied by ancient, Renaissance and modern Italian art. Although Italy had the longest tradition of protection for artworks and monuments in Europe, by the late 19th century regulation of the art market had become a controversial political issue, and it took decades before a comprehensive law – quickly deemed inefective – was passed by the Italian parliament. As a result, between 1900 and 1914 roughly one-ifth of all paintings imported into the United States came from Italy – a share similar to Britain and Germany, and second only to France.58 Opera was another area in which Italian inluence on US culture was important. Although German and Austrian composers, musicians and conductors were generally at the forefront of the US classical music scene, Italian directors, musicians and singers hegemonized opera and the transplantation of this art form – steeped in European aristocratic, and later bourgeois, cultural tradition – into the US cultural environment. he widely-acclaimed operatic tenor Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) best embodied the decisive Italian contribution to this realm of reined entertainment and consumer culture within the popular imagination.59 While musicians represented by far the largest segment of the “skilled and professional” category of Italian immigrants to New York between 1899 and 1910, the areas in which they shaped the US physical and cultural landscape most signiicantly at the turn of the 20th century, arguably more than any other national group, was construction and architecture.60 Italians left indelible marks on the physical environment and architecture of the US through a continuous interweaving of professional and unskilled migrants in the construction trade – architects, engineers, artists, craftsmen, artisans, masons, plasterers and carvers – many of whom came from the same specialized trade groups based in particular Italian towns or regions and had travelled worldwide in trade migration chains. he importation of Italian architectural models, which beautiied and transformed major US cities – notably New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco – made an equally import impact. Renaissance models inspired Frederick hompson, the creator of Luna Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn (1903), who dotted this landmark site of American commercial leisure with views of Vesuvius, Pompeii and the Venetian Grand Canal and Doge’s Palace to delight 58. Flaminia Gennari Sartori, “he Taste of Business: Deining the American Art Collector, 1900-1914,” in Across the Atlantic: Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the United States, ed. Luisa Passerini (Bern, 2000), 73-92. 59. John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT., 1993). 60. homas Kessner, he Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York, 1977), 33. 171 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space working-class visitors and provide beauty for their consumption.61 As noted by late historian Tony Judt, “in early-20th-century America, some [terminal train stations] were carefully modeled on Rome: the dimensions of Penn Station in New York were calibrated to those of the Baths of Caracalla (AD 217), while the barrel vault ceiling in Washington’s Union Station borrowed directly from the transept vaults in the Baths of Diocletian (AD 306).”62 he inluence of Italian cultural and consumer imperialism was felt most strongly in the arena of ilm. Even in this new industry, American productions represented but one player among many between 1900 and 1914. Movies developed independently in Europe and North America, with the irst large company (Pathé) originating in France. Hollywood did not ascend to international market domination until the 1920s, when the disruptions of World War I proved fatal to Europe’s former hegemony over the international silent ilm industry. French, German and Italian ilms accounted for half the melodrama, romance and adventure movies viewed in prewar United States. At the same time, US movies sold poorly in France and especially Italy, whose cities Turin, Rome and Naples were home to thriving moving picture companies and studios.63 Some of the Italian movies shown in nickelodeons and theaters in the United States were aimed at satiating US imperial viewers’ penchant for entertainment that associated natural landscapes with racial diferences and national identities. Most of these movies combined picturesque aesthetics and poetics with an artistic realism meant to disclose the ethnographic reality of the mysterious and intriguing southern Italy in particular. Favorite subjects included devastating earthquakes and spectacular natural disasters, as in L’Eruzione del Vesuvio (he Eruption of Vesuvius, 1906) and L’Eruzione dell’Etna (he Eruption of Mt. Etna, 1909); ethnographic renderings, such as Eating Macaroni in the Streets of Naples (prod. Edison, 1903); and melodramatic iction ilms, such as Sperduti nel buio (Lost in Darkness, Nino Martoglio, prod. Morgana Film, 1914) and Assunta Spina (Gustavo Serena, prod. Caesar Film, 1915; also known as Sangue Napolitano [Neapolitan Blood]).64 Newsreels celebrating the progress of contemporary Italian imperialism, such as Italian-Turkish War (prod. Cines, 1911), and documenting Italy’s war eforts in 61. Maddalena Tirabassi, “Making Space for Domesticity: Household Goods in Working-Class Italian American Homes, 1900-1940,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto (New York, 2014), 57-70. 62. Tony Judt, “he Glory of the Rails,” New York Times Review of Books, 57, 20 (December 23, 2010), 61, cit. in Tirabassi, “Making Space for Domesticity,” 74. 63. Gerben Bakker, “he Decline and Fall of the European Film Industry in the U.S., 1907-1920,” in Across the Atlantic: Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the United States, ed. Luisa Passerini (Bern, 2000), 213-240. 64. Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington, IN., 2010), 7. 172 simone cinotto Libya enjoyed far less circulation and were distributed for only the most exclusive Italian-oriented ilm audiences. he popularity of Italian historical movies is what best accounts for the prominence of images and fantasies of Italian imperialism in early-20th-century US consumer culture. Epic ilms made in Italy between 1910 and 1914 were breakthroughs in US ilm culture. Films like L’Inferno (“Dante’s Inferno,” Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro, 1911), Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1912), Spartaco (“Spartacus,” Giovanni Enrico Vidali, 1913) and Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) were the irst movies to convey the power of ilm to recreate and make a spectacle of the past, and they were vastly popular throughout the United States for their epic form, complicated plots, massive sets and unprecedented length of two to four hours. Grandiose in their production, from the writing and the set and costume design to the acting and ilming, Italian historical movies regularly garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity even prior to their release. hese extremely successful movies, all of which earned millions of dollars, attracted the interest of US audiences with their all-encompassing depictions of the ancient world that united spectacle, lavish set design, new camera movement techniques and narrative. In fact, they went on to have an enormous inluence on later developments in the cinematic arts. he irst giant of US cinematography, D. W. Griith, decided to make his two-reel biblical ilm, Judith of Bethulia (1914), after seeing Guazzoni’s blockbuster Quo Vadis? in 1913, and he began working on his own national historical ilm and masterpiece, the controversial he Birth of a Nation (1915), after learning about the grandest of Italian historical ilms, Pastrone’s Cabiria, still in production at the time. Cabiria, a ten-reel epic set during the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, was also screened at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson in a widely publicized event that witnessed ilm’s ascension from its lower-class origins to the status of respectable artistic form of middle-class leisure and ediication.65 As ilm historian Maria Wyke notes, “Putting into the present an exhibitionist spectacle of pomp and magniicence, of grand crowds and monumental architecture, of orgies, seductions, and sadistic martyrdoms, these extraordinarily costly historical reconstructions excited the voyeuristic look of their spectators and provoked the pleasure of gazing on the vividly realized vices and exoticisms of Rome’s imperial villains.”66 he acclaim with which US spectators greeted Italian historical ilms demonstrates not only their acknowledgment of Italian technical and aesthetic superiority in the staging of the most grandiose cinematic spectacles to date, but also a recognition of Italian imperialism as the cultural medium through which their new identities as imperial consumers at the center of a global marketplace were articulated. 65. Mark Whalan, American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh, U.K., 2010), 38-39. 66. Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York, 1997), 25-26. 173 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Conclusion Historical narratives of the United States and its place in the 20th-century world have insisted on the hegemony of US consumer and popular culture and its centrality in the articulation of a soft power that signiicantly partnered military, diplomatic and economic means in the US plan for world leadership. In particular, US consumer and popular cultures have been repeatedly portrayed as the most efective media of the Americanization of European societies throughout the century, albeit most forcefully from after World War II until 1989. Recent historiographical debates have identiied the key to overcoming such unidirectional, hegemonic and evenementiel explanations of changing consumer dynamics and meanings in a yet-to-be-realized positive mixing between the conceptualizations and methodologies of the history of early-modern and modern transatlantic consumerism. his essay has utilized the case of Italy and Italian-US relations within the landscape of consumer culture to argue that the formation of a modern consumer culture was instead a transnational, bidirectional and multidirectional process, best understood as the result of transatlantic and global circulations of capital, goods, ideas, images and imaginations. In the 20th century, US consumer culture was Italianized just as signiicantly as Italian consumer culture was Americanized. At the turn of the 20th century, the Italian consumer culture produced by and alongside Italian imperialism and colonialism provided a model and a companion to a US consumer culture that was, similarly, the product and the cause of imperial encounters with other cultures. Complicating matters, however, were the millions of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1914 – most of whom were poor, rural migrants from southern Italy who became denizens of the largest US industrial cities – encountered and experienced by imperial US consumers through commodities and commercial images, both abroad and at home. As a result, after World War I, the Italianization of US consumer culture characteristically played out through a dialogical articulation of identities, meanings and geographies based on an imperial, urban and masculine Italy centered in the North, an Italy representing the world’s center for art, culture, craftsmanship and taste for beauty, on the one hand; and a diasporic, rural, feminine Italy centered in the South that conveyed narratives of primitivism, familism, exoticism and sensuality, on the other. As I have recounted elsewhere, in the 1970s, juxtapositions of low- and high-class identities, northern and southern Italian geographies and imaginations, and diasporic and transnational meanings, sensibilities and tastes started developing in the realm of food, thus dramatically inluencing the way Americans ate, thought about their diet and saw themselves as global consumers.67 In the world of US 67. Simone Cinotto, “Consuming the European Other: Italian Cookbook Writers, the End of Labor, and the Transnational Formation of Taste in Postindustrial America, 1973-2000,” in Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective, eds. Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Rafaella Baritono (Turin, 2013), 181-203. 174 simone cinotto fashion, Italian designers and their tastes exercised considerable creative inluence between 1980 and the end of the century.68 he history of the inluence of Italian products, ideas and identities on US consumer culture in the 20th century continuously intertwined with the transatlantic trajectories of other national products, ideas and identities, including those that were formulated, described and understood as generally European. Indeed, the ultimate goal of this essay, based on the example of Italy, is to provide the preliminary framework for a larger study of the Europeanization of US consumer culture in the “American Century” that still needs to be written. 68. Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the Italian Fashion Industry (New York, 2000); Valerie Steele, Fashion, Italian Style (New Haven, CT., 2003); Courtney Ritter, “he Double Life of the Italian Suit: Italian Americans and the ‘Made in Italy’ Label,” in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities, ed. Simone Cinotto (New York, 2014), 195-206. 175 he Transatlantic Historiography of European Migration to the United States in a Global Context Matteo Pretelli Introduction In his seminal study of the American frontier, historian Frederick J. Turner argued that the progressive advancement of settlers towards the western territories of the North American continent was at the core of the American identity. he frontier was perceived as a mobile space to be conquered, a place where people would struggle against the wilderness. Both this confrontation and the westbound mobility of European newcomers signiied their growing independence from the English roots of the American nation and pushed them to leave their native cultures behind so they could quickly become American. Turner showed how the introduction of steamships and a network of American railroads in the 19th century eased transatlantic transport and allowed people from the British Isles, Germany and Scandinavia to break their ties with the obscurantist societies of the Old World and settle in these new western lands where democracy and individualism were being forged. In describing these pioneers, Turner mainly looked at immigrants from central and northern Europe and downplayed the role of those from eastern and southern Europe who started landing in the United States after the 1880s. Because of the tendency of the latter to concentrate themselves in the large urban industrial centers of the Atlantic coast, he said they have accented the antagonisms between capital and labor by the fact that the labor supply has become increasingly foreign born, and recruited from nationalities who arouse no sympathy on the part of capital and little on the part of the general public. Class distinctions are accented by national prejudices, and democracy is thereby invaded. But even in the dull brains of great masses of these unfortunates from southern and eastern Europe the idea of America as the land of freedom and of opportunity to rise, the land of pioneer democratic ideals, has found lodgment, and if it is given time and is not turned into revolutionary lines it will fructify.1 1. Turner’s thesis on the frontier is in Frederick J. Turner, “he Signiicance of the Frontier in American History,” in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC, 1894), 177 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space With these words, Turner made a clear distinction between the earlier stock of Europeans, whom he conceived as easier to assimilate to the American cultural mainstream, and the later stock of “deicient” people who could nevertheless also aspire to join American society. Turner’s relections betray his implicit belief in the “exceptional” ability of the United States to assimilate all ethnicities and races to the values of Anglo-Saxon Americanness. In fact, throughout the 20th century, at least until the 1960s, the historiography of European migration to the United States was imbued with the concept of “exceptionalism” as described by Turner. While the study of Old World ethnic minorities in the United States developed throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the scholars interested in transatlantic European mobility were mainly American, with European historians generally failing to include these human lows in their national narratives. he profound transformations that took place in American society following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s had a profound impact on US ethnic studies. A revisionist New Social History was introduced both to debunk the myth of a nation that had simply assimilated uprooted, passive European peasants and to properly recognize the social activism taking place in the New World. Inluenced by the 1970s’ ethnic revival that pushed American society towards becoming a multicultural mosaic, many scholars discovered the importance of ethnicity – a neglected dimension of American history according to Italian-American historian Rudolph J. Vecoli.2 Ethnic studies branched into multiple community studies that reclaimed the diferent histories of all the ethnic groups making up the colorful American tapestry, including those previously marginalized by historians such as people of Asian and Latin descent. his was the same period when European scholars broke their silence on the history of their compatriots’ migration and started dialoguing with their American peers and seeking out transatlantic scholarly collaborations. European scholars also played a key role in opening migration and ethnic studies to a global perspective. Profoundly inluenced by the innovative approach of world history, in the 1980s migration history started evolving to cover a wider global context and take a long-term temporal perspective, thus facilitating contacts with disciplines like Atlantic studies and slave trade studies. By deconstructing the myth of American “exceptionalism,” these new historical accounts reconigured the role of European transatlantic mobility as part of broader international migratory lows, while also focusing on migrations in other continents, especially within and from Asia. Although US history has now been stripped of its “uniqueness” and reduced to a “nation among nations,”3 migration history still devotes plenty of attention to the 19th- and early-20th-century transatlantic European mobility that prompted millions of migrant 199-227, now in Id., he Frontier in American History (New York, 1920). he quotation is from pages 277-278. 2. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Ethnicity: A Neglected Dimension of American History,” in Herbert J. Bass (ed.), he State of American History (Chicago, 1970), 70-88. 3. homas Bender, A Nation among Nations: American’s Place in World History (New York, 2006). 178 matteo pretelli departures. his essay aims to analyze the evolution of history writing on this mass inlux of European migrants to the United States with a focus on the interactions between American and European scholars. he irst part will address the aforementioned fact that, before the rise of the New Social History in the 1960s the history of Europeans who immigrated to the United States was mainly written by American scholars. he second part deals with European historians of Old World migration to the United States with a focus on Italy, Germany and Poland – three examples of non-English-speaking countries with high numbers of migrants overseas, whose migration specialists have engaged in a growing dialogue with their American colleagues, if in diferent varieties and intensities because of their political or scholarly diferences, since the 1970s. his was the decade that witnessed the establishment of a transatlantic scholarly community within the ield of migration history, and the third and inal part of this essay concentrates on the increasing reconceptualization of transatlantic migratory lows – including European mass mobility towards the United States – carried out within a global context thanks to the interaction between migration historians on both shores of the Atlantic. he American Phase of Migration History Writing From as early as the 17th century, migrations to the US were explored by pietistic, ancestor-worshipping American historians to celebrate the ethnic groups of colonial America to which they belonged.4 Nineteenth-century professional historians, on the other hand, showed little interest in the European immigrant lows heavily afecting American society at the time. Among the few exceptions were George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, who relegated foreign-born people of non-English backgrounds to “minor threads in the fabric of the American experience.”5 Later US historians, including Herbert Baxter Adams, thought of early white newcomers to America, especially those of “Teutonic” heritage, as coming from a “superior” stock. Adams traced the roots of American democracy back to the tribes of the great German forests and was concerned about groups of other origins that would seemingly fail to make the values of American democracy their own.6 During the Progressive Era, historians continued to overlook the history of migrations to the United States. he few who did so compared those belonging to the new stock of southern and eastern European migrants to those who had arrived in America in the 19th century from northern and central Europe. In History of the American People of 1902, for 4. Roger Daniels, “Observations on the Historiography of Immigration,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 42 (1997), 339. 5. Alan M. Kraut, “A Century of Scholarship in American Immigration and Ethnic History,” in James Banner (ed.), A Century of Scholarship in American Immigration and Ethnic History (Boston, 2010), 125. 6. Ibid., 124. 179 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space example, Princeton professor and later US President Woodrow Wilson characterized the new stock as composed of unintelligent individuals. he distinction between “old” and “new” immigration (that has now disappeared from the scholarly conversation) was at the core of nativist interpretations and was reiterated by scholars like sociologist Edward A. Ross and eugenicist Madison Grant, who theorized the superiority of the Nordic over the Mediterranean “race” in he Passing of the Great Race (1916). Even the progressive labor historian John R. Commons believed there were great diferences between “old” and “new” migrants. All these theories contributed to a rising nativist hysteria, which loomed large in the 1911 publication of the forty-one reports of the United States Immigration Commission chaired by Senator William Dillingham. Describing immigrants from eastern and southern Europe in denigrating terms, these reports led to the introduction by the US Congress of a literacy test to enter the country in 1917 and the enactment of nationality-based entry quotas in 1921 and 1924.7 While most historians avoided addressing migration to the United States, in the 1920s the sociologists of the Chicago School – including Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Ernest Burgess, William I. homas and Florian Znaniecki – took a special interest in recent immigrants and their assimilation. heir studies were aimed at contradicting those claiming that such immigrants could not be assimilated to American society. According to Park, for example, the American city was a laboratory for the social inclusion, assimilation and modernization of immigrants. hese studies went on to inluence progressive social reformers like Jane Addams, Lilian Wald and Jacob Riis who worked in urban contexts to facilitate the rapid Americanization of newcomers.8 his sociological research also prompted progressive historian Charles A. Beard to include immigration among the features of American capitalism that he presented in his 1927 book he Rise of American Civilization, though he left out the subject of ethnicity. However, it was not until the 1930s that American professional historians – mainly of Scandinavian and German descent like heodore Blegen, George Stephenson and Carl F. Wittke – started actually specializing in immigration history. While members of the Chicago School had focused on recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, these historians followed Turner’s example and explored the stories of 19th-century immigrants from central and northern Europe. One of the most inluential among them was Marcus Lee Hansen, 7. Roger Daniels, “Observations on the Historiography,” 339; Kraut, “A Century of Scholarship,” 125; Mae M. Ngai, “Immigration and Ethnic History,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (eds.), America History Now (Philadelphia, 2011), 360; and Walter Nugent, “he Great Transatlantic Migrations,” in Carl J. Guarnieri (ed.), America Compared: American History in International Perspective, vol. II (Boston-New York, 2005). A seminal study on American nativism between the 19th and 20th century is John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, 1955). 8. Kraut, “A Century of Scholarship,” 125; Id., “Doing as Americans Do: he Post-Migration Negotiation of Identity in the United States,” Journal of American History, 101 (2014), 709; and Jon Gjerde, “New Growth on Old Vines – he State of the Field: he Social History of Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 (1999), 42-43. 180 matteo pretelli who theorized a generational model whereby second-generation immigrants aimed to Americanize immediately and cut all ties with their native cultures, whereas members of the already fully Americanized third generation showed a new interest in their roots.9 he World War II period was pivotal for many ethnic groups of European descent, including natives of eastern and southern Europe, in helping accelerate their integration into American society and culture. Yet, not much changed in American historiography. Oscar Handlin’s book he Uprooted of 1951, for example, simply reiterated earlier opinions.10 As a scholar of eastern European Jewish background, Handlin believed immigrants passed through a stage of isolation and traumatization in their one-way shift from a rural (European) to an industrialized (American) society, which would cause them to sever ties with their native culture and adopt that of their host country. According to historian Roger Daniels, Handlin presented immigrants as “persons on whom history acts rather than actors in history, victims of circumstances rather than heroes of their own lives.”11 As contended by migration scholar Mae M. Ngai, both academic and popular histories of that period in the United States “entrenched a nationalist framework, which posited the telos of assimilation as evidence of America’s exceptional history and character. he founding historiography had established a normative theory of American immigration based on a model of European assimilation and American exceptionalism.”12 he supposedly innate ability of the United States to assimilate immigrants started falling under intense scrutiny in the 1960s. In his essay on Italian peasant migrants to Chicago, Italian-American historian Rudolph J. Vecoli criticized Handlin’s assumptions about the passivity of immigrants and re-evaluated them as active agents who sought to maintain the traits of their native cultures in their new world. heir activism included the ability to make their own economic choices, which sometimes meant planning to return to their native countries.13 Arguing against the alleged assimilationist power of American society, Vecoli accused other scholars of discarding the value of ethnicity by focusing on cultural change rather than the persistence of native cultures in the host society.14 Indeed, the concept of the “melting pot” – derived from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 19th-century view of Americans as a mixture of bloodlines – was now under attack. Popularized by the 1908 theatrical play he Melting Pot, which was written by 9. David A. Gerber, “Immigration Historiography at the Crossroads,” Reviews in American History, 39 (2011), 76; Kraut, “Doing as Americans Do,” 709; Id., “A Century of Scholarship,” 127; and Gjerde, “New Growth on Old Vines,” 47. 10. Oscar Handlin, he Uprooted: he Epic Story of the Great Migrations hat Made the American People (Boston 1951). 11. Daniels, “Observations on the Historiography,” 342. 12. Ngai, “Immigration and Ethnic History,” 362. 13. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted,” Journal of American History, 5 (1964), 404-417. 14. Vecoli, “Ethnicity: A Neglected Dimension,” 70-88. 181 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space the British Jew Israel Zangwill as a metaphor of newcomers’ willingness to give up their native cultural values and melt together within the American mainstream, the concept started falling into oblivion as an American multicultural society appeared on the horizon. Following the new “salad bowl” model, immigrants in this society would retain their distinctive ethnic and racial cultures and “assimilation” would be replaced by more politically correct terms like “incorporation” and “integration.” Nevertheless, the concept of assimilation has never been completely abandoned and has even been revived be some scholars in recent academic debates.15 Coinciding with the troublesome years of the civil and women’s rights movements, Vecoli helped launch a new season of ethnic studies through the New Social History School.16 his turn in historical studies was part of a political and social context that witnessed a new attitude towards immigration. In particular, the congressional legislation (Hart-Celler Act) of 1965 formally abolished the system of nationality-based entry quotas established in the 1920s (and reiterated by the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act), thus facilitating the arrival of non-European migrants from Asia and Latin America. New Social History scholars moved away from the idea of complete assimilation to outline a more complex view of immigrants’ daily lives and strategies, including the roles played by their kin and community networks. Any notion of the alleged “exceptional” ability of American society to completely assimilate migrants was discarded. According to scholars like Colin Greer and Michael B. Katz, for example, the US public education system was a racist, reactionary instrument managed by oligarchical elites who imposed their values on immigrants rather than contributing to their integration and upward mobility.17 Many of these “New Social historians” were of southern or eastern European descent and belonged to a new generation of American academics interested in an approach “from the bottom up” aimed at studying the everyday lives of ordinary people rather than the world of the elites.18 Such scholars included John Bodnar who in 1985 published he Transplanted, a title purposefully chosen to contradict the title of Handlin’s book and to emphasize the cultural activism of newcomers.19 his new interpretative approach took of alongside the ethnic revival that has characterized the United States since the 1960s. In the wake of the African-American civil rights movement, Americans of European descent sought a revaluation of their own ethnicities, which would become all important for gaining visibility and access to public resources. 15. Kraut, “Doing as Americans Do,” 710-711. 16. Jon Gjerde, “Rudolph J. Vecoli and the New Social History: An Appreciation,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 28 (2009), 13. 17. Bernard J. Weiss, “Introduction,” in Bernard J. Weiss (ed.), American Education and the European Immigrants: 1840-1940 (Champaign, 1982). 18. Gjerde, “Rudolph J. Vecoli,” 76-77. 19. John Bodnar, he Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985). 182 matteo pretelli he new emphasis on ethnicity facilitated the progress of US society towards a multiculturalism in which ethnic, racial and religious diferences would be preserved.20 In addition to Americans of European descent, minorities who had been particularly marginalized throughout US history like Native Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos also took part in the pursuit of public recognition.21 he societal trend towards multiculturalism led to a rethinking of US history away from an Anglo perspective and towards a more inclusive view based on diversity and pluralism that was mirrored in the rewriting of school textbooks to include the histories of diferent minorities.22 In the realm of history writing, this multiculturalization of American society helped launch new community studies that concentrated on the experiences of diferent ethnic groups and were often encouraged by ethnic associations interested in having minority histories publicly recognized. European Migration Historians At the 11th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Stockholm in 1960, British scholar Frank histlethwaite presented an essay that attempted to deconstruct the traditional US-centered approach to the study of transatlantic European migration. Recently reprinted in a volume edited by Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, the essay showed how this mobility had mostly been studied in the United States and only rarely in the Old World. Openly criticizing Handlin’s monolithic model of “uprooted” European migrants, histlethwaite argued that migration lows (including seasonal and return migration) were just as key for understanding transatlantic economic relations as they were for understanding the history of individual European countries.23 histlethwaite was right to point out that European scholars had overlooked the study of their own migrants to the New World, and he attributed this neglect to the European historiographical tendency to link national territories to national identities, thereby perceiving migrants as an anomaly within the nation state. Generally focused exclusively on national histories, European historians rarely included migrants in their narratives.24 German scholar Dirk Hoerder has suggested that those who have not ignored it altogether “traditionally have studied emigration from each and every nation separately, and their North American peers 20. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (London-Cambridge, 2006). 21. Knaut, “A Century of Scholarship,” 133; Ngai, “Immigration and Ethnic History,” 364. 22. Nathan Glazer and Reed Ueda, Ethnic Groups in History Textbooks (Washington, DC, 1983). 23. Frank histlewthwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” XIe Congress International des Sciences Historiques, Rapports V (Uppsala, 1960), now in Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke (eds.), A Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930 (Urbana-Chicago, 1991), 17-49. 24. Ioanna Laliotou, Transnational Subjects: Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America (Chicago-London, 2004), 4, 7-8. 183 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space have studied immigration by distinct ethnic group.”25 he overriding role of American scholarship has therefore led the historiographical discourse. A case in point is migration to the United States from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Despite the fact that some ive million people moved away from this multi-national empire between 1876 and 1910, overseas migration studies have concentrated on the single national groups to which newcomers claimed they belonged (e.g. Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks or “Germans” in the case of German-speaking migrants). he empire was not perceived as a single state entity and “Austria” was registered by US statistics as distinct from other points of departure within the empire.26 Even when European scholars tapped into the American debate, they seemed to reiterate a sort of Atlantic- and American-centered view of migration to the United States. British scholar Philip Taylor, for example, described it as coming exclusively from Europe, just as their American colleagues tended to do.27 As mentioned earlier, the history of European immigrants was mostly studied by American scholars until the 1970s, when the dialogue between US and European historians began to increase. We can see evidence of this in the evolution of migration history writing in three non-English-speaking European countries with sizable departure lows to the United States in the 19th and 20th century and historians who approached migration issues in diferent, speciic ways. Italy has been notable for the persistence of a nation-centered history writing that retarded an interest in migrating nationals. German migration became the subject of a fruitful academic conversation between German scholars and their American peers only after the period of oblivion caused by the tragedies of German national history. And in Poland, though their diiculties were eventually overcome, scholars struggled to establish transatlantic academic networks due to Cold War tensions and the fact that the country belonged to the soviet bloc. In the 1970s, however, historians from all three of these nations started communicating with American migration scholars and were encouraged in this by the US editors of the journal Perspectives in American History, whose 1973 issue on Dislocation and Emigration hosted essays by European and Europe-based migration specialists.28 As a united country since 1861, Italy stands out as one of the main European migrant departure countries from which around 26 million people left throughout the century spanning 1876 to 1976. From 1880 to 1920, around 4.1 million Italians migrated to the United States. Yet, despite these huge numbers, in the decades after World War II few scholars took an interest in these migrants. According to historians Emilio Franzina 25. Dirk Hoerder, “Losing National Identity or Gaining Transcultural Competence: Changing Approaches in Migration History,” in Heinz-Gerhard and Jürgen Kocka (eds.), Comparative and Transnational History: General European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York-Oxford, 2009), 247. 26. Josef Ehmer, Annemarie Steidl, Hermann Zeitlhofer, “Migration Patterns in Late Imperial Austria,” KMI Working Paper Series, Working Paper n. 3 (2004). 27. Philip Taylor, he Distant Magnet: European Migration to the U.S.A. (New York, 1971); Kraut, “A Century of Scholarship,” 128. 28. Perspectives in American History, 8 (1973), “Dislocation and Emigration.” 184 matteo pretelli and Ercole Sori, this lack of attention could be explained by the overwhelming interest of Italian academics in political history, especially the role of elites, and their lack of interest in the working class. While peasants who left the country failed to be included in categories like state and nation, they were also marginalized by scholars who attempted to carry out interdisciplinary approaches by merging socio-economic and cultural history. Even Marxist historiography, traditionally interested in the average person, rarely dealt with migrants unless they were political refugees.29 An analysis of migration from Italy did begin in the 1960s thanks to demographers and economic historians but it remained a niche subject among Italian specialists of American history, which was itself a latecomer to Italian academia. Furthermore, migration history ofered few job opportunities in a university realm overrun by modern and contemporary history, which was almost exclusively identiied with the history of Italy or Western Europe. A transatlantic dialogue on Italian migrants to the US did not start until 1969 when the University of Florence’s Istituto di Studi Americani (Institute for American Studies) organized a symposium on migration history. he event gathered Italian and American specialists (including Vecoli) together for the irst time and led to further collaboration between the two shores of the Atlantic over the following decades. In 1990, for instance, scholars Vecoli, Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska and George E. Pozzetta chose the Italian migration history journal Altreitalie to host their essay on the reinvention of ethnicity in the United States, which prompted a response from the likes of Richard Alba. he essay was reprinted in English a couple of years later in a slightly diferent version in the Journal of American Ethnic History.30 Nonetheless, in 1999 historian Donna Gabaccia pointed out that historical research on Italian Americans was still mainly being produced in the United States rather than in Italy.31 he turn of the millennium on the other hand marked a radical shift in Italian historical interest in Italian migration. After having neglected the study and memorialization of the migratory experiences of their compatriots for decades, at the end of the 20th century Italians started taking a new interest in those who had left the country, especially in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. his change of scholarly attitudes was favored by many factors, including the coeval transformation of Italy from a nation of emigrants to a land of immigrants, which inevitably led 29. Amoreno Martellini (ed.), “Cinque domande sulla storiograia della emigrazione a Emilio Franzina ed Ercole Sori,” Storia e problemi contemporanei, 34 (2003), 15-31; and Anna Maria Martellone, “Italian Mass Emigration to the United States, 1876-1930: A Historical Survey,” Perspectives in American History, 1 (1984), 379-423. 30. Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, Rudolph J. Vecoli, “he Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the USA,” Altreitalie, 3 (1990), 37-62; Id., “he Invention of Ethnicity,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 12 (1992), 3-41; and Richard D. Alba, “he Emergence of European-Americans,” Altreitalie, 4 (1990), 14-23. 31. Martellone, “Italian Mass Emigration,” 379-384; and Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 1120. 185 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space to a rethinking of its own migratory past. Equally important was the rise of a global economy that encouraged Italians to reconnect economically and politically with the communities of Italian descent scattered throughout the world. hese developments also prompted publishers to take an interest in the subject of migration. In the 2000s, major Italian publishers like Donzelli and Einaudi released comprehensive volumes on Italian migration (including many essays on migrants to the United States) and books that aimed to contextualize the history of Italian migration within the broader history of the nation.32 American historians were nevertheless the ones to produce, at the turn of the 20th century, an encyclopedia on the history of Italians in the United States that still represents the best synthesis of the state of the art.33 At the same time, the contributions of Italian scholars to the historiographical debate increased exponentially, with some of these scholars – in particular Stefano Luconi and Simone Cinotto – even publishing intensively in the United States and thus doing much to enhance the transatlantic scholarly dialogue.34 In Poland, national migration history writing has been greatly inluenced by the complex evolution of Polish national history. When mass migration began in the 1880s, the country was not yet independent but rather split among the empires of Germany, Austria and Russia. In Polish politics, opinions ranged from perceiving migration as a “safety valve” for avoiding social upheaval, to blaming Polish migrants for undermining the struggle for national independence. Migration studies started emerging after the achievement of national independence in 1918. At the time, migrants were either being blamed for contributing to a demographic “hemorrhage” or appreciated for their potential ability to contribute to the wellbeing of their homeland from elsewhere in Europe or from the United States. Despite this rising interest in those who had left, scholarly studies on Polish emigrants were only fully developed in the United States. Chicago School sociologists William I. homas and Florian Znaniecki made a notable contribution to the topic by writing what is probably the most inluential book on Polish settlers overseas, one that remained a scholarly cornerstone for most of the 32. Piero Bevilacqua, Emilio Franzina, Andreina De Clementi (eds.), Storia dell’Emigrazione Italiana, vol. 1 and 2 (Rome, 2001-2002); Paola Corti, Matteo Sanilippo (eds.), Storia d’Italia: Annali 24 (Turin, 2009); Patrizia Audenino and Maddalena Tirabassi, Migrazioni italiane: Storia e storie dall’Ancien régime a oggi (Milan, 2008); and Paola Corti and Matteo Sanilippo, L’Italia e le migrazioni (Rome-Bari, 2012). 33. Salvatore J. LaGumina et al. (ed.), he Italian-American Experience: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2000). 34. Matteo Sanilippo, “Nuovi contributi sull’emigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti,” Studi Emigrazione/ Migration Studies, 43 (2006), 199-206. See contributions in English by Simone Cinotto, Soft Soil, Black Grapes: he Birth of Italian Winemaking in California, trans. Michelle Tarnopolsky (New York, 2012), Id., he Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (Urbana-Chicago, 2013), Id. (ed.), Making Italian American: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (New York, 2014); and Stefano Luconi, From Paesani to White Ethnics: he Italian Experience in Philadelphia (Albany, 2001), Id., he Italian-American Vote in Providence, Rhode Island, 1916-1948 (Madison, 2004), Id. and Dennis Barone (eds.), Small Towns, Big Cities: he Urban Experience of Italian Americans (New York, 2010). 186 matteo pretelli 20th century.35 In the period after World War II, Polish academics lived in the isolation imposed by the pro-soviet communist regime, which put a brake on their transatlantic exchanges with American scholars. Polish historians were also compelled by the regime to apply Marxist categories to their studies and refrain from experimenting with any alternative approaches. According to the regime, migrants were unworthy of being studied because they were traitors to the nation. At the same time, scholars of Polish descent in the United States were some of the irst to denounce the political repression in their native land. Only after Stalin’s death and a partial loosening in East-West relations could some transatlantic contacts be strengthened thanks to a few Polish universities specializing in Polish migration studies. After the ethnic revival took place in the United States, research on Polish-American communities lourished, especially since this coincided with the coming of age of American-born Polish intellectuals like Jerzy Lerski, Victor Green and Joseph A. Wytrwal. he transatlantic dialogue was facilitated by American universities as well as by institutes like the New York Kosciuszko Foundation and the Polonia Research Institute at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. However, intellectual relations between the two countries were not fully reinstated until after the fall of the soviet bloc. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Polish American Historical Association in 1996, John J. Bukowczky – a leading expert on Polish migration – edited a collection of essays by Polish and American specialists in the ield that still represents the best, most up-to-date historiographical account of the subject.36 Among all the non-English-speaking European specialists in transatlantic migration, German historians have probably had more contact with their American peers than any others. According to the 2010 US Census, Germans were the number one ethnicity among Americans claiming European origins – a legacy of the mass migration from German territories that took place all throughout the 19th century. Despite these large numbers, however, German historians were latecomers in addressing the migration of their nationals from Europe to America. In the 1930s, the nazi regime was particularly keen to strengthen ties with foreign German communities, which were the target of Hitler’s imperialist ambitions. he regime allocated resources and personnel to improving these relations by intensifying espionage and producing racially based studies of migrant communities.37 After World War II, all scholarly interest in Germans residing abroad was temporarily abandoned, since scholars feared identifying in any way with the far-right political movements 35. William I. homas, Florian Znaniecki, he Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group, 5 vols. (Boston, 1918-1920). 36. John J. Bukowczky, “Polish Americans, History, Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” in John J. Bukowczky (ed.), Polish Americans and their History: Community, Culture, and Politics (Pittsburgh, 1996), 1-38; and Andrzej Brozek, “Post-World War II Polish Historiography on Emigration,” in Ibid., 180-193. 37. On nazi attempts to inluence German communities abroad, see Zbynek Zeman, Nazi Propaganda (London, 1973); and Donald M. McKale, “Hitlerism for Export! he Nazi Attempt to Control Schools and Youth Clubs Outside Germany,” Journal of European Studies, 5 (1975), 239-253. 187 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space that were searching for new contacts with foreign German communities to pursue nationalistic goals. Like in the Italian and Polish cases, research in Germany on emigration only really started taking of in the 1970s. As World War II receded in time, it became easier for German academics to relect critically on previously taboo topics. At the same time, the wave of new ethnic revivals and the rise of ethnic studies in the United States – including a number of studies on German Americans – were also favorably received in Germany. German scholars increasingly sought the cooperation and advice of their American counterparts while also trying to overcome the marginalization in national history departments of those who specialized in the history of extra-European continents, including Asiatists, Africanists, and North and South Americanists.38 In their attempt to construct transnational networks, German scholars reinvented the intellectual exchanges that had largely characterized the cultural relations between the two countries around the turn of the 20th century. While these bonds had been drastically severed by the outbreaks of both world wars, they were re-launched during the Cold War since Americans believed that scholarly exchanges were a suitable tool of cultural diplomacy with which to fully incorporate West Germany into international relations and the anti-soviet bloc.39 In Germany the interest in former migrants was also favored by the international oil crisis of 1973, which underscored an important turning point in the history of immigration to Germany (and Western Europe in general). Indeed, while on the one hand policymakers sought to curb the inlux of foreign labor, on the other hand the country witnessed a national debate regarding policies to integrate foreigners, which also led to a new interest in Germany as a migratory nation. Academic projects related to German migration to the United States also received a considerable boost from the grants allocated by the Volkswagen Foundation through its Nordamerika-Studien program. hese resources helped set up ive research clusters on German migration based at the Free University in Berlin and the universities of Bochum, Bremen, Hamburg and Munich. he largest grants were assigned to Hartmut Keil and Dirk Hoerder, two distinguished German scholars who spent part of their careers in the United States.40 Hoerder in particular not only greatly expanded the study of German migrants, but also made signiicant contributions to the broader theoretical discussion about the history of international migrations.41 History writing on Germans in the United 38. Hoerder, “Losing National Identity,” 248. 39. Hans-Jürgen Schröder (ed.), Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900-1914 (Providence-Oxford, 1993); Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: he American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 2012); and Detlef Junker (ed.), he United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945-1990: A Handbook, vol. 1-2 (Cambridge-New York, 2004). 40. Wolfgang Helbich, “German Research on German Migration to the United States,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 54 (2009), 384, 388, 396. 41. Dirk Hoerder (ed.) and Christiane Harzig (ass. ed.), he Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-1970s: An Annotated Bibliography, 3 vols. (Westport, 1987); Dirk Hoerder, People on the Move: Migration Acculturation, and Ethnic Interaction in Europe and North America (Cambridge, 1995); and 188 matteo pretelli States reached its climax in the 1980s and 1990s, when around eighty books were published on the subject. Conversely, the 2000s marked a downturn in the number of publications because of a declining interest in a topic that had already been widely studied, as well as the Volkswagen Foundation’s decision to reduce its funding.42 Towards a Global Turn and a Full Transatlantic Dialogue During the 20th century, the US-centered approach to migration studies was mostly based on the exceptional character of turn-of-the-20th-century European migration to the United States as a product of modernization, when a mass movement of European people interrupted the traditional sedentariness of pre-modern societies whose mobility had seemingly been hindered by class, gender and religious barriers. According to this view, scholars perceived the transatlantic westward lows of migrants as composed exclusively of free white men voluntarily leaving their countries to settle permanently in the United States. his static model completely failed to include the role of women or the multi-transatlantic journeys of migrants, as well as mobility to countries other than the United States. For instance, migrants from and within Asia were merely categorized as workers responding to the labor demands of the European empires. In addition, slave trade studies were dealt with as a diferent discipline because the forced mobility of enslaved Africans to the Americas was not considered a true migratory low.43 While these historical approaches reiterated the “exceptionalist” view of the United States as the only magnet that could attract immigrants, in 1960 Frank histlethwaite pointed to the importance of other countries like Canada, Brazil and Argentina as destinations for European migrants. hree years later, Canadian historian William H. McNeill published he Rise of the West, a book that contested the centrality of the western world and focused on the civilizations of other continents. By launching the new discipline of world history, McNeill searched for global interconnections and cross-fertilizations among diferent cultures.44 Following the accomplishments of world history, in the 1980s scholars started focusing their research on the Atlantic economic system as a macro-area connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas within a global framework in which commodities, Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagler (eds.), People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820-1930 (Cambridge, 1995). 42. Helbich, “German Research,” 387. 43. Daniels, “Observations on the Historiography,” 337-338; Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, 2002), 8; and Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “he Mobility Transition Revisited, 1500-1900: What the Case of Europe Can Ofer to Global History,” he Journal of Global History, 4 (2009), 347-377. 44. William H. McNeill, he Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963). 189 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space people and ideas circulated widely.45 Dirk Hoerder contextualized Europe’s labor mobility within this global space and, based on this approach, opened up an increasingly intense dialogue with American scholars.46 Strongly inluenced by world history and global studies, the historiography of European migrations expanded its spatial and temporal research horizons. In 1992, Leslie Page Moch embraced a long-term perspective and studied mobility within and from Europe from the mid-17th to the 20th century, an approach shared by German scholar Klaus J. Bade.47 After her initial study, Page Moch also edited a volume with Hoerder in which the “essays situate the 19th-century mass migrations of Europeans in the history of human mobility from the 13th century to the present day.”48 A broader perspective on European migrants was further encouraged when the term “transnationalism” entered the international discussion – after being coined in the early 1990s by anthropologists – and was largely applied to migration studies.49 Mostly stressing the deconstruction of the centrality of the nation state, this concept views migrants as having luid identities determined by the fact that they live in between their homeland and their host country. Migrants therefore maintain connections to their native lands through frequent communication via phone, Skype and/or recurrent visits. However, some historians – such as Nancy Foner in the United States and Matteo Sanilippo in Italy – argue that transnationalism is merely a new term for a lifestyle that turn-of-the-20th-century European migrants already knew well,50 since they were indeed active in circulating letters, remittances and pre-paid tickets from the host to the native country and favoring chain migrations of kin, friends and compatriots, while also periodically travelling back to their homeland for visits or seasonal jobs.51 he other methodological term now widely used (or abused) is “diaspora,” a concept that used to be applied to populations forced to move such as Jews, Armenians and enslaved 45. Donna R. Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies, 1 (2004), 1-27. 46. Dirk Hoerder (ed.), Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: he European and North America Working Classes during the Period of Industrialization (Westport, 1985); Id., “International Labor Markets and Community Building by Migrant Workers in the Atlantic Economies,” in Vecoli and Sinke, A Century of European Migrations, 70-107. 47. Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Indiana, 1992); and Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung: Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2000). 48. Leslie Page Moch, “Introduction,” in Leslie Page Moch and Dirk Hoerder (eds), European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston, 1996), 6. 49. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, Christina Szanton Blanton (eds.), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Amsterdam, 1992). 50. Matteo Sanilippo, Problemi di storiograia dell’emigrazione italiana (Viterbo, 2002), 171-172; and Nancy Foner, “hen and Now or hen to Now: Immigration to New York in Contemporary and Historical Perspective,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 25 (2006), 33-47. 51. Charles Tilly, “Transplanted Networks,” in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics (New York-Oxford, 1990), 79-95. 190 matteo pretelli Africans. Although there is still no commonly agreed upon deinition, many scholars now increasingly apply the term to populations whose mobility was not necessarily imposed on them by traumatic events. According to recent conceptualizations, diasporas may be driven by factors such as labor, trade or the combination of political exile and economic opportunity. Furthermore, unlike older deinitions that simply orient diasporas towards an imagined homeland, new usage also refers to the links between the migrants’ native land and their host country. Earlier views also emphasized the tendency of diasporic groups to not integrate themselves into the host society and remain separate from the dominant majority. Now, however, although a cultural “distinctiveness” is still implied, new deinitions stress the development of forms of cultural hybridism.52 Despite lacking a clear deinition of the term, a growing number of books use the word “diaspora” to refer to European migrant groups scattered around the world. Academics refer to the Irish as a “diasporic group” for example.53 It also applies to other nationalities that migrated to the United States en masse, such as Germans, Poles and Greeks.54 In the Italian case, the term has been used by both Rudolph J. Vecoli and Italian scholar Gianfausto Rosoli, while Donna Gabaccia has talked of many Italian diasporas in reference to the Italian exportation of multiple identities. However, Italian scholar Stefano Luconi believes Italian migrants do not fulill the requirements to be listed as members of a diaspora.55 Now that the Atlantic-centered view of migration has been deconstructed and the perception of mobility as an “exceptional” activity typical of the era of modernization has been rendered obsolete, scholars consider mobility as an innate human practice.56 52. Ngai, “Immigration and Ethnic History,” 365; and homas Faist, “Diaspora and Transnationalism: What Kind of Dance Partners?,” in Rainer Bauböck and homas Faist (eds.), Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, heories and Methods (Amsterdam, 2010), 12-13. 53. Andy Bielenberg (ed.), he Irish Diaspora (Essex, 2000); Kevin Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison: he Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of American History, 90 (2003), 134-162; William Murphy, “Conceiving Irish Diasporas: Irish Migration and Migrant Communities in the Modern Period,” in Mary McAulife, Katherine O’Donnell, Leeann Lane (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Irish History (New York, 2009), 127-146; and Cian T. McMahon, he Global Dimension of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840-1880 (Chapel Hill, 2015). 54. Dirk Hoerder, “he German-Language Diasporas: A Survey, Critique, and Interpretation,” Diaspora, 11 (2002), 7-44; Dominic Pacyha, “Polish Diaspora,” in Melvin Ember and Carol Ember (eds.), Immigrant and Refugee Cultures around the World, 2, (New York, 2004), 254-63; Richard Clogg, he Greek Diaspora in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke 1990); and Dimitris Tziovas, Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture (Surrey, 2009). 55. Gianfausto Rosoli, “he Global Picture of the Italian Diaspora to the Americas,” in Lidio Tomasi et al. (eds.), he Columbus People: Perspectives in Italian Immigration to the Americas and Australia (Staten Island, 1990), 304-322; Rudolph J. Vecoli, “he Italian Diaspora, 1876-1976,” in Robin Cohen (ed.), he Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambrige, 1995), 114-122; Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle, 2000); and Stefano Luconi, “Italians’ Global Migration: A Diaspora?,” Studi Emigrazione/ Migration Studies, 43 (2006), 467-482. 56. Leo Lucassen, “Migration and World History: Reaching a New Frontier,” International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 89-96. 191 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Following the publication in 1995 of British scholar Robin Cohen’s he Cambridge Survey of World Migration, which focuses on the modern era, in 2002 Hoerder published a monumental work encompassing human mobility over the past ten centuries.57 A few years later, American scholar Patrick Manning extended the time frame even further to include human mobility from the year forty thousand B.C. up to the present and assessed cultural encounters through the exchange of languages, customs and technologies among diferent groups of people. his perspective went on to be fully embraced by European scholars like the German-born Hoerder as well as Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen and Ulbe Bosma of Holland, all of whom have started several joint projects with their American colleagues.58 he publication in 2011 of he Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe underlined the substantial role now played by European scholars in international migration history writing.59 Joint undertakings between American and European scholars have also been beneicial for the writing of methodological treatises like What Is Migration History? by Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder and Donna Gabaccia.60 New trends in migration history have consequently broadened the focus on international mobility to consider all the world’s continents. According to some American and European scholars, mobility is also key for antedating the birth of globalization to the 1850s when the global circulation of capital and laborers in the Atlantic area was already taking place, facilitated by greater ease of travel; the availability of capital generated by the English Industrial Revolution and reinvested in American railroads; and a free trade ideology that spurred individual decisions to emigrate.61 American migration historians have likewise inally stripped themselves of “exceptionalist” rhetoric. In the present global conceptualization of mobility, the United States has lost its 57. Robin Cohen (ed.), he Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambrige, 1995); and Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, 2002). See also Dirk Hoerder, “Migrations and Belongings,” in Emily S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870-1945 (CambridgeLondon, 2012), 444-579. 58. Leo Lucassen, “Where Do We Go from Here? New Perspectives on Global Migration History,” International Review of Social History, 49 (2004), 505-510; Id., “Migration and World History: Reaching a New Frontier,” International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 89-96; Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen, Patrick Manning (eds.), Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary Approaches (Leiden-Boston, 2010); Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler, Leo Lucassen (eds.), Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective: An Introduction (Leiden-Boston, 2013); and Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen (eds.) Globalising Migration History: he Eurasian Experience (16th-21st Centuries) (Leiden-Boston, 2014). Italian historian Giovanni Gozzini attempted a comparison between global migration in the early and late 20th century. See “he Global System of International Migrations, 1900 and 2000: A Comparative Approach,” Journal of Global History, 1 (2006), 321-341. 59. Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, Jochen Oltmer (eds.), he Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe: From the 17th century to the present (New York, 2011). 60. Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder, Donna Gabaccia, What Is Migration History? (Cambridge, 2009). 61. Ercole Sori, “Il lavoro globalizzato: L’emigrazione intercontinentale europea, 1800-1914,” Memoria e Ricerca, 14 (2003), 99-158; and Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic,” 1-27. 192 matteo pretelli pivotal role as the main magnet of immigration. As a result, post-Cold-War historians of migration to the United States have chosen to take a methodological perspective aimed at placing American history within a global context. As homas Bender has pointed out, United States history is far from being unique and can only be understood if we compare its experience with those of other countries.62 In the current research on migrants to the United States, a number of earlier myths have been abandoned. he practice of migrants to engage in multiple journeys back and forth across the Atlantic has rendered the notion of a single model of assimilation obsolete.63 Historians like Gabaccia have even contested the idea that the United States was always the best place to migrate in terms of labor opportunities. As she has pointed out, three quarters of the workers coming from southern Europe were unskilled, but in countries like Brazil and Argentina they could enter semi-skilled occupations more easily, or they could even aspire to become merchants or white-collar workers. Independent farmers were also more numerous in those countries than in the United States, while of those who migrated within Europe, artisans and semi-skilled blue-collar workers were equal in number to seasonal, unskilled workers. Finally, the high cost of living in the United States sometimes even made residence overseas unproitable, unless male laborers were joined by their families and women’s work added a supplementary income.64 All in all, the new tendencies in migration studies – though still predominantly oriented towards Atlantic mobility in the age of modernization – now include other mass migratory lows, especially from Russia to Siberia and Central Asia, from China and Japan to South and East Asia, and from India to Southeast Asia and South and East Africa. In particular, Columbia University scholar Adam Mckeown has recognized that Asian migration lows are equal to European ones in their impact on the world economy and are therefore equally worthy of study.65 Indeed, historians are reviewing the biased interpretation whereby Asian migrants were merely following the migration routes traced by the labor demands of European colonialists and that they were unfree in their choice to migrate because they were mostly indentured servants. Scholars have now started to look at these migrants under a new light and believe that, on the contrary, only a minority was subject to indentured servitude. As they argue, the majority of these migrants had full control of strategies that they decided upon with their kin and community networks and included the possibility of returning home.66 Within this interpretative debate, Indian scholar Prabhu P. Mohapatra has criticized Mckeown’s dichotomy of 62. homas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002). 63. Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: he Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, 1993); Marjory Harper, Emigrant Homecomings: he Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000 (Manchester, 2005). 64. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?,” 1115-1134. 65. Adam Mckeown, “Global Migration, 1846-1940,” Journal of World History, 2 (2004), 155-189. 66. David Northrup, “Attraverso i conini: Suggestioni metodologiche,” Contemporanea, 4 (2006), 587-598. 193 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space free/unfree migrants, which in Mohapatra’s opinion are Eurocentric categories hardly applicable to the Asian context in which migrants had complex relations with labor recruiters, who were mostly European colonizers. Yet, Mohapatra has also recognized Mckeown for having contributed to the study of non-European migratory patterns.67 he periodization of migration lows has also assumed a pivotal role in the latest research trends. Reiterating the American centrism typical of the earliest migration studies, many historians long considered 1914 – the year World War I broke out – as an appropriate date with which to indicate the decline of international migration, which they strictly identiied with mass European mobility to the United States. Recently, however, Mckeown has suggested that we rethink this timeframe in light of the global context, since doing so reveals peaks of migration within the Asian continent in the 1920s.68 Bosma has also recommended that we use a diferent periodization to look at 19th- and 20th-century European migration. While around 80 percent of the outlow from the Old World was destined for the United States in 1846-1924, if we extend this survey to 1940 – i.e., after anti-immigration laws were introduced in the 1920s – rates of mobility to the United States tend to be much closer to the total rates of mobility to all other locations in the world.69 Conclusion Historians of European ethnic groups in the United States have also started looking at the intersection between race and migration, with a special focus on the concept of “whiteness.” Speciically, scholars like James Barrett, Matthew Jacobson, Noel Ignatiev and David R. Roediger, among others, have pointed out that immigrants of European ancestry who arrived in the US during the 19th and early 20th century made an efort to be recognized as “white” within the racially stratiied American society. European groups like the Irish and Italians increasingly chose to distance themselves from daily contact with African Americans as a suitable strategy for being accepted by those of Anglo-Saxon stock.70 67. Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “Eurocentrism, Forced Labour, and Global Migration: A Critical Assessment,” International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 110-115. 68. Mckeown, “Global Migration,” 155-156. 69. Ulbe Bosma, “Beyond the Atlantic: Connecting Migration and World History in the Age of Imperialism, 1840-1940,” International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 116-123. 70. For an overview of the scholarly debate, see Ngai, “Immigration and Ethnic History,” 367; Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: he New History of Race in America,” he Journal of American History, 89 (2002), 154-173; Andrew Hartman, “he Rise and Fall of Whiteness Studies,” Race & Class, 46 (2004), 22-38; and Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Becoming Caucasian: Vicissitudes of Whiteness in American Politics and Culture,” in Paul Spickard (ed.), Race and Immigration in the United States – New Histories (New YorkLondon, 2012), 131-147. he debate also involved European historians tapping into a transatlantic dialogue. For the Italian-American case see the contributions by, among others, Italian scholar Stefano Luconi, 194 matteo pretelli Another recent historiographical focus in migration studies deals with the role of the nation state within a transnational context. Not only have scholars analyzed the ability of ethnic groups of European descent to lobby US policy-makers,71 but a new transatlantic intellectual dialogue has also begun to address the departure points of migrants to expand on an earlier perspective almost exclusively focused on arrival points.72 Numerous other scholars are looking at the role of the European migrant sending states, which in an age of mass migration worked to establish close relations with the communities of their compatriots (or former nationals) abroad to use them as lobbyists in favor of the international interests of their home country. hese studies have addressed the policies of sending states not only towards migrants in the US but also those in other receiving countries. By taking this approach, European and Europe-based scholars have been at the forefront of innovation. US scholar Nancy Green, who works in France, and French historian François Weil, who edited a collection of essays by American and European scholars, have analyzed the policies of departure states towards their migrants, often in terms of the migrants’ role in the nation-building process.73 Other scholars have surveyed a few cases in major sending states like Italy, Ireland and Germany that reconnected to their diasporas by carrying out various social, cultural and political initiatives.74 Within this transnational realm, sociologists and anthropologists also now look at Americans of European descent who travel back to the country of their ancestors or to the “imagined” place from which their diasporas originated, as in the case of Jewish Americans (many of whom are of European ancestry) who visit Israel. Historian Dorothy Noyes has explored “roots tourism” from a historical perspective and has surveyed the case of Italian Americans travelling to fascist Italy in the late 1920s. In multicultural America, African and Asian Americans carry out this practice by traveling to West Africa and Asia, respectively.75 From Paesani to White Ethnics: he Italian Experience in Philadelphia (New York, 2001); and “Whiteness and Ethnicity in Italian-American Historiography,” in Jerome Krase (ed.), he Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies (Stony Brook, 2011), 146-163. 71. Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: he Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge-London, 2000); and Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton, 2012). 72. See the issue of the Journal of American Ethnic History, 13 (1993), “European Ports of Emigration.” 73. Nancy L. Green, François Weil (eds.), Citizenship and hose Who Leave: he Politics of Emigration and Expatriation (Urbana-Chicago, 2007). 74. Stefano Luconi, La “ diplomazia parallela”: Il regime fascista e la mobilitazione degli italo-americani (Milan, 2000); Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: he Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); John Day Tully, “Ethnicity, Security, and Public Diplomacy: Irish-Americans and Ireland’s Neutrality in World War II,” in Kenneth A. Osgood and Brian C. Etheridge (eds.), he United States and Public Diplomacy: New Directions in Cultural and International History (Leiden-Boston, 2010), 81-102; Michael Collyer, Emigrant Nations: Policies and Ideologies of Emigrant Engagement (New York, 2013); and Stefan Manz, Constructing a German Diaspora: he “Greater German Empire”, 1871-1914 (New York, 2014). 75. he vast literature includes: Mary E. Kelly, “Ethnic Pilgrimages of Lithuania Descent in Lithuania,” Sociological Spectrum, 20 (2000), 65-91; Bayo Holsey, “Transatlantic Dreaming: Slavery, Tourism, and 195 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space To conclude, the historiography of European migrations to the United States has largely beneitted from the adoption of a global perspective, which has helped to undermine earlier biased perceptions of the United States as an “exceptional” country allegedly able to welcome and assimilate people of all ethnicities. During the era of modernization, transatlantic migrants from Europe were far from the only relevant instance of international mobility. On the contrary, they were part of a global context in which mobility was a common practice that had been carried out by humankind since time immemorial. An important and still evolving scholarly dialogue between American and European historians has been fundamental in reaching this new global awareness. Diasporic Encounters,” in Fran Markowitz and Anders H. Stefansson (eds.), Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return (Lanham, 2004), 166-82; Andrea Louie, Chineseness across Borders: Renegotiating Chinese Identities in China and the United States (Durham-London, 2004); Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard, “Mae’n Bryd I ddod Adref – It’s Time to Come Home: Exploring the Contested Emotional Geographies of Wales,” in Tim Coles and Dallen J. Timothy (eds.), Tourism, Diasporas and Space (London, 2004), 233-245; Nadia Y. Kim, “Finding Our Way Home: Korean Americans, ‘Homeland’ Trips and Cultural Foreignness,” in Takeyuki Tsuda (ed.), Diasporic Homecoming: Ethnic Return Migration in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, 2009), 305-24; Shaul Kelner, Tours hat Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York-London, 2010); and Duncan Sim and Murray Leith, “Diaspora Tourists and the Scottish Homecomings 2009,” Journal of Heritage Tourism, 8 (2013), 259-74. See also Dorothy Noyes, “From the Paese to the Patria: An Italian American Pilgrimage to Rome in 1929,” in Luisa Del Giudice (ed.), Studies in Italian American Folklore (Logan, 1993), 127-52. 196 Transatlantic Histories of Energy during the Cold War: American and European Approaches Elisabetta Bini In June 2012, he Journal of American History devoted an entire issue to the topic of Oil in American History.1 he over twenty articles that were included addressed a variety of themes, such as the relationship between oil and empire, the importance oil has had in shaping the “American Century” and US foreign policy, the cultural aspects and implications of oil, labor and environmental protests against the oil industry, and the forms of conspicuous consumption made possible by the oil economy. hat same year, he Journal of American Studies published a whole issue on Oil Culture, with essays on the visual and written representations of petroleum during the twentieth century, in works of art, documentaries, museums and other institutions.2 While the scholarship on the history of oil – and more generally energy – in the US is extremely rich, it has often remained on the margins of mainstream narratives of American history. he two journal issues show the importance this topic has acquired over the last ten years in diferent disciplines and its strong link to contemporary domestic and international aspects of American political, social, economic and cultural life. Both issues drew on a series of debates about the implications of the world’s reliance on petroleum, which followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, they intersected with a wider set of analyses and methodological approaches coming from a growing ield of study, that of “energy humanities,” which has argued that the humanities might have an important role in providing useful answers to the current geological era – the “Anthropocene” – dominated by climate change and resource scarcity.3 1. Oil in American History, special issue of he Journal of American History, 99 (June 2012). 2. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (eds.), Oil Culture, special issue of he Journal of American Studies, 46 (May 2012); see also Marcelo Bucheli (ed.), “A Special Issue on the Oil Industry,” he Business History Review, 84 (Summer 2010). 3. See for example the Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University, and the research group Petrocultures at the University of Alberta. Daniel Yergin, he Quest: 197 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space his chapter examines recent scholarship concerning the history of US-European energy relations during the Cold War. As David S. Painter has argued, “understanding how oil fueled the ‘American Century’ is fundamental to understanding the sources, dynamics, and consequences of US global dominance.”4 Yet, scholarship about the Cold War and studies about US and international oil politics have seldom intersected. While books about the Cold War, such as Odd Arne Westad’s he Global Cold War, deal only in passing wih oil issues, publications about oil, such as Daniel Yergin’s he Prize, often do not address larger questions having to do with the Cold War or even international politics. With few exceptions, the same is true of the historiography about transatlantic relations during the twentieth century, which has rarely included oil issues in its framework of analysis.5 he aim of this chapter is to relate a series of publications dealing speciically with energy to the wider historiographical debate about the importance of “rethinking American history in the global age.”6 It seeks to establish a dialogue and exchange between studies about energy on the one hand and studies about the history of transatlantic relations, decolonization, and the Cold War, on the other. As Westad has argued, “the increase in energy supplies available for industrial production and destruction was at the core of the Cold War; it could be said that energy drove the conlict in more than one sense. Oil and nuclear power increased the potential for military production, but cheap energy also promised a new life for ordinary people, by making industrial jobs more widely available and less burdensome, and by making goods cheaper.”7 Access to oil shaped in important ways relations between the US and the USSR, as well as between the two superpowers, single European countries and oil producers. Until the latter started nationalizing their resources in the 1970s, the US controlled over two thirds of the world’s oil wealth, followed by the USSR. Domestic oil supplies and control over foreign oil were crucial in establishing America’s international position during the Cold War, providing the fuel needed for its military apparatus, assuring its industrial growth and allowing it to project its model abroad, by selling cheap gasoline and cars to Europeans. his complex story of how oil shaped the “American Century” intersected in Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York, 2011); Toyin Falola and Ann Genova, he Politics of the Global Oil Industry: An Introduction (Westport, 2005). 4. David S. Painter, “Oil and the American Century,” he Journal of American History, 99 (June 2012), 24. 5. Odd Arne Westad, he Global Cold War: hird World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005); Daniel Yergin, he Prize: he Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York, 1991). On the history of transatlantic relations, one exception is Mary Nolan, he Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (Cambridge, 2012). 6. homas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002); see also Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Rafaella Baritono (eds.), Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective (Turin, 2013). 7. Odd Arne Westad, “he Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” in he Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. I: Origins, ed. Melvyn P. Leler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge, 2010), 12. 198 elisabetta bini important ways with the redeinition of US-European relations during the Cold War, a topic that scholars have just started to examine. On the one hand, oil was central to the Marshall Plan, allowing western European countries to rebuild their economies, while at the same time assuring their dependence on a resource controlled by the US. On the other hand, oil played a central role in two of the main crises of European colonialism, namely the Anglo-Iranian crisis of 1951-1953 and the Suez crisis of 1956, which led the US to substitute Great Britain and France in maintaining stability in the Mediterranean and assuring access to Middle Eastern oil resources.8 As I will show in this chapter, one of the consequences of the Suez crisis was not only to push Western European countries to pursue a more forceful economic and political integration inside the European Economic Community (EEC), but also to increase commercial relations between Western Europe and the USSR. his aspect of the Cold War has only recently been addressed by scholars, who have highlighted the importance these exchanges had in shaping transatlantic debates during the 1960s and, most importantly, in the context of détente.9 It was especially the 1973 oil shock, however, that transformed the Atlantic Alliance, leading to what some scholars have argued was a crisis in transatlantic relations.10 he conlict revolved around energy security, and involved a wider set of issues having to do with the future of North-South relations and of the western world as it had emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War. Scholars have begun to investigate the role oil producers had in the oil shock, but much remains to be done to integrate the energy crisis into the international history of the late twentieth century, and to acknowledge the importance the hird World had in shaping the transatlantic world. 11 Reshaping Oil Empires in the Middle East Some of the most signiicant studies about US-European energy relations were published during the 1980s, by a generation of scholars that emphasized the importance of analyzing the role oil has had in shaping US foreign policy and, more generally, international relations. Largely inluenced by the oil shocks of the 1970s, this scholarship traced the historical roots of American oil policies in the Middle East, and their challenge to British and French oil interests. Most studies focused on US involvement in the region during 8. Ethan B. Kapstein, he Insecure Alliance: Energy Crises and Western Politics Since 1944 (New York, 1990). 9. See for instance the conference Oil, Gas and Pipelines: New Perspectives on the Role of Soviet Energy during the Cold War, University of Zurich, (January 14-16, 2015). 10. Daniel Möckli, “he EC-Nine and Transatlantic Conlict during the October War and the Oil Crisis, 1973-4,” in European-American Relations and the Middle East. From Suez to Iraq, ed. Daniel Möckli and Victor Mauer (London, 2010), 77-92. 11. Toward a History of the New International Economic Order, special issue of Humanity: an International Journal of Human Rights, 6 (Spring 2015). 199 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space the 1930s and 1940s, when the discovery of large quantities of crude in Saudi Arabia shifted “the center of gravity of world oil production... from the Gulf-Caribbean area to the Middle East area,” as geologist Everette DeGolyer put it in 1943.12 Some of the irst and most important publications on this topic focused on how America’s growing oil interests in the Middle East intersected with the transformation of imperial rule following the end of the First World War. As William Stivers and others have argued, the British Empire emerged out of the war as a winning power, and assigned a growing importance to Iraq, as a link between Egypt and India, and as crucial to maintaining the security of the Persian oilields – controlled by the state-owned company Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) – along with that of the Abadan reinery. During the 1920s, the British Empire used oil not only to build its military power, but also to establish imperial alliances. he Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC), later renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), served as the main tool to consolidate British rule over mandatory Iraq and, more generally, the Middle East.13 Early scholarship emphasized the diferences that characterized British and American approaches of oil politics, which emerged after the Sanremo Conference of 1920, when the British accepted French participation in the TPC, raising the opposition of US representatives. he American government, along with private oil companies, had been strong supporters of an open door policy in the Middle East, arguing that national interest would be best served if irms were allowed to operate freely with minimum government intervention. As such, at the Peace Conference held in Paris in 1919, the US had endorsed the establishment of a mandate system in the former Ottoman Empire, but refused to be directly involved in it. It argued that France and Great Britain should administer the mandates, while allowing US companies to access to their markets.14 he TPC, which eventually included American irms, assured Great Britain a series of international alliances, ratiied by the Red Line Agreement of 1928, which disciplined the extraction of oil in the former Ottoman Empire, limited competition among its signatories, and enforced price stability on the world market. Nonetheless, US-British relations in the Middle East deteriorated rapidly, as a result of British imperial decline and of the rise of the US as one of the leading world powers. While Great Britain was 12. Don Tinkle, Mr. De: a Biography of Everette Lee DeGolyer (Boston, 1970), 269; Ronald W. Ferrier and Alexander Fursenko (eds.), Oil in the World Economy (London, 1989). 13. William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, 1982); Gregory Nowell, Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel, 1900-1939 (Ithaca, 1994); Marian Kent, Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil, 1900-1920 (Basingstoke, 1976). 14. Fiona Venn, Oil Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 1986); Ead., he Anglo-American Oil War: International Politics and the Struggle for Foreign Petroleum, 1912-1945 (London, 2010); B.J.C. McKercher (ed.), Anglo-American Relations in the 1920s: he Struggle for Supremacy (Basingstoke, 1991); Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinsky (eds.), Britain and the Middle East in the 1930s: Security Problems 1935-39 (Basingstoke, 1992); Pinella Di Gregorio, Oro nero d’Oriente. Arabi, petrolio e imperi tra le due guerre mondiali (Rome, 2006). 200 elisabetta bini increasingly unable to meet the costs tied to the defense of and control over its overextended empire, the US assigned Middle Eastern oil a crucial role in maintaining its national security.15 One of the irst books to deal with US changing approaches to the Middle East was Aaron David Miller’s Search for Security, which placed US oil policies in Saudi Arabia in the context of a larger shift from isolation to an involvement in Middle Eastern afairs during the Second World War. According to the author, while the US administration and American oil companies had already expressed interest in Middle East concessions, until the late 1930s they accepted Great Britain’s leading role in the region. It was only during the Second World War, particularly after 1943, that the US changed its view, in the context of a heated debate about the depletion of national resources and the risk that the country might become a net importer of oil. In 1944, the State Department issued a paper titled “Foreign Petroleum Policy of the United States,” which pointed out that the resources of the Western Hemisphere were needed to assure US security, that American companies should be encouraged to search for oil abroad, and that Saudi oil should be used to reduce Europe’s dependence on oil from the US, Canada and Latin America. By doing so, the US administration started challenging the position of the British Empire in the Middle East, along with the Red Line Agreement, and contributed to redeine relations among European empires and between Europe and the US.16 In 1915, Saudi King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud had signed an agreement with Great Britain, according to which he renounced his sovereign rights in exchange for British protection, a policy that was conirmed even after the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was oicially established in 1932. he situation changed radically after the two American oil companies present in Saudi Arabia – Socal and Texaco – found vast amounts of crude and, most importantly, in the context of the Second World War. In 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared Saudi oil of vital interest for the US, and pointed out that it “was too important a commodity to be left entirely to the companies, to the British, or the Saudis.”17 He extended Lend-Lease assistance to the kingdom, thus explicitly challenging British policies. he US further consolidated its presence in Saudi Arabia with the creation in 1947 of the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO). While Miller’s book mostly focused on American foreign policy, other scholars have dealt with the role played by ARAMCO in furthering US interests in Saudi Arabia. In 15. Edwin Black, British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement: he West’s Secret Pact to Get Mideast Oil (Westport, 2011); Daniel Yergin, he Prize: he Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York, 1991); James H. Bamberg, he History of the British Petroleum Company, Vol. 2, he Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928-1954 (Cambridge, 1994). 16. Aaron David Miller, Search for Security: Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy, 1939-1949 (Chapel Hill, NC.,1980); see also Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1978). 17. Miller, Search for Security, 207. 201 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space particular, they have examined the peculiar relationship established between the private irm and the US administration, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Irvine Anderson’s Aramco, the United States, and Saudi Arabia was one of the most important books to do so. An expert on the history of oil, and the author of he Standard-Vacuum Oil Company and United States East Asian Policy, 1933-1941, Anderson examined the debates between private American oil companies and the US administration after the oil discoveries of the late 1930s. According to the author, irms, the American government and the Saudi monarchy converged around the developmend of Saudi oil, in order to satisfy diferent interests: while the US administration aimed at preserving domestic oil reserves, Ibn Saud needed money to maintain political stability, whereas Socal and Texaco lacked the inancial means to expand oil production. All three actors considered the British presence in the Middle East as an obstacle to the achievement of their aims.18 One of the most interesting aspects of this scholarship has been to highlight the wartime debates about the relationship between the US government and private oil companies, which had important implications for the post-World War II period. he 1943 decision to create the Petroleum Reserves Corporation (PRC) represented a particularly important turning point. Supported by Roosevelt, by Secretary of the Interior and Petroleum Administration for War, Harold L. Ickes, as well as by the military, the PRC tried to establish government control over the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC, later ARAMCO). As a New Dealer, Ickes had a speciic interpretation of the role the state and the government should have in shaping US foreign and domestic oil politics, and aroused great criticism on the part of private oil interests. he reasons for the failure of the PRC have been the object of diferent interpretations: whereas Miller has argued that Socal and Texaco undermined the PRC plan to acquire ownership over CASOC, Anderson has pointed out that “Ickes himself terminated the negotiations because of pressure brought to bear by Socony-Vacuum and Jersey,” two of the major US oil companies, which wanted to limit federal control over the oil industry.19 Relations between the government and private oil companies shaped US policies in important ways. In order to control Middle Eastern oil resources, the State Department proposed to sign an agreement with Great Britain, according to which the two countries would create a Joint Petroleum Commission in charge of monitoring world oil production. However, Roosevelt withdrew the proposal because of opposition by the industrial world and by members of Congress. his issue has been at the center of Michael Stof’s Oil, War, and American Security, which has mostly focused on the failure of the US government to develop a policy grounded in the public interest. As he put it, rather polemically, “government planners had attempted to institutionalize public responsibility over oil in 18. Irvine H. Anderson, Aramco, the United States and Saudi Arabia: A Study of the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933-1950 (Princeton, 1981). 19. Anderson, Aramco, the United States and Saudi Arabia, 56. 202 elisabetta bini order to inluence its developments and distribution for the good of the nation... he efort failed...[American oil companies] became the agents of national policy...”20 In Stof’s view, the Anglo-American deal represented a failed opportunity to plan postwar international oil policies in the Middle East. Negotiations with the British led instead to the signing of an agreement in 1944, according to which the British accepted not to interfere with US interests in Saudi Arabia, while at the same time subscribing to the principles of equal access and opportunity that were part of the Atlantic Charter. he outcome of these debates was a profound redeinition of the relationship between government and business, particularly in the ield of foreign economic policy. Indeed, as Robert Keohane has argued, oil companies succeeded in “encouraging governmental activism in defense of their foreign oil interests, while simultaneously ensuring that the companies would retain both their autonomy and their ability to capture oligopolistic rents.”21 he US government de facto assigned a handful of private companies the task of assuring the production and distribution of Middle Eastern oil. A series of events in the mid-1940s were crucial in changing this relationship. In 1945, after the Yalta Summit, Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud to discuss relations between the US and Saudi Arabia. By that point, the president considered Saudi oil to be crucial not only for national security, but also for the redeinition of American world hegemony after the Second World War. Not surprisingly, he had chosen Edward R. Stettinius Jr., a convinced supporter of businessgovernment cooperation, as Secretary of State. It was in this context that in 1947 Standard Oil (New Jersey) and Socony joined Socal and Texaco and became partners of ARAMCO, a company that soon became one of the main tools of US foreign economic policy.22 he creation of ARAMCO, along with a series of commercial agreements between the main Anglo-American oil companies, put an end to the Red Line Agreement, provoking a ierce opposition on the part of the French government, as well as the state-owned Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP). he issue of French-US relations has received less scholarly attention, compared to that of Anglo-American policies. However, as Anand Toprani has recently pointed out, given that the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) provided France with 20 percent of its oil imports, the CFP was strongly critical about US and British eforts to expand production in countries they controlled directly.23 By the late 1940s, Saudi 20. Michael B. Stof, Oil, War, and American Security: he Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941-1947 (New Haven, 1980), 207-208. 21. Robert O. Keohane, “State Power and Industry Inluence: American Foreign Oil Policy in the 1940s,” International Organization, 36 (Winter 1982), 167. 22. Henrietta Larson, Evelyn Knowlton and Charles Popple, New Horizons, 1927-1950 (New York, 1971); Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil: he Industry, the State System and the World Economy (University Park, 1991); Stephen J. Randall, United States Foreign Oil Policy since World War I: for Proits and Security (Montreal, 2007). 23. Anand Toprani, “he French Connection: A New Perspective on the End of the Red Line Agreement, 1945-1948,” Diplomatic History, 36 (April 2012), 261-299; see also Jean Rondot, La Compagnie Française 203 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Arabia and Iran had emerged as the main oil producers, whose crude supplied European markets and, partly, American ones. With the support of their government, private US oil companies were able to establish their position in Saudi Arabia and, most importantly, overcome supporters of state-led forms of intervention in the economy, contributing to the decline of Roosevelt’s eforts to control the oil industry. For the following two decades, the international oil market was dominated by the so-called “Seven Sisters,” ive of which were American companies (Standard Oil of New Jersey, Mobil Oil, Texaco, Gulf Oil, Socal), one British (APOC), and one Anglo-Dutch (Royal Dutch Shell).24 One of the best studies of the origins and long-term consequences of these changes is Painter’s Oil and the American Century. Drawing on the scholarship about corporatism, Painter was one of the irst scholars to examine the relationship between the state and oil companies, both domestically and internationally, from the 1920s to the 1950s. According to the author, the New Deal introduced a system based on private-public partnership, which was established to manage the domestic oil market and then exported to Saudi Arabia and, later, Europe and the Middle East. his form of cooperation was irst tested not in Saudi Arabia, but rather in Latin America, particularly in Venezuela and Mexico (after it nationalized its oil resources in 1938), where the US administration backed American oil companies by ofering its support to conservative forces against oil nationalism. After the Second World War, the American government endorsed private interests operating in the Middle East, assigning them the task of promoting US foreign policy. In so doing, it became “deeply involved in maintaining an international environment in which private companies could operate with security and proit.”25 One of the symbols of the new partnership between business and government, which lasted well into the 1970s, was the building of the Trans-Arabian pipeline (TAPLINE) in the late 1940s, which has been the object of several interesting studies. he initial proposal came in 1944 from Ickes, who argued that the PRC should be in charge of linking the Saudi oilields to the Mediterranean, thus avoiding the Suez canal and making cheap oil more readily available to Europeans. Most American companies, however, along with members of Congress, opposed the project, pointing out that the pipeline would lood the US market with cheap Saudi crude, and that it represented a threat to laissezfaire policies. Furthermore, the State Department argued that “a government-owned pipeline would raise the specter of a US sphere of inluence in the Middle East.”26 As des Pétroles: du franc-or au pétrole-franc (New York, 1977). 24. A. Sampson, he Seven Sisters. he Great Oil Companies and the World hey Made (London, 1975); Tyler Priest, “he Dilemma of Oil Empire,” he Journal of American History, 99 (June 2012), 237. 25. David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: he Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941-1954 (Baltimore, 1986), 1. 26. Douglas Little, “Pipeline Politics: America, TAPLINE, and the Arabs,” he Business History Review, 64 (Summer 1990), 259. 204 elisabetta bini Douglas Little has pointed out, US oicials carried out an intense debate about where to terminate the pipeline. While initial plans focused on Haifa, in British Palestine, US representatives worried that the pipeline might become the object of opposition in the context of discussions about the creation of Israel. In particular, they worried that the low of oil might be interrupted by local forms of sabotage. Together with ARAMCO businessmen, they thus decided to reroute TAPLINE towards Lebanon. In the process, Syrians and Lebanese used US oil policies to challenge the French mandate system, and considered “the proposed American pipeline as an easy way to break IPC’s oil monopoly in their country.”27 Since the 1980s, the history of US-Saudi relations has been the object of a growing scholarship.28 Many studies have emphasized the diferences that existed between US and European policies, highlighting the autonomy enjoyed by the Saudi king, compared to the colonial relations established in European empires. In a relatively recent book, America’s Kingdom, Robert Vitalis has called for a revision of scholarship that has emphasized the exceptionalism of the US presence in Saudi Arabia. Drawing on studies about the need for historians to integrate US history into world history, Vitalis has argued that there might be more similarities than diferences between US and European policies in the Middle East. He has thus challenged the idea that American economic expansion, through corporations such as ARAMCO, should be considered as radically diferent from that of other imperial powers. According to the author, the forms of imperial rule established by Great Britain in the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire were “not so diferent from [those promoted by the US in] Panama and El Salvador in the same era.”29 27. Little, “Pipeline Politics,” 268; see also Douglas Little, American Orientalism: he United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill, 2008); Irene L. Gendzier, Notes from the Mineield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945-1958 (New York, 1997); Zohar Segev, “Struggle for Cooperation and Integration: American Zionists and Arab Oil, 1940s,” Middle Eastern Studies, 42 (September 2006), 819-830; Rania Ghosn, “La pianiicazione e costruzione di una infrastruttura energetica: il caso della Trans-Arabian pipeline (Tapline),” 900. Per una storia del tempo presente, special issue on Risorse energetiche e democrazia nell’età contemporanea, ed. Elisabetta Bini and Simone Selva, 4 (Fall 2010), 41-58; Zachary Cuyler, “Building the Earth”: Labor Politics, Technopolitics, and Tapline in Lebanon, 1950-1964, M.A. thesis, Georgetown University, 2014. 28. See for example Rachel Bronson, hicker than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (Oxford, 2006); Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: the Story of Aramco and the Saudi King (Boston, 1999); Parker Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States: Birth of a Security Partnership (Bloomington, 1998); homas W. Lippmann, Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia (Boulder, 2004); Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis (eds.), Counternarratives: History, Society and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (New York, 2003). 29. Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2006), 10; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. by Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, 1998); Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review, 16 (2001), 1692-1720; Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper and Kevin W. Moore (eds.), Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New York, 2006). 205 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space One of the merits of Vitalis’s book has been to examine the labor relations ARAMCO established in Saudi Arabia during the 1950s and 1960s. he approach is particularly original, given that scholars have tended to focus their attention on the diplomatic and political aspects of oil, or have adopted the category of the “rentier state” to highlight the efects oil revenues had on oil-producing countries’ institutions and societies.30 he author’s approach has been largely inluenced by the rich debates about the interplay between US domestic and foreign policy, and the importance of race in shaping American international relations.31 Vitalis has argued that ARAMCO exported to Saudi Arabia a model “rooted in Jim Crow,” with its ideas of “white supremacy, norms of discrimination, and segregation and, at its margins, of paternalistic racial uplift.”32 Such a model drew on and replicated the forms of segregation that had characterized mining industries in the American South, as well as the expansion of US businesses in Latin America in the early twentieth century, thus continuing a “long, unbroken legacy of hierarchy across the world’s mineral frontiers.”33 he company divided workers by nationality and race, separating them in their working and living spaces in order to undermine their ability to collectively organize. In numerous instances, workers from diferent nationalities (Saudis, Italians, Pakistanis) challenged the forms of racial discrimination introduced by ARAMCO, by organizing strikes that company representatives and government oicials labelled as expressions of communism.34 In this sense, US policies in Saudi Arabia were not so diferent from those of Great Britain in Iran or Burma, where APOC established company towns, reineries and oil ields based on violence and racial segregation, an issue that has received growing attention.35 Since the publication of Vitalis’s book, several scholars have highlighted the importance of examining the social implications of oil regimes, and not only the economic, political 30. Hossein Mahdavy, “he Patterns and Problems of Economic Development in Rentier States: he Case of Iran,” in Studies in Economic History of the Middle East, ed. M.A. Cook (Oxford, 1970); Hazen Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani (eds.), he Rentier State (London, 1987). 31. homas Borstelmann, he Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, 2003); Mary Louise Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2000); Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1951-1960 (Cambridge, 2000). 32. Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude: An Essay on American Exceptionalism, Hierarchy, and Hegemony in the Gulf,” Diplomatic History, 26 (April 2002), 200. 33. Vitalis, America’s Kingdom, 18; Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: the Design of American Company Towns (London, 1995). 34. Ian Seccombe, “A Disgrace to American Enterprise: Italian Labor and the Arabian American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia, 1944-56,” Immigrants and Minorities, 5 (November 1986), 233-257. 35. Petter Nora and Terisa Turner (eds.), Oil and Class Struggle (London, 1980); Mark Crinson, “Abadan: Planning and Architecture under the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company,” Planning Perspectives, 12 (1997), 341-359; Katayoun Shaiee, “A Petro-Formula and its World: Calculating Proits, Labour and Production in the Assembling of Anglo-Iranian Oil,” Economy and Society, 41 (2012), 585-614; Kaveh Ehsani, he Social History of Labor in the Iranian Oil Industry (Amsterdam, 2014); Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, Kaveh Ehsani (eds.), Working for Oil: Social Histories of Labor in Petroleum (New York, forthcoming). 206 elisabetta bini and diplomatic ones. Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy has opened up new ways of thinking about the relationship between oil and democracy, not only in oil-producing but also in oil-consuming countries. By critiquing the literature on rentier states and the “oil curse,” and its tendency to explain the forms of authoritarianism that often characterize oil-producing countries in terms of oil revenues, Mitchell has argued for the need to move beyond the idea that the “oil curse [is] an aliction only of the governments that depend on its income.”36 In particular, he has pointed out that scholars need to examine “the ways in which oil is extracted, processed, shipped and consumed, the powers of oil as a concentrated source of energy, or the apparatus that turns this fuel into forms of aluence and power.”37 By linking the analysis of democracy to the materiality of oil, Mitchell’s book allows for a new understanding of post-World War II democracy, in the Middle East as well as in Europe and the US. In his view, the shift from coal-based to oil-based economies had profound implications for democratic life and institutions: while the extraction of coal requires large numbers of miners who work together underground, the extraction of oil is carried out by a small contingent of skilled workers. In Mitchell’s view, the material qualities of coal and oil inluenced the establishment of democracy in Europe, the US and the Middle East throughout the twentieth century. On the one hand, coal miners had much greater control over the entire process of production, transportation and distribution of resources. hey were thus able to organize mass protests revolving around strikes and trade unions, and inluenced in important ways the establishment of mass-based forms of social democratic life in Europe and the US, between the late nineteenth and the irst decades of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the oil workforce employed in the desert or ofshore was much smaller and could be controlled more easily. Furthermore, the oil industry kept the transport and distribution of petroleum irmly under control, and was thus able to reroute its oil tankers whenever social unrest or instability emerged in some oil-producing country. As Mitchell puts it, “Unlike the movement of coal, the low of oil could not readily be assembled into a machine that enabled large numbers of people to exercise novel forms of political power.”38 According to Mitchell, the post-World War II period brought a profound redeinition of “relations between labour forces and energy lows,” which had important consequences on international relations between Europe, the US and oil producers. In the second half of the 1940s, US oil companies – with the support of the State Department – exported to Europe a model of industrial relations that limited workers’ right to bargain. he United States’ emphasis on the importance for Europe of substituting oil for coal thus had deep 36. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London, 2011), 2. 37. Ibid. 38. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 39. On these aspects see also Timothy Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy,” Economy & Society, 38 (August 2009), 399-432. 207 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space implications for coal miners and, indirectly, democracy, especially in the context of the new forms of radicalism that characterized the “battle for coal” in Great Britain, France and Germany in the late 1940s. In this view, Marshall Plan aid transformed Europe’s energy system and, with it, coal miners’ “ability to interrupt the low of energy [which] had given organised labour the power to demand the improvements to collective life that had democratised Europe.”39 One of the most original aspects of Mitchell’s book is the link between changing forms of democracy in postwar Europe and the Middle East. According to the author, US oil interests in the oil-producing world translated into the support of authoritarian regimes and the pursuit of profoundly anti-labor policies. his was clear in the case of TAPLINE, whose route was changed to avoid anti-Zionist feelings, as well as workers’ protests in the Haifa reinery. Once Syria accepted to have the pipeline pass through its territory, the CIA organized a coup to put a military – and more accomodating – government in power. his was true of other oil-producing countries as well, such as Lebanon and Iran, where the US “engineered the postwar relationship between oil and democracy.”40 Oil, the Cold War, and the Marshall Plan With the end of the Second World War, relations between the US and Great Britain changed profoundly, as the US established its position as the world oil leader and sought to secure Middle Eastern oil resources for European reconstruction and against the USSR. Conlicts between the two superpowers emerged in the Middle East shortly after the end of the war, leading some historians to argue that the Cold War might have started in Iran rather than in Europe.41 Tensions arose when soviet troops refused to withdraw from Azerbaijan even after British and American ones had left, and demanded that a Soviet-Iranian oil irm be created. While it did not represent the beginning of the Cold War, it did contribute to increase US fears of a soviet expansion of its sphere of interest.42 Between the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s, oil was central to western European economic reconstruction, and reshaped relations between the US and Europe, as well as between European empires and their colonies. hanks to American aid, oil 39. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 29. 40, Ibid., 105. 41. Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: he Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston, 2009). 42. Hamilton Lytle, he Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1941-1953 (New York, 1987); James Clark, “Oil, the Cold War, and the Crisis in Azerbaijan of March 1946,” Oriente Moderno, 23 (2004), 557 574; Natalia I. Yegorova, “he ‘Iran Crisis’ of 1945-1946: a View from the Russian Archives,” Cold War International History Project, Working Paper no. 15 (May 1996); Geofrey Roberts, “Moscow’s Cold War on the Periphery: Soviet Policy in Greece, Iran, and Turkey, 1943-8,” Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (January 2011), 58-81. 208 elisabetta bini increasingly substituted coal as the main source of energy used for industrial production and, partly, heating and electricity. It fueled transportation and modernized European agriculture, promoting its mechanization and providing fertilizers. he importance acquired by oil made Western Europe strongly dependent on a resource controlled by the US, particularly by private American oil companies, which came to play a prominent role in postwar European economies, with the support of the State Department.43 Oil was especially important in deining and shaping the Marshall Plan, an issue historians have surprisingly overlooked. Over the last thirty years, scholars have devoted an increased attention to the study of the Marshall Plan.44 hey have thoroughly analyzed the interaction between US and European actors and have examined American forms of inluence on the European economy, society and culture. Challenging the idea that the US was able to export its own model of economic growth, they have argued that in the late 1940s and early 1950s western European industrialists and politicians selectively appropriated speciic elements of America’s “politics of productivity,” based on Keynesianism, high wages and increased levels of consumption. However, with few exceptions they have mostly ignored the role oil had in the Marshall Plan and, thus, some of the ways in which the US deined its international position in the aftermath of the Second World War.45 Painter has been one of the few scholars to address this issue, arguing that the Marshall Plan provided the funds necessary to buy Middle Eastern oil and the technology and expertise to search for oil and natural gas in Europe and build new pipelines, allowing several European companies to rebuild and expand their national industries. As he has put it, “more than 10 percent of the total aid extended under the Marshall Plan inanced imports of dollar oil from U.S. companies.”46 Of the $ 13 billion provided, $ 1 million were devoted to oil and $ 400 million to coal and machinery. While the Marshall Plan created markets for American oil companies, it also reconigured Western Europe’s energy patterns and relations. Whereas before the Second World War western Europe depended on coal for 90 percent of its energy requirements, after the war “oil increased its share of Western European energy consumption from about 10 percent in 1947 to almost 43. Yergin, he Prize; David S. Painter, “Oil, Resources, and the Cold War, 1945-1962,” in he Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Leler and Westad, 486-507. 44. See in particular Michael J. Hogan, he Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge, 1986); Alan S. Milward, he European Rescue of the Nation-State (London-New York, 1992); David W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction, 1945-1955 (London-New York, 1992); Greg Behrman, he Most Noble Adventure: he Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe (New York, 2007); Walter Millis, Winning the Peace: he Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (New York, 2008). One of the few exceptions is Nolan, he Transatlantic Century. 45. See in particular David S. Painter, “he Marshall Plan and Oil,” Cold War History, 9 (May 2009), 159-175; Ethan B. Kapstein, he Insecure Alliance: Energy Crises and Western Politics Since 1944 (New York, 1990); Yergin, he Prize, 423-425. 46. Painter, “he Marshall Plan and Oil,” 160. 209 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space 15 percent in 1951 and to 32.3 percent in 1960.”47 Marshall Plan aid was also used to fund the expansion of Western Europe’s reining industry, allowing for the import of crude rather than reined oil, and lowering the price to be paid to US oil companies and thus the dollar drain. he US emphasis on the importance of supplying oil to Western Europe had to do with several factors. On the one hand, through the Marshall Plan the US pushed western European countries to become less dependent on the oil resources of the Western Hemisphere and import oil from the Middle East. As Ethan B. Kapstein has argued, given Europe’s strong reliance on crude coming from the US, Latin America and Canada (which in 1946 covered 46 percent of its oil requirements), the Congress endorsed the reduction of exports to Europe, a policy many European governments supported especially in the aftermath of the coal crisis of 1944-1947. On the other hand, as Kapstein has put it, “Cold War considerations were decisive in shaping Marshall Plan energy policies.”48 Indeed, after the USSR occupied most of the oil ields and coal mines of Eastern Europe, which up to that point had provided resources to countries such as Austria, Italy and France, the US aimed assuring Western Europe’s self-suiciency, thus preventing it from turning to producers tied to the soviet bloc. For US policymakers, “the provision of adequate energy supplies to Western Europe [was] essential for economic recovery and political stability.”49 Along with oil and petroleum technology, the US also provided aid to Great Britain and Germany, in order to increase and modernize their coal production and reduce Western Europe’s dependence on US coal. It was in this context that the European Steel and Coal Community (ECSC) was created, which represented a response to French concerns about Germany’s restored economic power. he ECSC assured French access to German coal resources, it prevented future German-French conlicts, while at the same time strengthening Western Europe in light of growing American forms of inluence. he ECSC received immediate support from the US administration, since it reduced Western Europe’s dependence on American coal, and could become a bulwark against the USSR and the spread of communism.50 As a few recent studies have started to point out, compared to other western European countries, Italy was more willing to substitute oil for coal, given its lack of natural resources. In the second half of the 1940s, many Italian politicians and industrialists viewed Marshall Plan aid as a way of receiving the assistance necessary to carry out oil and gas exploration, rebuild many of the reineries that had been destroyed during the 47. Ibid., 164. 48. Kapstein, he Insecure Alliance, 49. 49. Ibid., 59. 50. Ibid.; A.S. Milward, he European Rescue of the Nation State. 210 elisabetta bini Second World War, and gain access to large quantities of cheap oil from the Middle East. Futhermore, the country’s position at the center of the Mediterranean made it an ideal place where to reine American oil, to the point that after the nationalization of Iranian oil and the closing of the Abadan reinery in 1951, Italy became what some observers called “Europe’s reinery,” providing part of the fuel needed for the western bloc’s industrial production and mass consumption.51 While scholars have started examining the importance the Marshall Plan had in shaping the postwar European oil industry, they have largely overlooked the issue of how American aid and forms of inluence impacted the emergence of forms of mass consumption made possible by the oil economy. Scholarship on the “irresistible empire” is abundant with speciic studies about the ways in which American industries, commodities and cultural artifacts reached the European markets, and how European consumers adopted, adapted or resisted to them. However, with few exceptions, the forms of consumption, marketing and distribution that were tied to petroleum – from plastics to gasoline – have yet to be investigated.52 he Cold War and Decolonization in Oil-Producing Countries Studies of transatlantic energy relations in the post-World War II period have largely beneited from the “global turn” in American history and, in particular, from scholars’ attention to the intersection between the history of the Cold War and the history of decolonization. Most of the research has focused on two crises that led to the demise of British imperial power in the Middle East, and to the rise of US hegemony in the region, namely the Anglo-Iranian crisis of 1951-9153 and the Suez crisis of 1956.53 Not surprisingly, the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in 1951 has been the object of many historiographical studies. After Mexico nationalized its oil resources in 1938 and after the Venezuelan government approved a new Hydrocarbon Law in 1943, Iran was the irst oil-producing country to establish control over its oil. In 1951, 51. Francesca Fauri, Il Piano Marshall e l’Italia (Bologna, 2010); Daniele Pozzi, Dai gatti selvaggi al cane a sei zampe. Tecnologia, conoscenza e organizzazione nell’Agip e nell’Eni di Enrico Mattei (Venice, 2009). Oil is instead absent from other important works on the Marshall Plan in Italy, such as Carlo Spagnolo, La stabilizzazione incompiuta. Il Piano Marshall in Italia (1947-1952) (Rome, 2001). 52. One important exception is Brian C. Black, Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (Lanham, 2012). he rich literature on Americanization includes, more recently, Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005); David W. Ellwood, he Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (New York, 2012). On gasoline consumption: Elisabetta Bini, La potente benzina italiana. Guerra fredda e consumi di massa tra Italia, Stati Uniti e Terzo mondo (1945-1973) (Rome, 2013); Ferdinando Fasce, “Immaginare la benzina. Mezzo secolo di pubblicità Erg, 1950-2000,” 900. Per una storia del tempo presente, 4 (Fall 2011). 53. For an example of scholars that incorporate the study of energy into the larger history of US power: Michael H. Hunt, he American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained & Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill, 2007). 211 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space following a dispute concerning the renegotiation of a concession, Iran’s Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq nationalized AIOC’s properties, which led the British government to impose an embargo and break all diplomatic relations with Iran. For Great Britain the crisis represented a challenge to its imperial power and prestige, and came at a particularly delicate moment in time, given the country’s economic crisis, which had led to the devaluation of the sterling, and the importance of AIOC’s activities in Iran in maintaining the British balance of payments. he crisis immediately acquired an international dimension and led to new forms of American intervention in the Middle East. In 1953, with the support of the British secret services, President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a CIA covert operation to overthrow Mossadeq and established an autocratic regime led by Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who remained in power until the Iranian Revolution of 1979.54 In his book Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil, Steve Marsh has analyzed relations between Iran, the US and Great Britain in the context of the Anglo-American “special relationship.” He has thus taken into consideration the ways in which the oil crisis transformed bilateral relations between the US and Great Britain, in a context characterized by the Cold War, but also by a deep transformation of the two powers’ international position. According to Marsh, the US and Great Britain approached the nationalization of oil in profoundly diferent ways: while Great Britain wanted to intervene militarily in order to protect its economic interests in Iran, the US interpreted the Iranian situation through the lens of the Cold War, fearing a communist expansion. In this sense, the American decision to adopt a neutral position should be seen as an expression of the strength of the “special relationship.”55 he importance of the Anglo-American alliance has been highlighted also by Nathan Citino, who has highlighted the importance of relating US policies in the Middle East to America’s growing involvement in postwar Europe. According to Citino, the US accepted Great Britain’s prominence in Middle Eastern oil politics not only because of its commitment to free trade, but also because of its concern for Britain’s balance of payment deicit, which could only be met with oil imports. As he puts it, “U.S. policy makers recognized that progress toward their free-trading vision for Europe, enshrined in the Bretton Woods System, the Marshall Plan, and the GATT Agreements, required preserving the British imperial presence in the Gulf.”56 54. James H. Bamberg, he History of the British Petroleum Company. Volume 2. he Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928-1954 (Cambridge, 1994); James Bill and William Roger Louis (eds.), Mussadiq, Iranian Nationalism, and Oil (Austin, 1988); Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle: Iran’s Oil Nationalization and its Aftermath (Syracuse, 1992); Steven G. Galpern, Money, Oil and Empire: Sterling and Postwar Imperialism, 1944-1971 (Cambridge, 2009). 55. Steve Marsh, Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil (New York, 2003). 56. Nathan J. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations (Bloomington, 2002), 8. 212 elisabetta bini In Marsh’s view, the US and British shared decision to overthrow Mossadeq changed the “special relationship” in several important ways, leading the US to replace Great Britain as the main western power in the Middle East. While Great Britain had hoped that the US intervention might restore AIOC’s prominence in Iran and the Middle East, the positions of the two powers grew further apart. According to several scholars, the consortium played a particularly important role in transforming US-British relations. As Mary Ann Heiss has argued, it allowed American companies to establish their position in Iran and established a client state, it gave the British the opportunity to regain some of their activities, and it safeguarded a region that was crucial for western economic and political interests, against communism threats and against the emergence of oil nationalism.57 he 1953 coup has been the object of increased scholarly attention, thanks to the opening of new archives. Many of these works have argued that the coup should be understood as the result of the Cold War. In this view, the US intervened because it considered Mossadeq to be a tool of the Soviet Union, and feared a soviet expansion in the Middle East. As Mark Gasiorowski and others have pointed out, the US administration put an end to its neutral position once it realized that Mossadeq’s policies might lead to political instability and, thus, to a growing inluence of international communism. According to them, Mossadeq proved unwilling to reach a compromise with the US and Great Britain, thus pushing the two powers to intervene.58 More recently, Ervand Abrahamian has argued for the need of placing oil at the center of any analysis of the coup, which should be seen as the result of a “conlict between imperialism and nationalism, between First and hird Worlds, between North and South, between developed industrial economies and underdeveloped countries dependent on exporting raw materials.”59 According to him, the coup should be understood not as the result of US anti-communism, but rather as the expression of US fears about the consequences oil nationalism might have for Iran and more broadly for other oil producing countries. Given that Mossadeq questioned western control over the international oil market, “compromise was unattainable simply because at the very core of the dispute lay the blunt question of who would control the oil industry.”60 57. Mary Ann Heiss, “he United States, Great Britain, and the Creation of the Iranian Oil Consortium, 1953-1954,” he International History Review, 16 (August 1994), 511-535; Ead., Empire and Nationhood: the United States, Great Britain and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 (New York, 1997). 58. Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (eds.), Mohammad Mossadeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, 2004); Stephen Kinzer, All the King’s Men: he Hidden Story of the CIA’s Coup in Iran (New York, 2003); Fariborz Mokhtari, “Iran’s 1953 Coup Revisited,” Middle East Journal, 62 (Summer 2008), 461-488; Darioush Bayandour, Iran and the CIA: the Fall of Mossadeq Revisited (New York, 2010). 59. Ervand Abrahamian, he Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (Cambridge, 2013), 2. 60. Ibid., 3. 213 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Abrahamian has examined the diferent forms of propaganda carried out in the US and Great Britain to gain support for the coup. hrough articles and cartoons published on mainstream newspapers and magazines, Mossadeq was represented as irrational, emotional and dictatorial, and the Iranian population as childish, in need of a irm guidance. As one article in the British press put it, “[Iranians’] emotions are strong and easily aroused. But they continually fail to test their imaginations against reality and to subordinate their emotions to reason. hey lack common sense and the ability to diferentiate emotions from facts.”61 Most importantly, Abrahamian has highlighted the long-term efects of the 1953 coup on Iranian-US relations and, more generally, on Iranian political life. In the name of anti-communism, the US destroyed a secular and democratic government, legitimized an authoritarian regime, and lay the groundwork for the emergence of the forms of religious fundamentalism led by Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1970s. Furthermore, it encouraged the emergence of a growing anti-Americanism and the perception of the US as a colonial power, similar to Great Britain. he Suez crisis further consolidated the position of the US in the Middle East and weakened the imperial power of both Great Britain and France, marking a crucial moment in the process of decolonization and in US-European relations. By examining European and American sources, scholars have shown how the US administration came to consider France and Britain as unable to deal with nationalist leaders. After the crisis, the US pursued new forms of intervention in the Mediterranean, through a policy aimed at supporting the end of European colonialism and promoting various forms of economic development, in order to keep Middle Eastern and North African countries – and, most importantly, their oil resources – aligned to the western bloc. According to recent scholarship, after 1956 the two superpowers emerged as the main actors in the region, ofering their economic and military support to the newly established nationalist leaders, and promoting their respective forms of modernization as models to be emulated.62 While the Soviet Union announced the extension of soviet economic assistance to countries that had participated or supported the Bandung Conference, particularly Egypt and, later, Algeria and Libya, the Eisenhower Doctrine granted aid and military assistance to Arab countries, ofering its support to moderate, pro-western, nationalist leaders in order to contain Nasserism. However, many Middle Eastern and North African countries escaped the boundaries of bipolarism and looked at non-alignment and, increasingly, oil nationalism as a way of airming their own interests.63 61. Ervand Abrahamian, “he 1953 Coup in Iran,” Science & Society, 65 (Summer 2001), 201. 62. Fawaz A. Gerges, he Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955-1967 (Boulder, 1994); Yezid Sayigh and Avi Shlaim, eds., he Cold War and the Middle East (Oxford, 1997). 63. Barry Turner, Suez 1956: he Inside Story of the First Oil War (London, 2006); Diane B. Kunz, he Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2009); Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: he Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, 2004); Nigel J. Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser. Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955-1959 (Basingstoke, 1996). 214 elisabetta bini From the mid-1950s onwards, US foreign policy in the Middle East was dominated by the issue of oil nationalism, which increasingly questioned international oil politics and, in particular, the economic power of the “Seven Sisters.” Taking over what until then had been Great Britain’s role, the US administration intervened in a growing number of countries, in order to maintain their stability and assure access to their oil resources. As Citino has argued in his book From Arab Nationalism to OPEC, America’s growing concern for oil nationalism transformed the importance the US assigned to Saudi Arabia, as a model that could be exported and used to undermine Arab nationalism. Indeed, Eisenhower “hoped that by working through enlightened corporate interests he could prevent Arab nationalism from threatening the petroleum so vital to the economic system nurtured by the U.S.” As such, the US administration promoted the presence of American oil companies and presented it as an alternative to Europe’s colonial practices as well as to Great Britain’s development projects in Iraq and Kuwait.64 European State-Owned Oil Companies With few exceptions, the scholarship about European-US energy relations has not analyzed the relationship between European and American oil companies. Despite the fact that numerous studies have focused on American forms of inluence on postwar European business, most studies have adopted a national perspective and have examined the role single irms played in their own countries. he issue of how oil companies interacted in the international market or how US and European corporations cooperated or clashed in Europe has often remained in the background.65 he Italian case, however, has received much scholarly attention, mostly because of its peculiar experience. During the 1950s and 1960s, the state-owned oil company Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (National Hydrocarbon Agency, ENI) challenged US, British and French oil interests in the Middle East and Africa, by signing a series of treaties with oil producers which partly redeined the rules of the international oil market. he agreements assigned producers greater control over their natural resources through the creation of mixed companies that recognized producers as partners of ENI in the exploration, extraction and distribution of oil. By doing so, they redeined the so-called “50-50 rule,” and inluenced the process of decolonization and the emergence of oil nationalism. 64. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC, 15; on development projects in Saudi Arabia see also Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, 2010). 65. Louis Turner, Oil Companies in the International System (London, 1978); Alain Beltran (ed.), A Comparative History of National Oil Companies (Brussels, 2010). On transatlantic business histories see for example Marie-Laure Djelic, Exporting the American Model: he Postwar Transformation of European Business (New York, 1998); Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel (eds.), Americanization and its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan (New York, 2000). 215 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Studies about ENI have been inluenced by wider discussions about Italy’s postwar foreign policy in the Mediterranean. One of the best books on the topic is Alessandro Brogi’s L’Italia e l’egemonia americana nel Mediterraneo. he author argues that throughout the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s, Italy used its position in the Mediterranean to promote its own national and international interests. It thus transformed its anticolonialism and “special relationship” with the Arab world into a way of strengthening its ties with the United States against Britain and France, and gain a more autonomous role in the Mediterranean and inside the Atlantic Alliance. Since the early 1950s, Brogi contends, members of the Italian government pushed forward the idea that the Cold War should be fought on economic, rather than only military, grounds. Highlighting the fact that colonialism was rapidly reaching an end and becoming a destabilizing factor in North Africa and the Middle East, they emphasized the importance for the Atlantic Alliance of adopting a common economic policy in the Mediterranean. In particular, they drew on Truman’s “Point Four” to argue that Italy and the United States – as the only members of the Atlantic Alliance that had embraced anti-colonialism – had a special role to play in promoting the economic development of the Arab world and, in turn, assure its loyalty to the western bloc.66 In Brogi’s analysis, Italy’s strategic use of its alliance with the United States reached its peak in the second half of the 1950s, and coincided with the growing involvement of the US in the Mediterranean. According to the author, after the Iranian coup and, in particular, in the context of the Suez crisis, the Italian government emphasized the country’s anti-colonialism to highlight the commonalities between US and Italian interpretations of decolonization. According to the author, the Suez crisis represented a major turning point for Italian foreign policy. While the Italian government placed itself side by side the United States in opposing any form of military intervention, it also attempted to gain a say in the diplomatic debates concerning the future of the Suez canal. Despite the fact that the US continued to exclude Italy from the most important decisions, Brogi contends, during the Suez crisis Italy proved to itself and to its allies that it “could play a crucial role, worthy of a great power, in making suggestions to solve the crisis and maintain the balance inside the Atlantic Alliance.”67 Scholars have ofered diferent interpretations about the meaning of Italy’s policies in the Mediterranean. For some, the support of Arab nationalism and the deinition of Italy as a bridge between Europe and the Arab world aimed at strengthening the relationship between Italy and the United States against Britain and France. For others, the support of anti-colonialism attempted to redeine the Cold War order. As Luciano Tosi has argued, Italy’s foreign policy in the Mediterranean did not aim only at promoting its international prestige and position inside the Atlantic Community, but also at assuring Italy’s own 66. Alessandro Brogi, L’Italia e l’egemonia americana nel Mediterraneo (Florence, 1996), 9. 67. Ibid., 222. 216 elisabetta bini economic growth. As such, the plan proposed by Minister of Foreign Afairs Giuseppe Pella in 1957 sought to insert the Middle East into the western bloc, while at the same time assuring the low of natural resources – and, in particular, oil and natural gas – to Italy. Indeed, Tosi contends, Italy’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil was a driving force behind the country’s foreign policy in the Mediterranean, and was the only realm in which the Italian government actually succeeded in carrying out its aims.68 Drawing on American, Italian, British and French sources, scholars have examined the role ENI played in several oil producing countries, and how its activities afected Italy’s relations with the US. Georg Meyr was one of the irst to access US archives, and argued that ENI took advantage of the crisis of British and French colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East to airm its own position in the Mediterranean. It thus appealed to producers by deining itself as being independent from the two blocs, as well as from the major oil companies. Meyr’s essay focused particularly on US perceptions of ENI’s policies in the Middle East, arguing that the United States repeatedly encouraged the Italian government to limit its activities. It viewed the company’s sympathies for non-aligned countries as a potential threat to the western bloc, fearing that ENI’s anti-colonialism might lead to a strengthening of neutralism in the Middle East.69 Leonardo Maugeri’s L’arma del petrolio pushed the issue of US-Italian relations one step further, by examining the extent to which ENI and, in particular, its irst president Enrico Mattei, were able to actually challenge the major oil companies and threaten the Cold War order. Maugeri has questioned the idea that the Italian company represented an alternative to the “Seven Sisters” or even to the two blocs. Most importantly, he has argued that ENI aimed not so much at opposing the major oil companies, but at becoming a part of them. According to the author, ENI remained too weak and too small to even establish Italy’s autonomy from the oil produced and marketed by the “Seven Sisters.” 70 he importance of examining ENI’s policies in the context of the Atlantic Alliance has been at the center of Leopoldo Nuti’s Gli Stati Uniti e l’apertura a sinistra, which has argued that, while the US administration remained weary that ENI’s support of oil nationalism might lead to a growing instability in the Middle East, it never feared its international activities. As such, it never attempted to block ENI from pursuing its 68. Luciano Tosi, “L’Italia e la cooperazione internazionale nel Mediterraneo: aspirazioni, interessi nazionali e realtà internazionale,” in Il Mediterraneo nella politica estera italiana del secondo dopoguerra, ed. Massimo De Leonardis (Bologna, 2003), 173-210. 69. Georg Meyr, “Enrico Mattei e la politica neoatlantica dell’Italia, nella percezione degli Stati Uniti d’America,” in Il Mediterraneo nella politica estera italiana del secondo dopoguerra, ed. De Leonardis, 157-169. Robert B. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (New York, 2013). 70. Leonardo Maugeri, L’arma del petrolio: questione petrolifera globale, guerra fredda e politica italiana nella vicenda di Enrico Mattei (Firenze, 1994). Among the works that emphasize ENI’s success in challenging the “Seven Sisters:” Paul H. Frankel, Mattei: Oil and Power Politics (London, 1966); Nico Perrone, Obiettivo Mattei: petrolio, Stati Uniti e politica dell’ENI (Rome, 1995). 217 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space policies in North Africa and the Middle-East. Rather, its greatest fear concerned ENI’s and Mattei’s destabilizing efects on Italy’s already unstable political situation. he Eisenhower Administration thus attempted to prevent Mattei from inluencing the Italian government and, most importantly, from pushing forward his anti-American sentiments through an alliance with the Italian Socialist Party.71 One of the greatest merits of this scholarship has been to question the idea that ENI’s activities aimed at challenging the division of the world into two blocs. However, they have tended to overlook the role oil producers had in shaping the company’s policies, limiting their anaylsis to US-Italian relations. A new generation of scholars has started examining this issue, reading American and British documents against the grain or accessing archives in the Middle East and North Africa. In La via italiana al petrolio, Ilaria Tremolada has pointed out that ENI’s agreements with Iran were the outcome of a series of talks initiated in the early 1950s by Mossadeq, who established relations with various independent oil companies in order to challenge the position of APOC in Iran. Similarly, Antonio Tonini, and Rosario Milano have emphasized the importance leaders such as Nasser, Mohammed V of Morocco and Houari Boumediene had in shaping, and even challenging ENI’s policies.72 As Bruna Bagnato has shown in her book Prove di Ostpolitik, ENI did explicitly challenge Cold War oil politics when it signed a treaty with the USSR in 1958 to import crude oil in exchange for rubber and steel, and the building of a pipeline from the Urals to East Germany. ENI’s agreement with the USSR spurred the US to reach a deal with Mattei, according to which the US oil company Esso would provide ENI with crude oil and natural gas it extracted in Libya, in exchange for services and equipment. At the same time, the building of the pipeline became the focus of a much debated NATO embargo.73 Scholars have only recently started to analyze the importance oil had in shaping relations between the US and the USSR and between Eastern and Western Europe. hey have focused on a few issues in particular, namely what has been called “pipeline politics,” and the efects of soviet oil exports to western European countries during the 1960s.74 71. Leopoldo Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e l’apertura a sinistra. Importanza e limiti della presenza americana in Italia (Roma-Bari, 1999); Silvio Labbate, Il governo dell’energia. L’Italia dal petrolio al nucleare (1945-1975) (Milan, 2010); see also Agostino Giovagnoli and Luciano Tosi (eds.), Amintore Fanfani e la politica estera italiana (Venice, 2010). 72. Ilaria Tremolada, La via italiana al petrolio. L’ENI di Enrico Mattei in Iran (1951-1958) (Milan, 2011); Bruna Bagnato, Petrolio e politica: Mattei in Marocco (Florence, 2004); Ead., L’Italia e la guerra d’Algeria (1954-1962) (Soveria Mannelli, 2012); Alberto Tonini, Il sogno proibito. Mattei, il petrolio arabo e le “sette sorelle” (Florence, 2003); Rosario Milano, L’ENI e l’Iran (1962-1970) (Napoli, 2014). 73. Bruna Bagnato, Prove di Ostpolitik. Politica ed economia nella strategia italiana verso l’Unione Sovietica, 1958-1963 (Firenze, 2003); Adriana Castagnoli, La guerra fredda economica. Italia e Stati Uniti 1947-1989 (Roma-Bari, 2015). 74. Oscar Sanchez Sibony, Red Globalization: he Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Krushchev (Cambridge, 2014); Bruce W. Gentleson, Pipeline Politics: the Complex Political Economy of East-West Energy Trade (Ithaca, 1986); Andrew Barry, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Chichester, 2013); 218 elisabetta bini According to these studies, the agreements that were signed between the USSR, Italy, Austria, West Germany, Finland and Sweden during the 1960s laid the groundwork for the emergence of the current European dependence on Russian energy resources. he treaties became the object of much discussion between the two sides of the Atlantic, since they challenged Western Europe’s dependence on oil provided by American oil companies, and opened European markets to cheap soviet oil. Yet, as Per Högselius has pointed out, the export of soviet oil and gas has “remained a ‘black box’, discussed only in passing in connection with political or economic analyses.”75 he 1973 Oil Shock Recent scholarship has pointed out that the years 1967-1973 should be considered a major shift in international history.76 Focusing on relations between Europe, the two superpowers and Arab countries, these studies have argued that after the Six Day War of 1967 the Mediterranean acquired a new centrality for the US and the USSR, leading to new conlicts between the two superpowers. According to these studies, the Arab-Israeli conlict (and the ensuing “oil shock”), along with the political changes that took place in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, challenged the process of détente in Europe and reinforced bipolarism. he rise of Anwar Sadat to power in 1970, along with the expulsion of soviet military advisors from Egypt two years later, represented crucial turning points, and marked the decline of soviet forms of inluence in the Mediterranean. Most importantly, the exclusion of the USSR from the peace process in 1973, consolidated the United States’ position as the only superpower capable of shaping regional policies. By the mid-1970s, with the end of dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece, and the emergence of Eurocommunism in Italy, the Mediterranean became increasingly divided between its northern shores, fully integrated into the Atlantic bloc and the EEC, and its southern shores, largely dominated by the Arab-Israeli conlict and by hird World politics.77 Niklas Jensen-Eriksen, “he First Wave of the Soviet Oil Ofensive: he Anglo-American Alliance and the Flow of ‘Red Oil’ to Finland during the 1950s,” Business History, 49 (2007), 348-366. 75. Per Högselius, Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence (Basingstoke, 2013), 3-4. 76. Nigel J. Ashton (ed.), he Cold War in the Middle East: Regional Conlict and the Superpowers, 1967-1973 (London, 2007); Yaacov Ro’i and Boris Morozov (eds.), he Soviet Union and the June 1967 Six Day War (Stanford, 2008); William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conlict Since 1967 (Berkeley, 2005); Ennio Di Nolfo, “he Cold War and the Transformation of the Mediterranean, 1960-1975,” in he Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 2. Crises and Détente, eds. Melvyn P. Leler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge, 2012), 238-257. 77. Mario Del Pero, Fernando Guirao and Antonio Varsori, eds., Democrazie. L’Europa meridionale e la ine delle dittature (Milan, 2010); Asaf Siniver, he October 1973 War: Politics, Diplomacy, Legacy (London, 2013). 219 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space With few exceptions, international relations scholars have largely overlooked the issue of how the energy crises of the 1970s impacted (and were impacted by) the Cold War.78 Scholars of the “oil shock,” on the other hand, have mostly ignored the relationship between the crisis and the larger geopolitical context. Yet, between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the Atlantic bloc underwent a profound transformation, as the EEC and the US approached the economic crisis and oil producers’ use of the “oil weapon” in profoundly diferent ways, while oil producers challenged US policies by demanding greater control over their energy resources. As Painter has argued, “although they did not result directly from the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the oil crises had a signiicant impact on the Cold War. [...] the oil crises reinforced perceptions of a weakened United States, raised questions about its leadership of the western alliance, heightened concerns about the dangers of western dependence on hird World resources, and led to fears that the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War.” 79 he 1973 “oil shock” has often been understood as a turning point not only in transatlantic history but more broadly in post-World War II history. According to most accounts, the shock put an end to an era characterized by economic growth, increased levels of consumption and low oil prices. he following decade was deined by staglation, unemployment, and social unrest, and by a more general uncertainty about the future. In recent years, particularly in the context of the fortieth anniversary of the oil shock, several scholars have challenged this interpretation, highlighting the efects the crisis had not only on a handful of industrialized countries, but also on decolonizing and hird World nations and, more generally, on international relations and the world economy. Some of the best works have also started to examine the oil shock in relation to the broader changes that characterized the 1970s, which have been the object of a growing historiography.80 As several scholars have pointed out, the 1973 “oil shock” marked a sharp decline of any shared transatlantic or EEC policy in the Mediterranean, as individual nations protected their economic interests by dealing directly with Arab producers. On the one hand, the US administration perceived the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) and oil producers as a new threat to the international economy, 78. Venn, he Oil Crisis; Vernon, Oil Crisis. 79. David S. Painter, “Oil and Geopolitics: he Oil Crises of the 1970s and the Cold War,” Historical Social Research, 39 (Fall 2014), 186-208. On the discursive importance of the “oil weapon”: Rüdiger Graf, “Making Use of the ‘Oil Weapon’: Western Industrialized Countries and Arab Petropolitics in 1973-1974,” Diplomatic History, 1 (2012), 185-208. 80. Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela and Daniel J. Sargent (eds.), he Shock of the Global: he 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, 2010); Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: he Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford, 2015); Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini and Federico Romero (eds.), Oil Shock: the 1973 Crisis and its Economic Legacy (London, forthcoming). 220 elisabetta bini which should be met not – as had been the case in the previous decades – through a coherent Mediterranean policy, but rather through bilateral relations. On the other hand, EEC members considered détente as a way of recovering their agency in a multipolar world, and tried to establish a more autonomous role by promoting a Euro-Arab dialogue and a common European approach to oil producers.81 Some of the most interesting scholarship has dealt with US-European relations in the aftermath of the oil embargo, particularly Henry Kissinger’s eforts to transform 1973 into the “Year of Europe.” As several scholars have argued, in order to deal with the growing power of the oil-producing world, in the early 1970s the US called for a concerted efort among consuming countries to promote a shared energy policy. he forms of dialogue endorsed by the US were not limited to energy issues but aimed at improving relations in a context characterized by deep economic and political tensions between the two sides of the Atlantic. However, as the “oil shock” hit consumer countries, a series of diferences emerged inside the Atlantic bloc, which undermined the forms of multipolarism made possible by détente. Whereas the EEC presented itself to oil producers as a privileged interlocutor, the US feared that a Euro-Arab dialogue might lead to a radicalization of Arab nationalism. Most importantly, it interpreted European positions as a betrayal of the Atlantic Alliance and of the United States’ primacy in it.82 he European Summit, held in Copenhagen in December 1973, and aimed at identifying a common policy to solve the crisis, represented a particularly important moment in transatlantic relations. he summit proposed to implement new forms of cooperation between the EEC and oil producers, based on the exchange of oil for development aid, and was fully supported by various delegations from Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sudan. However, EEC members refused to adopt a shared pro-Arab policy that might create a rift with Israel, nor did they want to upset the US. As a result, they only agreed to start a Euro-Arab dialogue, in large part because of pressures on the part of Arab countries. he position of the US administration before and after the summit was particularly important in shaping European responses. Indeed, the State Department constantly highlighted the need for Europeans of accepting and following the forms of diplomacy 81. Kapstein, he Insecure Alliance; Möckli, “he EC-Nine and Transatlantic Conlict;” Silvia Pierantonio, “he Year that Never Was: 1973 and the Crisis between the United States and the European Community,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 2 (2010), 158-177; Francesco Petrini, “L’arma del petrolio: lo ‘shock’ petrolifero e il confronto Nord-Sud. Parte prima. L’Europa alla ricerca di un’alternativa: la Comunità tra dipendenza energetica ed egemonia statunitense,” in Dollari, petrolio e aiuti allo sviluppo. Il confronto Nord-Sud negli anni ’60-’70, eds. Daniele Caviglia and Antonio Varsori (Milan, 2008), 79-108. 82. Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon, eds., he Year of Europe: America, Europe and the Energy Crisis, 1972-1974 (London, 2006); Matthias Schulz and homas A. Schwartz (eds.), he Strained Alliance: U.S.European Relations from Nixon to Carter (Cambridge, 2010); Argyris Adrianopoulos, Western Europe and Kissinger’s Global Strategy (London, 1988); Mario Del Pero, he Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, 2010). 221 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space promoted by the US. Kissinger in particular tended to interpret any diferences inside the Atlantic bloc as an expression of weakness, which would automatically lead to a strengthening of soviet positions internationally. In his view, the EEC’s pro-Arab policies represented a challenge to (and almost a betrayal of) America’s primacy. he US administration thus pressured EEC members not to pursue an autonomous policy and obtain preferential treatment from Arab producers.83 Most scholars agree that the Energy Conference, held in Washington, DC in February 1974 with the aim of deining a shared policy among consuming countries, transformed US-European relations for years to come. he Conference represented a testing ground for transatlantic relations, and brought to light a series of diferences inside the Atlantic Alliance about how to shape international oil politics and relations between oil producers and oil consumers. Before the Conference started the debate polarized around US and French approaches to the issue. While the EEC proved unable to promote a shared approach to oil consuming countries, the US succeeded in pushing Europeans to follow a common energy policy, and critiqued any country that pursued bilateral relations with single producers. Indeed, the Conference led to the establishment of new forms of cooperation across the Atlantic, through the creation of the International Energy Agency (IEA). As a result, the US acquired a stronger international position in Europe, as well as in the Mediterranean. According to the American administration, by establishing direct relations with oil producing countries, the US could continue to ensure Western Europe’s security and prosperity without having to compromise with the Europeans.84 While the issue of transatlantic energy relations has received some attention, more recently a few scholars have placed decolonizing countries at the center of their studies, arguing that for many of them – particularly oil producers and OAPEC members – the transformations that took place between the late 1960s and the 1970s represented the high point of decolonization, allowing them to gain a wider control over their oil resources and pursue new forms of oil nationalism. According to such studies, these changes had important consequences on the relationship between the hird World, the western bloc and the USSR. hey redeined international economic relations through the promotion of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), and shaped the emergence of a post-Cold War order.85 83. Giuliano Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South, 1957-1986 (New York, 2012). 84. Aurélie Elisa Gfeller, Building a European Identity: France, the United States, and the Oil Shock, 19731974 (New York, 2012); Henning Türk, “he Oil Crisis of 1973 as a Challenge to Multilateral Energy Cooperation among Western Industrialized Countries,” Historical Social Research, 39 (Fall 2014), 209-230; Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (New York, 2008). 85. Giuliano Garavini, “From Boumedienomics to Reaganomics: Algeria, OPEC, and the International Struggle for Economic Equality,” Humanity, 6, 1 (2015), 79-92. 222 Trans-Atlantic Stories, Transnational Perspectives, Hemispheric Mutations: American Literature beyond the Nation Cristina Iuli hey say it came irst from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Taìnos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukù americanus, or more colloquially; fukù – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; speciically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukù of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite ‘discovering’ the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukù, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. But the fukù ain’t just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare. In my parents’ day the fukù was real as shit, something your everyday person could believe in. Everybody knew someone who’d been eaten by a fukù just like everybody knew somebody who worked up in the Palacio. It was in the air, you could say, though, like all the most important things on the Island, not something folks really talked about. But in those elder days, fukù had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a high priest, you could say: Our then dictator-for-life Rafael Leònidas Trujillo Molina. Junot Diaz, he Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Beyond the Nation In the past couple of decades, American Studies at large and American Literature in particular have been challenged by a series of critical investigations aimed at denaturalizing the category of the nation as the ield’s main conceptual framework and problematizing historical, cultural, political and literary understandings of the United States based on nationalist criteria. he implicitly presupposed correspondence between the geopolitical contours of the nation, its cultural, political and economic structures, and “Americanness” 223 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space as a phenomenological experience has been contested on both historical and ideological grounds on all fronts of the human sciences. Historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, economists and sociologists have tried to develop methodologies that take into account the entanglements of regional and global phenomena and relations in the description of historical experience both across transnational geographies and power structures and over time. In spite of the interdisciplinary nature of these calls, however, the speciic forms that the questioning has taken within diferent disciplinary domains has varied according to the diferent traditions of scholarship internal to each ield of study. he recent proliferation of adjectives like “trans-national,” “hemispheric,” “global,” “Atlantic,” “trans-Atlantic,” “planetary,” “worldly” and “comparative” in both literary and historical studies related to the US testiies to a will not only to extend the scope of analysis to objects not directly connected to the nation, but also to bring into focus various kinds of relationships between the US and the world. hus, these adjectives suggest various theoretical orientations, objects of study and geographies. At the same time, they all operate under the same rubric of acquiring better knowledge of cultural, historical and material phenomena related to the Americas by decentralizing the US as their primary subject of research. As will be discussed in detail below, the concept of the Atlantic “as a watery site of cross-cultural exchange and struggle”1 gained increasing currency in historical studies throughout the 1990s in scholarship related to the history of Africa, Europe and the Americas. Meanwhile, there was a parallel though more sporadic trend to adopt Atlantic, neo-Atlantic or trans-Atlantic perspectives in literary studies related to Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean between the late 1990s and the early 21st century.2 Before examining the Atlantic/trans-Atlantic discourse as a distinct ield 1. Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies, 1, 1 (2004), 1-27, 1. Gabaccia also points out how the various genealogies of “Atlantic Studies” have located them “almost exclusively within the discipline of history” (2). Gabaccia’s punctualization underscores the explicit distinction William Boelhower makes between “Old” and “New” Atlantic scholarship, the former being “pre-eminently AngloAmerican and North-Atlantic” as well as “unabashedly Eurocentric.” See Boelhower, “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” ALH, 20, 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2008), 84. Eric Slauter notes that while the phrase “Atlantic World” was used in a handful of books and articles in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not in regular use until the late 1980s, after the publication of Nichola Canny and Anthony Padgen’s collection, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World (1987). Its use decidedly accelerated after 1999 when “seven books adopted the phrase, as many as had appeared during the preceding decade. From 2000 to 2006, forty-ive books, iftytwo articles (excluding book reviews), and twenty-one dissertations invoked the phrase. Use of the phrase peaked in 2005 (fourteen books, eleven articles, and four dissertations) and then fell in 2006 (six books, seven articles, four dissertations).” Eric Slauter, “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” he William and Mary Quarterly, hird Series, 65, 1 (Jan. 2008), 135-166, 137. 2. Paul Gilroy’s he Black Atlantic is considered the foundational text of the neo-Atlanticist or trans-Atlanticist matrix in literary studies, as well as the study that “really fueled the explosion of research in transnational arenas” (Elliott, What Does it Mean). Together with Roach’s Cities of the Dead (2003), Gilroy’s inluence in the larger ield of literary studies has been instrumental in enabling a shift in how American literature is analyzed, from the nationalist pedagogy of the previous generation to the new perspectives opened by an Atlantic model emphasizing the circulation of ideas, texts and cultures at large. See the special issue of William and 224 cristina iuli of literary inquiry that has emerged in the last twenty years or so, we must therefore acknowledge that such scholarship is part of a general reorientation of American Studies as a meta-ield along the double axis of international geopolitics and internal cultural conlict. his reorientation, which afects American Studies both in the US and in Europe, should in turn be understood in the context of two related macro trends, both of which were rooted in the 1960s, became pressing from the early 1980s on and have since challenged the humanities at large.3 he irst is the acceleration of global processes involving the intensiication of post-migratory movements, the multinational transformation of capitalism and the emergence of new forms of colonialism that have powerfully afected the demographic, ethnic, political, cultural and economic composition and stability of nation states.4 he second is the vast revision of methodological and institutional practices across the humanities along genealogical, postcolonial and comparative lines triggered by the epistemological pressure put on conventional disciplinary boundaries, canons and foundations of academic knowledge by a new global self-consciousness.5 In literary studies, the combined efect of these two trends has prompted the reorientation of some of the dominant critical matrices of the 1980s – deconstruction, multiculturalism, post-Marxism, postcolonialism and comparative cultural studies – towards a transnational perspective, “so that the histories of groups ‘within’ the U.S” could also be placed “within the context of global forces and diaspora.”6 In the late 1990s, the emphasis Mary Quarterly by Eric Slauter, with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Allison Games, Eliga Gould, and Bryan Waterman, “he ‘Trade Gap’ in Atlantic Studies: A Forum on Literary and Historical Scholarship,” William and Mary Quarterly, 65, 1 (January 2008) 135-186. 3. On the relation between decolonization and the emergence of “theory” in the 1960s, see Robert Young, White Mythologies (London, 1990), 173. For a speciic discussion of theory as inherently postcolonial, see Stuart Brown, “he Eidaesthetic Itinerary: Notes on the Geopolitical Movement of the Literary Absolute,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 100, 3 (2001), 829-851, 846. 4. his point has been discussed extensively by several authors, including Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis, 1996); Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. he Cultures of Globalisation (Durham, 1988); Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of hree Worlds (London, 2004); Douglas Massey, et al. Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millenium. (Oxford, 1998); Ramon Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez, eds. he Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century. Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitcs of Knowledge. (Westport, 2000), especially Ramon Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez’s “Introduction” (XI-XXX) and the following essays by Eric Mielants, “Mass Migration in the World-System: an Antisystemic Movement in the Long Run?”, 79-102, and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodrigues, “Transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony: Review of Alternative Perspectives and their Implications for World-Systems Analysis,” 47-78; Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds. he Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, 2007); and Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, 1998). 5. he scholarship on this issue is vast. For an overview of the evolution of the methodological discourse on this and related topics in the past twenty years or so, the reader may refer to the following main academic journals: American Literary History, American Literature, South Atlantic Quarterly, Transatlantic Studies and PMLA. 6. Amritji Singh and Peter Schmidt, Postcolonial heory and the United States. Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jeferson, 2000), 15. his collection provides a useful overview of the plethora of positions that character- 225 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space on domestic ethnic and racial diversity – brought into focus by the so-called culture wars over canon revision of the 1980s and 1990s, and methodologically still associated with ethnic and area studies – adopted a decidedly postcolonial and deconstructive edge. It was then that scholars began identifying questions related to border porosity, luidity of exchange, hybridity and diaspora as crucial to the articulation of the cultural, linguistic and literary diferences that coexisted within the imaginary, symbolic and material boundaries of the nation, thus powerfully challenging rigid demarcations of what was and what was not “national literature.” he dominant model of national literature as an expression of a homogenous historical and geopolitical environment appeared profoundly inadequate to describe the “luid, irregular, multi-directional and historically speciic” processes of symbolic exchange, dissemination and transformation generated by cultural and literary contact. his awareness has since fueled an ongoing process to revise critical methodologies, research directions and pedagogical practices. As Giles Gunn put it, English departments have been forced to adjust to the realization that, “all national traditions are plural rather than singular; that the pluralization and heterogeneity, even polyvocality, of these traditions can be fully accessed and understood only through the use of critical methods from across the whole range of human sciences; and that this widening and deepening, not to say thickening, of the category of the literary has produced problems of comprehension we are still struggling to formulate.”7 he extent to which literary cultures forged along the borders between diferent nations and cultural zones, or brought into domestic contact after being carried on extended transatlantic or transpaciic waves and then spread across the mainland, could be said to belong to a national literature has recently become both a disciplinary and a cultural question. he extraordinary surge in studies on the articulation and reproduction of nationhood, social membership and national identiication throughout the 1990s can attest to this.8 hose studies tended to combine a robust analytics of nation, citizenship ized literary, cultural and ethnic studies in the US at the turn of the 21st century. Within this framework, key publications of the 1990s should be mentioned such as the volume edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, 1993), and that edited by Donald Pease, National Identities and Post-Americanist Narrative (1994). See also the following monographs: Joan Dayan’s Haiti, History, and the Gods (1994), Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996); and Sieglinde Lemke’s Primitive Postmodernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (1996). 7. Giles Gunn, “Introduction,” PMLA, 116, 1 (2001), Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies, 1-17, 4. 8. Trying to ofer an exhaustive bibliography on this scholarship, whether it calls itself transnational, postnational, global or comparative, would be daunting given its exponential proliferation in the past twenty years or so. Such growth can be assessed by reading the addresses of various presidents of the American Studies Association, published in the journal American Quarterly, particularly those from 1999-2006 delivered by Janice Radway, Amy Kaplan, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (2004) and Emory Elliott (2006), respectively. hese four are particularly relevant in their bibliographic surveys because they chart a period in which the ield was reoriented that relects the political passage from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, with all the historical events this passage entails, and the methodological transition of the ield from the waning of multiculturalism and the emergence of transnationalism as the dominant framework. See Janice Radway, “‘What’s 226 cristina iuli and identity formation with a dissection of imperialist and neo-imperialist projects and ideologies of exceptionalism, at the time still prominent in literary history, particularly in histories related to the literatures of the colonial period (1600 to the revolutions and independence, approximately) and the national period (from independence to the 1880s, approximately).9 Transnational or hemispheric approaches to the study of American literature and its relations to the western side of the Atlantic or the Western Hemisphere were not absent from literary scholarship in and about the US, but they were generally implied in the “elusive search for distinctive national identities” for which, for instance, the colonial periods “had to provide the cultural origins.”10 It was only from the late 1990s that a strong, innovative postcolonialist methodology started to be incorporated by these studies in order to “systematically [study] the efects of imperialism in the former colonies and at the heart of empire itself.”11 When Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her 2004 American Studies Association (ASA) Presidential Address, deined the transnational in American Literary Studies along spatial coordinates as “a web of contact zones [that] has increasingly superseded the nation” as “the basic unit of, and frame for, analysis,” the works she referenced were almost exclusively referred to as “transnational,” rather than “trans-Atlantic” or “Atlantic,” imaginatively in a Name?’ Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly, 51, 1 (March 1999), 1-32; Amy Kaplan, “‘Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today’: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly, 56, 1 (March 2004), 1; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: the Transnational Turn in American Studies, Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly, 57, 1 (March 2005), 17-57; and Emory Eliott, “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational.” Presidential Address delivered at the 2006 American Studies Association Conference, American Quarterly, 59, 1 (2007), 1-22. For a decidedly comparativist perspective, see also the special issue of PMLA, edited by Giles Gunn (116, 1) on the Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies (2001) and the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 100, 3 (2001) edited by Imre Szeman and Susie O’Brian, he Globalization of Fiction/he Fiction of Globalization. 9. Works such as Amy Kaplan’s he Work of Empire in the Making of U.S. Cultures, José Saldivar,’s he Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, 1991), David Shields’ Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750 (Chicago, 1990), Djelal Kadir’s Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology (Berkeley, 1992), Peter Caraiol’s he American Ideal: Literary History as a Worldly Activity (New York, 1991), and Laurent Berlant’s he Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, 1994) are all important examples of this critical fold. 10. Ralph Bauer, “Notes on the Comparative Study of the Colonial Americas,” Early American Literature, 38, 2 (2003), 281-304, 283. 11. he conceptual matrices of all these studies are rooted in the 1960s, particularly in work dealing with identity formation, psychoanalysis, post-Marxism and postcolonial studies. (London, 1984) See Stuart Hall (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London, 1987); “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10, 2 (1980), 5-27; “Encoding / Decoding,” in Hall, S. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willis (eds). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. (London, 1980), 128-138. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, 1971); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moufe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategies: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1984). With respect to the US, the notion of colonialism generally refers to the colonial, pre-insurrectional period. 227 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space relating to the frontier rather than to the waves.12 And yet, by the time Fishkin’s Presidential Address was published in American Quarterly in 2005 the notion of the “transatlantic”13 had already been widely disseminated in American literary and historical studies, partly inspired by the publication of David Armitage’s inluential “hree Concepts of Atlantic History,” (2002) which had helped stir interest in the Atlantic from a new, transnational perspective. In a 2004 review essay entitled “Transatlanticism Now” published in American Literary History, Laura Stevens pointed out that “few terms had spread across the academic landscape with the speed and thoroughness of transatlantic.” Indeed, it was soon found in college curricula, academic publications, conferences and research projects; two dedicated journals – Symbiosis and the Journal of Transatlantic Studies 14 – were formed; and research programs quickly bifurcated between a narrow perspective restricted to the English language and a wider, more worldly one with an expanded awareness of the history of modernity and its implication in colonialism, slavery and nationality. It is within the tension-illed context evoked by Stevens that we should situate the trans-Atlantic paradigm in literary studies. his paradigm aims to account for the relational, mutable and erratic nature of literary objects and their concurrence in processes of identiication and identity formation that transcend and transgress the category of the nation, particularly when those processes have occurred throughout historical, geopolitical and cultural environments brought into contact by Atlantic crossings. Not unlike transnational studies in general, “by showing that national identity can extend beyond natural geographical obstacles, by highlighting broader patterns of exchange, and by tracing the fraught ties of colony to metropole,” trans-Atlantic studies suggest “that nations and nationalisms cannot really be considered in isolation.”15 Once the box of the nation as the conceptual unit of literary history is cracked open, however, the narratives of the literary historian get exposed not only to issues of space and politics, but also to the problem of irreducible time frames, alternative periodizations, heterogeneous cultural clusters and 12. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: he Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly, 57, 1 (2005), 17-57. Only one “transatlantic” collection and one essay – both by European scholars – are mentioned in the published speech. 13. he term “transatlantic” without hyphenation or further speciication refers to the broad, general transatlanticist discourse that has evolved as a reaction to the “Old” Atlantic studies Boelhower analyzes in his “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix.” “Trans-Atlantic” refers to a more recent declination of transatlanticism meant to emphasize the multi-perspective movement of goods, ideas, humans and other animals, and cultures throughout diferent stretches of Atlantic passages and from there across the African, American and European continents. In this respect, “trans-Atlantic” falls in line with Boelhower’s use of the notion “New Atlantic.” See Boelhower, “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” 83-101. 14. In 2004, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents joined the cluster of journals dedicated to transatlantic discourse. To my knowledge, American Literary History has hosted the methodological transformation of the ield more systematically than any other journal and is hence the most updated and comprehensive archive for the discussion on trans-Atlanticism in US literature. 15. Laura Stevens, “Transatlanticism Now,” ALH, 16, 1 (Spring, 2004), 93-102. 228 cristina iuli their relative causalities, including literary imaginaries.16 Considering that nationhood and identity are products of how people conceive of the relationship between past, present and future, time and language – i.e., the conceptual ability to move between temporal scales and among linguistic hierarchies and variety – are no less important than space.17 he trans-Atlantic or neo-Atlantic studies “matrix” – as William Boelhower calls it in an inluential essay to diferentiate it from the old, dominant Anglo-American brand of Atlanticism – emerged from the convergence of a constellation of factors: the waning of the Cold War political context; globalization and the pressure to move beyond knowledge models based on the form of the nation state; the emergence and dissemination of a postcolonial critical self-consciousness in academic culture studies; the epistemological questioning of historical knowledge and the history writing brought about by the discursive turn in literary and historical studies in the 1980s and 1990s; the investment of narratives of historical traumas (the African diaspora, the Middle passage, the plantation system) with a strong testimonial function, following the example of Holocaust studies; and the identiication of the cartographic text as the fundamental epistemological object of modernity, which allowed the Atlantic to emerge as both a material and an imaginary igure. “Ultimately,” Boelhower argues, “it is the apparatus (the dispositio) of the cartographic text – representing a stratiied and temporally rich skein of intersecting discursive and material trajectories across the Atlantic world – that allows us to refer to Atlantic studies research practices as a new disciplinary matrix.”18 We should keep Boelhower’s paradigmatic synthesis in mind as we consider Paul Giles’ concept of a “transatlantic imaginary” which he coined to identify “the interiorization of a literal or metaphorical Atlantic world in all its expansive dimensions,”19 and hence its incorporation into identity formation. As Giles explains, “conceptions of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic emerged through engagement with – and often deliberate exclusion of – a transatlantic imaginary.”20 However, rather than simply dismissing a 16. Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Worlding America: he Hemispheric Text-Network,” in he Companion to American Liteary Studies (2011), 228-245, 229. 17. Notions of “Deep Time” are found in Wai Chee Dimock, hrough Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, 2006), and Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2010). As we will see, the question of time, representation and identity formation has been discussed in Ian Baucom, “Introduction: Atlantic Genealogies,” he South Atlantic Quarterly, 100, 1 (2001), 1-13; Bauer, Ralph. he Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge, 2003); Fabian Johannes Time and the Other (New York, 1983); Andreas Huyssens, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” in Peter Brooker and Andrew hacker (eds.), Geographies of Modernism. Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (Oxon, 2005); and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “he Otherwise Modern. Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in B.M. Knauft (ed), Critically Modern (Bloomington, 2002), and Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995). 18. William Boelhower, “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” 90. 19. Paul Giles, Virtual Subjects: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham, 2002), 1. 20. Ibid., 2. 229 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space nation-based approach to the study of English-language literature, Giles is interested in foregrounding the history of the nation state paradigm “and its function for the nationstate, to examine ways literature has been instrumental in consolidating or interrogating forms of national identity.”21 But how expansive are the dimensions of the Atlantic world? How dramatic are the luctuations of the transatlantic imaginary, and how precise are the methodologies for interrogating it? Giles’ comparative approach might be appropriate for investigating how “the various crossovers between British and American literature might engender doubleedge discourses liable to destabilize traditional hierarchies and power relations, thereby illuminating the epistemological boundaries of both national cultures.”22 Indeed, as his brilliant work has demonstrated, this approach provides an adequate epistemological framework for reading the emergence of American literature during the 18th century “in light of the British culture and vice-versa.”23 Giles has successfully established a model of comparative analysis focused on the cruxes and points of convergence of these two cultures. And this methodology may work well for reading British and American literature alongside one another, especially because it does not assume the existence of two cohesive literatures to be compared but rather networks of overlapping literary inluences. In fact, this was the approach taken throughout the 19th century before these literatures went their own national ways in the 20th century, as demonstrated in recent scholarship.24 However, this approach is insuicient for investigating the kind of trans-linguistic transactions that surface to critical attention when the notion of the Atlantic expands beyond its BritishAmerican shores. From a trans-Atlantic, hemispheric perspective, “one cannot think the Americas together, [...] without considering the discrepant timing of modernity”25 and the multiple registers of language use and their relation to power. When literary-cultural artifacts are the objects of investigation, as Susan Gillman and Kirstin Silva Gruesz put it, their material conditions also demand a model of analysis that can “multiply situate where a text ‘belongs’ in time and space by noting how it stands in relation to [the] third scale, language;” i.e., how it moves through “multiple translations, adaptations, and signiicant editions and republications, each instantiation punctuated along the scales 21. Ibid., 5. 22. Ibid. 23. Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections. British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730 1860 (Philadelphia, 2001), 8. 24. For a critical overview of the vicissitudes of British and American literature, from their shared status as Literature in English throughout the 19th century to their academic separation in the 20th century and their reunion in transatlantic studies, see Amanda Claybaugh, “Toward a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States,” Victorian Studies, 48, 3 (2006), 440-460. Recent trans-Atlantic works by Paul Giles, Eve Tavor Bannet, Susan Manning, Amanda Claybaugh, Laurence Buell, Andrew Taylor, Elisa Tamarkin and others have adopted a language-bound notion of transatlanticism. 25. Gillman and Silva Gruesz, “Worlding,” 229. 230 cristina iuli of time and space” by its linguistic registers. “Translation represents both one form that this dynamic exchange between nations can take, and a igure for that process.”26 As they showed through their reading of an American literary classic, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, this means pushing literary studies – including Atlantic and trans-Atlantic literary studies – beyond the transnational paradigm and towards what the authors call a “worlded analysis:” A worlded analysis would plant the foot of the drawing-compass somewhere and sometime else than an “America” conceived of as the inevitable center and beginning. Further, it would attend to the way that texts move between multiple forms of language usage – native and foreign, dialect and register, Creole and patois – that are tied to forms of social capital. hinking dialectally and translationally about the movements of texts across space, time, and language, such a worlded analysis would map out a network of crosshatched, multidirectional inluences rather than drawing one-way or even two-way lines of comparison.27 Translation and adaptation rather than speciic genres; movement in time and space instead of historical periods; and lux rather than direct transmission: following the shift from a national to a post-national context, this series of substitutions actualizes the turn from a nationalist to a post-national, “trans-Atlantic” hermeneutics by introducing a poetics of relation as alternative or, at the very least, complementary to a poetics of comparison. A poetics of relation operates both metaphorically and epistemologically to mark the continuities between “transnational,” “hemispheric” and “transatlantic.”28 As Kate Flint put it: “he Atlantic is a space of translation and transformation, rather than of straightforward transmission. [...] It has been the task of transatlantic studies and of its close relatives, Atlantic studies and Atlantic World studies, to replace the language of the frontier with that of the oceanic,” and to substitute its semantics for notions of nationhood “that depend on ideas of expansion and conquering, a concern with luidity, transmission, and exchange.”29 his task relies on comparative, elliptical methodologies that work to defamiliarize canonical formations in literature and identity by relating them to alternative focal points. In this respect, to read British and American literature side by side, as Paul Giles does, means to consider “a complex and interactive Anglophone culture” and consequently “to open up wider questions about the deinition and status of literatures in English,”30 while remaining well grounded in a contained cultural and linguistic space and thereby eschewing the risk of “promoting academic dilettantism, however well-intended 26. Ibid., 230. Emphasis mine. 27. Ibid., 231. 28. he key text here is Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, (Paris, 1990). 29. Kate Flint, “Transatlantic Currents,” ALH, 21, 2 (2009), 324-334, 325. 30. Paul Giles, Virtual Americas, 5. 231 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space and progressive it may be.”31 And yet, even if it is innovative and productive within a contained deinition of trans-Atlanticism as really an Anglo-American phenomenon, a comparative methodology so designed is also subject to the charge, raised especially by transnational anti- and post-colonial scholars, of being focused on pre-established objects of study rather than on relations between and among lexible entities.32 Scholars continue to debate over how best to conceptualize a methodology that addresses both the oceanic “luidity” of language, ideas, commodities and people, on the one hand, and the clustering, sedimentations, transformations and dispersions of their debris across transatlantic currents and hemispheric lands, on the other. hey do however unanimously agree that “Trans-Atlanticism [...] is a call to reorganize our existing objects of study in new ways,”33 as Amanda Claybaugh put it. his demands a point of view that is broad enough and lexible enough to consider the multiple levels of possible and actual connection as well as the many histories carried across Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean together with things, people and ideas. Transatlanticist scholarship in literary studies, then, tends to bifurcate into two main directions: scholars who work strictly with the English language and focus mainly on the convergences of Anglo-American transatlantic textual production, circulation and reception; and scholars who concentrate on relations established by transatlantic contacts and who emphasize the institution of western modernity and colonialism and the critique of that process. For the former, “the crossing of national boundaries is largely incidental to their arguments, whether about literary movements (Richard Gravil and Leon Chai), literary genre (George P. Landow), philosophical traditions (Susan Manning), or the interrelations of literary and social phenomena (Jonathan Arac).”34 For the latter, instead, the focus is either “on the whole Anglo-American world, which includes those Caribbean islands under British control and ports in Africa and Latin America as well as Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the United States,” or “on the relations between two nations within that world, most commonly the United States and Great Britain.”35 According to Claybaugh’s provisional scholarly map, scholars who explore the relationship between Great Britain and the United States have tended “to focus on relations that are imagined, not material,”36 whereas those who investigate the larger Anglo-American world “have tended to excavate the material 31. Heinz Ickstadt, “American Studies in an Age of Globalization,” American Quarterly, 54, 4 (December 2002), 543-562, 554. 32. See Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: the Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review, 91 (Winter 2005), 62-90. 33. Amanda Claybaugh, “New Fields, Conventional Habits, and the Legacy of Atlantic Double Cross,” ALH, 20, 3 (June 2008), 439-448, 445. 34. Amanda Claybaugh, “Toward a New Transatlanticism,” 442. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 232 cristina iuli networks that constituted it, such as the slave trade (Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach), and black newspapers in the United States, Europe, and Africa (Brent Edwards).”37 What seems to emerge for the time being as a crucial diference between these alternative conceptualizations is that one considers the literary transatlantic as a consistent conceptual unit, relatively well deined in historical, linguistic, geopolitical and cultural terms that have sedimented over time, while the other considers it in more luid, relational terms as a fragment of the global literary world. Provided that both views imply strictly site-speciic interpretive strategies, the irst kind of Atlanticism relies on a methodology based in “comparativist defamiliarization”38 and underscores “a transatlanticism that is as attentive to the connections across national boundaries as to the diferences between nations, as attentive to the concrete collaborations of individuals and groups as to the imaginings of nations as a whole.”39 he second kind, on the other hand, demands a broader methodological framework, consistent with the view that a broader notion of the relations between transatlantic and worldly literary phenomena is required to give nuanced, comprehensive accounts of the complexities of the modern world system as it has emerged from the events of colonization – a world multiplied in various centers of exchange and reference that have in turn engendered new phenomena and centers of exchange and reference. his latter view tends to address literary events as joined or separate points of convergence and dispersion; unique, singular occurrences or fragments of a wider, interconnected network of phenomena whose limits have been constitutively made and remade by the actual dynamics of the material, political and imaginative economies of Atlantic crossings. he more self-limiting version of transatlantic/neo-Atlantic studies tends to focus on British-American relations. he more expansive version identiies the wider Atlantic as a unit of analysis despite the elusiveness and lack of coherence historians attribute to the Atlantic and the geographies it has brought into contact as a “system or uniform region.”40 In both cases, the transatlantic “envisions a relationship to an always distant yet ever proximate other,” as Colleen Glenney Boggs aptly put it. “Transatlantic deines a location that is always elsewhere: it means ‘being in America’ only when one is not in America; when one is in America, it means being in Europe or Africa. he term operates in relation to, yet independently of, any deinitive locus. Only secondarily a geographic marker, it is therefore irst and foremost a term that deines relationship.”41 Because 37. Ibid. 38. Paul Giles, Atlantic Insurrections, 12. 39. Ibid., 439. 40. Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Deinitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review, 111, 3 (June 2006), 743-57, 747; Alison Games, “Atlantic History,” 741. 41. Coleen Glenney Buggs “Transatlantic Romanticism,” in Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830, eds. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (2010), 219-235, 222. 233 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space it measures its explanatory ambitions in relation to the context of the modern world, Atlantic history is, in the words of Alison Games, “a slice of world history.”42 Similarly, and by extension, as a critical practice that sees its “subject as an object that is also a space – the Atlantic Ocean and all that it holds, carries, and touches on in time,”43 trans-Atlantic/neo-Atlantic literary studies is also ambiguously situated between world history, geography and cultural history. Yet, “the Atlantic” it conjures up does not appear as a space that could be established by geography or history alone so much as a conceptual and material site engendered by power relations, knowledge and physical constraints as world capitalism expanded across the watery mass of the Atlantic ocean before spreading into the European, American and African continents. he Atlantic, in Boelhower’s words, is “a uniquely extended heuristic space,” a “loating life” marked by... of “unity-in-multiplicity” whose intelligibility as a conceptual and material space “seems strictly linked to the materializing activities of ships and maps.” Indeed, “he ocean-going ship and the modern world map are undoubtedly the two major emblems of the genesis and taking hold of the modern world-system. So much so that they can be considered critical conduits for the low of peoples, goods, and ideas back and forth between Europe, Africa, and the Americas particularly in the early centuries of the Atlantic world’s formation.”44 If the intelligibility of the Atlantic world were generated in the making by Atlantic traicking routes and in the luctuations of science and capital powerfully captured by the igures of the ship and the map, then the historical narrative of the dual expansion of the (North) Atlantic and of capitalism can only be a product of what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the juxtaposition of “a geography of imagination and a geography of management,” both distinctive yet intertwined in the global expansion of the North Atlantic,45 since the logical order of the Renaissance imagination “went hand in hand [...] with the elaboration and implementation of procedures and institu42. “Atlantic history is a slice of world history. It is a way of looking at global and regional processes within a contained unit, although that region was not, of course, hermetically sealed of from the rest of the world, and thus was simultaneously involved in transformations unique to the Atlantic and those derived from global processes. he Atlantic, moreover, is a geographic space that has a limited chronology as a logical unit of historical analysis: it is not a timeless unit; nor can this space fully explain all changes within it. Nonetheless, like other maritime regions, the Atlantic can ofer a useful laboratory within which to examine regional and global transformations.” Ibid., 747. 43. Tamarkin, Elisa. “Transatlantic Returns,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, eds. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (London, 2011), 264-293, 267. 44. William Boelhower, “I’ll Teach You How to Flow: On Figuring out Atlantic Studies,” Atlantic Studies, 1 (2004), 28-48, 33 and 47. For a brilliant reading of the paradoxes of production, discourses of freedom and racial narratives within a mercantile Atlantic context that relies on and exploits Boelhower’s iguration of the early Atlantic, see Laura Doyle, “Reconstructing Race and Freedom in Atlantic Modernity,” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, 4, 2 (2007), 195-224. Online, last accessed September 3, 2014. 45. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “he Otherwise Modern. Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” 220-237, 221. 234 cristina iuli tions of control both at home and abroad.”46 his twofold geography, in turn, can only be described from a perspective that relativizes the (North) Atlantic as one factor in the evolution of colonial, trans-Atlantic world cultural history. Maps and ships – organizational instruments of world capitalism – were initially “fully involved in ‘worlding’ the space [of the Atlantic]” because they functioned simultaneously as the semiotic operators of modernity and modernization in the two geographies of management and imagination. It is precisely in the issures and points of disjuncture of these two geographies that, Trouillot reminds us, “we are likely to identify processes most relevant to the joint production of sameness and diference that characterizes the dual expansion of the North Atlantic and of world capitalism,”47 since the latter established the modern world with the new order over/of the world. hat order was established as the epistemological distinction between modernity and coloniality brought about by modernity itself. herefore, just like the Fukù Americanus in Junot Diaz’s novel, that order remains inluential even in today’s globalized world. Midwifed on the Antilles by the Admiral Christopher Columbus – another one of “its great European victims” – fukù haunts the present and has bound cultures and histories ever since, much like the experience of colonial or modern subjectivity brought about by the maps and ships that instituted and installed modernity. As Diaz’s narrator explains: “No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukù on the world, and we’ve been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fukù’s kilometer zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.”48 Transatlantic/Neo-Atlantic Studies Just as Atlantic history has its conventional beginning in Columbus’ 1492 voyage and the trade between the European, African and American continents,49 Atlantic literary studies also has two points of origin: Robert Weisbuch’s 1986 monograph, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Inluence in the Age of Emerson, and Paul Gilroy’s he Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Together, these critical works not only spurred the two main paths along which Atlantic studies were developed but they also chronologically established the shift from Atlantic to Transatlantic (or neo-Atlantic) studies. he Anglo-American “special relationship” was foregrounded and contested 46. Ibid., 222. 47. Ibid., 223. 48. Junot Diaz, he Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (London, 2008), 1-2. 49. See Alison Games, “Atlantic History,” 747. See also, David Armitage, “hree Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), he British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002), 1-30. 235 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space in the old, “white” Atlantic matrix of studies focused on European imperialism and Anglo-American traditions that followed Weisbuch’s call for “a rigorous study of Anglo-American literary relations.”50 he “black” Atlantic genealogy of the trauma of slavery and the history of the African diaspora is unanimously acknowledged as the foundation of what Boelhower has called “the new Atlantic studies matrix,” which emphasizes the “abrupt perspectival reversals” injected into Atlanticist scholarship by postcolonial and cultural studies methodologies.51 Although we can ind signiicant overlaps between these two lines of research throughout the long list of publications they have inspired, those with a special awareness of “the heteronomic and multilingual condition of Atlantic studies themselves” who also question “the very concept of Europe as a uniied, integral entity”52 tend to distinguish between Black Atlantic and Anglo-American transatlantic studies. he Anglo-Atlantic matrix gradually shifted the focus of American literary studies, especially that concerning early revolutionary literary histories, away from considering American literature as an extension of the English tradition. Instead, that literature came to be viewed more as a dynamic element in an emergent transatlantic system that was “produced in a process of mutual intraimperial cultural exchanges”53 and was later identiied with all writing in English that attempts to “make room in the language of the New World [and has] helped to create the stylistic circumstances in which that writing is now received.”54 Early major works using this matrix include William C. Spengenmann’s A New World of Words: Redeining Early American Literature (1994); Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s inluential anthology, he English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (1997), which treated pre-revolutionary Atlantic culture as a unit while also seeking to canonize marginal voices; and Paul Giles’ Transatlantic Insurrections (2001) detailing the intertwined relations between English and American literatures during the revolutionary years, culminating with the American Revolution. he legacy of such critical investigation can be seen in the countless scholarly attempts to compare the construction of transatlantic subjects, subjectivities, identities and reformism, and to analyze the correspondence, travelogues, poems and print cultures shared by the cultures of Britain and the early revolutionary antebellum US and published into the early 21st century.55 50. Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Inluence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago, 1986), XX. 51. William Boelhower, “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” ALH, 20, 1-2 (2008), 83-107. 52. Ibid., 85. 53. Bauer, Comparative Studies of Colonial America, 285. 54. Ibid. 55. In addition to works already mentioned in Paul Giles’ Atlantic Republic: he American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford, 2006), some of the most signiicant publications in this tradition include: 236 cristina iuli We can ind the Black Atlantic matrix in most studies of transatlantic culture. Indeed, one could argue that Paul Gilroy’s he Black Atlantic midwifed transatlantic American studies by ushering in its (black? mixed?) post-postcolonial coniguration to replace its (white) Atlantic matrix. In his inluential study, Gilroy invited scholars to “take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”56 In Gilroy’s seminal project, “the Black Atlantic” referred to both a speciic “modern political and cultural formation” and a conceptual category, thereby rupturing accounts of modernity based on “the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.”57 It also helped articulate a “counterculture of modernity” grounded in the transactions and movements between Africa, Europe and America, conceived as lows in “watery spaces”58 as part of a “system of cultural exchange” largely determined by “the economic and historical matrix in which plantation slavery – ‘capitalism with its clothes of’ – was one special moment.”59 By reintroducing to the history of western modernity the history of the Middle Passage, “the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation,” and its dissemination, Gilroy bound the ield of Atlantic/neo-Atlantic studies to a rewriting of modernity that operates both historically and conceptually, in order to pressure us “to rethink Amanda Claybaugh, he Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca, NY, 2007); Kate Flint, he Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 (Princeton, 2009); Audrey Fish, American Slaves in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2000); Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008); Meredith McGill (ed.), American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadelphia, 2003) and he Traic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (New Brunswick, 2008); Eve Tavor Bannett and Susan Manning, Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 (Cambridge, 2012); Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Trans-Atlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Baltimore, 2007); Lance Newmann, Joel Pace and Chris Koening-Woodyard, Trans-Atlantic Romanticism: an Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature, 1767-1867 (New York, 2006); Leonard Tennenhouse, he Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora (Princeton, 2007); Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862 (New York, 2000); Heather Slettedahl Macpherson, Transatlantic Women’s Literature (Edinburgh, 2008); Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill, 2007); Leslie Eckel, Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth Century American Writers at Work in the World (Edinburgh, 2013); and Samantha Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature (Edinburgh, 2011). 56. Paul Gilroy, he Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, 1993), 15. Other key contributions to this burgeoning research ield include Marcus Rediker Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1989), and he Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000); and Edward Brent Hayes, he Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, 2003). 57. Paul Gilroy, he Black Atlantic, 19. 58. Kate Flint, “Transatlantic Currents,” ALH, 21, 2 (2009), 324-334, 325. 59. Paul Gilroy, he Black Atlantic, 15. 237 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere.”60 Atlantic studies understood as studies of literary, political, ideological and commercial relationships across the Atlantic, particularly between British and North American literatures, was hardly a new subject at the time he Black Atlantic was published. However, two trends in American literary history retained a strong Eurocentric connotation that is incompatible with the critical questioning of the western epistemology of modernity intrinsic to Gilroy’s Black Atlanticism: irst, the lengthy dominance of the “American exceptionalism” theory cast as the search for the origins of an authentically American identity “however that was deined at various point in history”61 and, more recently, the re-historicization of the ield from a British imperial perspective inspired by historians like Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn, according to whom, for instance, early American culture formed “a huge, outwardly expanding peripheral arc” connecting the colonies and the rural provinces of England to metropolitan London.62 Baylin’s view seems highly innovative if we think of literary studies as a discipline historically related to nationalist ideologies and projects of cultural nationalism. However, if we resituate this view in the context of the methodological shift from the mid-1980s that led historians of early American literature to “abandon the quest for a distinctly American literary tradition [and begin] to see early American literary culture as an extension of the English tradition,” we must acknowledge that, while valuable, this view left little conceptual room to account for the circular traic of the Black Atlantic.63 On the contrary, as Boelhower has pointed out, Baylin’s attempt “to delineate an Atlantic history narrative” now seems to belong “to an already completed paradigm, ending – in terms of its thinkability – with 60. Ibid., 17. Scholars agree that he Black Atlantic is “the most inluential and ield-deining” of several works around which a recent, critical Atlantic discourse has developed. See Mackenthun, Hall, Boelhower and Baucom. 61. Bauer, Ralph. “Notes on the Comparative Studies of the Colonial Americas,” Early American Literature, 38, 3 (2008), 281-304, 284. I am extending here Bauer’s reconstruction of the roles played by ideologies of exceptionalism and British imperialism in American literary history beyond the province of Early American Literature, which is Bauer’s focus. he revisionist impetus of American Literary History in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, which resulted in the publication of the two major histories of American literature – the eight-volume Cambridge History of American Literature edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and the Columbia History of American Literature edited by Emory Eliott – testify to the shift in orientation from the old exceptionalism of origins to the new exceptionalism of multiculturalism and diversity. See also Stevens, Claybaugh and Eltys. 62. For a historical account of a colonial, imperial Atlantic pursued vigorously by historians of the British Atlantic and historians of colonial British America working within national paradigms characterized by exceptionalism, see Alison Games, “Atlantic History,” 744. Games also dates the most recent emergence of an Atlantic orientation in historical studies to the 1970s. 63. Literary historians such as Michael Warner, Myra Jehlen and William Dowling told the story of early (or Revolutionary) American literature as that of an “English Diaspora,” a Protestant “print culture” or a transatlantic variant of an essentially English “Country ideology;” Bauer, “Notes,” 285. 238 cristina iuli its own pre-eminently Anglo-American and North Atlantic explorations.”64 he limits of this paradigm can be foreseen in its “often parochial and at times unabashedly Eurocentric genealogy [...] and, even more tellingly, [Baylin’s] unwillingness to consider the ways in which Atlantic history is being signiicantly enriched by cultural studies and decolonizing methodologies.”65 By challenging national histories and charting the evolutions and convolutions of modernity across national borders, postcolonial methodologies demonstrated that the “European world system” emerged alongside the colonization of Africa and the Americas, thus instituting an epistemology that bounded modernity and colonization as the efects of the same historical and conceptual event, while also producing a counterhistoriography aligned with the counter-cultural, anti-Eurocentric project of the Black Atlantic and thence with the new Atlantic or trans-Atlantic studies matrix. Furthermore, as Charles Piot pointed out, he Black Atlantic also helped to establish the sort of cultural mixing – creolité/métissage/hybridity – characteristic of black Atlantic cultures as generally paradigmatic of cultural process.66 As an explicit anti-Eurocentric critique of modernity, the mode of inquiry launched by he Black Atlantic demands new epistemologies of modernity, new ways of posing the relationship between the Atlantic and the modern that “question, rather than take for granted the very concept of ‘Europe’ as a uniied, integral entity.” his can be done by interrogating the archive of slavery and the network of meanings and relations it produced alongside the emergence of a European world system, thus forcing a reconsideration of modernity, the Enlightenment and their attendant categories: “the idea of universality, the ixity of meaning, the coherence of the subject, and, of course, the foundational ethnocentrism in which these have all tended to be anchored [...] through the lenses of colonialism or scientiic racism.”67 Furthermore, as Ian Baucom suggests, by asking a genealogical question about the emergence and convergence of modernity, race and identity, Gilroy’s study really raises the question as to whether the modern concept of the subject and the conception of identity we inherit are not “in some fragmentary, 64. William, Boelhower, “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” 83-107, 84. 65. Ibid. 66. Charles Piot. “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 100, 1 (2001), 155-169. It is worth pointing out that Piot’s essay explicitly criticizes Gilroy and Stuart Hall’s work on the African diaspora and on identity and diaspora for focusing almost exclusively on Britain, the US and the Caribbean, thus leaving Africa out of the picture. Piot also tries to re-Atlanticize the African continent by addressing the diasporic, multicultural, multilinguistic and socially diverse environment generated by the displacement of people throughout the continent caused by colonization and the Atlantic slave trade. As he puts it, “his omission not only silences a major entity in the black Atlantic world but also leaves unchallenged the notion that Africa is somehow diferent – that it remains a site of origin and purity, uncontaminated by those histories of the modern that have lent black Atlantic cultures their distinctive character – and thus risking reinscribing a conception of culture that Gilroy, Hall, and many of the new diaspora scholars otherwise spent much of their work critiquing,” (Piot, “Atlantic Aporias,” 155-156). 67. Paul Gilroy, he Black Atlantic, 54. 239 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space issured, heterogeneous sense,” traceable to that “centuries-long ‘Atlantic now’” that we have inherited.68 In this regard, the Black Atlantic, post-postcolonial matrix of trans-Atlantic studies described by Boelhower, Baucum, Jonathan Elmer – as we will see below – and others installs within literary studies a critique of modernity that dovetails with the hemispheric critique of modernity developed by Peruvian sociologist-anthropologist Anibal Quijano, Argentine-Mexican political scientist Enrique Dussel and Argentinian semiologist and anthropologist Walter Mignolo, who explore the relationship between globalization, capitalism, modernity and colonialism from the vantage point of “coloniality as a place of enunciation from where the invention of modernity can be disclosed and its ‘natural’ underpinning revealed.”69 heir aim is to actualize the project to decolonize knowledge/power and to separate from modern rationality and its epistemology in order to foreground “other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economies, other politics, other ethics.” 70 Baucom also emphasizes the logic of unsettlement undergirding these anti-Eurocentric, post-postcolonial, genealogical – i.e. decolonial and trans-Atlantic – critiques of modernity in his description of Atlantic discourse as a critique of modernity: Whatever else it has been, Atlantic discourse has articulated itself over this period as an origin-and foundation-worrying mode of critique, as an examination of those “subtle, singular, and subindividual marks” that collectively compose a complex transmarine “network” of cultural, historical, literary, and ethnographic exchanges, as a form of critique that – whether its object of study is the modern nation-state, the literary canon, religious, commemorative, or expressive practices, the constitution of corporate identities, or the formative logics of modernity itself – repeatedly “disturbs what was previously thought immobile,” “fragments what was thought uniied,” and “shows the heterogeneity of what was thought consistent with itself.” [...] If Atlantic discourse is thus, in Foucault’s sense, a recognizably genealogical mode of discursive inquiry, then [...] such disturbances, fragmentations, and issurings name more than a critical grammar of unsettlement, [...]. hey also name an unsettled and unsettling way of inhabiting and experiencing the modern.71 Trans-Atlantic discourse so conceived works to reveal the hidden faces of modernity and to dislodge its prescriptive universals by suggesting the discontinuities “inherent” in 68. Ian Baucom, “Introduction: Atlantic Genealogies,” (2001), 1-13, 5. 69. Walter D. Mignolo, “he Enduring Enchantment (or, he Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here),” South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4 (Fall 2002), 927-954, 934. 70. For a good synthesis of the decolonization project in the context of transnational American studies, and for an overview of the many theoretical positions within that ield, see Guenter Lenz, “Toward a Politics of American Transcultural Studies – Discourses of Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4, 2 (2012), 1-33. 71. Ian Baucom, “Introduction: Atlantic Genealogies,” 3. 240 cristina iuli Atlantic history and the ideologies that underwrite “a Western system of racial hierarchy.” In this sense, Elisa Tamarkin points out, “Atlantic Studies derives from black Atlantic studies in particular its characteristic modality: a provocation away from ideologies of modernity and progress that are put at sea.”72 hose “real disjunctions that characterized the Atlantic’s historical and geographical components”73 therefore become the conceptual levers of a critical, truly circum-Atlantic74 methodology that is “fundamentally ocean based” (Boelhower)75 or “transmarine” (Baucom) because the Atlantic world is “a ield of strategic possibilities in which the Oceanic order holds all together in a common but highly luid space.”76 According to Boelhower, we can call the Atlantic and its mutants a “ield of emergence and transformation,” a luid, relational, excessive and perhaps inexhaustible conceptual domain that is necessarily “more than itself,” both historically and spatially, as it is meant to evoke the material and symbolic reservoir of information lost at sea, carried by the crosscurrents of the ocean through the centuries, and retrievable only by adopting a speciic set of research strategies. Together with the genealogical method, these are: “foregrounding of scale, the archaeological turn, the writing of history as testimony, radical archival maneuvering, focus on case studies, and semiophoric analysis.” 77 As is clear from this quote, not only are traditional categories of humanistic scholarship (national canons, historical periods, literary genres, monolingualism) challenged by the improvisational, context speciic, multi-scalar methodology heralded by Boelhower, but the set of strategies demanded by the heterogeneity of Atlantic genealogies and their dissemination may also require expertise not readily available in literary scholarship. he important point here is that an Atlantic domain so conceived deies any comprehensive literary methodology. We are thus warned that any attempt to bring together a “whole” Atlantic world may be, as Tamarkin has observed, only “an anachronism of it – one that relects an impulse to imagine histories beyond the presence of the nation, that an earlier [...] moment has passed down to us.” 78 72. Elisa Tamarkin, “Transatlantic Returns” in Caroline F. Leander, Robert S, Levine, eds., A Companion to American Literary Studies (London, 2011), 270. 73. Alison Games, “Atlantic History,” 741. 74. he term “circum-Atlantic” is one of three descriptors identiied by David Armitage in his overview of Atlantic History. Armitage derived it from literary scholar Joseph Roach, who irst used it in his inluential monograph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, 1996). Roach’s study was greatly inspired by Paul Gilroy’s he Black Atlantic, but expanded the deinition of the Black Atlantic to encompass the African-diasporic, Native American and Caribbean dimension of Euro-Colonial Atlanticism. 75. Boelhower, “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” 89. 76. Ibid., 93. 77. Ibid., 94. Inspired by Krzystof Pomian, Boelhower deines a semiophore as “a highly condensed site, object, or event that brings the typically contingent history of the Atlantic world into focus in a leeting but exemplary fashion.” Ibid., 97. 78. Tamarkin, “Transatlantic Returns,” 267. 241 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space Shifting the methodological weight from place to relation via a spatialization of time inspired by Braudel’s historiography – “he armature of Atlantic studies, we might conclude, is nothing less than the changing historical relation between land and sea understood as two diferent symbolic and geopolitical orders”79 – allows new Atlantic studies to avoid the pitfall of returning to an anachronistic “totality” of the sea. However, what remains elusive is the object of studies proper to this “matrix” as well its research methodology and the archive it conigures, since all ultimately depend, in Boelhower’s words, on an equally elusive, problematic, “Extended phenomenological awareness [...] of the shifting historical relation between [land and sea].” Constitutive of the ield, thus, are not even the relations, but the awareness of those relations. In fact, as Boelhower emphasizes, it is precisely the “awareness of this shifting relation” that “has generated the Atlantic world’s irst language and arguably its irst archives.”80 However, while a heightened awareness of shifting historical relations between elusive entities may open up fresh perspectives from which to analyze disciplinary subjects, it does not in itself provide suicient grounds to either deine a ield or delimit an archive, and as a research project it will likely fail to satisfy either the epistemologist or the historian. he irst will question the formal, epistemological limits of “an extended phenomenological awareness” to constitute a research matrix, precisely since this notion brings us back to the problem of subjectivity as central to the conceptual vocabulary of the new Atlantic paradigm. Whose awareness does this research perspective rely on? hat of the literary historian? What if no literary historian is aware? Does the matrix then disappear? (“Awareness of the shifting relation between them has generated…”) he second will raise the question of what precisely establishes the authority of such a self-instituted, elusive archive, and what explanatory power it holds over what objects, materials and un-archivable ghosts the Atlantic is supposed to hold (“the Atlantic world’s irst language and arguably its irst archives”). In his extension of the Black Atlantic order to the entire aqueous globe, Boelhower identiies the space of the Caribbean archipelago – “the Atlantic world in microcosm”81 – as an exemplary environment for the anti-Eurocentric, new-Atlantic methodology he is laboring to describe, and he singles out two texts that epitomize Atlantic ur-textuality and new-Atlantic methodology, respectively. he irst is Olaudah Equiano’s he Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, he African Written by Himself (1789) – a classic of the Black Atlantic tradition to which we will return in the inal part of this essay. Boelhower deines it as a “quintessentially ield text” whose erratic and paradoxical unity is the result of “a set of conditions, moves, utterances, and transformations, which need to be interpreted in terms of the very processes of their emergence and 79. Boelhower, “he Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” 92. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 93. 242 cristina iuli formation, all of which take place in a spatial ield.”82 he second is Edouard Glissant’s Poétique de la Relation (1990), whose methodological value springs from its dominant mode of inquiry and its logical construction, both of which emphasize the process of circulation of cultural traces and implies an understanding of history less inclined to chart progress and change than to trace the slow emergence of events and the transformations and hybridization of relations over the longue durée.83 Perfectly in keeping with the expanded, post Black Atlantic idea of neo-Atlantic studies described by Boelhower, both examples herald an ambiguity, a conceptual paradox that only surfaces once it departs from its Black Atlantic matrix to expand into a more comprehensive paradigm for literary criticism. Unmoored from the traumatic archive of slavery, the heuristic and epistemological values of trans-Atlanticism become intellectually seductive but historically and conceptually questionable, because they are left bereft of a principle in relation to which an oceanic logic may be adjudicated as preferable to a territorial one, on both empirical and conceptual grounds. Unhinged from the history of the Black Atlantic as “a structure and a system,” as Gilroy framed it, even an expanded neo-Atlanticism so invested in the deconstruction of western modernity and its symbolic expressions loses its epistemological anchorage. We are thus left to wonder, along with Jed Etsy: “Does a liquid or oceanic spatial array bear an inherently radical relation to the authority of the Archive? [and...] Is it possible for land-based interdisciplines such as the new hemispheric studies [...] to challenge the authority of state archives in parallel ways?”84 Literary scholars and historians have adopted an Atlantic perspective with the purpose of “seeking larger patterns derived from the new interactions of people around, within, and across the Atlantic.”85 Yet, the Atlantic does not always function as a necessary or preferable concept with which to explore so many types of literary exchange. In other words, unless it functions as a device – i.e. an epistemological machine that can produce and lead to otherwise inaccessible knowledge – the notion of the sea remains metaphorical and, as such, is unlike any other trope literary scholars have mobilized to organize their knowledge. To paraphrase Gaines’ words in reference to history, if circulation around and across the ocean is not a fundamental part of literary historical analysis and does not in itself provide explanatory power of the system under discussion, “then we would do well to deine these projects by some other name.”86 If the liquid, luid, transnational order of the water does not secure an epistemological advantage over other domains of erratic transnationalism or globalism, such as those constitutively inhabited by literature, whose 82. Ibid., 93. 83. Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (1990). 84. Jed Esty, “Oceanic, Traumatic, Post-Paradigmatic: A Response to William Boelhower,” ALH, 20, 1-2 (2008), 102-107, 104. 85. Gaines, “Atlantic History,” 749. 86. Ibid., 746. 243 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space object is always literature in relation to other literature – across cultures, continents, waterways and what Wai Chee Dimock calls “deep time” – then literary trans-Atlanticism must perhaps content itself with claiming to itself an aesthetic advantage over other perspectives, rather than an epistemological one. An aesthetic advantage also carries with it the ability to afect our understanding of how the dynamics of water and land, ideas and objects, past and present, slavery and freedom, modernity and coloniality have incessantly shaped and re-shaped each other. If the trans-Atlantic deines a project to map out literary inluences across time and space, it does not necessarily need to project an impossible, imagined origin back onto the igments and traces of “a world that remains apart from the modernity it helps to make.”87 With this question in mind, we can begin to see, as Tamarkin wrote, that the project of transatlanticism is almost impossible to conceptualize, in literary terms at least, without a sense that its character as an intellectual practice is essentially genealogical: alternative lineages are claimed for igures rarely pictured in relation; multiple inheritances for texts are accumulated but left unresolved as if to conirm that genealogy ‘opposes itself to the search for origins’ in favor of ‘the details and accidents that accompany every beginning’ (Foucault, 77, 80).88 Varieties of Trans-Atlantic Experience In literary history, the explanatory power of a concept depends on its ability to organize and give logical, rhetorical, ideological, aesthetic and chronological consistency to otherwise heterogeneous material, thus providing the measuring stick that “spans the distance from literary history as narrative to literary history as reference archive.”89 To date, there is no comprehensive literary history of the Atlantic. However, one could speculate on what such a project would be like, methodologically speaking. Bracketing, for purely speculative purposes, all linguistic, temporal and cultural problems, we can say that, ideally, a literary history of the Atlantic would be a narrative history organized around the suprapersonal, collective concept of the Atlantic. his would in turn hold together and explain the vast archive of drawn and submerged traces of “trans-,” “circum-,” and “cis-” Atlantic space and the historical and literary modernities that evolved alongside it. Like 19th-century narrative literary histories, this history would also present a plot (the history of the Atlantic as a literary archive and as a conceptual fold). Unlike its positivistic predecessors, however, it would not be directed by a teleology (of the nation, freedom, 87. Tamarkin, 277. 88. Ibid. 89. Jonathan Arac, “What Good Can Literary History Do?,” ALH (2008), 1-11, 1. 244 cristina iuli emancipation, conquest or any other). On the contrary, and like most postmodernist literary histories, by taking an Atlanticist perspective to select, organize, generalize and explain diverse cultural and historical elements, material and discursive phenomena, and real or imagined events that have occurred over time in relation to a geopolitical space, such a history would likely try to counterbalance the impulse to encyclopedically include the boundlessness of the Atlantic with the impulse to organize it narratively.90 From this vantage point, a literary history of the Atlantic would not be methodologically diferent from now-familiar literary histories that aim to retrieve “the context in the text,” as Hayden White put it long ago, and to provide historical reconstructions of the complex network of relations instantiated by textual objects by resituating these relations in speciic material zones of production, representation, appropriation and use.91 As we may now infer from the discussion presented thus far, such a history would also be genealogically oriented so as to “cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning,” and to “seek the subtle, singular, and sub-individual marks that might possibly intersect in them to form a network that is diicult to unravel,”92 thus connecting asymmetrically, in disparity, modernity and the Atlantic as “a space of dwelling ‘in’ and a way of relecting ‘on’ the modern [beginning of things].”93 And yet, what seems most challenging about a prospective Atlantic literary history is precisely the problem of framing the Atlantic as “a modern archive,”94 as Jonathan Elmer put it in his Foucaultian review of Black Atlantic methodologies.95 Indeed, Foucault argued that the archive is “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements,” that which “between tradition and oblivion reveals the rules of a practice that enable statements both to survive and to undergo regular modiication;”96 a practice that articulates language and objects, making statements emerge as regularities from dispersion and thus subtracting language and objects from “the indiscriminate generativity of language” and making them available for further re-description by keeping them “between tradition and oblivion.”97 If we no longer assume that the archive can be equated with tradition – as all Atlanticist scholarship makes abundantly clear – then, Elmer claims, we need to be more self-relectively aware of the “continuities between [...] historical discursive practices and our own archiving 90. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London, 2002). For a detailed discussion on these topics, see also my Efetti Teorici: critica culturale e nuova storiograia letteraria americana (Torino, 2002). 91. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1979). 92. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Donald F. Bouchard, ed., (Ithaca, 1977), 139-164, 142. 93. Ian Baucom, “Atlantic Geneaologies,” 4. 94. Jonathan Elmer, “he Black Atlantic Archive,” ALH, 17, 1 (2005), 160-170, 168. 95. Ibid. 96. Michel Foucault, he Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1972), 130. Quoted in Elmer, “he Black Atlantic Archive,” ibid. 97. Ibid. 245 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space practices.” his is particularly true when the latter cluster around that “recognizable genealogical mode of discursive inquiry that is ‘Atlantic discourse’,” 98 and which we may also call the archival apparatus holding together the narrative and referential dimensions of literary history by negotiating between the vastness of the oceanic environment and the statements about what that environment is and how it relates to other discursive practices, texts and phenomena. Otherwise, we would once more evade either the epistemological or the ideological question implied in suggesting or establishing a relationship between the two. his seems to be what Elmer suggests with his example about our current archival practice of naming with regards to Olaudah Equiano’s he Interesting Narrative – a key recurrent text in Black Atlantic scholarship also mentioned by Boelhower, as we have seen. he three names used by the author for his autobiography – “Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, he African” – are bracketed in contemporary editions of the text, and the irst, African name is used despite the fact that, as Vincent Carretta scrupulously points out in his preface to the Penguin Edition, the author signed himself as “Gustavus Vassa” in all but two documents.99 As Elmer insists, Carretta’s eforts are insuicient to challenge Penguin’s design needs, and this is exactly where discursive, that is, archival (epistemological? ideological?) constraints are at work and demand relection: “Vassa was regularly Vassa in his own time, he is regularly Equiano now. he ‘statement’ of he Interesting Narrative has undergone a transformation. Why? he kinds of puzzles about identity, experience, and history so powerfully revealed in research on the black Atlantic infest our own archiving practice.”100 What else, Elmer goes on to ask, does ‘the Atlantic’, in the various manifestations of Atlantic studies, stand for if not an unstable articulation of identity, experience and history? One way of addressing Elmer’s question beyond the Black Atlantic framework is to present the issue of the Atlantic as always doubly bound to modernity. his way, it can be read in relation to a colonial past and a neocolonial present and the many genealogies of Atlantic practices encompassed in both: “history, institution, form, or mode of subjectivity that exists ‘within’ a circumambient modernity.”101 By foregoing all ambition to operate within a single disciplinary or institutional framework and by attending to the interdependence of the three concepts structuring our Atlantic discourse – identity, ideology and epistemology – we could perhaps better understand the links that make literary practices and literary histories modern and Atlantic. In practice, this would mean doing what scholars have recently been doing 98. Ian Baucom, “Atlantic Geneaologies,” 3. 99. Jonathan Elmer, “he Black Atlantic Archive,” 169. 100. Ibid. 101. Ian Baucom, “Atlantic Genealogies,” 5. 246 cristina iuli on a large scale: linking literary texts from old empires, such as Edmund Spenser’s he Fairie Queen, with, in Baucom’s words: the transatlantic slave trade, the slave trade to the modern forms of mobile identity, mobile identity to cosmopolitan traveling theory, traveling theory to the invention and, counterintuitively, the puriication of diasporic religious, cultural, and commemorative practices, such purity discourses to the contemporary resurgence of a range of cultural nationalisms all around the Atlantic Rim, and the discourses of postcolonial nationalism to the Atlantic denationalization or diasporization of Caribbean, South African, West African, and British polities and cultural forms. Such a scholarly endeavor would be aimed at disassembling not only the nation state but also other central forms of modernity such as “the sovereign individual, a range of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary modes, etc.;” in other words, doing the preliminary work to enable literary scholars to reroute and expand canonical readings and works of literature in order to critically reassemble something like a provisional, Atlantic countercanon that runs from Edmund Spenser to Victor Headley and replaces the analysis “of the exclusive generic characteristics” of an individual national literature with the examination of “the subtle, singular and subindividual” intersections of Renaissance epic, Caribbean romance, and yardie iction within a network that is [...] diicult to unravel.102 Baucom seems to consider the permanence of the slave trade as the foundational element of the ongoing Atlantic discourse he has in mind, as though – in line with Gilroy’s project – that event/archive could not be separated from modernity. he extension of the Black Atlantic paradigm to the neo-Atlantic project foregrounded by Baucom’s words expands “the temporal, canonic, geographic and linguistic” boundaries of the old paradigm to encompass the globalized, diasporic, polylinguistic and polycultural neoliberal present. It engages Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Hispanophone Atlantic cultures and hemispheres, and covers literary genres and periods like “Renaissance epic, high modernist drama, postcolonial bildungsroman, ‘minor’ literature [...] and [...] postcolonial pulp iction.”103 Ultimately, a critical Atlanticist discourse so practiced takes the shape of an ongoing series of investigations around events and moments in which “an array of African, Caribbean, North American, South American, or Western European cultural, narrative, literary, historical and ideological practices converge” 104 and then linger, recede, resurface or oscillate as coexisting modern phenomena bound to diferent temporalities and hence unevenly distributed over time. Here, the Black Atlantic is truly a synecdoche for the Atlantic, which is a synecdoche for “modernity.” 102. Ibid., 6. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 247 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space How valuable has this critical discourse been to literary scholarship? To answer this question, we must begin by considering both the number of publications it has generated in the past twenty years and the quality of knowledge it has inspired. When it comes to quantity, there is no question that Atlantic studies has been extraordinarily generative. Suice it to consider Eric Slauter’s 2008 “Historiographical Note,” which lists over 120 publications – partial literary histories, multivolume literary histories, anthologies and monographic studies – each dealing with some aspect of the literary Atlantic.105 his number has even since expanded because the ield continues to grow. As for quality, the methodological revision sparked by the Atlantic/neo-Atlantic paradigm helped both retrieve archival material and organize that material in fresh ways in at least three main areas of American literary studies, namely, early modern/colonial literary studies, 19thcentury and African diasporic studies, and modernist studies. Each of these areas has developed a ield-speciic version of transatlanticism consistent with its own historical relationship to the narratives of the nation and/or of exceptionalism. As Eric Bauer explains, for instance, the study of colonial/early modern American culture sprouted from the “puritan origins” model, which valued early American literary and cultural productions based on what they had contributed to the national literary culture of the US in the 19th and 20th century. In the 1990s early Americanists challenged this proto-nationalist interpretive model, which was both anachronistic and philologically wrong given the widely diverse cultural production of the Americas, and “included not only geographical and cultural areas outside Puritan New England (such as Catholic Maryland) but also geographical areas not now part of the US (such as the Caribbean or Canada).”106 However, by placing their object of study within the transatlantic frame of British imperialism, these scholars ended up redeining it in equally problematic Anglocentric terms like “literature of British America,” which was ideologically focused on the mutations of British Renaissance cultures across the ocean. he introduction of a broader circumAtlantic perspective critically focused on the study of literary cultures in relation to imperialism and colonialism depended upon a steady recuperation of a hemispheric, comparative approach to the study of Anglo and Ibero American cultures that had always been vital among literary historians and historians.107 Although this perspective does partially overlap with a transatlantic approach, the latter tends to emphasize linguistic 105. Eric Slauter, “History. Literature, and the Atlantic World,” Willam and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 55, 1 (2008), 135-166. 106. Ralph Bauer, “Early American Literature and American Literary History at the ‘Hemispheric Turn’,” ALH, 22, 2 (2010), 250-265, 250. 107. Ralph Bauer demonstrates how this alternative, circum-Atlantic and hemispheric interpretation of early American cultures was already in place during the irst three decades of the 19th century, during the peak of the Monroe Doctrine’s success and the ideological process of nation building, thus establishing a continuity in literary scholarship that stretches from he North American Review (1832), to Stanley William’s he Spanish Background of American Literature (1968), to José Saldivar’s he Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, 1991). 248 cristina iuli ainities, ethnic ancestry and literary-cultural continuities that move back and forth between single cultures across the Old World/New World divide. he former approach, on the other hand, has traditionally “emphasized the relations among and similarities between the literatures and cultures of the New World, focusing on what distinguishes the cultures and literatures of the New World at large”108 from those of the Old World. hus, the comparative hemispheric study of American cultures qualiies as a genuinely circum-Atlantic perspective, which in its current coniguration has been inspired by the publication of works like Joseph Roach’s black circum-Atlantic study, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996).109 Signiicant examples of hemispheric scholarship on the colonial period include: Eric Bauer, he Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (2003); Caroline Levander and Robert Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (2008); Eric Bauer and Jose´ Antonio Mazzotti, eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (2009); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2001) and Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (2006); Felipe Fernández-Armesto, he Americas: A Hemispheric History (2003); and Tamara Harvey, Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700 (2008). Some of the most relevant examples of a hemispheric approach to the study of American literature beyond the colonial period include: Anthony Pinn, Caroline Levander and Michael Emerson, Teaching and Studying the Americas. Cultural Inluences from Colonialism to the Present (2010); Eric Wertheimer, Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1870 (1999); Kirsten Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: he Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2002); and Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004). Important works on 20th-century hemispheric literary history include José David Saldívar, he Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1991); Hortense Spillers, Comparative American Identities (1991); and Jefrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández, eds., José Marti’s “Our America” from National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (1991).110 From a transatlantic perspective, studies of American literary cultures in and around the national period (1776 to 1880s) tend to split into Anglo-American or Black Atlantic studies. As we saw in the irst two sections of this essay, the irst group addresses the 108. Ralph Bauer, “Early American Literature,” 251. 109. See Elica J. Gould, “Atlantic History and the Literary Turn,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 55, 1 (2008), 175-180. See also John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York, 2004); and Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville and London, 1996), 17-42. 110. For a full, updated bibliography on hemispheric American studies, see the website of “he Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative” at UC Santa Barbara, http://hemsouths.english.ucsb.edu. 249 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space commerce and reciprocal inluences of ideas, material cultures, genres, styles, expressions, books, political movements and social ideals mainly between Britain and the US (with some extensions to Canada and Ireland), and restricts its critical investigations to the English language. he second, following the legacy of Peter Linenbaugh, Marcus Rediker and Paul Gilroy, expands the Black Atlantic perspective to encompass cultures of North and South America, Africa (especially West Africa) and the European empires, and spans a boundless array of languages and cultures, at least in theory. In general, works of criticism aligned with the Anglo-American brand of transatlanticism tend to revise nationalist literary histories, be they British or American, and to engage with the process of identity formation and the emergence of an American literary and cultural scene in relation to a continuous process of exchange and inluence with its British counterpart. Issues like the American reinvention of literary genres, the history of American publishing, the genealogy of reformism and the production of new subjectivities from an intricate nexus of connections and correspondences between writers on both sides of the Atlantic make up the focus of this branch of scholarship. In addition to the aforementioned monographs by Paul Giles, the many important publications in this group include Leonard Tennenhouse, he Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora 1750-1850 (2007); Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (2007); Amanda Claybaugh, he Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007); Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (2002); Heather Macpherson, Transatlantic Women’s Literature (2008); and Samantha Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature (2011). Among the most inluential examples of collaborative collections that showcase research on a variety of subjects within Anglo-American transatlanticism, we should mention Janet Bear and Bridget Bennet, eds., Special Relationships: Anglo-American Ainities and Antagonism 1854-1936 (2002); Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (2007); and Eve Tavor Bannett and Susan Manning, Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 (2012). he slave trade and the African diaspora provide the main point of convergence between Anglo-American transatlanticism and Black Atlanticism via a vast scholarship focused on reassessing anti-slavery movements and abolitionist rhetoric in England and America (typical of Anglo-American transatlanticism), as well as eforts to inscribe in literary studies the traumatic history of the African diaspora and the modernities that emerged alongside it across Africa, Europe, and the Americas as typical of Black Atlanticism. Important examples of cross-fertilization between diferent areas of the transatlantic literary 19th century include Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, (2007); David Eltis, he Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000); Timothy McCarthy, Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of 250 cristina iuli American Abolitionism (2006); Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer and Emily Todd, Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (2006); and Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Age of the Novel in Literary Modernity, 1640-1949 (2008). By shifting the focus from the literary to the cultural practices that accompanied the slave trade and focusing on their disseminations into the 20th century, the following publications all reconstruct alternative, fully racialized versions of Atlantic modernity and its formations of capital, nation and language: Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996); Brent Edwards, he Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003); and Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance, Capital Slavery and the Philosophy of History (2005). he perspectives outlined by Baucom, Roach, Edwards and other scholars only strengthen the hypothesis whereby the Black Atlantic is one of modernity’s foundational archives, particularly if we recall that “the African diaspora provides the greatest number of voyages, migrations and trades around the Atlantic (the British, for example, carried three Africans to the Americas for every European through the early nineteenth century).”111 Starting from the awareness that the African diaspora also “points to the atrocities that leave gaps in the archive,”112 Atlantic studies tries to respond to such absences “through the immensity of its eforts to chart them, seeing the proliferation of materials and perspectives as a challenge to binary categories of centers and peripheries [...] and other paradigms of knowledge that fail to capture the complexities of the diasporic experience. he closer we look the more we ind exceptions to oicial archives that subsume slaves within slave societies.”113 Furthermore, taking inspiration from Toni Morrison’s foundational 1992 essay about the absence of Africans and African Americans in canonical American literature,114 pioneering work by literary scholars such as Gesa Mackentum’s Fictions of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2003) address the absence in literary historiography of the transatlantic slave trade as both historical subject and critical practice, and connect this absence with the vicissitudes of the discourse on American national identity. From a transatlantic perspective, the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, the post-revolutionary novels of Royall Tyler and Charles Brockden Brown, and the Paciic ictions of Melville 111. Tamarkin, “Transatlantic Returns,” 269. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. “For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as ‘knowledge.’ his knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, irst Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence – which shaped the body politics, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture – has had no signiicant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature.” Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 4-5. 251 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space became evidence for Mackentun’s claim that “the absence of the Black Atlantic is in part the result of the absence of the Atlantic as such from a discourse that still seeks to accommodate the ideological demands for national myth-making.”115 Taking the same research approach, Mackentun’s critical revision of some classical American narratives from a Black Atlanticist perspective has been radically extended by Yogita Goyal’s Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2013), which discusses literary representations of Africa as “constitutive” of black modernity. According to Goyal, African-American, African and black British diasporic writers fabricated a discourse of Africa that challenged existing models of nation and diaspora and shaped a black Atlantic canon [that includes] not only texts that highlight transnational mobility across various locations of the Atlantic triangle, but also those that take up the conceptual core of the idea of diaspora: the loss of home, the meaning of memory, and the struggle to ind a usable past [... and involve] a meditation on the legacy of slavery and colonialism, as well as a consideration of the relationship of blacks to the modern West and its traditions of thought.116 From Gilroy’s to Goyal’s Black Atlantic, the canon of diaspora and Atlantic studies has signiicantly expanded to include everything from the late-nineteenth-century African-American magazine iction of Pauline Hopkins to the late-twentieth century black British novels of Caryl Phillips, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Ama Ata Aidoo.117 “Read together,” Goyal writes, “the writings of these intellectuals comprise what I call a black Atlantic canon.” Alongside the long path navigated by these two revisionist interventions into the circum-Atlantic canon are a plethora of interdisciplinary studies that take Gilroy’s Black Atlantic as their epistemological and historical point of departure, as well as the publication of archival material from the historical Black Atlantic. Of the former, some of the most important works include: Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (1999); Jonathan Elmer, On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World (2008); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2008); Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003); Hugh homas, he Slave Trade: he Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (1997); Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, Genius in Bondage: Literature 115. Gesa Mackentum, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (London and New York, 2004). 116. Yogita Goyal, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge, 2013). 117. Ibid., 8. 252 cristina iuli of the Early Black Atlantic (2003); Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865. (2000); and Philip Gould, Barbaric Traick: Commerce and Anti-slavery in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (2003). he latter includes Vincent Carretta, Unchained Voices: an Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century (1996); William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772-1815 (1998); and Joanna Brooks and John Saillant,“Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798 (2002). he third area of literary studies currently undergoing Atlantic recontextualization is “Transatlantic Modernism,” which has long been considered the foundational axis of international, cosmopolitan modernism historically connecting Europe and the US through a nexus of exchanges and collaborations between artists, institutions and cultures. As a sort of naturalized trope for international modernism, “Transatlantic Modernism” has, paradoxically, only become particularized recently as an efect of the transnational turn in modernist studies. By broadening the perimeter of modernism to include Caribbean, African, South American and Latin American routes, “Transatlantic Modernism” has widened its geopolitical imagination to actually become circum-Atlantic modernism. At the same time, it has also foregrounded a rethinking of modernity from an antiEurocentric, postcolonial, global perspective. his approach has brought new transatlantic formations and relational networks to the surface and demands sophisticated comparative models of analysis to address both their alternative temporalities and their racial and colonial conigurations.118 For instance, and to insist on the Black Atlantic legacy of this new circum-Atlantic modernism and its broader transnational past, Laura Doyle’s work on Nella Larsen collected in Doyle and Winkiel,’s Geomodernisms (2005) reinstalls Larsen’s early-20th-century narratives in a long “Atlantic story” that links the Harlem modernist scene to earlier political writing from New England, Britain, Africa and the Caribbean. Doyle’s Atlantic modernity traces the relationship between literature by Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Claude McKay, among others, and the emergence, appropriations and transformations of notions of liberty back to its 1640s polysemic and ideological roots. Similarly, in her study of Nancy Cunard’s Negro, Laura Winkiel aims to recontextualize the aesthetics and politics of the white avant-garde in relation to African and African-diasporic modernity in order to explore the possibility of alternative modernisms. Winkiel’s revision of the standard Euro-Anglo-American-centric modernism is based on 118. See Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” in Peter Brooker and Andrew hacker (eds.), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London and New York, 2005). See also the special issue of Modernism/Modernity, 13, 3 (September 2006) entitled Modernism and Transnationalisms. For a synthetic overview of the current coniguration of Modernist Studies, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “he New Modernist Studies,” PMLA, 123, 3 (2008), 737-48. 253 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space the reconstruction of the relationships between race, nation and modernity in avant-garde manifestoes. Like Doyle’s work, it is also greatly inspired by Brent Edwards’ monograph, Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, one of the irst to present the Harlem Renaissance as a transnational movement.119 Similarly inspired by Brent Edwards’ important monograph is a recent cluster of studies that have moved away from interpreting the African American intellectual diaspora to Paris in the central decades of the 20th century as a de-localized, limited chapter in the history of 20th-century African American literature in order to view it as a segment of a wider transatlantic circulation of people, ideas and texts from the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean to Paris.120 Important contributions in this area of trans-Atlantic modernism range from the studies of individual authors, intellectuals and public igures to comprehensive accounts of the Black Atlantic scene in Paris, including: Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (2000); William Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: a Paris Jazz Stories Between the Great Wars (2001); Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan Eburne, eds., Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora (2013); Tyler Stoval, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (2012); and Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015). Some of the most important studies on circum-Atlantic modernism include: Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006); Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, Modernism and Empire (2000); Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (2000); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (2001); Patricia Chu, Race, Nationalism, and the State in British and American Modernism. (2006); Edward Culter, Recovering the New: Transatlantic Roots of Modernism (2003); and Paul Stasi, Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense (2012). he current coniguration of the neo-Atlanticist paradigm in literary studies has greatly expanded our understanding of the interconnections between the cultural, material and conceptual roots of the modern circum-Atlantic world and their dissemination into so many routes across the watery and terrestrial global surface. he genealogical methodologies developed by scholars in the various sub-ields concerned with Atlantic phenomena have helped to retrieve and pursue Atlantic cultural, material and ideological formations in the long “modernity at large” that we still inhabit. hey have also generally succeeded in establishing some conceptual parameters that not only give coherence to an otherwise too 119. Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race, and Manifestos (Cambridge, 2008). 120. Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (Urbana, 1993) is a foundational text in the critical history of the study of the African American diaspora to France and exempliies (by contrast) how the research orientation of this ield has shifted from international to trans-national, and from African American to Black Atlantic. 254 cristina iuli ample and amorphous range of abstract and material experiences dispersed and re-clustered across a wide spatial and long temporal axis, but also allow us to compare such experiences. In particular, by epistemologically addressing the connection between modernity, slavery and coloniality, scholars working within the Atlanticist paradigm have exposed the plurality of modernities and their “uneven lows of translation, transmission and appropriation,”121 thus keeping on the critical studies agenda the awareness that current globalization is “both continuous with and yet distinct from”122 the earlier modernity that produced the circum-Atlantic imagination our literary practices set out to retrieve and investigate. 121. Andreas Huyssens, “Geographies of Modernism,” 17. 122. Ibid. 255 Authors Matteo Battistini is Adjunct Professor in History of the United States and US Foreign Policy at the School of Political Sciences (University of Bologna). His main research areas are the history of the American middle class and the role of the political and social sciences in the US between the New Deal and the Cold War. In 2012 he was Visiting Scholar at the History Department of Columbia University. His main publications are: Una Rivoluzione per lo Stato: homas Paine e la Rivoluzione americana nel mondo atlantico,(Rome, 2012) and “Harold Lasswell, the ‘Problem of World Order’, and the Historic Mission of the American Middle Class,” in F. Fasce, M. Vaudagna, R. Baritono (eds.), Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective, (Turin, 2013). Elisabetta Bini is Research Fellow at the University of Trieste. She received her PhD from New York University and has been Max Weber Postdoctoral Research at the European University Institute in Florence. Her research interests revolve around the history of transatlantic relations during the Cold War, the history of international energy politics, and the history of consumer culture. She has been Visiting Scholar at the History Department of Columbia University. Her publications include La potente benzina italiana. Guerra fredda e consumi di massa tra Italia, Stati Uniti e Terzo mondo (1945-1973) (Rome, 2013) (forthcoming in English). Alessandra Bitumi (PhD, University of Pavia, 2011) is currently Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and Adjunct Professor of European History at Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris. A recipient of the Fulbright-Schumann Fellowship, she was visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2010-11 and at New York University in 2012. Among her recent publications are: “Building Bridges across the Atlantic: the European Union Visitors Program”, in International History Review (2013), and Un ponte sull’Atlantico. Il “Programma di visitatori” e la diplomazia pubblica della Comunità europea negli anni Settanta (Bologna, 2014). Giovanni Borgognone is Associate Professor of History of Political heory at the University of Turin. His main research revolves around elite theory, managerialism and technocracy. He serves as associate editor of the academic journal Storia del pensiero 257 modern european-american relations in the transatlantic space politico and is a member of the editorial board of the historical review Passato e presente. Among his books are Storia degli Stati Uniti (Milan, 2013) and Tecnocrati del progresso (Turin, 2015). Simone Cinotto is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy. Currently he is Visiting Scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) of New York University. He is the author of he Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (UrbanaChampaign,ILL., 2013) and Soft Soil, Black Grapes: he Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (New York, 2012), and the editor of Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (New York, 2014), which won the 2015 John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer of the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association. Cristina Iuli teaches American Literature and American Studies at University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli, Italy. She specializes in literary history, American modernism, contemporary American literature, and in science and literature. She authored three monographs: Effetti Teorici: critica culturale e nuova storiografia letteraria americana (Turin, 2002); Giusto il tempo di esplodere: “Miss Lonelyhearts”, il romanzo pop di Nathanael West (Bergamo, 2004); Modernity and the Question of Literature (Vercelli, 2009). Her recent essays have been publishen in Arizona Quarterly, European Journal of English Studies, and Modernism/Modernity. Marco Mariano is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Eastern Piedmont. He specializes in transatlantic relations, Atlantic history, and US intellectual history. He has been Research Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies of Columbia University and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies of New York University. He is the editor of Defining the Atlantic Community. Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2010) and the author of L’America nell’“Occidente”. Storia della dottrina Monroe (Carocci, 2013). Matteo Pretelli (PhD, University of Trieste) is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures – Italian Studies of the University of Warwick. He has been Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Minnesota, Lecturer in Italian Studies at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has received the Alberto Aquarone Prize, the Gianfausto Rosoli Prize, the Altreitalie Dissertation Prize for his studies of the history of Italian migration. His latest publications include “Mussolini’s Mobilities: 258 authors Transnational Movements between Fascist Italy and Italian Communities Abroad,” Journal of Migration History, 1 (2015). Edoardo Tortarolo teaches Early Modern History at the University of Eastern Piedmont and is a permanent fellow of the Academy of the Sciences in Turin. His research interests cover the 18th century intellectual history and the history of historiography. In 2006 he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 2010 the Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Italian History at Northwestern University and in 2015 a Trinity Long Room Visiting Fellow in Dublin. His latest book is L’ invenzione della libertà di stampa (Firenze, 2011). Maurizio Vaudagna teaches Contemporary History at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli, Italy. Has taught modules in American and European-American History at Columbia, Cornell and other international universities. His main scholarly interests concentrate on the history of the New Deal, the comparative history of the transatlantic welfare states, the history of United States/European relations, and American history writing in Europe. His most recent book is he New Deal and the American Welfare State. Essays from a Transatlantic Perspective (1933-1945) (Turin,2014). 259 This book is part of the Italian Americanists’ interest in how Europe has contributed to US modern society and culture in the context of the interpretative innovations launched since the 1970s that have revolutionized the narrative of the American past. The original purpose of the research project that has led to the present publication has been to “reinstate Europe in American history.” But the increasing awareness of the radical changes brought about by the new “Atlantic history” has necessitated authors to contextualize their essays in the interpretative and methodological changes that have recently characterized the study of European-American relations. The different brands of Atlantic history have emphasized that cultures, identities and institutions in the United States can be investigated as particular, localized effects of larger relational networks in which the Atlantic basin is reconceptualized as a matrix of power, ideas and capital both worldwide and within nations. These fresh approaches to the Atlantic space posit the need to construct a new narrative of Europe’s role in the transatlantic arena in light of the latest theories and methods being applied to historical and identity reconstruction. In the last thirty-five years the sheer amount and quality of such studies has been so large that they truly merit a systematic survey. This book aims to be such a survey by focusing on historical studies of social stratification, international relations, consumer cultures, literary studies, the social sciences, migrations and the history of energy exchanges across the Atlantic. It aspires therefore to be an informative, systematic, up-to-date historiographical tool available to all researchers who venture into the field of transatlantic relations to better define their hypotheses, research guidelines and conceptual instruments. Maurizio Vaudagna teaches Contemporary History at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli, Italy. Has taught modules in American and European-American History at Columbia, Cornell and other international universities. His main scholarly interests concentrate on the history of the New Deal, the comparative history of the transatlantic welfare states, the history of United States/European relations, and American history writing in Europe. His most recent book is “The New Deal and the American Welfare State. Essays from a Transatlantic Perspective (1933-1945)”, Turin, 2014. Books in the “Nova Americana” and “Nova Americana in English” series also appear in electronic format and can be found at the website www.otto.to.it. ISBN 978-88-95285-57-3 € 9,90