National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States 9780822389156

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National History and the World of Nations

Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society Editors: Rey Chow, H. D. Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi

A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

National History and the World of Nations

Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States

Christopher L. Hill

Duke University Press Durham and London 2008

© 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Janson by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is Columbia University’s center for research, publication, and teaching on modern and contemporary East Asia regions. The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

this book was Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

For Miki Higasa

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1. National History and the Shape of the NineteenthCentury World 1

Part I. Spaces of History 2. Liberal Social Imaginaries and the Interiority of History 47 3. The Nationality of Expansion 82 4. Decline, Renewal, and the Rhetoric of Will 119

Part II. Times of Crisis 5. The Rupture of Meiji and the New Japan 155 6. Americanization and Historical Consciousness 194 7. French Revolution, Third Republic 233 Conclusion: National History and Other Worlds 269 Notes 283 Bibliography 309 Index 329

Preface

This book is about how people wrote the history of a kind of community called the nation in Japan, the United States, and France in the last third of the nineteenth century. The writing of national history, I argue, was a way to imagine the place of the nation in the world and its relationship to preceding forms of sovereignty and community at a time when the consolidation of capitalist markets and the international system of states was changing the shape of the world. Although national histories are typically concerned only with the history of “their” nations, during this period the writing of national history outlines a world of nations in which selfcontained processes of coming-to-consciousness explain both the transformation of societies and their relations with each other. National History and the World of Nations is not a comparative study if comparison means juxtaposing several objects thought to exist separately from the comparison itself. Instead the book examines the representation of national history in these three places from the point of view of the single modernity of which they were part. In the case of national history, an approach that compared three nations as if each existed in itself would accept—fall for—a central contention of national ideologies, that nations are self-evident, timeless entities. In contrast, the approach that I pursue brings into view the systems within which nation-states and the populations to which they laid claim existed: global capitalism and the system of sovereign states. To this end, I keep in mind as much as possible the dialectic between global and local conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. My working assumption of a single modernity is borne out by what I find in investigating the forms that national history took in different parts of the world. The writing of national history must be approached as a problem in international intellectual and cultural history. But why compare three countries rather than two or ten, or for that matter why not study a single

country while trying to “think globally”? One reason: a triangular comparison resists the reductive, binary conclusions that are likely to develop when investigating phenomena like nationalism that hold essential qualities dear, such as conclusions about the “West” in comparison to the Japanese “East” or about “old” societies in comparison to the “new” society of the United States. Three countries are the minimum here, but not so many that the details of each case are flattened out. Another reason is the opportunity to pursue comparisons among several countries that from a systemic point of view are generically different. My analyses exploit as far as possible the fact that Japan and the United States faced Europe from dissimilar positions, one as a potential object of colonization, the other as a former settler colony, and faced problems in the nationalization of their populaces that derived in part from these differing geopolitical situations. From the point of view of global capitalism and the international system of states, France in contrast stood in the center of the world and confronted ideological problems stemming partly from competition among the great powers of the time. The varieties of exceptionalism that are part of the national ideologies of these places—proclamations about the unique conditions of North America, about the “national essence” (kokusui) of Japan, about France as the universal nation—linger in scholarship more than we like to admit, but examined in this manner they look more like reflections of the three countries’ relative positions in the world. One benefit of the tripartite comparison is to provincialize Europe, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, but another is to make it hard to remain provincial about other places.1 There are also reasons for putting these specific countries together. In each, a state existed before the emergence of a widespread sense of nationality, commonly thought to have appeared in France in the eighteenth century, in the United States in the early nineteenth century, and in Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. Each country, however, had recently experienced a political upheaval that changed the nature of the state: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the Civil War in the United States, and the fall of the Second Empire and the Paris Commune in France. Accounting for these upheavals posed a challenge in the representation of history that extended beyond historical writing proper to political discourse and other forms of representation such as fiction. The combination of a state predating a sense of nationality with recent political turmoil that changed the state’s character provides the conditions to explore how national history deals with political rupture, the origins of the state, and state violence 

Preface

in ways that would not be possible otherwise. The prior existence of a state is an important difference from other countries I could have chosen, such as Italy or Germany during this period; the weight of a recent political upheaval is a similarly important difference from a country such as nineteenth-century Britain, whose power in this period haunts historical discourse in France, Japan, and the United States alike. A final similarity is the work in all three countries to build (or, in France, to rebuild) an empire, prompted in part by Britain’s immense imperial presence. Most serious students of the subject agree that the nation, as a form of community that assumes the congruence of state, “people,” and territory, is a recent phenomenon and the exception in world history.2 Nonetheless Rogers Brubaker observes that even scholars who reject nationalist claims of ancient origins and enduring spiritual essences frequently treat nations as if they are substances whose existence or nonexistence can be determined. Such studies transform a category of practice—the practice of “acting nationally,” so to speak—into a category of analysis: the nation and nationality shift from being social phenomena to theoretical categories for analyzing societies.3 If the nation is a category of practice, then so too is national history. In this book, I approach national history as a practice of writing that appears in many kinds of sources, with an eye to the ways that the practice encourages precisely the confusion that Brubaker describes, that is, the idea that history is essentially a national phenomenon. I examine the genealogy of ideas of history and community in the three places but focus on the practice itself. In examining the different forms that such a practice took in these countries—differences within and between them—I am as interested in the question of “how it works” as in that of “what it means.” The ideas that national history expounds are important, but so are the techniques of representation through which it expounds them. I thus rely on two methods, intellectual history and the textual analysis of rhetoric and narrative form, applying both methods to every kind of source. It will be abundantly evident that I consider rhetoric and narrative form to be varieties of historical evidence when analyzed properly.4 My major sources include narrative histories and historiographic essays, prose fiction, works of social thought—including political economy and philosophy of history—textbooks, and a missionary tract. I treat all sources as examples of national history for reasons that their analysis makes clear. Many provide narratives of the history of a particular nation, identified as such or advanced through allegory, while others address probPreface

xi

lems in thinking about the history of the nation, and still others outline theories of social evolution in which the nation has a privileged role. In every case, the sources are representative in form and argument of ways that social philosophers, novelists, and historians wrote about nations and their histories in these places. For example, the French reading manual that I examine in chapter 4 is a classic of a consequential genre from the early decades of the education-obsessed Third Republic, the pedagogical narrative, and employs the journey of two orphaned boys to elaborate ideas of national renewal that had wide currency in France. The sources are generally addressed to broad audiences. In the case of historical writing conventionally defined, which stood on the cusp of institutionalization in universities in all three countries, I rely on works not addressed solely to academics, on the assumption that their arguments intervene in larger circuits of debate. It is worth keeping in mind that in all three places, intellectual fields were not differentiated in the same way that they are differentiated today. After the first chapter, each chapter of National History and the World of Nations focuses on a single country, making cumulative comparisons along the way that I reconsider in the book’s conclusion. Organizing the chapters by country cuts against the methodological point I made earlier—that we should approach nationalism from the point of view of the systemic conditions in which nation-states form—but is unavoidable because of the need to discuss the political, economic, and social conditions that affected the strategies for writing the history of the nation that emerged in the three places. Another way to explain the problem: we do not yet have the understanding of global, systemic mediations that would allow me to dispense with some of the detail, but we may—I hope—develop such an understanding through the investigations of international and transnational cultural and intellectual history to which this book contributes. The first chapter examines the global political economy in the late nineteenth century, the three countries’ positions in it, and reasons that arguments about the history of the nation played a central role in debates on political, economic, and social problems of the time. The next three chapters, which make up part 1 of the book, examine how national histories in Japan, the United States, and France defined the spatial boundaries of historical representation and discuss problems in representation that arise from those definitions, owing in part to the ease with which capital crosses national borders. In part 2, comprising the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters, I turn to the temporalities of national history in each country, with a xii

Preface

particular eye to how national history treated individuals and groups that resisted the nationalization of society, and how it treated the relationship of state to nation. Inversion is the key concept of the first group of chapters, allegory that of the second. The book’s conclusion brings together the arguments on space in part 1 and time in part 2 to readdress the ways that the writing of national history responded to the changing political and economic conditions of the late nineteenth century. National history, I argue, performs a range of ideological labor: it naturalizes the division of the world by systems of states and markets and the positions of particular nations in these systems; it establishes temporalities that seem to demonstrate the inevitability of the reorganization of human community by capital and the state; it quarantines alternative forms of community by displacing the sources of dissent, for example, to a premodern, prenational past; and it interpellates the individual with such political goals in mind by presenting the subject’s acceptance of nationality as the primary form of identity as the unavoidable outcome of the passage from youth to adulthood.

Japanese names appear in the order of family name followed by personal name, and on second reference I use the family name alone. Following custom, however, I refer to Japanese authors who use a pseudonym by that name on second reference. This may cause some confusion, so for clarity’s sake, the main authors in question are Mori Ōgai (pen name Ōgai), Suehiro Tetchō (pen name Tetchō), and Tokutomi Sohō (pen name Sohō). To the extent possible, I use “U.S.” instead of “American” as an adjective, except when “American” is part of the concept in question, as in “American destiny.” I use “national” to mean “of the nation” rather than the totality of the various U.S. states, a habit of speech in the United States that has its own role in national ideology. All the translations are my own.

Preface

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Acknowledgments

This book owes many things to many people. Carol Gluck, Paul Anderer, Priscilla Wald, and Priscilla Ferguson are due more gratitude than I can give. Harry Harootunian offered essential advice at several stages. A number of friends and colleagues read portions of the manuscript: Scott O’Bryan, Sarah Thal, Andrew Bernstein, Sebastian Conrad, Alexis Dudden, Joshua Goldstein, Seth Fein, Joanne Freeman, Pablo Piccato, and Amy Chazkel. Their suggestions and those of the readers for Duke University Press were invaluable. In Japan, Karatani Kōjin and Narita Ryūichi gave inspiration and guidance. Sudo Reiko and Sudo Kazuyoshi offered a cheerful Sunday table and relief whenever the books seemed too many. The Kanekatsu family gave me a country home away from home and, with their circle of friends, many adventures. Kanekatsu Takeaki, Iwasawa Takako, and Watanabe Akira reminded me what this project had to do with the world. In France, Barbara Schlager made my research possible by offering her home. Geneviève Pardo solved many problems of life in Sèvres and cheered things whenever she dropped by. In Cambridge, Andrew Gordon provided generous intellectual hospitality at the Reischauer Institute and read the manuscript in an early stage. John Treat, Ed Kamens, and other colleagues at Yale were patiently supportive as chapters became a book. Without the encouragement of Neil Levi, Sabu Kohso, Ueno Toshiya, and Seth Fein, I would not have been able to follow this project to its conclusion. My parents Joan and David Hill and my sister Laurie Niewoehner have given me lifelong strength. By showing me how many things it is possible to do in one’s life, my cousin Chris Merillat gave me the courage to embark on an academic career. I owe the greatest gratitude to Miki Higasa, who heard about this project before it was one and lived with it for many years. Research for this project was supported by the Japan Foundation, the

Jacob Javits Fellowship Program of the U.S. Department of Education, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and, at Yale University, by the Griswold Faculty Research Fund, the Council on East Asian Studies, and a Morse Fellowship. A publishing subvention was provided by Yale’s Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund. I thank the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University for permission to quote from sources in its collection. Finally my thanks go to Reynolds Smith and the production staff of Duke University Press, and Madge Huntington of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, for their expert advice and assistance.

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

National History and the Shape of the Nineteenth-Century World

In 1869, the year that the Suez Canal linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and a rail line joined the coasts of North America, the year after a “restorationist” government seized power in the city renamed Tokyo, a Japanese reformer named Fukuzawa Yukichi published a geography primer called All the Countries of the World (Sekai kuni zukushi ). This rhythmically phrased chapbook offers a survey of the political geography of the world beginning in Asia and passing through Africa, Europe, and North and South America, ending finally in the islands of the Pacific. Fukuzawa’s sketch of the world does not stop with the enumeration of countries, although the names alone of most of them would probably have been unfamiliar to his readers, whom he assumed to be the women and children of the new Japanese state. Fukuzawa’s descriptions, elaborated in sidebars to the main text, focus on the countries’ inhabitants and their activities and routinely recur to a handful of criteria: literacy, the pursuit of knowledge, and “character” (seishitsu) or “manners” ( fūzoku). Together Fukuzawa calls these “civilization” (bunmei). As he leads his tour of the world, Fukuzawa also offers another criterion: independence. Possession of independence is an issue only for countries outside Europe. Countries on that continent are assumed to have it. Colonialism, in fact, informs the entire tableau of the world: the student-reader encounters it on the first stop, China, long before reaching the colonial powers themselves in Europe. If colonialism and independence are at stake, then so too is the nation-state. This is clear in the pains that Fukuzawa takes to explain the relationship of such geopolitical questions to civilization. Independence alone does not amount to civilization. The kingdoms west of India such as Afghanistan are inde-

pendent in name, he says, but the inhabitants “are only savages [ebisu] of coarse customs.”1 True independence comes only with a collective selfcultivation that Fukuzawa repeatedly exhorts his readers to undertake. His models are Egypt, Brazil, and Chile—for Fukuzawa, countries that have thrown off the foreign yoke to pursue lasting independence through civilization. All the Countries of the World ends with elusive comments on a Pacific archipelago: “Northeast of New Zealand, beyond many thousands of islands and north of the equator, the Sandwich Islands have a population of scarcely seventy thousand. The land is cramped, but it is an independent country; it governs an isolated, distant part of the North Pacific. The islands’ sole market, Honolulu on the island of Oahu, is a port of call for whalers. Ships from England and the countries of America also stop, and with the commerce entering and departing, the land has become more and more prosperous.”2 Still a sovereign kingdom at the time, Hawaii seems to epitomize an ideal for Fukuzawa: independent because geographically insulated, prosperous despite slight resources, taking part in the business of the world and gaining from it. Not anticipating the ambitions of the North American planters who dominated the islands’ economy, Fukuzawa suggests that commercial vigor and the personal industriousness it implies are in themselves a guarantee of independence and a bulwark against the colonialism that haunts his picture of the world. That Fukuzawa concludes All the Countries of the World with such comments suggests that Hawaii is a figure for Japan, or at least for a Japan that Fukuzawa, an Anglophile liberal, wants to see appear: one that has taken its place in the world as a nation among nations, one that is a meeting ground of nations, one that has eschewed barbarian independence for civilization and the promise of a progressively greater future. The optimistic if urgent message of Fukuzawa’s geographical aperçu is belied by admissions along the way, grudging in tone, that some nations have fallen from their civilizational zenith. That Fukuzawa makes such an observation about China—the victim of self-satisfaction, he says—is predictable given his long-standing interest in promoting Europe over China as a model for national striving.3 Yet in Europe itself, he says, onceglorious Spain now lags behind France and England in civilization because of the indolent character of the Spanish people.4 Indeed, in Europe countries rise and fall according to something that Fukuzawa calls the “tendency of the age” ( jisei). He sees Russia, Prussia, Austria, England,



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and France as the “dawning” powers of the continent, but he leaves open the possibility that they too may decline.5 Time thus creeps into Fukuzawa’s tableau of the world. In his view, the civilization of nations and their standing in the world are subject to a process of change according to which they form and grow, gain or lose power and independence. Fukuzawa does not name this process in All the Countries of the World, although he will later ponder it at greater length. Fukuzawa and his contemporaries around the world might simply have called it “national history.” This book is concerned with the narrative and rhetorical forms that national history assumed in three countries, Japan, the United States, and France, in the last third of the nineteenth century. These forms, I argue, allowed writers to explain the place of their nation—a relatively new kind of community—in the world and its relationship to the types of community and political territoriality that preceded it. Such explanations were marked by local and geopolitical conditions, as well as the specific pasts of the places where they were crafted, but reveal compelling similarities in their treatment of problems such as social heterogeneity and the formation of national unity, and in the strategies of narrative and rhetoric they use to transform the past into stories of collective becoming. Although I have called them “explanations,” they were not innocent: one of the most important characteristics of the writing of national history in this period was its labor to channel, constrain, and in some cases extinguish objections to the nation as a form of community and the activities of the state to guarantee its existence. All the Countries of the World shows many marks of its era. Imperialist expansion and rivalry are facts of the world for Fukuzawa, as is the expansion of world markets that imperial rivalry spurred. But perhaps what Fukuzawa had most in common with historians, novelists, and social philosophers in other parts of the world as they confronted such transformations was his preoccupation with understanding the process of social change in the abstract and Japan’s current stage of development in comparison to other countries. For Fukuzawa, such an understanding was the key not only to geopolitics but also to the problem of what to do with the men, women, and children who had been inducted into the newly created nation-state of Japan. It was the key, then, not only to national independence but also to domestic political stability, the two being aspects of a continuous process of political consolidation centered on the new state. Given Fukuzawa’s conviction of the ultimate political efficacy of knowing

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the processes of social evolution, it was natural that he would believe such knowledge must not only be gathered by the student of society but also inculcated in society’s students. The attitude explains Fukuzawa’s choice of audience for All the Countries of the World and the primer’s accessible form. When Fukuzawa declares that China “is moving backward in civilization and enlightenment” because its people have let their manners slacken and neither pursue virtue nor cultivate their intellect, he does not muddy the message with a definition of his terms. An explanation of the voguish idea of “civilization” might interest sophisticates, but Fukuzawa’s discussion of China and its history reflects his contention in the book’s preface that the intelligence of the “nation” (kokumin) is the source of the happiness and woes of a realm.6 He aims to exhort readers through a negative example: cultivate yourselves or suffer the fate of China, rocked by domestic chaos and progressively losing position against the European and American powers. (An explanation of civilization finally appears in an appendix on political geography, where Fukuzawa explains that civilization is the final stage of social development, following chaos, barbarism, and semi-enlightenment.)7 Fukuzawa’s attitude toward his readers suggests that he considers their knowledge of history part of a national mobilization in which the selfcultivation of individuals combines in a collective movement of progress and self-protection. Yet reading All the Countries of the World in the twentyfirst century, when economic and political events have diminished the apparent universality of the nation-state as a political form, one can recognize that it is Fukuzawa’s hortatory position, and not his description of geographic and political boundaries, that projects and thus creates the primer’s audience of a striving national “people.” Indeed, the performative quality of All the Countries of the World—it creates something in the utterance, rather than describing something that is already there—should alert us to the possibility that national history is preeminently a practice of writing, not an explication of facts (such as origins and turning points) that exist prior to their representation. If we examine national history as a practice of writing, comprising specific rhetorical figures and narrative techniques, we can see that invoking threats to the nation’s existence and exhorting the people to mobilize are inseparable, nearly indistinguishable, from the story it tells about the national past, present, and future. How such a practice works and what political possibilities it opens and forecloses are the major topics of this book.



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The Shape of the World: Markets, States, Communication, Travel The metaphorical layer of meaning in Fukuzawa’s treatment of Hawaii at the end of All the Countries of the World attests to the role that figurative language and related techniques of narrative play in national history’s treatment of the various, diverse pasts of the territory claimed by modern nation-states. Such strategies of language are not crafted in a vacuum but conditioned and constrained by worldly economic, political, and social conditions. This chapter surveys such conditions in the late nineteenth century at the level of the globe and in three countries that I take as points for studying the transnational phenomenon of national history—Japan, the United States, and France—and then considers the question of why representations of history were central to debate on the nation. I make no assumptions about the background knowledge of readers, who may be specialists in one or another of the countries, to establish the perspective for what must be an international, rather than simply comparative, investigation. Fukuzawa’s figurative substitution of Hawaii for Japan as an independent trading nation in All the Countries of the World succeeds because it is grounded in what Charles Tilly has called “the two interdependent master processes” of the modern era, the formation of a system of national states and a worldwide system of markets and capital accumulation.8 Hawaii-asJapan depends for its plausibility on a broad awareness of the unfolding of these two processes, and indeed one can say that the connection between Hawaii as figure and Japan as referent passes through or is mediated by such an awareness. In the figure’s elaboration of a national future, moreover, the processes are interdependent: not only is commercial engagement with the world expected to ensure the independence of the Japanese state, but such political independence is to be the basis for commercial vigor. That Fukuzawa’s view of the world and Japan’s place in it should be so fundamentally informed by knowledge of its geopolitical and economic form suggests that a single global modernity, rooted in the uneven and inequitable but hegemonic systems of states and markets, had emerged by this period. That a social reformer in Japan, a historian in the United States, and the writer of a textbook in France, among others, regarded the conditions of their nations from differing positions in such a single modernity is a basic premise of this book. After observing such general

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connections, however, one must concede that the processes Tilly outlines not only are “large,” as he says, but also reach back hundreds of years before the late-nineteenth-century moment I take as my subject. The writing of national history, too, has its own history. In the late nineteenth century, it was preoccupied with the particular relationship between capital and political territoriality that prevailed at the time. We can begin to understand this relationship between capital and territoriality in terms of the transition from the age of “free-trade imperialism” to the second wave of European colonization.9 Following the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe in 1815, the imperial rivalry and overt calls for overseas territorial acquisition of the eighteenth century faded from the international political scene. Not only did British naval dominance of the seas make expansion difficult for any state save Britain, but the fact that the newly independent states in North and South America were free to trade with anyone they liked also dramatically weakened the classical mercantilist justification for territorial expansion itself.10 In place of territorial expansion and the establishment of formal rule, Britain in particular pursued a strategy of informal control through trade agreements and financial arrangements, resulting in a great and secure expansion of trade. When the security of British interests was threatened, however, policymakers never hesitated to establish formal control.11 It was thus that, in the apparently anti-imperialist interregnum between the territorially acquisitive eighteenth century and the return of inter-imperialist conflict in the 1870s, European powers expanded their overseas territories faster than in any earlier period. In 1800, Europe, its territorial claims, and its former colonies made up 55 percent of the earth’s land surface, but the gap between territory claimed and territory controlled was great: actual control extended over just 35 percent of land surface, much of this being Europe itself. By 1878, however, European powers and former colonies exerted control over 67 percent of the earth’s land, a vast increase during an “antiimperial” era. (The total would reach nearly 85 percent by 1914.)12 Giovanni Arrighi has shown that the simultaneous pursuit of free trade and imperial expansion was far from contradictory, but rather essential to the “part-capitalist, part-territorialist,” and fully coherent imperial structure of Britain, which dominated both the world economy and world politics.13 The practice of free trade during this period was largely unilateral: Britain opened its markets to foreign goods in the 1840s and kept them open until 1931, but a multilateral regime effectively prevailed for only nineteen years, between 1860 and 1879. Britain’s position fostered 

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rapid growth in international trade in which the capitalist market reached nearly every corner of the world. Participation in the market theoretically was open and equal, under the ideally free conditions described by liberal economics. Supported by the dominant positions of the empire in international politics and London in finance, however, the free-trade regime created a world economy that in fact depended on the continued expansion of British wealth and power. Given this reality, British interests were identified with those of the market economy per se, a situation that Arrighi identifies as one of Gramscian hegemony, in which Britain was able to successfully assert that its particular economic and political interests were also the universal interest. While the size of the empire and of the domestic-colonial economy laid the ultimate foundation of such hegemonic aspirations, the identification of Britain with the universal allowed it to exert power over the international state system and world economy to an extent that surpassed Britain’s actual ability to intervene. The state system itself underwent changes during the nineteenth century that posed fundamental challenges to the writing of national history. Within Europe, the number of independent political units had been shrinking for several centuries—from approximately five hundred in the year 1500 to around twenty-five in 1900—as a new form of political territoriality, the sovereign state, emerged.14 In contrast to competing types of territorial organization, such as the loose federation of the Holy Roman Empire or the networks of trading city-states of northern Italy and northern Germany, this new type controlled a contiguous and well-defined territory, was relatively centralized, clearly differentiated its institutions of government from other institutions, and tended toward a monopoly of the means of physical coercion within its borders to strengthen its territorial claims. Political historians and theorists of international relations typically view this combination of attributes as the key to the process through which sovereign states eliminated other forms of territoriality in Europe.15 The process also produced a system of states, articulated through interstate agreements, that regulated their interaction through structures of mutual recognition and—ideally—the peaceful resolution of conflicts. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War, is widely recognized as the decisive moment in the emergence of the system because of its large-scale application of the idea of a balance of power among states that would ensure the freedom of all states. In this sense there no longer existed an authority higher than states—the principles regulating their relations operated between, rather than above, them.16 National History



Although in some respects the concept of a “society of states” that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe simply legitimated the rise of sovereign states in the face of the decline of the Holy Roman Empire— and was frequently disregarded by states like Britain and France that wielded the most power—it did establish essential formal conditions for the existence of the state system itself and a logic for its operation.17 In addition to the mutual recognition of sovereignty and borders (the official fiction was and is that such recognition is voluntary), the system rested on an assumption that all states were functionally similar, so that they were in a formal sense identical and interchangeable regardless of size or actual power.18 Given these two basic conditions, the logic of the system held that expansion did not change its character. Neither the inclusion of new states into the system (such as the independent states of the Americas) nor the expropriation of large amounts of territory by existing states (such as Britain’s colonization of the Indian subcontinent) cut against the system’s principles so long as other members recognized these developments. Over the centuries following the Peace of Westphalia, the European colonial powers and offshoots such as the United States extended the interstate system to encompass the territory of the entire world, culminating in the decolonizations that followed World War II. Although the powers preferred to avoid granting sovereignty to newly incorporated lands whenever possible, the state system also placed constraints on areas that succeeded in entering as sovereign states. Despite the guarantees that the system nominally offered to new states, their territory was frequently defined by states already in the system, with twentieth-century decolonization providing a patent example.19 Nonetheless a new state such as Japan, which had been inducted by treaty in 1853, could exploit the logic of the system to maneuver for regional political advantage (as it did in negotiating treaties with China beginning in 1885) and to legitimate its own expansion (for example, in the purportedly consensual annexation of Korea by treaty in 1910).20 Some aspects of the assumptions and logic of the state system that emerged in Europe and eventually spanned the globe resemble those of a capitalist economy, a similarity that bears discussion. Each is presumed to operate through transactions between formally equal agents—states on the one hand, economic actors on the other. Moreover, in both cases, the interest of each agent is presumed to include the stability of the transactional system as a whole. Nonetheless the two systems are heteronomous, operating according to their own laws and patterns of growth, even 

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though they are interdependent and complementary. The relationship between political territoriality and the space of the market thus is not fixed but shifting and dialectical.21 Their relationship is different at given moments—not the same in the mercantilist era as in the age of free-trade imperialism, for example—and can be expected to change decisively in the wake of significant changes in interstate relations, such as wars and colonization, and changes in conditions of production and exchange, such as industrialization or a shift in the balance of industrial and finance capital. The shifting relationship between state and capital prompts two questions important for the writing of national history at the end of the nineteenth century: First, what is the place of national territory in global economic and political space? Second, what is the relationship of the present national form of territoriality to those forms that have been superseded? Parts 1 and 2 of this book are roughly divided between these intertwined questions. The advances in communications technology and the trade infrastructure commonly referred to as the “communications revolution” also propelled changes in economic and political space in the nineteenth century. This was neither the first such revolution (the invention of writing surely is among the earlier examples) nor the last (witness the rapid evolution of the Internet). Nonetheless titles such as The Cosmopolitan Railway, Compacting and Fusing Together All the World’s Continents (1890), by the American William Gilpin, suggest that the advent of the railroad, the telegraph, and steam navigation affected not only the economic and political organization of the world but also the ways that observers grasped social phenomena.22 Consider that until the 1830s a letter from England required five to eight months to reach colonial India by sail around Africa, and a reply would arrive fully two years after the initial letter had been sent. In the 1850s, a similar letter passing by rail across France, by steamship to Cairo, by camel to Suez, and from there by steamer to Mumbai or Calcutta required thirty to forty-five days, with the return taking the same amount of time. In the 1870s, a letter required thirty days, but a telegram could reach Mumbai in five hours. Improvements in naval technology further contributed to the consolidation of networks of communication and trade and the acceleration of movement within them. Regularly scheduled, quick passage by steamship across the Atlantic was available beginning in the 1840s, and steam navigation of the Red Sea transformed travel eastward from Europe. The opening of the Suez Canal was one culmination of such National History



nineteenth-century improvements in physical passage: the journey from London to Mumbai, completed fully by ship, was now 51 percent shorter than it had been using the Cape route.23 The completion of the North American transcontinental railroad was another, equally iconic moment in the history of transportation: including the seven-day passage across the Atlantic, it now was possible to reach the Pacific coast from Europe in fourteen days.24 At the same time, telegraph cables were reaching across Europe and farther east and west. In the 1850s, cables were laid across the English Channel and the Baltic; reliable transatlantic cables were laid in 1865, connecting to feeder networks in the Americas, and Britain and France had dependable and secure cables to India and Algeria in place by the 1870s.25 As an example of what David Harvey has called the time-space compression of modernity, such a rapid extension of systems of transport and communication surely is remarkable in itself.26 The changes also mirrored the position of Britain in the world economy and world politics. While the Suez Canal was built largely with French money and machinery and Egyptian labor (much of it forced), it most benefited British interests by making possible swift movement of people and goods between the United Kingdom and its Asian and Pacific possessions.27 Britain also dominated the construction, ownership, and operation of submarine cables, including the main trunk lines to the Americas, Africa, India, East Asia, and Australasia. Indeed, the span of forty days it took a telegram sending word of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 to reach London was the major spur to building a telegraph relay to India that was reliable and almost wholly British owned and operated.28 The revolution in transportation and communication was indispensable to Britain’s forcible reorganization of the political and economic space of the world. Changes in the state system, the world market, and transportation and communications systems spurred two significant kinds of travel, of bodies and books, through the networks undergoing such great transformations. Recent estimates of the number of people taken as slaves from West and Central Africa to North, Central, and South America and Europe from the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century range from nine to fifteen million.29 The contribution this brutal involuntary migration made to European economic growth through the transatlantic “triangular trade” in African slaves to the Americas, American agricultural products to Europe, and European manufactures to Africa, dominated first by Holland and then by Britain, is well known.30 During the 10

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same period, an estimated 4.3 million more people were taken as slaves from Northeast, East, and Central Africa to the Middle East and Persian Gulf.31 From 1815 to 1914, after the restriction and eventual abolition of the slave trade, voluntary migration overtook involuntary migration and reached the highest levels in human history. Among the major flows, an estimated sixty million people moved from Europe, the Russian Empire, and East Asia to the Americas, the Pacific, and South and East Africa, the most commonly cited movement in the period. Other significant migrations included an estimated 10 million people from Russia to Siberia and Central Asia; around 1 million people from Southern Europe to North Africa; around 12 million people from China and 6 million people from Japan to destinations within East Asia and to Southeast Asia; and 1.5 million people from South Asia to South and East Africa.32 Such a massive movement of people had a great impact on the ways one could talk about the “nation” in settler societies such as the United States, but the effect was no less significant in Europe itself, where large-scale migration from peripheral areas such as Italy, Poland, and Ireland to central areas such as England, France, and Germany responded to the labor vacuum created by declining birthrates and the departure of workers for overseas destinations.33 As chapter 2 shows, the prospect of “mixed residence” of foreigners and Japanese even played an important role in the figurative construction of the nation in Japan, which until the colonization of Korea was mainly a point of departure rather than a destination for migration. Books and ideas also traveled widely, a phenomenon remarked at the time. In the United States, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner observed that ideas “refuse the bounds of a nation,” all the more so in “our modern world with its complex commerce and means of intellectual connection.”34 A comprehensive history of such travels is not the goal of this book, but several examples suggest both the extent of the phenomenon and the complicated pathways involved. The usual explanations of “influence” and “diffusion” hardly suffice to account for the convolutions through which ideas and the language used to express them gained wide currency. In the range of arguments on society, civility, and progress in the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) is notable for attaching a history to civil society and making it the basis for the creation and maintenance of republican government. Although Ferguson’s arguments fell by the wayside in Britain, where political-economic (rather than republican) views of the role of civility in social development prevailed, his ideas circulated widely on the European National History

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continent and appeared, among other places, in the work of Benjamin Constant, Victor Cousin, and other liberals in France during the Restoration. (Ferguson’s Essay had been translated into French in 1783.) The view that civility and its condition, “civilization,” had a progressive history underpinned François Guizot’s General History of Civilization in Europe (Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe, 1828), which enlisted the past to argue that a liberal French monarchy, not reversing the Revolution but avoiding its “excesses,” was the just and necessary outcome of the entire movement of history in Europe.35 Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill read Guizot’s arguments on the evolution of political institutions with interest, and they became a mainstay of the conservative republicans who took power in France in 1870. The republicans especially favored Guizot’s view that the Revolution was conclusively over.36 In the meantime, four translations of Guizot’s history were published in Britain between 1837 and 1846. One 1837 translation (two appeared that year) was released in the United States in 1840, then republished in 1842 with interpretive notes by Caleb Sprague Henry, a professor of philosophy and history in New York.37 In search of a framework for representing the past, present, and future of civilization (bunmei), Fukuzawa Yukichi is well known to have drawn on Guizot in his book Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 1875), an attempt to create a history of progress for Japan that I examine in the next chapter. It was Henry’s edition of the first English translation that Fukuzawa read, however: the reception of Guizot’s history in Japan was mediated by translation and annotation, making the path through Britain and the United States a key factor in the history of its ideas.38 Similar examples abound. While Walter Scott did not invent the European historical novel, as is sometimes claimed, his novels beginning with Waverly (1814) led the genre’s rise, commonly acknowledged as an important indication of the broad change in historical consciousness during the nineteenth century.39 The impact of Scott’s work, which offered a quietistic model for national awakening as territories on the British periphery were subsumed into the empire, eventually extended to colonies from Canada to Australia.40 Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s engagement with Scott and his fellow historical novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton played an important role in transforming prose fiction in British India, and writers of the “foundational fictions” of Latin America tapped Scott through the mediation of James Fenimore Cooper, a North American disciple.41 A number of Scott’s and Bulwer-Lytton’s works were translated into Japa12

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nese in the 1880s, introducing new plots and styles at a time when young writers sought a literature capable of expressing their political aspirations in a rapidly changing society. A further contribution came through translations into Japanese, via English, of French novelists such as Alexandre Dumas père, one of Scott’s many heirs on the Continent.42 Liberal political economy, whose theory and rhetoric played an important role in new descriptions of social evolution, also traveled multiple paths. Often misnamed the founder of the field, Adam Smith was one of many who innovated through summary by drawing together currents of thought in England, Scotland, and the European continent—including those of the French Physiocrats—in The Wealth of Nations (1776).43 Jean Baptiste Say, who considered himself an interpreter of Smith (although Say’s own contributions were significant), helped to redisseminate these ideas in France.44 An English translation of Say’s Traité d’économie politique (1803) published in 1821, along with editions of Smith and David Ricardo, spurred the popularization of liberal theory in the United States and became a mainstay in colleges.45 Fukuzawa Yukichi used an American textbook marked by Say’s work, Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy (1837), in the first course in liberal economics offered in Japan, at the predecessor of Keiō University.46 The first works of liberal economics published in Japanese, which both appeared in 1867, were translations of books similarly intended for nonspecialists: John Hill Burton’s Political Economy for Use in Schools and for Private Instruction (1852), roughly half of which Fukuzawa included in Conditions in the West (Seiyō jijō), and William Ellis’s Outlines of Social Economy (1846), which Kanda Takahira translated as Elementary Economics (Keizai shōgaku). Kanda’s book was a double translation from a Dutch edition by Simon Vissering, his teacher at Leiden University.47 The illustrations of such travel could continue, but the point should be clear that the works in question had an “international” status regardless of their origin and contributed to a commonly held language for representing the formation and transformation of societies. The supranational domain in which texts circulated was not neutral. The political and economic power of Europe lent prestige to works originating there, and the language of Britain had further importance as a vehicle of translation. Nonetheless the travel of texts helped to erase the provenance of their ideas and expressive forms and assisted a process through which propositions about social development drawn from European history were accepted as universal models. The pretense of universality had been comNational History

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mon in Europe since the Enlightenment, perhaps best exemplified by the ubiquitous stage theories—from the ten epochs of progress in Condorcet to the four stages favored by republican thinkers in Britain and the three proposed by Comte—that made turning points in European history into chapters in the life of every society. Because it was enlisted in the aid of colonial conquest, such universalism was always more dangerous than the banal egotism it might have represented had it remained at home.48 The pretense of universality becomes truly significant, however, when such arguments are accepted and reproduced outside Europe, as when Wayland, writing in the United States, produces a “homegrown” exposition of political economy that scarcely diverges from European orthodoxy. The phenomenon extended to works that were not obviously universalistic themselves. Thomas Macaulay’s History of England (1849–61) concerns only that country, but when John McMaster and Tokutomi Sohō wrote History of the People of the United States (1883–1913) and The Future Japan (Shōrai no Nihon, 1886), the authors each lifted a motif from Macaulay’s celebrated third chapter, which imagines a nineteenth-century observer sent back to 1685. The allusive reproduction of a device Macaulay used to evoke the transformation of England thereby became a generalized motif for talking about the transformation of nations.49 What one could call the “universalization of universalism” proceeded not only through the reiteration of ideas but also through the reproduction of rhetoric and narrative form. Much of this book is concerned with the ways that social philosophers, historians, and novelists negotiated a problem that the common language and forms helped to produce: the apparent divergence between the history of specific nations and the universalistic models against which they were measured.

Three Positions The positions of France, Japan, and the United States in the world at this time were greatly determined by British dominance in international affairs and the world economy. The three nonetheless were in dissimilar situations within the shared international context, as the result not only of contemporary circumstances but also of their respective political, economic, and social histories. One reason to examine the writing of national history in these three countries is precisely that they are generically different. Japan, subject to disadvantageous treaties covering economic and diplomatic relations and the threat of colonization, faced the power of Europe 14

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from a position different from the former settler colony of the United States. France stood at the heart of the most powerful region of the world, but its political and economic position had been declining since the eighteenth century vis-à-vis Britain and then Prussia (soon to be Germany). The novelists, historians, and social philosophers who contributed to creating national histories in the three countries thus responded to political and economic situations that in some ways fundamentally differed. In other respects, the countries show similarities that account for common elements in the forms that representations of national history took in them. In France a central state existed long before the “nation” (nation) became an issue in political discourse in the eighteenth century. Japan too had a relatively long history of a central state: the Tokugawa state founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century, although less centralized than the state that took shape after 1868, predated both the appearance of quasi-national thought in the eighteenth century and the emergence of a national identity in the 1870s and 1880s. The establishment of a central state in the United States coincided more closely with the emergence of a national identity, with elements of that identity appearing in colonial religious thought and political discourse leading up to the American Revolution, but most historians consider a broad sense of American nationality to be a phenomenon of the early nineteenth century. The chronological relationship of state and national identity thus differed from Italy and Germany, for example, where establishing a national state was a major nationalist goal, and from postcolonial countries where nationalists inherited a colonial state.50 In all three countries, however, a recent political upheaval—the fall of the Second Empire in France, the Civil War in the United States, the Meiji Restoration in Japan—had changed the nature of the state, forcing new attention to the relationship of state and nation and the development of new narrative strategies for transforming political ruptures into history. The issue of the state reveals differences within such similarities. Although the third French republic owed its existence to the Prussian defeat of the Second Empire and republicans’ own annihilation of the Paris Commune, arguments about the legitimacy of the state could not avoid the nation’s “originary” moment of 1789, which was still in dispute. The Civil War in the United States was a watershed in the development of national identity, but many writers were as preoccupied with the relationship of the American nation to England as they were with explaining the conditions for postbellum reconciliation. In Japan treatments of the origiNational History

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nary event of 1868, which was closer at hand than the French or American revolutions, were complicated by the official stance that it was a restoration of imperial rule after centuries of “usurpation” by samurai intermediaries. These three countries thus exhibit both parallels and divergences. Examining other countries would clearly introduce other factors, structural and historical, that affected the writing of national history. Because I have rooted my investigation of all three countries in a common world situation, however, making this study international rather than simply comparative, I believe that additional rather than contrary conclusions would be the result.

In the common view , the Japanese archipelago had existed in geopolitical seclusion since the 1640s as the result of isolationist policies enacted during the Tokugawa era (1600–1867). Scholarship since the 1970s has refuted this idea by showing that although relations with European states were restricted to a single Dutch trading post in Nagasaki, the Tokugawa shogunate and different feudal domains carried on active diplomatic and economic relations with other East Asian states.51 Pressure from European powers beginning in the early nineteenth century led to the disintegration of the Sinocentric diplomatic system within which the Tokugawa regime conducted such relations and the introduction of Japan to the system of sovereign states that originated in Europe. Such pressure also had internal consequences. Popular outrage over treaties that the Tokugawa state signed with the United States and major European powers in the 1850s, which surrendered control over tariffs and gave rights of extraterritoriality to the foreign signatories, fanned economic discontent among peasants and low-ranking samurai functionaries and played a major part in the fall of the regime and the nominal restoration of the emperor to power in 1868. The modern bureaucratic state that formed in the succeeding decades of the Meiji era was supported by a coalition of the lower samurai who led the military campaigns for restoration and wealthy mercantile houses. While such a coalition represented a shift of the center of political power down the social hierarchy, the regime moved swiftly to block political liberalization by centralizing power and building strong police and military forces.52 Fears of formal colonization or the semiformal domination that had befallen China led the Meiji state to stress such domestic political stability as well as industrial development as instruments of national security. Similar tactics quickly appeared in Japanese 16

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policies toward East Asia: driven by the perceived need to seize territory preemptively, and by the desire to secure sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, the Meiji state asserted sovereignty over Hokkaidō and the Ryūkyū archipelago (Okinawa), sent a military expedition to Taiwan in 1874 that gained Chinese assent to Japan’s claim on the island, and forcibly established diplomatic and commercial relations with Korea in 1876, in much the same way that the United States had forced relations on the Tokugawa regime two decades earlier.53 On the economic front, financial problems in Japan following the Restoration of 1868 strengthened the presence of the state in the economy— and simultaneously, the financial elite that was the state’s most substantial backer—as the government undertook projects to develop manufacturing. Faced with large debts, the government restructured and reduced the samurai stipends that were its greatest expenditure, ultimately converting them to bonds that the state encouraged the largest holders to place in new national banks. The wealthiest portion of the samurai was thus integrated into the elite supporting the regime.54 The government’s other main response to its financial problems, the institution of a land tax paid in money rather than in kind, resulted in a concentration of landownership and similarly produced capital that flowed into the financial system.55 Holders of capital were reluctant to invest directly in undertakings such as industrial development, however, and foreign investors were similarly uninterested. The state itself took on the task, financed by domestic loans and the proceeds of the land tax, investing initially in munitions, heavy industry, and railroads and other infrastructure. The immediate impact was small but laid the ground for future growth, particularly because private companies usually received the projects at a discount once they were going concerns.56 In comparison, areas that the state did not patronize lacked capital, and the capitalist enterprise thus developed unevenly. Non- or partly industrialized sectors continued to grow, however, and accounted for the bulk of activity for many decades. The textile industry through which Japan competed in the world economy, for example, was dominated by pre-Restoration technologies and organizations until the 1890s.57 Perhaps the most dramatic social consequences of the government’s economic policies in the Meiji period followed from its borrowing, which led to high inflation and monetary instability in the 1870s. The commutation of stipends to bonds in this environment meant that most samurai lost their means of support at the same time that the establishment of conscription robbed them of any argument for their military usefulness. National History

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Their dissatisfaction was a major factor in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, the last significant challenge to the new regime, but the unskilled samurai had no other choice than to support themselves with menial jobs, and many slipped into poverty. Another social blow came from deflationary policies the government instituted in 1881 in response to the fiscal and monetary crisis. Because land taxes were now paid in money, the rapid rise and plunge of prices for agricultural products forced many small landholders into tenancy.58 Like the disemployed samurai, peasants did not accept such changes easily. Rural riots—including protests against conscription—were frequent and reached a peak in a ten-day armed rebellion in Saitama (north of Tokyo) in 1884.59 Labor shortages in textile factories led employers to exploit the misery of rural households with the promise of easy work for young daughters and advances for their parents. Although some of these women’s lives improved, they lived essentially under paternalistic lock and key in factory dormitories and could be beaten for poor productivity. Trapped working off debt under long-term contracts, they frequently fled or committed suicide.60 By the 1890s, the situations of peasants and factory workers, along with the visible growth of slums in major cities, were contributing to widespread discussion of “social problems” (shakai mondai), in which economic matters were seen to threaten the health of society as a whole.61 The North American territory under control of the United States steadily expanded in the nineteenth century as it moved into areas once held by European empires, including the formerly Spanish territory seized from Mexico between 1846 and 1848. Fundamental changes in the character of the federal government and its relation to the economy took place during the Civil War and Reconstruction. During the war, the position of the federal government strengthened dramatically, particularly through the decisive establishment of its territorial and administrative sovereignty over the individual states.62 The central state that emerged was closely aligned with the industrial and financial interests of the Northeast and Great Lakes regions through the intermediary of the Republican Party. Its final commitment to those interests came in 1877 with the compromise that ended efforts to reorganize the former Confederate states: in exchange for Republican control of the national political economy, the central state would abandon Reconstruction and have minimal involvement in local and regional affairs. Although the compromise effectively limited the further growth of the state, it remained organized around the principles established during the Civil War and Reconstruction, that 18

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is, against separatism and in favor of the destruction of local barriers to the development of a national capitalist market. Political power shifted decisively toward northern financial and industrial elites, which exerted power through a Republican Party that melded elite interests with a mass vision of economic development.63 Such a developmentalist coalition was not immune to criticism, particularly because the economy experienced a series of recessions and depressions from the 1870s to the late 1890s, including a severe four-year plunge beginning in 1893.64 Although the South was unable to mount a political challenge, financial and industrial elites were the target of vocal and determined protest by midwestern farmers in the Grange and Populist movements and by workers who struck across the entire country to improve working conditions. With the relationship between the state system and the world market in mind, one response to such discontent is especially significant. Both elite and popular opinion saw overseas expansion as a means of ensuring political stability and opportunities for continuing economic growth.65 The state-sponsored continental expansion that resumed after the Civil War easily became a model for overseas expansion at the turn of the century, when the United States annexed Hawaii and made colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines after its war with Spain. Despite phenomenal increases in industrial production, development in the United States was markedly uneven in a manner that tended to correspond to regional differences and exacerbate questions about national unity and the character of the polity. In contrast to the extensive quality of most growth in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth— accomplished by integrating new territory into the national economy— most growth from the 1870s onward was intensive and transformational. Activity overall shifted from agriculture to factory production and from farm to city. The change was dramatic: in 1860 the United States lagged Britain, France, and Germany in industrial output, but in 1900 its industrial output was greater than that of the three countries combined.66 A manufacturing belt appeared that stretched from Pennsylvania to New England and across the southern edge of the Great Lakes to Chicago. The factories received a significant boost from waves of skilled immigrants, who brought knowledge of production techniques.67 The South and West, in contrast, remained focused on commodity agriculture. Both areas sold their products at competitive international prices but bought manufactured goods from northern factories protected by tariff, and these areas thus bore the heaviest burden as the integration of the United States into National History

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the world economy increased. The tariff was a means to buy off resistance to two other policies in the Republican program, institution of the gold standard and the creation of a national market in labor and goods through the elimination of state and local barriers. All three policies favored the North—home of the major financial centers as well as most manufacturing—over the South and West. As industrial output grew, wealth therefore flowed from agriculture to manufacturing, and geographically from the South and the West to the North. Further evidence of the unevenness of growth may be found in the fact that even though manufacturing boomed in the period and legendary fortunes were made, the overall rate of growth actually fell from 1870 to 1900, along with profits and prices.68 The factory, the technological change that made mechanization possible, and the rise of bureaucratic corporations shifted the social definition of basic notions such as work and ownership beginning in the 1870s, in a change Alan Trachtenberg has called “the incorporation of America.” Even as entrepreneurs and inventors were held up as models of economic individualism, the insertion of machines into work and the organization of work in the interest of efficiency spawned new patterns of production that limited the autonomy of labor. By the end of the century, the “scientific management” espoused by figures such as Frederick Taylor had effectively transferred much of the knowledge once held by skilled labor to the side of capital and drastically diminished wage laborers’ ability to determine basic conditions such as the pace of work.69 The extent of workers’ anger over the share of income going to management and their determination to preserve a degree of autonomy are demonstrated by the nearly continuous strikes that erupted after an initial round of railroad strikes in 1877. While the Haymarket bombing and riots (which began with action for a shorter workday), the Homestead strike, and the Pullman strike and boycott are among the best-known clashes between labor and capital, such conflicts were general.70 If wage labor had become a permanent feature of economic life, many still were not resigned to it. In France, the sudden disintegration of the Second Empire in 1870 dramatically changed the country’s position in European and imperial politics and gave rise to a third republican state, this one more durable than those of 1792 and 1848. Republicans had nurtured a movement throughout the 1850s and 1860s and were thus able to seize opportunity when it arose. Although they took care to distinguish themselves from monarchists and the Bonapartist regime, their program did not include a change in basic social relations, a position made clear by their massacre of supporters of 20

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the Paris Commune in 1871.71 The republican regime that gained a lasting grip on power in 1877 and consolidated its rule over the next decade was founded on a settlement among diverse and mutually distrustful groups, including conservative republicans, industrial capitalists, small-scale producers, and large rural landowners, at the exclusion of the working class.72 The republican state was keenly attuned to the problem of political stability, given the interest of all the groups in maintaining their fragment of the status quo and limiting working-class unrest. It thus worked to integrate rural areas into urban networks of administration and economy and render republican political culture official through new institutions such as public schools.73 Significantly, in light of the comparison to Japan and the United States, the French state also pursued a second wave of territorial expansion in North and West Africa and Southeast Asia as a vehicle to manage unrest. Advocates offered the new imperialism both as a solution to the shame and dismemberment that France suffered when Germany took control of Alsace and part of Lorraine and as an economic outlet in the straitened conditions of the 1880s and 1890s.74 The French economy did not experience rapid industrialization of the sort found in the manufacturing belt of the United States after its Civil War. Following swift growth from the 1840s to 1860s, which included industrial development in textiles and heavy industry, growth slumped in the mid-1870s and did not revive until after 1895. Agriculture and nonfactory manufacturing maintained a large presence in the economy, growing alongside industrialized sectors, with the overall result being a “dual economy” similar to what emerged in Japan and persisted in the United States.75 The republican government pursued the construction of a national market as both an economic and a political strategy but was unable to realize its goal outside a few sectors. Moreover, in those parts of the economy where a national market did appear, the result was deindustrialization in regions whose manufactured products became uncompetitive without a parallel rise in other activities.76 Two factors in the uneven pattern of development are of particular interest. First, France experienced low population growth among citizens throughout the nineteenth century, with the rate reaching zero in the 1890s. Low population growth limited the growth of industrial production because it allowed farmers (who consciously limited the size of their families) to remain in the agricultural sector rather than seek factory work. Many factory jobs were filled by unnaturalized immigrants, whose numbers grew rapidly for two decades beginning in the mid-1860s. The demographic situation was blamed for National History

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ills such as the defeat to fecund Prussia but abetted policies intended to maintain the social and economic status quo.77 Second, despite the dominance of nonindustrial activities in the domestic economy, by the end of the century France was surpassed only by Britain as a financial power at a time of large global flows of capital. Returns on overseas investment were great enough to wholly offset the trade deficit that ballooned through imports of manufactured goods.78 Because there was little akin to an “industrial revolution” in nineteenthcentury France, French society did not experience the sudden transformation of social relations that typically follows a rapid shift of labor from agriculture to industry. The state, moreover, sought to control growth in the interest of maintaining social stability (and thereby political order).79 The most prominent examples of policies with this goal were tariffs, which offered the possibility of appeasing various interests while avoiding structural reform.80 Discontent nonetheless grew among members of the growing class of industrial workers—who were excluded from the republican settlement—and gathered momentum in the late 1880s as the fin de siècle depression deepened. Strikes multiplied along with the number of workers participating and were increasingly centered in northern France, involving industrialized textile and mine workers, in contrast to earlier strikes, which had tended to occur in Paris with construction workers and skilled artisans at their center.81 The economic decline also led to anti-immigrant campaigns and changes in citizenship laws in 1889 intended to strengthen the position of “native” workers in the labor market.82 Meanwhile the agricultural workforce experienced its own variety of proletarianization as small cultivators lost ground to large commercialized competitors and were forced to accept supplementary wage labor to survive. Socialism suddenly found a receptive audience in rural areas, many of which had nourished a leftist tradition since earlier in the century.83 While the state and the business community tried to contain such economically driven protest and blunt its edge with concessions, any significant change in the organization of the economy or of society was ruled out in advance. Instead, republican ideologists offered doctrines such as “solidarity,” which called for the reconciliation of classes in the name of the nation.84 To summarize the political and economic conditions in these countries, Japan, France, and the United States each experienced violent political disruptions in the 1860s or early 1870s that transformed the character and organization of the state. During and in the wake of these transformations, the states and the elites supporting them tolerated varying de22

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grees of political liberalization, but in none of the three did the “people” have direct control over the state that was said to rule on its behalf. Economically, the United States and France suffered from the worldwide depression of the last three decades of the nineteenth century, while the economic problems of Japan, which was only beginning to be subject to international market forces, can better be traced to the government’s fiscal policies. During this period, industrialization proceeded at different paces in the three countries. In all, however, industrialization was notably uneven, varying by region, between economic sectors, and within sectors. The transformation of patterns of work and consumption by factory discipline and the standardization of goods, among other factors, was uneven as well, although in all three countries the penetration and reorganization of society by the market appeared inexorable. Inexorable or not, economic and political conditions sparked anger, protest, and at times violent clashes. Significantly, when all three states seized territory outside their borders, one frequent justification was that expansion would secure the nation’s economic future and therefore limit the spread of such discontent.

The Nation: Crisis, Future, and History The problem of protest and responses to it in the three countries point to a further commonality among them that deeply affected the way national histories in the period treated both territoriality and development, that is, space and time: the tendency to view political discord, economic dislocation, and the uncertainties of the future as problems of and for the “nation.” Cultural and intellectual historians of Japan commonly regard the eighteenth century as the period when quasi-national views of the population of the archipelago began to appear, particularly through kokugaku, a school of philological and interpretive examination of classical Japanese texts whose name is often translated as “national studies.” Such studies were especially concerned with distinguishing Japan from China and frequently bemoaned the introduction of Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Chinese writing system, which in their view had sullied the original nature of the “Japanese” people.85 Later kokugaku scholars contributed to the fall of the Tokugawa state, although efforts to create a government in which the emperor exerted actual power failed. The decade that followed the Restoration of 1868 was dominated, rather, by advocates of “civilization and enlightenment” such as Fukuzawa. The view of such intellectuNational History

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als that the populace must be unified and educated to protect Japanese independence was reiterated in declarations issuing from the new state, most notably in the Charter Oath (Gokajō no goseimon) of 1868, which called for the unification of high and low social strata, the destruction of antiquated customs, and the pursuit of knowledge in light of the unprecedented changes the country was experiencing.86 During the 1880s, anxiety grew about the consequences for “Japanese” identity of the European- and American-inspired reforms urged by liberal intellectuals, and was exacerbated by disillusionment with the promise of rapid social transformation. The essentially negative character of such anxiety—with the “nation” considered to be suffering both from the slow pace of change and from the loss of authenticity that change might bring—indicates the crisis mentality that prevailed.87 The state’s evolving response to the situation may be found in the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku ni kansuru chokugo) of 1890, the most significant official ideological statement of the period. In contrast to the Charter Oath, which speaks of “commoners” and “the masses” (shomin and shū), the Rescript on Education addresses itself directly to “you, Our subjects” (nanji shinmin) and makes moral rectitude and loyalty to the throne the center of national preservation. The rescript thus connected the nation to the state though the emperor; as Tessa Morris-Suzuki observes, the name of the state became an “ethnonym” for the people it ruled.88 While liberal currents of thought in the 1880s focused on deliberative politics and a national assembly, liberals’ own tendency to identify state and nation is evident in their calls for a “second Restoration” to rescue the state from the authoritarian clique that controlled it and establish conditions for an independent and prosperous national future. The perceived gap between state and people remained an intractable problem for ideologues, even though the Restoration of 1868 was supposed to have settled the question once and for all.89 If the “external others” of the colonial powers loomed large in debate on the nation and its future in Japan, we may say that the specter of internal others—domestic division—figured more prominently in debate in the United States. Both immigration and regional differences were at stake. Arguments that settlers shared a collective “American” mission appeared during the Puritan colonization of New England, and the idea of collective struggle by a distinctive people also informed the movement for independence from Britain. The decades following the War of 1812, however, are most frequently identified as the period in which a national 24

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identity, replete with earlier ideas of mission, spread widely.90 The Civil War reinforced the feeling of collective identity in the North and West, with Southern whites acquiescing to the terms of interregional reconciliation after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Nonetheless, in his long essay “Democratic Vistas” (1871), Walt Whitman confessed he was haunted by “the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close.” Whitman predicted that the United States would succeed Europe in the scheme of world history, through a Hegelian synthesis of democracy and “prosperity,” but only if its writers succeeded in producing a truly American literature that would reconcile the contradictory elements of the country’s European inheritance.91 Economic changes, particularly the spread of wage labor, were especially important in driving such attempts to define “America,” with the term itself forming an important front in ongoing battles between capitalists and labor organizers. Strikes such as the fierce round of 1877 were regarded in respectable quarters as proof of the decline of virtue in the nation.92 Increasingly over the course of the 1880s and 1890s, immigrant workers were singled out as the source of labor unrest. Alarm over the labor problem thus supported the work of some to define the ideal nation in monoethnic terms and call for the immediate restriction of immigration as a matter of survival.93 The political scientist John Burgess predicted the end of the United States unless dramatic steps were taken to end regional differences and eradicate the “dissolution and decay” caused by the presence of African and Mongol races among the supposedly native stock of northern Europeans. The only viable commonwealths, according to Burgess, were those founded and maintained by Teutons.94 By the 1890s, the idea mutated into the view that competition with immigrants discouraged the native stock from reproducing, and in the early years of the twentieth century, into prophecies that northern European “natives” would commit “race suicide” unless they brought a halt to immigration. A somewhat more positive expression of the challenge seen to be facing the nation appeared in the term “Americanization,” which stressed the transformation of character rather than the exclusion of other races, in a manner that recalls the proponents of civilization and enlightenment in Japan.95 Yet even the project of Americanization depended on the erasure of difference in individual immigrants. Some proponents found that the conditions that had encouraged such Americanization—for Frederick Jackson Turner, the availability of land in the West—had disappeared, and

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they expressed the fear that the nation would henceforth be perpetually riven by discord.96 Debates on the health of the nation in France took the defeat by Prussia and the Commune as their touchstone, particularly in the decade that immediately followed them. The view that France comprised a “nation” with terms of belonging different from loyalty to the state grew in the eighteenth century and played an important role in the Revolution.97 Nationalism was a strong current in opposition republican thought after 1815 and included a sense of mission reflected in the historian Jules Michelet’s assertion in 1830 that France was “the pilot of the ship of humanity,” a sentiment not far from claims of American destiny such as Herman Melville’s declaration in White-Jacket (1850) that Americans “bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”98 In the wake of the “terrible year” of 1870–71, meditation on French decline and decadence pervaded such views of the French nation.99 The historian Ernest Renan wrote in 1871 that France had been “chastised” by Providence for ignoring its vocation in the history of humanity and sinking into enervated prosperity. He added that while other countries too had become weak and corrupt, France suffered reprisal precisely because it had a mission to fulfill.100 Renan’s reflection on French decadence thus proceeded with an eye to the nation’s future. The main current in France differed from the warnings of racial decay and race suicide in the United States, however, in rejecting the idea that the French nation had a racial foundation. Renan’s well-known essay “What Is a Nation?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 1882) is representative in its rejection of the thesis that formed the basis of racial definitions of French nationality, the eighteenth-century argument that French history continues an original war between aristocratic Franks and commoner Gauls. According to Renan, nationality in France was a voluntaristic spiritual stance.101 The same position was strong among the republicans who controlled the educational apparatus. “Regeneration,” promising not an absolute beginning but a future built by cleansing the nation of the mistakes of the past, was the watchword of the republicans who decisively gained power in 1877. (The notion itself had been revived from the era of the Revolution.)102 Such a position was evident, for example, in the assertion of republican ideologists that the Third Republic would complete the aborted work of the First. The fervor of declarations about the nation, however, did not indicate consensus on the program for renewal.103 Indeed, as economic changes such as industrialization and the transformation of small cultivators into wage laborers 26

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proceeded, debate on the nation’s present and future became infused with dissatisfaction over new social hierarchies.104 Despite their work to control such discontent, the republicans’ own reformist programs suggest that they remained unsure of their position. Reprising an attitude descended from the Revolution, that heterogeneity threatened national unity and hence the republic itself, the republicans approached diversity—particularly regional diversity—as a deficiency that had to be remedied.105 Thus alongside building roads, railways, and schools, republican administrators pursued programs to eradicate dialects and otherwise “civilize” the rural population, all in the interest of national renewal. Summarily outlined in this manner, the rhetorics of nation in Japan, the United States, and France at the end of the nineteenth century display many similarities and several significant differences. The most evident point in common is a crisis mentality in which social, political, and economic problems metamorphose into a “national” calamity. Related to the shared alarmism is the frequency of declarations that the crisis may be averted only by changing the character of the nation itself. The focus on national character suggests a third similarity that indicates the impetus behind the rhetoric itself: the displacement of debate from structural problems in society, such as the concentration of wealth or the exclusion of some groups from the political settlement, to a more ambiguous domain in which a narrow stratum of society deploys moralistic visions, racist science, technocratic positivism, and philosophy of history, among other stratagems, to compete for the high ground in diagnosing and treating problems now defined as rooted in something—the nation—that is notoriously ill-defined. Such choreographed exercises in avoidance tend toward a predominantly negative definition of the nation in terms of what it lacks or what it has lost. The combination of the idea of deficiency and the conviction that change is necessary indicates a final commonality that appears frequently in the chapters ahead. Taken together, the two positions introduce an orientation toward the future evident in the assertion that national problems will be solved fully at some later point in the nation’s life, provided that proper action is taken in the present. In such a view of the future the solution of national problems will be nothing less than the realization of the nation’s true character, which had been realized only imperfectly in the past: the nation, as Tom Nairn observed, has a Janus face that looks toward both past and future.106 The strategy of displacing debate about present social problems into the domain of history thus introduces an entire continuum of time—past, National History

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present, and future—into the conception of national problems and the response to them, but it also tries to extricate the nation from time itself. The result is a temporal preoccupation that takes its place next to the spatial preoccupation with the relationship of national territory to global space as a characteristic problem for national history. National history must work constantly to suspend the contradiction between temporalized arguments on national progress and steadfastly atemporal definitions of the nation in its ideal form because such a suspension allows structural problems in the economy and politics to be banished from debate. Such strategies of avoidance gravitate unwillingly toward the origin of political settlements—like moths toward a candle—and thus one of the notable differences in the rhetoric of nation in the three countries fittingly lies in the treatment of political disruptions in the recent past. Although the outcome of the Civil War seemed proof of views in the North and West that the American people must not be divided—and that the accomplishment of unity was indeed a national mission—debates on national character in the Northern-dominated intellectual world ignored the war in favor of considerations of immigration and the related problem of class division.107 In France, by contrast, the events of 1870 and 1871 were touchstones in any analysis of the sources of social problems, from the moral decay of the Second Empire to the causes of worker revolt. The politics of the Revolution, however, informed most views of recent events. Although republicans tried to establish their legitimacy by reference to the recent “disaster,” they often had to defend themselves by means of arguments about the Revolution. Such was not the case in Japan, where 1868 had an overwhelmingly positive status among elites as the initiation of modernity and the harbinger of progress to come. Even liberal arguments in favor of greater political openness viewed the Restoration as the essential first step. Yet, as noted, the official characterization of 1868 as a restoration meant that it was rarely described as a complete break with the past. Differences may also be found in the role that ideas of race and ethnicity played in discourse on the nation. They played a significant role in the United States, appearing, for example, in arguments on hierarchies of whiteness and degrees of national belonging in debates over immigration.108 Even many writers who defined the nation in terms of Americanization considered immigrants’ ethnic and racial difference a problem. In France, doctrines of racial inequality flourished in the administration of the colonies, but race did not factor significantly in definitions of the nation, despite increasing immigration from other European countries. 28

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Mainstream definitions, as in the example of Renan, were voluntaristic and emphasized commitment. In Japan, the arguments on the contamination of Japan by China that appeared in the eighteenth century could be found in new form in concerns over “Europeanization” in the era of civilization and enlightenment, reaching a high pitch in the writings of cultural nationalists in the 1890s.109 Such efforts were directed toward defining Japan with respect to other nations, in contrast to the concern with internal ethnic others in the United States. Yet French and Japanese arguments about the nation’s problems placed high value on social homogeneity and in this respect showed an orientation similar to the stress on racial homogeneity in the United States. Heterogeneity tended to be approached as a problem in the composition of the nation, and numerous solutions proposed to national problems plotted its future elimination.

The Past Finds New Forms That such late-nineteenth-century alarm about the national future found hospitable expression in arguments about the national past might seem a paradoxical assertion if supported only by presumed epistemological links among the constellation of terms past, present, and future. The point is borne out, however, by many of the representations of history that appeared in the period, which set out on the one hand to put the people at the center of the enterprise and on the other to draw lessons from the past in order to understand the future. The trend may be found not only in narrative histories but also in prose fiction and in the evolutionary social theory that dominated efforts to explain history in the abstract. While the different fields followed separate paths of development, their convergence in the issue of the nation during this era demands they be examined together. Historical arguments for the reestablishment of imperial rule such as Rai San’yō’s Unofficial History of Japan (Nihon gaishi, 1827) and the work of the Mito school introduced the idea of the “national polity” (kokutai) as a factor in political legitimacy in Japan during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, but it was in the first decade of the Meiji era that the nation and the people assumed a central role in representations of social change.110 The new narratives laid out a history based on “civil” activity rather than on the deeds of aristocrats and the state, with the goal of establishing a liberal path for Japanese development. Sohō’s The Future Japan, for example, devotes most of its pages to a general theory of social National History

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evolution (inspired by the English social philosopher Herbert Spencer) that establishes the historical inevitability of evolution toward democratic, industrial society, and to a reading of Japanese history that demonstrates such a process in Japan. The book aims to understand the “deluge” of the present and the course of the future through such an explanation of the past.111 Takekoshi Yosaburō’s Shin Nihonshi, published in 1891 by the company that Sohō founded with profits from his book, displays a similar orientation. The title may be translated as either New History of Japan or History of New Japan with equal accuracy: the book is meant to explain the great changes that the Restoration of 1868 brought to Japan, and at the same time to take a new approach, notably by tracing “the particular character of the nation [kokumin]” as a force in history. Takekoshi said that concern that the Restoration was losing its way drove him to the project, but he clearly also considered the situation in Japan after 1868 to demand a new method that would account for both the character of the people and the psychology of individual actors.112 Developments in prose fiction in Japan displayed similar concerns. Amid widespread discussions of the contribution that literature could make to reform and progress, liberal journalists and politicians began producing political novels that struggled with the issues of social evolution popularized through the work of Guizot, Spencer, and historical novelists such as Scott and Dumas. A number staged their intervention as political allegory, offering the histories of other places (for example, fifth-century Thebes) as models for Japan. Others elaborated allegories through speculative constructions of Japan’s future.113 As debate on the reform of fiction continued, writers took up the call to depict “human emotions and worldly conditions” (ninjō setai ) and engaged in “sketch literature” (shaseibun). Both demanded excursions into the world for actual social observation, a project exemplified by Kunikida Doppo’s story “Unforgettable People” (“Wasureenu hitobito,” 1898), in which a writer confronts the memory of people he has met while traveling in post-Restoration Japan. Given the beginnings of the United States as a group of settler colonies and the high level of immigration in the late nineteenth century, representations of national history there were concerned to establish at the minimum a historical process by which a single people had been or could be formed, if not a distant point of origin. During the nineteenth century, destinarian views of the nation’s history and future were increasingly infused by racial ideas that privileged the role of “Anglo-Saxon” settlers.114 By the 1870s, such views had prestigious vehicles in the so-called Teutonic 30

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germ theory, which found the origins of American liberty in the tribes of northern Germany, and the related school of Anglo-Saxon historiography, whose determination to predict the eventual domination of the globe by this “race” is suggested by the title of Dexter Hawkins’s pamphlet The AngloSaxon Race: Its History, Character, and Destiny (1875).115 Even those resisting a simple racial definition of the nation had to contend with such racist philosophy of history. Most histories of the “people,” such as McMaster’s History of the People of the United States, deployed race as one factor in their schemes of national development. McMaster, however, laid heaviest stress on changes in the everyday life of the people—social history—to distinguish his history from earlier narratives focused on politics.116 Such a stress on the social fabric as the warp and woof of national history may also be found in realist fiction, including John De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867)—a postbellum novel of reconciliation between North and South—and the work of William Dean Howells. Howells’s style of social observation confronted the durability of class divisions in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and the difficult integration of immigrants into society in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), whose protagonist likens immigrant ghettos to foreign countries.117 Regionalist fiction such as Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) approached social heterogeneity from a parallel perspective, observing rural society in a national frame.118 Some arguments on social divisions and their consequences for the nation took the form of “historical” documentations of the future, in a manner that resembles the future-allegories of some Japanese political novels. The entire genre has been called utopian fiction, and there were truly hopeful examples, such as Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887, which describes a future socialist society. Dystopian views were just as common, however, including Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890), in which untrammeled capitalism leads to the demise of the United States at the hands of ethnic pseudo-socialists, and Robert Woltor’s A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899 (1882), which delivers its thesis in the title.119 While such racist predictions of national doom are extreme examples, even Woodrow Wilson, who published a Whiggish History of the American People in 1902, conceded that the ultimate “economic and spiritual union” of the nation lay ahead, asking that Americans “constantly recall our reassuring past” lest the determination to achieve such unity flag.120 National History

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Treatments of national history in France throughout the nineteenth century were dominated by the question of the Revolution, and after 1871 such overwhelming concern was heightened by the use of the history of the Revolution as a vehicle for reflection on the Defeat and the Commune. Varieties of history that focused on the development of “society” and the “people” had been available in France since Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe, followed by Jules Michelet’s more populist History of France (Histoire de France), whose first volume appeared in 1833.121 The Revolution, which Michelet treated in a separate history appearing from 1847 to 1853, figured in such narratives as a decisive moment in the awakening of the nation. Keen observation of contemporary society became a strong current in nineteenth-century literature with the work of Balzac and Stendhal (reaching anatomical accuracy in Flaubert), but the closest parallels to treatments of the nation in historiography appeared in the work of Eugène Sue and Michelet’s kindred romantic Victor Hugo. Sue’s historical epic The Mysteries of the People (Les Mystères du peuple), whose first volume appeared in 1849, died with him in 1857, but Hugo lived long enough to produce an allegorical reflection on the origins of the Third Republic, among his numerous populist sagas. Three years after the massacres of 1871, Hugo published Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize), intended as a sincere and politically ecumenical rumination on the Commune through the history of the Terror and counterrevolution. The field of such arm’s-length reflection on recent events was quickly politicized. The Right, from the various Royalist positions to Bonapartist holdouts, directly likened the Commune to the Terror, and the Left decried its suppression as another betrayal of the true revolution. The tone was set by Hippolyte Taine’s The Origins of Contemporary France (Les Origines de la France contemporaine), whose first volume appeared in 1875 with the announced intention of discovering the political form proper to France. By asserting that the course of all events in the Revolution could be predicted from the earliest events of 1789, Taine effectively reduced the entire period to a trajectory from popular anarchy to the Terror. He also pathologized the Revolution as the origin of lasting atavism in the masses through quasi-medical ideas of degeneration.122 The force of such indirect attacks on the legitimacy of the new regime propelled most republican historiography during the period. A centenary history published by the philosopher Paul Janet suggests the strategy of the counterattack: proclaim loyalty to the “spirit of the Revolution” while condemning “the revolutionary spirit” and thereby distinguish contemporary republicans 32

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from both the Jacobins of the past and the socialists of the present, each supposedly unable to distinguish revolution from practical reform.123 Despite defenses of the Commune from the Left such as Prosper Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871 (Histoire de la Commune de 1871, 1876) and Jules Vallès’s The Rebel (L’insurgé, 1886), the pathologization of radical dissent became a central motif in meditations on the crisis and renewal of the nation, extending to the pseudoscientific anatomizations of workingclass uprisings in Emile Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal. Comparing the different strategies that novelists, historians, and social philosophers pursued in representing national history in the three countries suggests some initial explanations for its popularity as a means of arguing the nation. Accelerating changes to social life in the late nineteenth century (the solidification of class structures, domestic and international migration, urbanization) that originated in national and international political economies doubtless were a force behind new efforts to represent change and make it comprehensible. Indeed, the effort to render rapid social change intelligible is perhaps the most basic characteristic that nineteenth-century prose fiction, historiography, and philosophy of history share. Moreover, in their pursuit of this goal, Georg Lukács notes, all tend to represent social transformation as a national experience.124 One consequence of such widespread social change, particularly when political settlements were shifting, was the need to reestablish the legitimacy of the state. In the era of the nation-state, the project required establishing the state’s necessary relationship to the nation, its supposed foundation. National history aided by elaborating retrospective illusions in which the evolution of the state and the nation culminate in the present moment.125 Two distinct tactics can be discerned in the deployment of such illusions. The first was to assert clear continuities between the present regime and some distant past, as in the theory of Teutonic origins in the United States, which asserted a continuous line of descent from the forests of Germany for what was essentially the political class but was nonetheless called the nation. The second was to assert the link to such a distant origin but to discredit preceding regimes by invoking a rupture in history, as found in the rhetoric of “restoration” in Japan, according to which the natural ties between the imperial house and the people were obstructed— temporarily, for some 670 years—by samurai intermediaries. Both tactics operated by shifting present debates over legitimacy to the past and declaring them to have been settled at a remote moment. They did so as a National History

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way of making arguments about the future, which loomed as a problem given the constancy of change. The situation in France, however, shows that neither of these tactics was guaranteed success. Even with the Second Empire greatly discredited, the Right, the Left, and the conservative republican center fought over the interpretation of the Revolution without any party decisively gaining high ground and the ability to legitimate itself or discredit others by reference to the period. The sheer weight of the Revolution also made appeals to other eras or more distant origins difficult to sustain. Finally, the convolutions of the debates on the Revolution in the 1870s and 1880s, involving analogies between the Terror and the Commune and the First Republic and the Third, reveal the great influence that the particular history of the territory claimed by the state had on the “content” of the tactics as distinguished from their logical strategies alone. Local circumstances determined the resources available to ideology, its vocabulary as opposed to its grammar. Understanding such circumstances yields valuable insights into the creation of national narratives and is of crucial importance in the chapters that follow. Yet if local circumstances alone determined the manner in which intellectuals articulated the relationship between nation and state, it would be surprising to find extensive similarities among representations of national history in the United States, Japan, and France in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, on the basis of local circumstances alone, some strategies that national histories pursue seem needlessly complex: the argument that the democracy of the United States began in the customs of Germanic tribes, for example, requires such a stretch of the imagination— the philosopher William James dismissed it as “sniveling cant”—that one could expect an easier ideological solution to have appeared were it not for some factor not unique to the United States that demanded the production of a temporally distant origin.126 Moreover, focusing solely on the impact of local circumstances risks reducing national histories to their immediate political utility. Again the consistent effort devoted to creating them suggests that more was at stake. Above all, local circumstances alone do not explain why national history as a practice of writing appeared in so many different parts of the globe. All these objections to the simple political reading of national history suggest that this method of representing the past is inseparable from the nation-state in general, as the universal political unit of modernity, and that an investigation both comparative and international in orientation will allow us to draw broader conclusions about the relationship between the two. 34

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National History and the Nation: Fellow Travelers? The tendency to couch debate over social heterogeneity, economic inequity, and political conflict in terms that are both historical and national seems tied to the nation-state as a political institution, but the connection does not necessarily imply that the creation of national histories is simply a consequence of the establishment of individual states, whose histories assume similar form because the states are functionally identical. Some theories of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner’s, support such a conclusion, but the work of Benedict Anderson suggests that national history is part of a traveling “module” of nationalist thought, while that of Partha Chatterjee, critical of Gellner and Anderson alike, leads to the conclusion that representations of national history outside Europe are “derivative” versions of European originals, like the nationalist ideologies to which they contribute. A brief examination of these three theorists’ arguments on nationalism suggests, on the contrary, that the ubiquity of national history in the late nineteenth century is the consequence of the heterogeneous structure of a single, global modernity that was established as the capitalist market and international state system achieved an effective universality in the world. Gellner argues in Nations and Nationalism that nationalism is a new form of social organization that appears as the consequence of changes in the division of labor. According to Gellner, industrialism, the third of three stages of human history, forces the destruction of the social hierarchies characteristic of agrarian society to ensure the mobility of the labor force and thereby the possibility of continuous growth in productivity. Aiming always at the production of a flexible labor pool, such social mobility gives rise to nominal egalitarianism but more importantly prompts the standardization of the educational system and other institutions of socialization. The state takes control of these institutions, given their importance, leading to a coincidence of state and “culture,” one of the basic foundations of nationalist thought in Gellner’s view.127 Regardless of the assertions of nationalists that the nation conquers in the name of a folk culture, what effectively results is the imposition of a standardized high culture on the population as a whole in the interest of facilitating bureaucratic and technological communication. On the basis of the direct relationship he sees between nationalism and industrialization, Gellner asserts that all nationalisms are essentially the same, with superficial variations, because industrialization “arrives” in all countries in basically National History

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the same form (52, 57). Nationalism for Gellner thus is a minor if visible aspect of a socioeconomic modernization that occurs in all countries according to the same pattern. The major strength of Gellner’s approach is its ability to explain the abstract equivalence within nationalist ideologies of all subjects of the nation-state. The “mutually substitutable atomized individuals” that industrial and bureaucratic organizations require become members of the same nation through shared culture, and within the national culture they are considered to be essentially identical, one Frenchman the same as any other (57). The theory’s weaknesses, however, are numerous. Setting aside the apology that Gellner offers under the guise of “modernization” for the reorganization of society according to the needs of capital (which is a subterfuge of modernization theory in general, not only Gellner’s theory of nationalism), the dramatic reduction of nationalism to an offshoot of economic development leaves the theory unable to explain significant aspects of the history of nationalism. Gellner is forced to dismiss ideas of race and völkisch ethnicity, which play important roles in the articulation of national identity in many countries, as the creation of nationalist intellectuals working in bad faith (57). Gellner’s theory also has great difficulty explaining nationalism in non- or partly industrialized countries, particularly the anticolonial nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, which, according to his theory, should not occur. Moreover, while some connections Gellner draws between nationalism and economic change are compelling, his unitary view of economies, in which each passes through a self-contained set of internal stages, supports a purely endogenous view of social development and therefore of nationalism. By the end of the nineteenth century, local economies in various parts of the world were increasingly integrated with each other, without regard for what Gellner would call their stage of development, a reality which, if acknowledged by Gellner, would force him to give up the idea that nationalism is purely the product of internal development. The argument Anderson advances in Imagined Communities offers a number of advantages over Gellner. Anderson too takes economic evolution as the base line of his theory, although this aspect of his book has often been neglected because of narrow engagement with the phrase of its title. Anderson maintains that nationalism should be treated not as a doctrine—a concrete “ism”—but as a basic quality of identity similar to kinship or religion, in light of the fact that in the modern world all

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people are expected to “have” nationality.128 Anderson links the appearance of this universal and—in the view of nationalists—timeless quality to the recent appearance of print capitalism. The development of commercial markets in books (and eventually newspapers) promoted the development of vernacular languages for consumption in print, encouraging wide communication outside sacred and administrative languages such as Latin, and ultimately making it possible for readers to imagine themselves sharing the time and space of the present with their fellow nationals in a community moving together through history (24–26, 44–45). The rise of print capitalism alone does not explain nationalism, much less its worldwide spread, however. Anderson finds the key in the Creole independence movements of the Americas in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, which differed from the typical examples of nationalism taken from nineteenth-century Europe in that they did not take language as a central issue (the colonies shared their languages with the metropolitan powers) and were not populist in orientation (46–48). When they succeeded, they became not simply political precedents but conceptual models for Europe and eventually the rest of the world, available for what Anderson likens to the “pirating” of ideas. As models, the North and South American movements imposed standards and restricted deviation. Their conceptualization, moreover, brought elements to the fore which had not been significant in the movements themselves, such as popular participation in national affairs and the elimination of serfdom (81–82). Once put into such “modular” form, the imagined community of the nation could be transplanted into a wide variety of societies and exploited by a wide range of political alliances (4). Anderson’s argument about print culture and linguistic change is inspired, while his treatment of subjective attitudes as social facts (valid and consequential to those who hold them), which follows from his anthropological approach rather than his economic narrative, helps explain the quasi-sacred status of the nation in modern societies and opens the way for examining the contribution of race and ethnicity to nationalism. Anderson’s insistence on the role that revolutionary nationalism in the Americas played in the development of nationalism in Europe, however, comes at the cost of ignoring examples such as France and Britain, where a sense of national identity appeared before the American independence movements. Anderson, moreover, seems little concerned with explaining how nationalisms that emerge in established states differ from the nationalism

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of movements seeking a state. The greatest shortcoming of Anderson’s approach, however, is his resort to the idea of “modularization” to explain the proliferation of nationalism. As seen earlier, social thought—of which nationalist thought is a subset—did circulate widely during the nineteenth century. The argument that nationalist thought was a discrete module with significant prescriptive power offers little, however, to explain differences among the varieties of nationalism that appeared around the world in the nineteenth century. At a minimum, explaining such divergence requires acknowledging the role that ideas outside the “module” played in the formation of national identities. In Japan, for example, arguments that the Japanese polity was essentially different from the polities of Europe became prominent in the 1890s, as may be seen in the deployment of Confucian values in the Imperial Rescript on Education and in the fidelity to “national essence” (kokusui) espoused by modernist but anti-Western intellectuals such as Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei.129 The dichotomy of East and West comes not from the nationalisms of the Americas but from European Orientalism, rearticulated as a positive statement of difference from Europe. The appearance of the dichotomy in arguments about the nation must be traced to a body of thought supporting European imperialism, and therefore to geopolitics, rather than a nationalist module. Partha Chatterjee’s examination of the “problematic” and “thematic” of Indian nationalism in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World moves beyond Anderson by elucidating the geopolitical conditions behind the reproduction of nationalist thought and its admixture with other discourses. Chatterjee distinguishes between problematic and thematic to separate the claims of an ideology from its “justificatory structures.” In its problematic, Chatterjee argues, colonial nationalism rejects the assertions of European superiority in post-Enlightenment thought, but in its thematic accepts the structures of knowledge that support such assertions. These structures include a transcendent knowing subject, objectification as the initial gesture of knowing, and the proposition of an essential difference between East and West.130 In contrast to Gellner and Anderson, who consider economic developments to explain the rise of nationalism, Chatterjee stresses that the problematic of colonial nationalism is an active thinking out of new political possibilities. Its thematic too is a dynamic formation that is deliberately selective about what it takes from European thought (40–41). The thematic, however, is strongly conditioned by relations of power between Europe and the colonial world, particularly 38

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because its ability to make pronouncements on the nation depends on its claim to modernity. Post-Enlightenment rationalism supported the geopolitical power of Europe through arguments that non-European peoples were culturally incapable of progress, and the reality of European power in turn seemed to give proof to the claims of post-Enlightenment rationalism to be a universal and modern framework of knowledge free of cultural location. To advance its own claim to modernity, Chatterjee observes, nationalist thought accepts the claim to universality of this framework of thought even as it asserts autonomy for the national culture (11). National thought thereby admits into its structure an unhappy distinction between the national and the modern. The effort to resolve the divergence between them, which, I should point out, was also a divergence between the national and the universal, was a critical undertaking for national thought, although a consistently fruitless one because the divergence was not a matter of concrete conditions but was inscribed in nationalist epistemology (80). Chatterjee offers a sophisticated and many-layered view of the politics and epistemology of nationalist thought, to which I owe a great deal. Chatterjee’s insistence that the emergence of colonial nationalism is conditioned by the politics of knowledge of the age of imperialism is a crucial intervention that should inform all attempts to study cultural and intellectual history from an international or transnational point of view. Texts and ideas travel neither freely nor innocently. Chatterjee also provides compelling evidence that by lending credibility to the universalistic pretensions of the science of society promoted by European thinkers such as Comte, J. S. Mill, and Spencer, the power of Europe aided the abstraction of the histories of Western Europe and European countries as theoretical models for social development. In such a process of abstraction, nation and state—privileged categories in European social thought—also gained universality as basic units of social analysis. My objection is that Chatterjee suggests these conditions affected only the colonial world. The objection is both minor and large: Chatterjee demonstrates the “derivative” quality of colonial nationalism, which is his topic proper, but by focusing on colonized formations such as South Asia, he closes his investigation to the rest of the world. Once the histories of Europe and its countries attain the status of theoretical models, I would argue, explaining the divergence of the nation from the universal modern becomes a problem in the nationalist thought of every state. Such a statement of the problem is a key point of departure for this book and is amply borne out by evidence National History

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from the United States, Japan, and France. The critical question regarding national history, if not nationalist thought in general, is not whether it is derivative or original but how it responds to the challenge of reconciling the national and the universal modern.131 Because the modern was not only a time but a place—in the late nineteenth century, Europe, and within Europe, Britain—perceptions of the divergence between the national and the universal modern were consistently informed by the position of the state in question with respect to the region and state considered to represent the modern in its most advanced form. To understand how reflections on the nation’s past, present, and future worked to reconcile such divergence, one must take into account both particular histories and the systemic conditions imposed by the capitalist market and the state system, examining examples both in themselves and in their systemic context, and making comparisons with mediating systemic factors in mind. While I have already discussed many of the relevant local and systemic contexts, one more is worth stressing: as the nation-state gained effective universality as the basic unit of the state system, the assumption in the logic of the system that all states are functionally similar collided with the common notion in national ideologies that every nation is constituted uniquely. Unique or not, every nation existed in what was assumed to be a world of nations that, through their association with states, were in some manner formally equivalent. The consequent, paradoxical contention—that one’s nation is like every other in that all are unique—gives one example of the patterns of thought imposed on national history by systemic conditions. The explanation I propose for the different forms that the writing of national history took in the late nineteenth century thus suggests a variety of structural causality. Stated in this manner, however, such a structural explanation speaks little to the true significance of local differences.132 Despite the systemic assertion of a formal identity among all nation-states, both the state system and the global market were characterized by asymmetries of power in the late nineteenth century, as they are now. The most powerful states were the systems’ most important enforcers but did not suffer the burden of operating according to the systems’ principles except in their relations with each other. Such a discrepancy was compounded by the fact that the state system and the capitalist market have different etiologies and are mutually supportive rather than operating as one. Regardless of the ideal array of a world of nations that is implied by the abstract equivalence of nation-states, these systems did not close the gap between 40

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their formal logic and the reality of great-power politics and capital accumulation, both because of the discrepant activities of their strongest units and because of the lack of convergence between the systems themselves. Such gaps appeared consistently in disjunctions between local conditions and systemic logic. The situation opens the possibility for local “variation” of three sorts. The first is the potential for behavior which takes no heed of systemic expectations and is dismissed because it does not make sense within the prescribed logic, regardless of its disruptive quality.133 It is important to recognize the existence of such behavior because classic versions of structural causality cannot explain it. Considering such behavior to be nationalism is difficult, however, if only for the reason that it does not aim to create or support a state. The gap between systemic logic and local reality also opens the possibility for truly antisystemic activity, such as anticolonial nationalisms that call not just for seizure of the colonial state but also resistance to capitalism. A third possibility, however, seems to have been the more common result and is the major topic of this book: the work by nationstates and nationalist elites to work in the other direction, to maintain a semblance of alignment between the actual conditions in the systems that organized the space of the world and the shared suppositions about how they operated, through constant adjustments in ideology. Nation-states have a large investment in the systems by virtue of which they exist, and thus must have an ideological commitment to keeping structural contradictions in suspension. This could not be accomplished once and for all but was an ongoing project that depended on the ability to explain the discrepancy between the local and the systemic. Why, then, did reflection on history play a central role in efforts to explain a nation’s position in the world? Considering the ubiquity of stage theories of development, it may not be surprising that meditation on the past and contemplation of the future were important to explanations of the present. Nineteenth-century philosophies of history themselves, however, were products of the political, economic, and social changes that were sweeping the world, and we should therefore look beyond immediate textual sources to the forces driving change and the systems in which they were at work. In late-nineteenth-century reflections on the nation, at least as important as the dissimilar positions that nations and their states occupied in world political and economic systems was their arrival at those positions by dissimilar paths. In such a situation, the disjunction between the particular path that the territory and populace claimed by a National History

41

nation-state followed in their entry into the international systems, on the one hand, and the universalistic models taken to explain systemic conditions—including the existence of nations—on the other, becomes a lasting problem in national ideology. It should thus be clear that it was almost inevitable that historical discourse would be one of the major means for suturing the disjunction between the national particular and the systemic universal. (The other, as Fukuzawa’s All the Countries of the World has already suggested, was geography, and history and geography appear to be mutually parasitical when it comes to national questions.)134 Remade as national history, varied, heterogeneous pasts become explanations of the present circumstances of nations. The history that emerges as synchronic conditions are transformed into a diachronic story of interior development functions as both account and diagnosis of the divergence of the nation from patterns accepted as universal. The operation of national history in this manner is characteristic of an era when the nation-state as a political institution and the nation as a form of human community had achieved an effective universality, that is, after a transitional era when other forms of community and sovereignty rivaled the nation and nation-state, but before the further transnational integration of capital made it clear that the latter too were passing, not eternal, institutions. At this juncture, the practice of national history displays several characteristic preoccupations. To create a narrative of internal development, national history must bound the space in which the nation is born and grows, while distinguishing that space from the spaces of other nations. It must also establish the inevitability of the destruction of prior forms of community and past regimes, making the present the necessary culmination of a past transformed into a series of prefigurations. Broadly speaking, these are problems of space and time, respectively, which this book takes as rubrics for examining other problems and issues in the practice of national history. The following chapters thus form two groups, or parts. Because few readers will be equally familiar with the histories of the three countries, each chapter opens with a historical introduction intended also to establish the comparative and international context. The argument develops both within and across chapters, and within and across the book’s two parts. Part 1, “Spaces of History,” begins in chapter 2 by examining the demarcation of national-historical space in Japanese histories of civilization, a genre that emerged in the 1870s in works by Fukuzawa Yukichi, Taguchi Ukichi, and others. Drawing on liberal philosophy of history, 42

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especially the notion of “intercourse” as the foundation of society, the genre limns an inversion of the systemic conditions that constitute nationstates, thereby bounding the space of national development and establishing historical diachrony. Chapter 3 considers the task of defining nationalhistorical space in the settler society of the United States, where narratives of national development by Josiah Strong and Frederick Jackson Turner display an anxiety that the movement of history exacerbates internal divisions through the very mechanisms liberal thought predicted would create unity. Strong’s vision of a national future protected by imperialist expansion and Turner’s description of a process of Americanization that seems destined to fail after the “closing” of the North American frontier bring to light a fundamental instability in national history’s representations of space. Chapter 4 examines responses to a similar perception of “closed space” in France after the civil war on the Commune and loss of AlsaceLorraine. The programs to recommence the movement of the nation’s history that appeared, including the reconciliation promoted through a reading primer by G. Bruno and the establishment of “second Frances” championed by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu and others in the colonial lobby, reveal the role that a hortatory rhetoric of commitment plays in the description of national pasts, presents, and futures. Part 2, “Times of Crisis,” begins in chapter 5 by investigating the problem of 1868—the year of the Meiji Restoration—in representations of national history in Japan, where motifs of rupture proliferated in historical narrative. Works by Suehiro Tetchō, Tokutomi Sohō, and Mori Ōgai suggest that rupture and related structures of allegory offer a way to manage the nation’s relationship to nonnational pasts and the individuals it claimed as subjects. Chapter 6 turns to efforts to imagine national unity in the United States, whose inhabitants in a time of high immigration possessed heterogeneous pasts, making the historical consciousness of the national subject a significant problem for debate. Henry James, John Fiske, and Woodrow Wilson sketched the resolution of the problem of divergent pasts as a process in which the subject’s accession to nationality, a key moment in allegories of the nation, includes the adoption of a shared view of the nation’s history. Chapter 7 considers the problem of the past in the early decades of the Third Republic, where dispute over the French Revolution demanded ways to imagine the emergence of a cohesive nation that did not rely on political history. The alternative modes of belonging proposed by Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, and republican historians of the Revolution suggest the ways that national history works to expel poNational History

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litical violence from the constitution of the nation and obscure its role in the foundation of the national state. The book’s conclusion reconsiders the representation of the space and time of the nation and reassesses the practice of national history in a global context. I conclude here by reiterating the proposition that national history mediated between the particular and the universal in a period of accelerating integration of the international state system and the world market, making the process representable and thereby comprehensible. I want to caution, however, against forgetting that the same mechanisms of representation turned the political form of the nation-state into a universal itself and placed its quasi-corporeal proxy, the nation, at the center of the process of social development. Far from being recognized as a newcomer among forms of human community, the nation became both an atemporal verity, said always to have existed, and a conceptual category, the unquestioned criterion defining the scope of knowledge not only of history but of the social in general. By examining the ways that the practice of national history transformed the understanding of the shape of society and the place of people in it, I hope to emphasize the importance of crafting and defending alternative views of the force that capital and state exert on our world.

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Chapter 2

Liberal Social Imaginaries and the Interiority of History

Changes in the practice of historical writing in Japan in the years following 1868, during which large segments of Japanese society were reorganized under the banners of civilization and progress, offer a first example to explore the ways that national history mediated between the local and the systemic as new territories were integrated into the world market and the state system in the late nineteenth century. The transformation of interstate relations in East Asia under the pressures of European and North American imperial expansion, which institutionalized the nationstate as the basic form of sovereignty in the region, precipitated significant changes in views of both space and time among Japanese intellectuals. Through such changes, whose first consequence in historical writing was the appearance of a genre known as “history of civilization” (bunmeishi), the nation emerged as an epistemological space within which a history specific to it unfolds in apposition to other such national histories. Significantly, in a region whose geography was being overlaid with new classifications such as colony, protectorate, and “sphere of influence,” the new historiography in Japan looked to such a bounded national history to explain the position of each nation in the world and thus to reveal the conditions under which nations could remain sovereign. Although states had existed in East Asia long before the European (and later U.S.) empires arrived, the system of relations among them was not the one that had evolved in Europe since the Peace of Westphalia, based on the notion of formal equality among sovereign states. The so-called Sinocentric state system that prevailed in East Asia was based, on the contrary, on hierarchical relationships of vassalage, with the Chinese empire nominally at the top of the chain. If we recognize that one defining

characteristic of the nation-state is its existence in a system of formally equal relations with other such states, then regardless of continuing debates about when identities such as “Chinese,” “Japanese,” and “Korean” emerged in the region, the states existing in the mid-nineteenth century cannot be likened to nation-states with much justification. Groupings that are apparently protonational gain this appearance only in retrospect, as a consequence of the naturalization of the nation-state as the universal political form of modernity. For such naturalization to occur in East Asia, a range of considerable changes had to take place, whose poles were on the one hand the integration of the region into the European state system and on the other the transformation of the populations of newly integrated states into national peoples, that is, a range of changes that establish the distinction between national “interior” and international “exterior” that is central to the systemic existence of the nation-state. The conceptual shifts that made such transformations possible, in notions of boundaries, identity, and the origins and evolution of social forms, underlay changes in the writing of history in the period. Japanese restrictions on interstate political and economic relations during the Tokugawa period have frequently been exaggerated by a focus on the relations of the Tokugawa government with European states, producing corresponding exaggerations of the extent of the “opening” that took place in the 1850s. The solidity of the Sinocentric system of relations has likewise been inflated, with similar effect on views of its demise. A more nuanced perspective is necessary to understand the epistemological change that took place in Japan in a regional and global context. Contrary to the common view of Tokugawa-era Japan as isolated, the Tokugawa regime worked to reestablish relations in East Asia after the war Toyotomi Hideyoshi fought on the Korean peninsula in the 1590s and enjoyed active relations with states in the region by 1640, when its series of edicts expelling European missionaries and restricting trade was complete.1 In its attitudes toward areas populated by the Ainu, in areas north of Honshū, the regime was expansionist rather than isolationist.2 It moreover built a relatively independent position in the Sinocentric system of relations. Participation did not require accepting the self-perception of the Chinese regimes, and other countries could thus take part in different degrees. While the Yi court on the Korean peninsula was tightly integrated and drew on the idea of Chinese centrality for its legitimacy, Siam paid only lip service to the idea and participated simply for the benefits of trade and cultural relations.3 For its part, the Tokugawa government developed a 48

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system of protocols intended to maintain trade while giving it comparative autonomy in regulating its relations. The new set of practices was presented in Confucian terminology but placed Japan, rather than China, at the center. Countries that sought relations with Japan were able to do so only according to the new norms. Maintaining the Japan-centered system was an important source of legitimacy for the regime.4 Heterogeneous as it was, the gradual disintegration of the Sinocentric diplomatic system affected different states in different ways. As the economic and political penetration of the region by European powers increased, the Tokugawa regime was able to maintain its position of relative autonomy in part because of these more distant states’ lack of interest in Japan. As a consequence, Japan shifted from the political and trade systems centered on China to the systems extending from Europe more slowly than some other states, and it shifted into these systems territorially intact. Belief that the islands had few resources and a small population unlikely to become a significant market for manufactured goods kept interest in them low. As European economic interests grew in the entire region during the era of free-trade imperialism, larger and richer areas were the major targets even after Japan was politically integrated into the international state system in the 1850s.5 In the era of intense interimperialist competition that began in the 1870s, China was gradually dismantled into leased areas, spheres of influence, and economic concessions, while the regional diplomatic order completely collapsed at last because of European refusal to participate.6 Other areas that had formerly been part of this order, such as Burma and Annam, were now indisputably under European suzerainty, but by this time the Meiji government had built a military strong enough to make conquest costly in the case of Japan.7 For several decades foreign investment in the country remained minimal, and trade with Japan was only marginally important to European and North American economies. Thus in comparison to other East Asian countries, most notably China, international economic integration lagged political integration in Japan.8 Over the course of the nineteenth century in the region of East Asia as a whole, then, a political system based on notions of state sovereignty and an economic system based on trade between sovereign states displaced a system of economic and political relations expressed in a Confucian terminology of hierarchical relations. The Sinocentric system had allowed for a great deal of territorial ambiguity, so that the kingdom of the Ryūkyū islands, for example, could be a vassal of both China and the Japanese doThe Interiority of History

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main of Satsuma. The interstate system that superseded it contained hierarchies of its own in practice but demanded a definition of territoriality according to which states were sovereign within their own borders and all territory belonged to one or another such state, whether as “homeland” or colony. Cases of ambiguous sovereignty had to be resolved, with the result that the Meiji government annexed the Ryūkyū archipelago in 1879, with the reluctant acquiescence of the Ching state.9 The logic of this division of the world was never perfectly realized or even consistently applied. The different ways in which Japan and China were integrated into the state system and world market testify to the fact that the most powerful European states were always able to discard protocol in the pursuit of economic and political advantage. Because economic flows did not respect borders set down by treaty, the new organization of relations, moreover, was perpetually unraveling even as it extended its reach. Nonetheless the case of China gave ample evidence of the great consequences of failing to recognize the changed situation and to develop concepts and practices adequate to it. The developing situation required a new view of the shape of the world and the states that comprised it. The creation of what Thongchai Winichakul has called a sovereign national “geo-body” embedded in a network of interstate relations was a radical displacement of existing conceptions of space, ranging from spatial sensibilities in local areas to the hierarchies of states in the Chinese system. The shift generated other conceptual changes, most importantly in dominant ideas of history, which could not account for the appearance of this novel territorial form.10 Because the nation-state had a universal status in the interstate system and the world market, the new concepts of history that emerged were not simply incremental improvements that added a new chapter to existing versions of the past. Rather, the nation-state brought with it an assumption that historical processes likewise were universal. Thinking the place of the nation in the world required embracing a variety of universal time, according to which the histories of nation-states were in some manner equivalent because of the logical equivalence of nation-states themselves. The new concepts of national space and national time thus had a dialectical relationship. The tension of the dialectic followed from the fact that the idea of national space as having self-evident internal coherence—which therefore is different for each nation—is not easily reconciled with assumptions that national histories, as instances of universal time, are equivalent.11 I will call the product of this epistemological change “national-historical 50

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space,” a space within which the history of the nation unfolds according to a logic considered to be universal and which is defined not only by its apparent internal coherence but also by its existence in a matrix of other such spaces. The ways that national-historical space was established and maintained in different parts of the world in the late nineteenth century are a central concern of this book. I speak of the establishment and maintenance of national-historical space because regardless of where it appears, it is saddled with contradictions—such as that between the specificity of national territory and the equivalence of national time—which can be assuaged but not resolved. The conditions under which the process took place were both systemic and local: the operations of national history are inflected not only by the theoretical universality of the nation-state in world political and economic systems but also by the geopolitical location of states within these systems, which reflects the unevenness and inequities that characterize these systems in practice.

Writing the History of Civilization in Japan As the position of China in the region weakened and the Tokugawa regime itself faltered under pressure from Europe and the United States, Japanese intellectuals were pushed into a series of reconsiderations of existing ideas of history. In addition to accounting for the changes around them, the shifting organization of regional space meant they needed new ways to place Japan in the world, geographically and historically. The following chapters on the United States and France show that this was indeed a commonly shared burden at the time, albeit one that was strongly conditioned by relative geopolitical position. Various epistemological frameworks for placing Japan in the world had existed in the Tokugawa era, including the Sinocentric diplomatic order and the Japan-centered views that arose in response to it. Now, however, Japan had to be put in a world of nationstates. While previous explanations that placed Japan at the center of the region offered precedents for the new concepts that were needed, they were inadequate because they were couched in Confucian terms and therefore had to be revised if they were not to be discarded.12 Alternatives had been emerging since the early nineteenth century, as Russian and British incursions on Japanese borders increased. The first Opium War (1839–42), alarming for Japanese observers because it revealed not only the weakness of China but also the power of a formerly distant group of isles, was an intellectual catalyst for developments in both geography and The Interiority of History

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historical thought. Miyachi Masato has shown that the world gazetteers (sekai chishi ) that began to appear in Japan in the wake of the Opium War incorporated a variety of world history, because understanding the outcome of the war required knowing the history of Britain, China, and their interaction.13 A further spur to reevaluating prevailing views of history came from reformist currents that appeared in the 1860s and developed into the “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) thought glimpsed in Fukuzawa’s All the Countries of the World. In its simplest outlines, bunmei kaika was a project to use education to make modern worker-citizens out of a populace considered to be backward and benighted. The elitist and tutelary orientation that this view suggests is abundantly evident, the impression strengthened by the fact that the writers grouped around its house organ Meiji Six Magazine (Meiroku zasshi) were almost solely of samurai origin, while those considered most in need of reform were laborers and peasants.14 Nonetheless the faith that proponents of civilization displayed in education, and thus in the ability of the people to transform themselves through education, was immense and genuine.15 Taking the two poles into account, civilization and enlightenment appears to be less a movement than the name for a new grasp of human social organization under the sign of “civilization,” in which the continual transformation of daily life was not merely a prescription delivered from above but an assumed aspect of social reality. Many of the reforms that resulted, ranging from diet and hairstyles to religiosity and the organization of labor and leisure, were carried out with such ruthless disregard for existing patterns of life that Takashi Fujitani has likened them to a “cultural terror.”16 In the end, however, they could not be legitimated simply by belief in education, much less by violence. Like all ideologies of progress, civilization and enlightenment needed to explain not just society’s future but also its formation and mechanisms of development and thus demanded the elaboration of a vision of history in which change was perpetual and natural. The proselytizing orientation of civilization-and-enlightenment thought, focused on transforming and mobilizing those living under the new state, resulted in the publication of many texts meant to incite inner reform. The goal toward which the masses were to be driven was “civilization” itself, typically illustrated by reference to a “West” viewed as the exemplar of the universal ideal.17 The titles of Fukuzawa’s popular book An Encouragement of Learning (Gakumon no susume, ser. 1872–73) and an essay by his compatriot Tsuda Mamichi, “On the Methods of Promoting Civili52

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zation” (“Kaika o susumeru hōhō o ronzu,” 1874), illustrate the earnestness with which many approached the task, but the ideal of civilization was also reproduced and circulated in light literature such as Kanagaki Robun’s Sitting around the Stewpot (Agura nabe, 1871–72) and “The Uses of Cucumbers” (“Kyūri zukai,” 1872), a parody of Fukuzawa’s essay “Illustrated Explanations of Scientific Principles” (1868), whose title is phonetically identical. Whether promoted with high seriousness or a light touch, civilization as an ideal demanded not just the physical compliance but the active spiritual participation of the masses in what was presented as an ongoing project undertaken in common.18 The famous complaint by Fukuzawa in An Encouragement of Learning that “in Japan there is not yet a nation [kokumin], only a government,” reflects the impatience he and other reformers expressed toward the resistance of both the masses and the new regime, which they faulted for encouraging dependence.19 A final factor prompting the emergence of new strategies for apprehending and representing history thus was the need to “produce the people” as a unified nation, to borrow a phrase from Etienne Balibar.20 The task was not simple in an archipelago with strong local sensibilities, a range of dialects, and patterns of political jurisdiction that bore little resemblance to regional boundaries, and where individuals were as likely to identify themselves by their occupation as by a putative bond to an emperor whom few had ever seen.21 The new government pursued a series of strategies to insert the emperor into the fabric of daily life and vigorous campaigns to create uniform customs and identities across the territory it claimed.22 The government’s decision in 1869 to resume compiling annalistic political histories reflects its expectations that historical writing would contribute to the project.23 What was really required, however, was a means of representing history that could explain the source of a national people, its metamorphoses, and the conditions for its future unity. The genre of history of civilization, which evolved directly out of Meiji civilization-and-enlightenment thought, provided such means. We should not assume, however, that creating a history for the nation was therefore easy work. On the contrary, the possibility arose that “civilization” might create a history that the government did not desire. As Irokawa Daikichi has shown, the notion of civilization became the vehicle for popular reimagination of the social and for an optimism that led from civilization-and-enlightenment thought to a movement for an elected assembly that some champions of civilization were loath to support. The movement exacerbated divisions among the oligarchic governThe Interiority of History

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ment, democratic gradualists, and those demanding quick introduction of a broadly franchised assembly.24 Even those advocating only narrow democracy drew the ire of the government, and violent protests in the early 1880s provided the excuse for severe limits on public gatherings and the press in 1884. The government’s crackdown on the movement for an assembly has classically been seen as the beginning of a turn from an open, promise-filled early Meiji period toward a closed, repressive late Meiji that began formally in 1889 and 1890 with the introduction of a constitution and diet centered on the emperor and state. Optimism about the possibility of rapid social change through civilization had been dogged by pessimism about the force of social habit since the mid-1870s, however. Enthusiasm for foreign learning was similarly tempered by fear that superficial “Europeanization” (Ōka) would have malign effects on the populace. Nativist alarm about the purity of the nation, temporarily in abeyance during the height of enthusiasm for civilization and enlightenment in the early 1870s, became increasingly raucous and would be a permanent point of reference in political and social thought. The genre of history of civilization emerged at this political and social juncture as an attempt to create a Japanese past for civilization and enlightenment. In the face of changing attitudes toward reform, the genre elaborated a view of social change as a process beginning in distant times and extending into the future. Although widely read during the Meiji period, the genre is typically treated in histories of historical thought as a transitional episode between the demise of the historiography of the Tokugawa period and the establishment of the methods still in use today among academic historians. In contrast to the government’s early annalistic projects, which were modeled on the Confucian philology known as kōshōgaku, histories of civilization are widely acknowledged to have taken the first significant steps toward a truly new manner of understanding and representing history as a process. Because the genre originated in philosophy of history and displayed little interest in the treatment and verification of sources, most histories of historiography ultimately fault the genre for its very innovations. In this view, the key event in the development of a method adequate to the demands of modern research is the merging of Confucian and Rankean methods beginning in the late 1880s.25 Yet close analysis shows that histories of civilization worked toward a conception of events as embedded in a continuous national process which explained the emergence of the nation-state and its requisite people. Later histori-

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ography accepted the perspective at the same time that it repudiated the founding texts themselves. Unlike later academic historians, the writers of histories of civilization were forthright about the political project behind their work: the continuation of “civilization and enlightenment.”26 By situating early Meijiperiod reformism in universal processes that had been unfolding in Japan over centuries, the genre defended civilization from nativists by declaring it to be Japanese at the same time that it was inevitable. Moreover, by creating a history of the civilization of the Japanese nation, they provided a historical argument against “restoration” politics that maintained that the unity of Japan lay in its uninterrupted imperial line rather than in the people. Finally, by recasting civilization as a process, these historians circumscribed the possibility of sudden, radical social change. Their politics were gradualist and liberal in the nineteenth-century sense of the word: to protect Japanese sovereignty through a project of national strengthening that included industrialization, trade with Europe and North America, free speech, and a minimal dose of democracy. These intellectuals were as distrustful of the will of the masses as they were of the intentions of the European powers and the United States in Asia. It is fitting that Fukuzawa, who stirred enthusiasm for civilization in his early works, founded the genre with the publication of Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku) in 1875. The genre continued in Short History of Japanese Civilization (Nihon kaika shōshi, 1877–82) by Taguchi Ukichi, an economist and translator for the Finance Ministry who resigned his post to write history and preach free trade through the Tokyo Economic Journal (Tōkyō keizai zasshi ), which he founded for the purpose in 1879. The ensuing years saw the appearance of a host of histories of civilization, among them History of the Eastward Advance of Civilization (Bunmei tōzenshi, 1884) by Fujita Mokichi, a journalist and former student of Fukuzawa’s who was active in the democracy movement as a moderate and eventually sat in the Diet.27 The appearance of Outline of a Theory of Civilization is typically taken as a “conservative” turn for Fukuzawa and other proponents of civilization and enlightenment, on the argument that the book shows Fukuzawa relinquishing liberalism for nationalism.28 On the contrary, Fukuzawa’s book and the genre as a whole merely refract the already abundant concern among enlighteners to turn the masses into a nation by rooting projects of national strengthening in a narrative of national development deeply marked by liberal views of history. Histories

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of civilization abandoned the possibility of quick reform, but in its place they asserted that progress had begun in previous eras and would continue in the future, clearly a strong declaration of faith in the inexorability of civilization and its value to the nation and state. The aim of histories of civilization was to narrate the advance of civilization in Japan as a linear process that was driven by specific, identifiable mechanisms. Fukuzawa’s Outline of a Theory of Civilization begins: “‘Theory of civilization’ is the examination of the advancement of the human spirit. This does not mean examining the advancement of the spirit of one person, but rather drawing together the advancements in the spirit of people of all the realm and examining this advancement as a whole. Thus the theory of civilization also could be called the theory of the advancement of the mind of the masses [shūshin].”29 Despite the idealist overtones of such a statement, civilization signified technology and technological knowledge as much as it did a spiritual condition. This is a meaning that the English “civilization” and its cognates in western European languages have largely lost, but that the Japanese word retains.30 Such knowledge was considered to be universal, lacking any specific geographic identity, and to be capable of unlimited increase.31 The history of civilization accordingly was the narrative of the development of specific social practices which had both spiritual and material groundings. Writers of histories of civilization appropriated the work of several European liberal historians as models, in particular Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe and Henry Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1856–61).32 In rearticulating European paradigms of history, however, Fukuzawa, Taguchi, Fujita, and others relativized the position of European civilization in the historical process. Fukuzawa maintained that European civilization should be the goal of Japanese labors only because it was currently the most advanced in the world. Civilization was not equal to Europeanization.33 In declarations of this sort, writers of histories of civilization tried to disengage the universality of civilization from the exemplarity of Europe. Disengaging the two entailed the “delocalization” of European history through its abstraction into developmental paradigms of which Europe remains the theoretical if not the actual subject, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase.34 The founding gesture of histories of civilization in this respect was to make civilization historical and processual, thus asserting its potential for development in places other than Europe. In specifying the nation-state of Japan as one such place, they elaborated a view of history that was endogenous or “internalist” in the sense that they 56

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traced historical processes at work inside the imagined space of Japan, and “national” in the sense that they located these processes in the activity of the “nation” (kokumin), rather than in the politics of the courtly and military elite. That is, these histories are epistemologically bounded in a manner that precedes and makes possible their use of the “Japanese” past as archive. The new boundaries that the genre gave history were not only the result of changes in theory, however. They were also the result of the rhetoric it used to make the past into a story of civilization.

“Intercourse” as History In positing the existence of civilization as a universal telos of social development and outlining the mechanisms for progress toward it, histories of civilization appropriated an aspect of classical European liberalism with roots deeper than the immediate sources in writers such as Guizot and Buckle. At the heart of the ideal of civilization was an economic imaginary of society that Charles Taylor argues forms one of the primary means for understanding social relationships in modernity.35 Such a framework for imagining history explains the central phenomena of human society under the rubric of exchange, an activity with both economic and moral aspects that is grounded in communal existence as a nation. A constellation of terms related to exchange thus appears throughout these texts, including kōtsū (communication, communion, concourse), tsūkō (transit, passage), kōeki (trade, commerce, barter), kōkan (exchange, barter, swap), and most importantly kōsai (relations, interaction, intercourse). All these terms include a Chinese character (read as kō) whose most basic meaning is mixing, mingling, or association, and a second character signifying circulation or exchange in some form.36 Indeed, histories of civilization could perhaps most simply be described as historical phenomenologies of exchange. The crucial term kōsai—most appropriately translated as “intercourse,” a privileged term in European liberalism—is intertwined with the history of Japanese translations for the English word “society” and its western European cognates. (Fukuzawa favored the translation ningen kōsai—literally, “human intercourse”—although the word shakai eventually prevailed.)37 The connection is revealing in light of the unfamiliar conjunction of political and economic territoriality in early Meiji Japan. Pierre Rosanvallon has shown that in Europe, too, at the metropolitan core of the world economy and the international state system, such a conjunction was inseparable from the emergence of “society” as a dominant category The Interiority of History

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of political and economic thought in the eighteenth century and its territorialization by the nation-state.38 What defines these works as a genre of historical knowledge is an evangelical desire to explain all aspects of society as manifestations of intercourse, circulation, and exchange: The nature of humankind inherently is to associate with others. In independence and isolation there are no means for intelligence to be born. Nor is gathering together a family enough to exhaust human intercourse. As those in the world associate together and people come into contact with each other, their intercourse gradually widening and their laws gradually becoming regular, human sentiment gradually moderates and knowledge gradually unfolds. In English, bunmei is “civilization.” It derives from the Latin civitas and thus means “country.” Hence the word “civilization” describes the tendency toward successive improvement of human intercourse for the better, and in contrast to the independence of barbarian anarchy, means the formation of a country [ikkoku].39 In this definition from Outline of a Theory of Civilization, Fukuzawa deploys a theory of human nature and a theory of social formation that together amount to a philosophy of history. Both the theory of individual motivation and the theory of history are carried by the term “intercourse,” which signifies at once a basic human drive, the essential fiber of social relations, and the engine of social change. Fukuzawa’s use of the term is a revealing indication of the moment in world intellectual history at which he wrote because it displays connections to both Confucianism and European liberalism. Nishikawa Nagao has shown that Fukuzawa’s contemporaries frequently defined bunmei (civilization) in the classical Chinese sense of the term as refinement in matters of courtesy or decorum (reigi ) even as they used it to describe western European social institutions. Intercourse designated the way in which individual courtesy contributed to the well-being of all.40 A similar view of social relations appears in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antecedents of the works by Guizot and Buckle that were the most direct sources for Outline of a Theory of Civilization. In Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (L’esprit des lois, 1748) and other works of social and economic thought of the time, “commerce”—which, like the Japanese kōsai, had connotations ranging from economic to personal relations—was believed to calm and soften the human passions and thereby to bring predictability 58

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and constancy to society as a whole.41 Like the Confucian view of manners, this view of social improvement also included a moral component. Note, however, that neither thrust civility into the stream of history in an explicit theory of development: this gesture belonged to Fukuzawa’s century. Two points in the passage from Outline of a Theory of Civilization just quoted mark the metamorphosis of intercourse into a theory of history: first, the idea that the expansion of intercourse makes possible successive improvements; and second, the idea that intercourse itself constantly expands. The relationship between improvement and expansion in histories of civilization is exceedingly important for what Fukuzawa calls “the formation of a country.” Words signifying trade, circulation, and so on begin themselves to circulate in histories of civilization as the writers bring ever more aspects of human activity under the rubric of exchange. In the process, the terms assume a broad variety of rhetorical meanings yet retain a stubborn literality even when Fujita, for example, speaks of the “trade in ideas” between Japanese and Dutch in the treaty port of Tokugawa-era Nagasaki. I will call this constellation of words a trope—the trope of intercourse—to foreground the range of meanings that the constellation encompasses as well as its simultaneously literal and figurative function.42 As these historians use it, the trope of intercourse does not simply indicate their attempts to understand the world—a discovery of intercourse in the world—but rather constitutes an active assertion that the world has a specific order. While writers of histories of civilization propose intercourse as a mechanism that is the same in every location and on every scale, their rhetoric itself breaks down, however, into two irreconcilable tropes, intercourse within a nation on the one hand and between nations on the other. Relying on the same group of words, the two tropes are distinguished by their use, not their conception, and therefore cannot be reconciled by a single logic of intercourse. Jointly they reveal that the “nation”—whose existence is supposed to be explained by intercourse—is an a priori on which the idea of intercourse depends. Intercourse in histories of civilization is a nationally delimited process, and the history of intercourse is the history of national unity. These histories produce the people through such an all-encompassing narrative of progress. And yet, as I argue later, even the genre’s split rhetoric could not counter the logical implication of its theory, that national difference would gradually be erased by the action of universal progress. Such an attempt to create a progressive national past thus brought with it the necessity of The Interiority of History

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maintaining the conditions for nationality within a theory of universal progress. To meet this necessity, histories of civilization ultimately resort to certain exclusions from their progressive narratives. “Barbarism” and woman emerge as loci of nationality in a world tending toward the same universal ideal. The meaning of intercourse as a social process emerges most clearly in the synthetic theories of history that Fukuzawa, Taguchi, and Fujita offer. Fukuzawa’s Outline of a Theory of Civilization sketches a process in which human intercourse—dominated by “physical power” (wanryoku) in primitive ages—comes under the increasing influence of “intellectual power” (chiryoku). Civilization is able to advance when intellectual power gains sway.43 Fukuzawa stresses that the improvements in material comfort or refinement of the spirit that appear with such advancement are only indications of more important improvements in “intellect and virtue” (chitoku). Because intellect and virtue have no limits, civilization ultimately means progress in them (61–63). Civilization thus passes through three stages. In the first, “barbarism” ( yaban), social groups are nomadic and temporary, and even if food and clothing are sufficient, knowledge of tools is lacking. People have no writing and no bungaku, a term Fukuzawa uses not to mean literature (as in modern Japanese) but written culture, including science. In the second stage, “semi-enlightenment” (hankai ), people enjoy agriculture and industry, houses and cities. Externally there appears to be a “unified country” (ikkoku), but much is lacking: in particular, written culture is widespread but few pursue “practical learning” ( jitsugaku). People know how to cultivate the old but not how to renew it, and thus human intercourse remains dominated by “custom” (shūkan). This is the stage that Japan currently occupies with respect to civilized Europe, Fukuzawa says. In the third stage—which, in keeping with his relativization of Europe, Fukuzawa calls “the present civilization” (ima no bunmei)—all matters of the world have been subjected to rules, and within these rules people go about their activities vigorously, without indulging in old customs; they support themselves without relying on the benevolence of others. They pursue virtue and cultivate their intellect on their own initiative; rather than taking satisfaction in small comforts, they make plans for future successes (26–27). As the echoes of Victorian and Confucian morality suggest, Fukuzawa maintains throughout Outline of a Theory of Civilization that civilization is a matter not of outward form but of “spirit” (seishin) (29–30). Moreover, civilization is a matter of the “temperament” (kifū) of an entire coun60

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try rather than of an individual. Fukuzawa thus argues that the spirit of civilization is “the temperament of a country’s people” (ikkoku jinmin no kifū) and could be called “the mind and manners of a country” (ikkoku no jinshin fūzoku). It is the spirit of civilization that separates Europe from semi-enlightened Asia, according to Fukuzawa, and cultivating it in Japan therefore is of the utmost importance (31–32). Declaring that “the duty of Japanese at this time is the single task of protecting our nationality [kokutai],” Fukuzawa writes: “Protecting our nationality means not losing sovereignty. In order not to lose sovereignty, the intellectual power of the people must be advanced. . . . The first step toward promoting intellectual power is to do away with indulgence in old customs and adopt the spirit of civilization that prevails in the West.”44 The model that Taguchi advances in Short History of Japanese Civilization is more thoroughly materialist in its approach to what Fukuzawa calls “spirit.” In the first chapter, Taguchi writes: “In general whether the human mind advances or not goes hand in hand, inseparably, with the ease or difficulty of acquiring wealth. There is no place where wealth is abundant and the mind does not advance; there is no country where the mind advances and wealth is scarce.”45 The parallel progress of mind and wealth is driven by “human nature” (ningen no tensei ), which for Taguchi is to protect one’s life and flee death. Intellect is born in the earliest human era from the self-interested desire to control one’s environment and avoid calamity, while the greater material comfort that results allows broader human intercourse and a consequent elevation of the mind.46 For Taguchi, a key moment in this process comes when the individual recognizes his self-interest in the interests of others. Mutual self-interest becomes the basis for ethics and finally for “loyalty” (chūgi). Similarly, language and “manners” (fūzoku) are formed by a process of self-interested imitation. Such imitation in turn is the basis for all that unites a people.47 The single danger that Taguchi sees to the infinite advance of wealth and mind driven by this happily self-reinforcing cycle of interest and benefit is divergence of the interests of members of society. As a good nineteenth-century liberal, he finds taxation and the state to be the main cause of such schisms.48 Because “one can conclude by reasoning on the facts [of history] that progress in civilization is the nature of society [shakai],” Taguchi says, the only question that remains is what form of government will encourage the fastest progress.49 Fujita’s History of the Eastward Advance of Civilization is more closely concerned with the effects of technology on intercourse than are either The Interiority of History

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Fukuzawa’s or Taguchi’s histories. In this sense, it apparently privileges European civilization to a greater degree because, as the title indicates, Fujita considers the arrival of European technology in Japan to be a decisive event. Closer examination, however, shows the extent to which Fujita and historians of civilization in general consider knowledge, like the theory of society as intercourse, to be free of any geographic or political affiliation. (In this sense, their belief in the universality of civilization is premised on a belief in the universality of instrumental reason.) The book traces the manifestation of the universal patterns of civilization in Japan under the rubric of what Fujita styles the “Theory of Water and Fire” (suikaron). “What destroy the two great obstacles on the path of improvement that the world follows, what make possible the exploitation of a new world, are the two powers of water and fire,” Fujita explains. “One pierces natural obstacles, the other destroys man-made ones. What makes possible great acts in society [shakai ] and indeed what gives rise to the improvement of the world as a whole is ease of communication. Associating widely and hearing a variety of things are the means by which human intellect increases. Thus the ease of conveying thought [shisō o tsutae] and imparting words [gengo o tsūzuru] suffices to indicate the degree of prosperity of the world.”50 In the natural world, free transmission of thought and language is blocked by mountains and oceans. Watt’s invention of the steam engine—the power of water—enabled humans to overcome these barriers and cross vast distances by ship and train. The human world posed a different barrier: feudalism blocked progress in the countries of Europe by keeping society perpetually at war. Gunpowder—the power of fire—let “the dazzling light of enlightenment” into Europe because firearms demanded capital and specialized training and thus led to standing armies. Wars were shorter and soldiers fewer, leaving society able to pursue other work (246, 247). Japan was first touched by the advance of civilization in the sixteenth century, Fujita says, when Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on an island fortuitously named Tanegashima (literally Island of the Seed) transmitted the art of gun making to Japanese craftsmen (248). Such exchange continued with the transmission of medical knowledge by Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and by Dutch traders in Nagasaki, giving Japanese scholars the means to protect both human life and the stability of the country (and thus, one might say, the kokutai, the “national body” or nationhood) (285). The seeds of civilization sprouted and took root in a corner of Japanese society, growing over a period of two hundred years 62

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(229). The Meiji Restoration and the fall of feudalism in Japan were caused by a convergence of the powers of water and fire: Commodore Matthew Perry used a steamship to enter Tokyo Bay, and Japanese partisans of enlightenment used firearms to overthrow a government too weak to oppose his demands (247, 248). Fujita maintains that because the knowledge that entered Japan via Tanegashima and Nagasaki was cultivated and transmitted by groups like the small band of scholars of Dutch learning whose persecution he records in the book’s latter half, the achievements of the present Japan are due not to the sponsorship of either the old or the new state, which continues to restrict free debate, but rather to the work of “civil patriots” (minkan no shishi) within Japanese society (285).

Tropes of Integration and Difference Two different tropes of intercourse emerge from these narratives of history. One is a trope of expansion, integration, and amalgamation already suggested by Fukuzawa’s declaration that human nature is to associate in ever-widening circles. Here the scope of intercourse is constantly broadening. Fukuzawa employs this trope in describing the formation of “popular opinion” (shūron) in the so-called West: “Even in a remote village, people form circles and discuss public and private affairs. With these circles formed, inevitably each will have its own views. For example, when several friends or two or three neighboring houses form a circle, the circle has its own view. When circles unite to form a village, there is a village view of things. When they form a district or county, there is a district or county view. This view and that view converge and change slightly, gradually merging and including more until finally the public opinion of a country is decided.”51 Intercourse in this integrative sense is achieved by crossing or overcoming barriers to communication, as Fujita argues the power of water makes possible. And as in the case of Fujita’s power of fire, intercourse may entail active destruction of barriers: histories of civilization consistently represent feudalism (hōken) as an impediment to natural unity, common to all countries, that must be destroyed for civilization to progress. It is only in breaching such barriers—geographic and political— and circulating freely that a people achieves strength. Fukuzawa thus considered the speed and wide reach of communication in Europe to be one source of the strength of its civilization.52 Indeed, in Outline of a Theory of Civilization, Fukuzawa follows the description of the expansive character of popular opinion in the West quoted earlier with an attack on what he The Interiority of History

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sees as the tendency of people in Asian countries to keep to themselves and stay out of public affairs. Popular debate is like money, Fukuzawa says: it does the country no good if it is kept at home.53 Such a view of impediments to circulation as fundamentally damaging to society underlies one of Fukuzawa’s best-known pronouncements in Outline of a Theory of Civilization, that Japan has suffered from an “imbalance of authority” (kenryoku no henchō) for most of its history that has affected all aspects of human intercourse, from intercourse among members of a family to the highest structures of governance, and thereby the “temperament” (kifū) of the country.54 Returning to Taguchi’s stress on the force of mutual self-interest, it is clear that the expansive and integrative trope of intercourse involves a type of self-recognition among those who take part. In Taguchi, manners and language form through a process of imitation because such imitation promotes the well-being of the individual. The results of this process in turn give a group its unity.55 Hence this also is a trope for the confirmation of sameness, as defined by commonly held interests. From a certain point of view, Taguchi’s model for the formation of group identity is markedly nonessentialist and nonfoundationalist: what is at stake for Taguchi is not an essence ( Japaneseness) but a relationality that manifests itself in the recognition of mutual self-interest. The historical determinants of “human nature” remain unexamined, as they do in classical political economy, but it is precisely the assumption of the universality of self-interest as a motivation that allows Taguchi to maintain that civilization is a universal phenomenon rather than simply a European one. The consequence of Taguchi’s stress on imitation is an inability to explain why a particular language or set of manners appeared. But in a theory based on the idea of intercourse, origins are a secondary concern; more important is the sense in which, for Taguchi, identity is constantly reconfirmed by the recognition of others who are the same. The limit between the expansive, integrative trope of intercourse in histories of civilization and a distinct differentiating trope appears in Fukuzawa’s explanation of the meaning of nationality (kokutai). Glossing John Stuart Mill, Fukuzawa writes that “nationality means a race of people gather together and share sorrows and joys, create differences between themselves and other people of other countries, regard each other more warmly than they regard people of other countries, strive to expend their energies for each other rather than for people of other countries, govern themselves under a single government, resent suffering the 64

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control of other governments, bear their calamities and happiness themselves in independence. This is what they call ‘nationality’ [nashonarichi] in Western languages.”56 In an otherwise withering critique of Fukuzawa as Orientalist, Kang Sang-jung notes that the conception of nationality Fukuzawa outlines here resembles Balibar’s idea of “fictive ethnicity” in the way that it centers on shared experience.57 Such a view of nationality also is quite close to positions taken by Ernest Renan, Woodrow Wilson, and other writers whom I examine in this study. But Fukuzawa’s rhetoric of self and other here suggests a limit—epistemological and spatial—of the integrative trope of intercourse and brings us to representations of intercourse with an other that is different. In histories of civilization, it goes without saying that expansion and integration never proceed beyond the limits of the nation. An expansion that in principle should be unlimited in fact takes place within a determinate territory. None of these writers discuss the actual territorial limits of “Japan” as a community of intercourse: its territorial unity is considered to be self-evident, despite the persistence of local loyalties and the recent expansion of the state’s formal frontiers to include Hokkaidō and the Ryūkyū archipelago. Rather, they offer the limits of mutual interest and the difference of mentalities and manners as reasons for the halt of integration at national borders. Considering Taguchi’s inability to explain the origins of manners, such explanations do not go far. Beyond this there is only an elusive suggestion in these histories that integration must proceed as far as national borders precisely because it can go no farther. Taguchi, for example, comments that the Tokugawa system was excellent at keeping the peace, “but the parcelization of feudalism was useless when it came to uniting the land [kaidai] and facing a foreign enemy.”58 Taguchi’s use of kaidai—a Chinese term that could be translated literally as “what is bounded by the seas”—suggests the extent to which histories of civilization assume a natural unity of Japan, the “inside,” in the face of a foreign exterior. Based on improvements in technology rather than ideas of human nature, Fujita’s theory of intercourse seems to differ from those of Fukuzawa and Taguchi. In fact, it confirms the consistency with which the genre posits the nation as the natural limit of expansive integration, at the same time revealing the premises underlying the trope of intercourse as differentiation. Consider three examples in relation to one another: First, in discussing the Tokugawa government’s expulsion of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries from Japan in 1612, Fujita asks that the missionaries’ The Interiority of History

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legacy not be overshadowed by their monarchs’ plans for conquest: “In fact, was it not the Portuguese who first conveyed [tsutaetaru] Western medicine to us? And they bequeathed another great benefit to us, the fowling piece. The Portuguese first conveyed firearms to us at Tanegashima.” Second, Fujita comments that after the formalization of trade relations with the Dutch East India Company in 1639, “Nagasaki was not simply a place for trade in goods with the Dutch, it was also a new port for trade in knowledge.” Finally, Fujita observes that although the privileges that Perry demanded from the Tokugawa government were economic, trade itself had to be preceded by a different kind of exchange: “While the aim of communication really was trade, words and thoughts had to be swapped before products. As people associate, they slowly undergo reform inside that then extends to the outside and has repercussions for the things of the world.”59 In the first example, Fujita’s use of the transitive verb tsutaeru makes it clear that he considers these examples of intercourse between Portuguese and Japanese to involve the transfer of a particular thing—knowledge of medicine or arms—from one party to another. The description of Nagasaki in the second example makes the structure of such transactions clearer: the port as a space devoted to the barter of knowledge between Japanese and Dutch, as a gateway or border area for these transactions. Finally, Fujita’s description of the establishment of trade relations between Japan and the United States schematizes trade as an exchange of language and thought that penetrates inside Japan and causes a revolution there. In each case the parties to a transaction are defined by nationality. Knowledge, as an object, changes hands and is brought inside the nation of the second party. The trope of intercourse as differentiation thus takes trade as a privileged metaphor, in comparison to the trope of intercourse as integration, which relies on the metaphor of social contact. In spatial terms, differentiation is a trope not of expansion but of transmission between positions fixed as national. The precise extent to which Fujita’s idea of “trade” in words and ideas is only a metaphor is not clear, however, because in his view of knowledge as universal, the words are the ideas, which exist in a state of perfect representation, as language before Saussure or value before Marx, free of any instabilities, social filiations, geopolitics. The stubborn literality of this metaphor reveals the degree to which the logic of trade penetrates conceptions of nationality in the late nineteenth century. That nations are the agents in the trope of intercourse as differentiation 66

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is unmistakable in remarks that Fukuzawa makes on international relations in the closing chapter of Outline of a Theory of Civilization, titled “On the Independence of a Country.” Fukuzawa warns that “there are only two sorts of intercourse between countries. In peacetime, buying and selling things and fighting each other over the profit; or when it comes to it, killing each other with weapons. In other words, today’s world could be called one of trade and war.”60 Fittingly, Fukuzawa says that the response to a situation of trade as war is cultivation of a “spirit of dedication to country” (hōkokushin) by “creating discrimination of self and other regarding other countries, so even if, for example, there is no intent to hurt others, one is hospitable toward one’s own and cold toward others, working for the independence of one’s country because it is one’s country.”61 Fukuzawa expected such recognition of external difference to lead to the extinction of internal difference and the establishment of national harmony.62 In light of Taguchi’s position that nations form by pursuit of mutual self-interest, it is fitting that he describes the appearance of late-Tokugawa-period “love of country” (aikoku) in a similar, if far more succinct, way: patriotism appears out of fear that concourse with foreigners will overwhelm the country.63 Clearly this trope of intercourse involves a recognition of self via an opposed and by definition antagonistic other. Where the integrative trope imagines a confirmation of self by recognition of sameness, the differentiating trope imagines such confirmation by recognition of alterity. The lingering moral quality of intercourse observed earlier, while apparently directed toward all people, thus finds its ultimate ground in nationalism: morality in intercourse consists in the recognition that obligations to one’s fellows in the nation supersede obligations to others. From the point of view of the trope of intercourse as differentiation that I have just described, the barriers to exchange and circulation that figure so prominently in the integrative trope are internal barriers dividing the nation. In light of the integrative trope, the trope of differentiation appears to be concerned with external intercourse across national boundaries. It might seem plausible therefore to speak of two steps, modes, or scales of intercourse in histories of civilization, rather than of two “tropes.” Yet Fukuzawa, Taguchi, and Fujita make no explicit distinction between the two, speaking only of a single phenomenon of intercourse. None of these writers explain why integrative, unifying intercourse with foreigners is impossible or why subjects of the same nation do not encounter each other as antagonistic trading partners. I use the term “trope” to avoid the suggestion that these two differing representations of The Interiority of History

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historical processes—operating rhetorically through the same interrelated group of Chinese compounds—can be reconciled to each other directly. The seemingly universal and borderless narrative of history as intercourse in histories of civilization breaks down into two tropes that can be reconciled only through an inverted naturalization of the nation as an epistemological category.

National Inversion and Historical Interiority The irreconcilability of tropes of intercourse in histories of civilization is not the cause but the manifestation of a basic instability of limits in the genre, whose source is evoked in an unusual phrase, “the mixed residence of money” (kane no zakkyo), that Fukuzawa uses to describe the disregard of capital for borders. Fukuzawa displays an unease toward capital that reminds us that the congruence of economic and political frontiers in capitalist modernity was new in Japan, and highlights the precariousness of the congruence itself. The origin of Fukuzawa’s phrase was a debate in the Meiji period on “mixed residence in the interior” (naichi zakkyo), the residence of citizens of the United States and European states outside designated treaty ports and the influence (usually expected to be malign) it would have on the Japanese people.64 Following the declaration quoted earlier that countries interact by either trade or war, Fukuzawa observes that the advance of civilization in Europe led to a great increase in the population of its nations. He cites an unnamed economist as saying that only three ways exist to alleviate the costs of the increase: first, export manufactures and import food and clothing; second, send surplus population abroad as colonists; and third, lend capital to foreign countries and use the interest at home. The first has its limits, Fukuzawa says, and the second is expensive and often unsuccessful, in part because of the difficulty of mixed residence among people who observe different customs and manners. In the end, all civilized countries resort to the third strategy, “the mixed residence of money.” Unlike people, Fukuzawa observes, money is able to go anywhere because no one bothers to inquire where it comes from. Before one realizes, one is paying interest to people of another country.65 In other words, money does not simply circulate within a country (the trope of integration) or between countries (the trope of differentiation); its circulation is neither national nor international, neither particular nor universal. Such a half-breed promiscuity— the suggestion of miscegenation through intermarriage is implicit in the 68

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reference to the residency debates—unnerves Fukuzawa because it reveals not simply the porousness of national boundaries but the epistemological fragility of limits and unities themselves. Fukuzawa’s warning regarding the circulation of money opens a new line of inquiry into the relationship of the tropes of circulation and exchange in histories of civilization to the political and economic structure of the world in the late nineteenth century. The two tropes of intercourse, I argue, result from an inversion of the economic and political conditions of formation of the nation-state, to borrow a term from the Japanese critic and philosopher Karatani Kōjin. Such an inversion is the condition of possibility for the writing of national history as a narrative of progress in civilization. As a consequence of the inversion, nations appear to be selfevident geopolitical entities that exist before their relations to each other. Differences in wealth and power among nation-states appear to express the relative degree of progress and development—the relative degree of civilization—that can be observed in their various separate histories, that is, that can be observed by narrating the origins and progress of their respective civilizations. Karatani uses the term inversion (tentō) to describe a situation in which the structural conditions of relation that allow the constitution of terms in a formal system are effaced in such a way that the terms themselves emerge as a priori categories of thought, while the terms’ structural relations appear simply as their expression. He develops the concept through a poststructuralist reading of Marx’s theory of value. Two points in Karatani’s argument are particularly useful in analyzing the rhetoric of intercourse in histories of civilization. First, inversion results in the appearance of “interiority” (naimensei) in the individual terms in a system, by which Karatani means inherent, essential characteristics. Second, inversion is what makes it possible to imagine origins and diachronic history unfolding within such an interiority.66 In his reading of Marx, Karatani argues that the value form in capitalism is a formal language based on the assumed correspondence of sign, signified, and signifier. In Saussurean terms, relative forms of value are the signifieds of this system, the value-form is its sign, and the signifier is an equivalent form of value through which all relative forms of value may be expressed. Both classical political economy and Marx, as its critic, begin their reflections on value from within the consciousness that results from this formal system, which includes as its most important presupposition the existence of money. Therefore both classical political economy and The Interiority of History

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Marx consider the emergence of a central commodity that can signify the value of all other commodities to be inevitable, and consider money to be the ultimate example of such a central commodity, since it has no value in itself and hence only signifies other commodities. Yet this narrative of the inevitability of the emergence of money as the center of the system of value, Karatani argues, inverts the conditions of what always is an uncentered system constituted by the relationships of commodities to each other.67 In the money system of value, Karatani argues, money has a function equivalent to that of phonetic script in language, but contrary to appearances, money and script do not “express” value or interiority. Rather, they create it. The historicity of the creation of value as such is hidden from consciousness precisely because of the inversion that makes the creation possible.68 Consciousness and value therefore assume the appearance of a priori categories, and it becomes possible, in fact necessary, to narrate the emergence of script and money as their respective means of expression. For this reason, it is a mistake to see what Karatani calls “inversion” as simply a reversal of cause and effect, that is, putting money after value when it really comes before. The act of thinking such a diachronic relationship is possible because of the inversion itself: the synchronic conditions that create consciousness and value are inverted into diachronic narratives of their emergence. The ultimate consequence of the inversion, therefore, is the naturalization of the terms that emerge as a priori categories through its operation: value, interiorized consciousness, and, in the case of histories of civilization, nations. Although Karatani constantly reiterates the position that epistemological inversions are not perceptible because they are the foundations of subjectivity, the assertion is contradicted, performatively, by his own identification of them. In fact, one must recognize that such epistemological transformations are neither sudden nor total. Elements of past formations necessarily remain and throw the new formation into relief. The lingering moral quality of intercourse in histories of civilization is one such sedimented legacy. The irreconcilability of the two tropes of intercourse in the genre, moreover, suggests that such fundamental epistemological changes generate traces of themselves in the form of internal aporias that also reveal the outlines of the new formation. With these qualifications, Karatani’s concept remains particularly valuable because it highlights the way that inversion naturalizes the conditions of a system and thus points a way to uncovering the politics that are the ultimate force behind any epistemology. 70

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Considered as aspects of an inversion, the tropes of intercourse in histories of civilization mark the epistemological shift through which the category of the nation was naturalized and became common sense in the representation of history. The tropes of integrative and differentiating intercourse in histories of civilization jointly trace a national space within which the diachronic history of the nation unfolds as the history of national circulation. The two tropes thus jointly limn an epistemological “frontier,” that of the nation-state, in a way that inverts and effaces its historicity by positing it as the inherent limit of social processes. As the result of the inversion, the novel political form of the nation-state gains an interiority that can be described simply as “national history.” The nation gains origins and diachrony and thereby a life of continuous unfolding. Such a narrative of origins and progress becomes not only possible but inescapable, because as a consequence of the inversion, the structural conditions that constitute nation-states as terms in the world market and the international system of nation-states appear to be the results of nationally bounded historical processes. Two corollaries in Karatani’s argument on the function of money in the value form shed further light on the relationship between the naturalization of the nation-state in histories of civilization and global economic and political conditions in the late nineteenth century. Karatani observes that the general form of value (and ultimately the money form) extinguishes difference among commodities and organizes them instead according to a relationship of qualitative identity (all are commodities) and quantitative proportion (each has a different money value). What henceforth appears to be the relative value of a commodity is expressed by money, a transparent signifier and the seeming center of the system. In the money form of value, then, all commodities are related to each other through the mediation of money. “Value” does not mark difference but rather marks its disappearance. Following the same reasoning, Karatani argues that a world market likewise extinguishes difference: because such a market is established through the integration of commodity production, once a world market is established, heretofore separated regions are related to each other only through the mediation of the market.69 Differences among regions henceforth appear as proportional differences in the production of value and are therefore naturalized along with the money form of value itself. (Although it does not detract from Karatani’s argument, we should acknowledge that the international state system works alongside the world market in such an effacement of differThe Interiority of History

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ence, as both assert the formal identity among terms that is essential to the inversion.) By this reasoning, the inversion in histories of civilization produces an epistemology in which “nations” assume relationships to each other that resemble the relationships of qualitative identity and quantitative proportion that Karatani observes in the money form of value. Differences among nations are expressed by relative differences in the progress of civilization in each, with “civilization” itself assuming the status of a universal and value-free signifier. This is to say that in histories of civilization, the question of intercourse between nations—how they interact, why this intercourse is dominated by inequities—is to be explained by examining the history of intercourse within each nation. Under the conditions of this inversion there is no world history, there is only The History of Nations— interestingly enough, the title of a book published in English in 1888 by Shiga Shigetaka, who became a prominent advocate of the protection of “national essence” (kokusui) in the late Meiji period.70 What such an inversion finally accomplished was the establishment on the global periphery of the type of theory of internal social change that had played an essential legitimating role in the expansion of the economic and political power of Europe since the sixteenth century. Samir Amin and Enrique Dussel have argued convincingly that such theories’ assertions that the power and wealth of Europe arose because of internal factors (such as Protestantism) that other regions lacked not only gave the imprimatur of history to metropolitan domination but also justified the forcible imposition of European models of development on colonial possessions (and more recently, neocolonial dependencies). The key legitimating function of such internal paradigms was to obscure the systemic factors that made European domination not only possible but at a certain point inevitable (in particular, the accumulation of capital at the metropole) and instead to fault peripheral areas for their own subjugation.71 Thus in histories of civilization we find the synchronic, structural conditions of metropolitan capital accumulation and peripheral exploitation that constitute nation-states as discrete trading subjects replaced by a history of separate Japanese progress that supports campaigns to speed the nation’s self-civilization. In appropriating such internal theories of social change, writers of histories of civilization accepted what Dussel calls the “developmentalist fallacy.” The consequences are twofold. First, the “national inversion” in histories of civilization formalizes in epistemology the organization of 72

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the world as a system of nation-states so that the nation-state becomes the universal political-economic form and its creation the telos of individual national histories. The project to protect the independence of the nation through universal civilization must leave the systemic inequities of the global political economy unquestioned. Second, within the national context, the national inversion in histories of civilization positions enlightened Japanese intellectuals in precisely the same relationship to the inhabitants of the archipelago as colonial administrators to their subjects. The unenlightened masses become the subaltern by which intellectuals consolidate their stance of universality. The agents of a coercive transformation of daily life to suit the needs of the nation-state, such intellectuals nonetheless were able to claim for themselves the legitimation of history and maintain that they acted on behalf of the “nation.” The formation and perpetuation of such an inversion therefore is not only an issue of the legitimation of inequities in “international” relations. It also is an issue of the production of epistemological categories that support the enclosure and administration by nation-states of geographic areas and their populations. In the new nation-state of Japan, histories of civilization were instrumental in establishing these categories. “History” from this point of view is an epistemological strategy for enclosing a populace that henceforth will be the object of a civilizing process whose seeming subject is the nation rather than intellectuals and bureaucrats. In histories of civilization this process includes, on the one hand, inculcation of the people with the universal knowledge that will make the nation strong: Fukuzawa’s Encouragement of Learning is far from a casual suggestion. On the other, it includes the destruction of any locality or particularity that is not “national,” to wit, the backward customs and manners that intellectuals regarded as the barrier to progress. The populace will indeed come together, but in a process of self-recognition as “Japanese” in which all recognize their interest in the interest of the nation. National history narrates the origin, progress, and setbacks of this process of coming together into natural and total unity.

The Production of Particularity As a universal theory of social change, the narrative of intercourse in histories of civilization can be seen as a mechanism for imposing, in epistemology, a specific particularity on the populace: nationality. Despite the apparent confidence with which histories of civilization carry out such The Interiority of History

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a project of epistemological enclosure and nationalization, however, the genre remains beset by the inadequacy of its two tropes to totalize social phenomena and by a contradiction that resides in the genre’s very conception of civilization as history. The genre’s responses to such paradigmatic problems are in a sense peripheral to its main labor of theorizing the basis for the development of civilization in Japan. Yet the responses— centering around the relationship of “barbarism” and woman to civilization—reappear in representations of national history in the United States and France and thus appear to be symptomatic of narratives of national coming-to-being in general. With this in mind, I examine the attempt in Japanese histories of civilization to address internal contradictions in the last part of this chapter and return to the issue in subsequent chapters. The problem of the “mixed residence of money” raised by Fukuzawa is emblematic of the difficulty that histories of civilization have in creating an all-encompassing explanation of social development as the formation of nations, because Fukuzawa’s warning is based on an unhappy concession that some forms of intercourse are neither national (integrative) or international (differentiating). Despite the inverted naturalization of the nation-state, intercourse continues to cross national borders and to undermine them in the process. Although the genre is intensely concerned with protecting the sovereignty of the Japanese state, its philosophy of history also predicts that all intercourse will tend to assume the same universal, civilized form. Fukuzawa’s efforts to relativize the position of Europe in the parade of progress notwithstanding, this form looked European. The inability of histories of civilization to fully explain social phenomena through their tropes of intercourse thus arises from a contradiction between the genre’s universalist valorization of intercourse and its particularist project of national progress and independence. The nature of the contradiction can be explained by a syllogism: The goal of civilization is to protect the independence of the “nation” by promoting knowledge and eliminating backward customs. As knowledge, civilization is universal, the same wherever it is established, and by the same token what remains as particular, hence national, are backwardness and customs. The process of civilization is therefore intent on destroying what it aims to protect. Put another way, the contradiction begs the question, what is national in the universal progress of civilization? To resolve the contradiction, histories of civilization must be able to produce particularity at the same time that they produce progress: the particular has to be both present and continuously diminishing. Despite 74

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the prominent place that they give to universalistic theories of development in their representations of history, texts from the genre work to restrain the universal, in effect, and to limit its operation on the particularities that they identify as national. The ironic result is to provide for the perpetuation of “backwardness” in society as the sign of nationality. Tensions between the universal and the particular in histories of civilization thus prompt a crisis formation in the genre’s treatment of nationality: the loss of national particularity perpetually threatens but is never complete. Any resolution of such logical contradictions is ambiguous and partial at best because the threat to national character in histories of civilization is originary: it is always already threatened by the universal. The roles that barbarism and woman play in the genre’s scheme of history reflect the difficulty these writers have in dealing with such a fundamental problem, implicit as it is in the very notion of civilization as a model for protecting sovereignty. In Outline of a Theory of Civilization, the question of barbarism first appears in Fukuzawa’s division of human history into three stages, with barbarism followed by semi-enlightenment and civilization proper. Recall that Fukuzawa uses the three-stage scheme not only to establish civilization as the telos of social change but also to insist that European civilization is merely the current exemplar of civilization, not its final form. Because civilization always advances, the three stages always stand in relative positions to each other. In striving to progress from semi-enlightenment to civilization, therefore, Japan need not fear “Europeanization.” One implication of Fukuzawa’s assertion that civilization is relative, however, is that barbarism—also a relative stage—will never disappear in the world. Fukuzawa’s three-stage scheme thus does not just qualify the position of Europe but also provides for the perpetual existence of regions that are more backward and therefore more particular than Japan. Moreover, because Japan is situated in the middle of civilization’s three-step sequence, the pattern of history itself ensures that Japan will always be situated between the universal and particular, perpetually in danger of losing what makes it a nation, yet never having completely lost it. “Barbarism” in histories of civilization provides not only for progress in civilization in Japan but also for the persistence of particularism and national character in the face of the homogenizing tendencies of universal progress. Barbarism thus is both a stage and a place: a historical elsewhere (the Japanese past) and a geographic one (the barbarous regions of the world). The doubled temporal-spatial configuration recalls a pattern in European The Interiority of History

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historicism in which the primitive is displaced from the past of a civilized country or region to the present of another part of the world. (The classic example is Hegel’s version of the westward course of empire in The Philosophy of History, where the Orient languishes in previous historical stages and Africa remains entirely outside history.)72 The duality of barbarism in histories of civilization indicates their inability to provide for the persistence of national particularity through the purely internal scheme of development that they preach. They must logically posit the existence of uncivilized areas to establish their narratives of progress. As Stefan Tanaka has shown, the strategy of positioning Japan with respect to a backward other became the foundation of the discipline of Oriental history (Tōyōshi), in which China figured as both the origin of modern Japan and the object of ministrations by the offspring that had surpassed it.73 The changing position of China in Meiji-period historiography hints at another role that the spatialization of barbarism plays in histories of civilization, to valorize the domination of other countries as a measure of the civilization of the conqueror. In Outline of a Theory of Civilization, Fukuzawa offers a passing observation that the ability of European countries to wage wars of conquest shows the advanced state of their civilization.74 The endorsement of conquest is reinforced in the book’s final chapter, where Fukuzawa says history teaches that countries that achieve civilization earlier dominate those that reach it later. Far from criticizing civilization on this basis, Fukuzawa considers the point further proof that Japan’s leaders must implement civilizing policies or risk losing the nation’s independence to the more civilized nations of the “West.”75 In the 1880s, Fukuzawa turned to promoting the forcible civilization of Korea as a matter of national interest, an obvious extension of this logic.76 In History of the Eastward Advance of Civilization, Fujita too endorses expansion and conquest as signs of civilization. Reviewing the origins of scientific research in Japan in the Tokugawa period, Fujita remarks that the desire of one domainal lord to send an army to conquer Europe indicated his enlightened interest in Western civilization.77 In an echo of European liberal economics on the virtue of seizing fallow land, Fujita also approvingly quotes a Tokugawa-era scholar of Dutch learning who maintains that Japan has pursued the enlightened opening of barbarian lands in the north since the era of the (mythical) emperor Jimmu, and praises the plans of a group of which this scholar is part to seize and settle the Bonin Islands south of Japan.78 For both Fukuzawa and Fujita, the conquest and domination of other areas are possible because of the superiority of the 76

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mechanisms of intercourse in the conqueror compared to those of the conquered. From the point of view of the narrative of progress in histories of civilization, such differences in the character of intercourse mean that the conqueror is more universal than the conquered, which pays for its particularism with subordination. Those who cannot civilize themselves must be civilized by others. Barbarism thus emerges as the second term of a logical binary with civilization by serving both as a locus of national particularity in a universalizing world and as the proof of the civilization of the universalizing nation. But if barbarism is logically necessary to the representation of national history in histories of civilization, it should be clear that the genre inscribes imperialism in Meiji-period historical thought in a way that is more fundamental than Kang Sang-jung’s dismissal of Fukuzawa as an apologist for the domination of Korea, for example, would suggest.79 In the genre’s theory of history, national progress that is not imperialistic is quite simply impossible. The nation-state that the genre’s rhetorical tropes naturalize in epistemology is categorically imperialist—rather than opportunistically so—in the sense that the genre posits imperialism as a necessary characteristic of the relationship between civilization and barbarism. What emerges resembles a hierarchy of nations, deeply rooted in the theory of history espoused by histories of civilization, in which barbarism becomes tendentially identified with racial inferiority. Such an argument for imperialism as a matter of national survival appears also in the United States in Josiah Strong’s prophecies of Anglo-Saxon world domination and in France in Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s call to revitalize France through the colonization of North Africa, for example. As the following chapters show, in these cases too, imperialism is assumed to be part of the full realization of the nation’s character. The second of the ambiguous resolutions that histories of civilization offer to the threat civilization poses to national particularity emerges from declarations that exclude women from the movement of universal history by limiting the scope of the integrative intercourse that is the basis for national progress. Fukuzawa defines civilization as progress in both intellect and virtue, as noted earlier. But while he loudly declares the potential for increase in intelligence (chie) to be infinite, he says that once morals (tokugi) emerge in a particular country, they do not change.80 Morals therefore have different forms in Japan and what Fukuzawa refers to as the “West.” To head off the conclusion that Japan must adopt Christianity to achieve civilization, Fukuzawa argues that the views of good and The Interiority of History

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evil in the ten Mosaic commandments and the five Confucian relationships (parent and child, lord and vassal, husband and wife, old and young, friend and friend) are essentially the same.81 The assertion strengthens the interesting implication that morals retain a national quality regardless of progress in civilization. I have already observed that the latent moral quality of intercourse in histories of civilization is grounded in conceptions of nationality. The point deserves to be developed because Fukuzawa uses the argument on morals to single out the figure of woman as a repository of national particularity. Fukuzawa explains precisely where in Japanese society national morals pertain: the household. Relations between parent and child and between husband and wife are dominated by affection or compassion (nasake) and are therefore best governed by morals, according to Fukuzawa. As the bond in relations grows more distant and intercourse becomes dominated by self-interest, morals become insufficient to govern conduct. Relations between lord and vassal and friend and friend, therefore, are always governed by “rules” (kisoku) determined according to the temperament of the era. On the basis of this argument, Fukuzawa declares that there is no need for intelligence in intercourse between husband and wife and parent and child: intelligence and morals have separate domains that do not overlap.82 As a counterpart to Fukuzawa’s implication that the pursuit and application of intelligence are a matter for adult males, Taguchi and Fujita blame a dearth of masculinity among elites for Japan’s slow progress in civilization in previous eras. In Short History of Japanese Civilization, Taguchi remarks on the growing domination of bunjaku—overindulgence in literature with a common connotation of effeteness—among the courtly nobility during the Heian period, contrasting bunjaku to the virility of the warriors amassing in the provinces and blaming it for impeding the progress of civilization. By the time of the establishment of the Kamakura government, Taguchi says, the nobility were “no different than women and children,” and warrior clans therefore were able easily to topple the imperial government.83 Fujita’s History of the Eastward Advance of Civilization similarly blames the persecution of forward-looking Tokugawa-period scholars by the government on that fact that most high officials and advisors were indecisive lords who had been raised by women.84 Such arguments on the masculinity of civilizing intercourse leave no doubt that the expansive, unifying intercourse that histories of civilization depict as the basis for national strength takes place outside the household and, as I have shown earlier, within national borders. Governed by morals, 78

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the household remains a knot of national particularity untouched by the flux and progress of intercourse outside it.85 The contrast between the relationships involved—lords, vassals, and friends associate through intelligence, while parents, children, husbands, and wives do not—indicates that the subject of national intercourse is male, rational, a patriarch who represents the household in wider society. In contrast, what is “inside the house” (a literal translation of the common Japanese words for wife, kanai and okusan) is, by deduction, female and motivated by affection. Apparently this is the reason that the household must be governed by unchanging moral principle. Pursuing Fukuzawa’s distinction between the different historical character of intelligence and morals, it is clear, moreover, that while the male subject of history in histories of civilization is universal, the woman is marked ontologically by a national particularity that lies outside of history. Paradoxically, such assertions that unchanging national particularity is located in the household and specifically in woman are grounded in an argument on the universality of civilization. The universalizing perspective of histories of civilization, which elaborate their arguments on the processes of national history in a comparative frame based on belief that social development has a single pattern, produces the abstract category of woman and attributes national particularity to her.86 While the specific characteristics ascribed to woman in this perspective would vary from nation to nation, that woman is the bearer of national characteristics is a universal principle for histories of civilization. If the bearing of particularity by woman is universal, preserving her particularity becomes an imperative of civilization: as the civilized nation demonstrates and realizes its universality by colonizing regions that resist the movement of history, so too does it prove and accomplish its universality by protecting woman from taint by the universal itself, civilization. Following Luce Irigaray, we could characterize such a solution to the problem of particularity as a “national homo-sociality” legitimated and naturalized by the narrative of history as progress in circulation.87 The distinctions that histories of civilization make between intercourse between men and women on the one hand and among men on the other— between private and public intercourse—render the “social” domain between the borders of the household and the frontiers of the nation an exclusively male preserve. Warnings that certain kinds of intercourse weaken men and impede progress underline the degree to which these histories attribute to virile men the varieties of intercourse that advance civilization and strengthen the nation. Although my translation of kōsai as The Interiority of History

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“intercourse” reflects these writers’ appropriation of nineteenth-century liberalism and is not meant to imply a sexual connotation, the gendered dimension of intercourse in the genre is nonetheless clear.88 In the masculine world of intercourse, men are subjects, never objects of exchange. The role of object is reserved for woman, representative of the national particularity that civilization is to protect. Because the existence of such a universal, “intercoursing” male subject is predicated on the existence of the putatively particularistic, objectified woman, such a male subject is assured—ontologically—of never losing his relationship to the national. The production of such a gendered particularity in histories of civilization therefore ensures the continuing presence of “Japaneseness” in a civilized Japan. The work of arguments on barbarism and woman to provide for the persistence of particularity in a civilized Japan needs finally to be considered in light of concessions in histories of civilization that not all intercourse adapts itself to the national cause. Taguchi’s and Fujita’s comments on the effeminacy of former elites contribute to the characterization of civilization as the activity of virile men but acknowledge that elements of social practice in the past do not fit their vision of the universal pattern of history. Fukuzawa echoes the tenor of their comments in remonstrations that the national crisis is too grave to allow the people to “pass their days lightheartedly,” an acknowledgment that in the present too there is much intercourse that does not serve progress.89 Fukuzawa’s warning about the “mixed residence of money,” through which the more civilized dupe the less into subservience, even suggests that avoiding the hard work of civilization by accepting foreign gifts could push Japan back into the ranks of barbarous countries. Such suggestions that effeminacy and barbarism are ever lurking charge undisciplined intercourse with weakening the nation. The work in histories of civilization to explain all aspects of human activity as phenomena of intercourse thus is at the same time an effort to stigmatize some types of activity as irrational, effeminate, barbarous, and ultimately unnational. The genre’s negative characterization of certain kinds of intercourse reinforces the specific identity—that of a patriarchal, national, and self-civilizing male subject—produced by the tropes of intercourse that the genre employs to represent history. Such a containment of the potential identities of the subject in histories of civilization depends on naming the subject’s activity as “intercourse” and then by designating intercourse as national. On a larger scale, the same argument locates the territory claimed by the new regime in Tokyo within global 80

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economic and political systems as a nation-state—the universal territorial form of modernity—disqualifying attachment to other forms of territoriality with a similar warning of their dire consequences. Both strategies were at work in arguments on national history in the United States in the same period, where calls for national mobilization were underwritten by warnings of the nation’s imminent demise.

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Chapter 3

The Nationality of Expansion

The warning against the “mixed residence of money” that Fukuzawa delivers in Outline of a Theory of Civilization ultimately is a warning against the dissolution of the nation by unnational behavior. The warning functions through the image of a porous border: something that is neither foreign nor native—capital—enters and undermines the interiority defined by the “national inversion” in Japanese histories of civilization. While the threat in this case is phrased in terms of finance capital, the rhetoric of histories of civilization suggests that the problem of forming stable epistemological borders is inherent to national history and hence to the nation as a form of community. Given the variety of places in the world in which the nation form was institutionalized, we can expect that the phrasing in which the problem was posed varies. Like their Japanese counterparts, intellectuals in the late-nineteenth-century United States drew on the common theories of social evolution of the time to explain the growth and formation of the nation. The vocabulary used to address the problem of borders, however, centered on immigration (mixed residence in the more literal sense) and the physical movement of the frontiers of the nation-state. The reasons for the shift can be found in the particular circumstances of the United States, highlighting the importance of local factors as the epistemological problematic of national history spread around the world, but analysis of the intellectual constellation that resulted also sheds light on the operation of national history in general. The immediate reasons for the U.S. intellectuals’ concern with immigration and borders are obvious: the United States was overwhelmingly a country of settlement, and from the Colonial period until the late nineteenth century, the nation’s borders shifted with successive intracontinental wars, annexations, and internal migrations. Observations on the

importance of these issues in the history of the United States have nearly become historical banalities, but not because they lack significance. The problem is rather that they have so often been the basis for exceptionalist views of U.S. history elaborated through comparisons to European societies presumed to have “native” populations and frontiers restrained by their neighbors. It is possible, however, to reconsider the issues from broader perspectives and shed new light on them. Many of the preoccupations of national histories crafted in the United States in the late nineteenth century can be traced to circumstances common in settler societies, rather than unique conditions. Although my argument in this book proceeds by comparing representations of national history in countries with broadly different places in the global political economy of the late nineteenth century, a short discussion of the similarities between the United States and other settler societies dispels the appearance of American exceptionalism that arises from comparisons to Europe alone, as prominent historians have argued in recent years.1 For these purposes, “settler society” refers to a society that has evolved from a colony of settlement (rather than a colony of exploitation), to which European colonists immigrated in relatively large numbers, their descendants remaining politically dominant over indigenous peoples, and which is heterogeneous in terms of class, ethnicity, and race.2 Early in the history of such societies, the struggle over land is the defining factor in the relationship of settlers with indigenous peoples.3 Expansion by seizure of terra nullius, purportedly vacant land, becomes both a historical starting point for the nation and a motif for representing later events and the nation’s entire history. Patrick Wolfe, examining the treatment of indigenous peoples in Australian ethnography of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, observes that in such cases, invasion is transformed from a specific event into a structure of discourse that not only explains the relationship of settler and indigenous person to land but is essential in remaking the presettlement past into prehistory.4 Settler groups that install themselves through the seizure of land commonly identify the metropolitan power as their point of origin, as a sign of superiority over indigenous peoples and migrants from other places inside and outside Europe. The distinction is typically maintained even after independence. The association of the hegemonic settler group with political and legal institutions founded on the metropolitan model reinforces such prestige.5 Such an association allows some ideological sleight of hand: because national ideologies typically present the state as the institutional The Nationality of Expansion

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outgrowth of the nation, the dominant settler group’s association with the institutions of the state implies that it is the center of the nation, if not the nation tout court.6 The tendency to legitimate social position by descent from the metropolitan population has the further consequence of introducing questions of lineage into the definition of the nation, as when the Australian politician Harry Parkes spoke in 1890 of a “crimson thread of kinship” uniting Anglo-Celtic settlers in Australia and connecting them to Britain.7 The structure of national belonging that results differs significantly, however, from the idea of the nation as a people united by common ties of blood. What typically emerges instead is an institutional and ideological system that correlates race with degrees of citizenship, numerous examples of which can be found in settler societies established by Britain, including South Africa, Australia, and the United States. Such a system is not simply a ranked racial hierarchy. Although descendants of the “original” settlers have a privileged place in the nation, the relationships of indigenous peoples, other European and non-European migrants, and (in areas with plantation economies) slaves and former slaves to the dominant group differ.8 The ideologies of settler societies commonly associate national character with the original settler “race,” and state policy (particularly on immigration and indigenous peoples) is conducted with the aim of maintaining the position of that race versus other groups in both numbers and social status.9 From this perspective, efforts to define a nation in the United States are connected not only to immigration but to the history of imperial conquest, the doctrines of racial superiority that accompanied it, and the ongoing political and economic relationships between metropolitan powers and former colonies.10 As in Japan, the problem of borders in representations of history in the United States was inflected by global conditions. As Charles Bright and Michael Geyer point out, the shifting and consolidating of borders was a hemisphere-wide phenomenon stemming from the gradual collapse of the British and Spanish empires in the Americas in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. Where interimperial rivalry had required the recognition of middle zones to avoid direct clashes between the metropolitan powers, the states that formed as the empires receded defended their sovereignty against each other and against Britain and Spain by seizing the undefined areas. The seizure of territory produced the sovereign states of the Western Hemisphere. In this respect, the shifting of borders was not unique to the United States but was a regional transformation traceable to geopolitical changes. Other aspects of the same transformation include 84

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the rapid capitalization of agriculture in newly expropriated areas, which were henceforth connected to world markets, and the flow of immigrant cultivators into these areas through both Atlantic and Pacific crossings.11 In certain respects, the situation differed from that in Japan, to which immigration was minimal until the colonization of Korea, but there are clear parallels in the Japanese state’s declarations of sovereignty over illdefined areas such as the Ryūkyūs and Hokkaidō after the Meiji Restoration. Transformations in transnational political and economic conditions were shared ground for ideological problems in both countries. Where the threat of imperialism set the terms of debate on the nation in Japan in the 1870s, in the United States the terms of discussion followed from its situation as a settler society. Intellectuals in the two countries faced the same world from different places on the imperial periphery. The seizure and settlement of land had long been important issues in social thought in the United States, particularly in the political economy of the late eighteenth century, which considered the settlement and cultivation of new land a way to prolong the existence of a society founded on agriculture and thereby maintain the simple, virtuous citizenry needed to sustain a republic. Trade, too, was to have an important role in maintaining a republican polity, through the export of agricultural goods. Republican thinkers acknowledged, however, that if domestic commerce were to grow, it would encourage manufacturing and propel the agricultural United States into a more advanced stage of social development, leaving a profound tension in the “Jeffersonian” view of history between liberal enthusiasm for progress in intercourse and a more specifically republican mistrust of it.12 The enthusiastic rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the Jacksonian era, in which territorial expansion was a national mission, may seem to have obscured such tension, but it returned in the late nineteenth century in a recognition that the social conditions that expansion was meant to ward off had arrived. At this juncture, representations of national history in the United States confronted the failure of expansion to produce a unified nation and searched for the conditions under which such a nation might yet appear. Works from the time such as Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1886) and essays of Frederick Jackson Turner from the 1890s show that territorial expansion remained a central theme in representations of the nation’s history. In contrast to the mixed views of commerce in the Revolutionary and Republican eras, improvements in intercourse and circulation were by now considered essential to the movement of history. In light of the apparent The Nationality of Expansion

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failure to forestall social evolution, however, intellectuals such as Strong and Turner reconsidered the role that national space played in the formation and growth of the nation. Through Strong and Turner, I trace two different views of the formation of national space, one that connects national history to race and another that ties it to “Americanization,” the phrase of the time for immigrant assimilation. Both Strong, a partisan of race, and Turner, of Americanization, accepted the idea that national-historical space is the product of expansion of networks of circulation, yet they conceded that the process of national history that they valorized was inadequate to the task of creating unity. For Strong, the expansion of circulation was a persistent source of heterogeneity, while for Turner, the danger of heterogeneity rather increased when expansion of the space of circulation slowed. The verso of the idea that national space was constantly in the process of formation was thus a persistent sense of crisis. Here we can see the beginnings of several parallels to the representation of national history in Japanese histories of civilization: the vision of the process of national history founded in nineteenth-century liberalism does not resolve the problems threatening the nation but rather produces a permanent crisis state. Conditions in the United States force this aspect of national history to the surface and deepen our understanding of the connection of the writing of national history to the consolidation of global systems of markets and states.

“Complexity” Comes to North America The period that Mark Twain and Charles Warner named The Gilded Age in their 1873 novel was marked by increasing doubts about the view of history that had been hegemonic up to the time of the Civil War. The sense of crisis reflected a confrontation with unfamiliar social phenomena such as the consequences of industrialization, but also with the failings of a view of history that was essentially hostile to change. History and territorial expansion paradoxically were opposites in the Jacksonian view of history that grew out of late-eighteenth-century republican thought. As in republican political economy, so in the Jacksonian view a steady supply of “free” land would be the foundation for a democracy of small agrarian freeholders. Because the polity would remain composed of independent farmers, territorial expansion was security against social change, particularly the development of the moral corruption and social divisions found in Europe. Married to existing ideas of American destiny and an emerg86

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ing nationalism, this view of history made westward expansion a national mission with moral implications for the entire world.13 It was, however, a view of history curiously opposed to time: in the ideal Jacksonian society, which was by definition possible only in North America, social evolution stops even as the nation realizes its mission.14 The unspoken corollary was that social change was a sign of a national and moral crisis and the falling of the United States into the world. The appearance of new social conditions suggesting that the United States was not exempt from the problems that could be observed in the histories of other countries prompted reconsiderations of Jacksonian philosophy of history.15 Twain and Warner comically invoke such popular doubt about the state of society in the preface to The Gilded Age, which they say “deals with an entirely ideal state of society” because of “the want of illustrative examples” from their own. “In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic,” they explain, “there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out of an ideal commonwealth.”16 The “frontier anxiety” that appeared beginning in the 1870s as the supply of land for settlement dwindled was an expectable aspect of the crisis in historical consciousness, but intellectuals confronted conditions beyond those that the Jacksonian view of history predicted would follow the end of territorial expansion.17 The attack of the nation on itself in the Civil War was an early source of doubt, soon followed by the growth of industrial production on a scale far beyond the manufacturing that had worried republican political economy.18 Waves of immigrants, drawn by the labor market, led intellectuals of the so-called native stock to warn of a “peaceful invasion” of latter-day Goths and Vandals from eastern and southern Europe, in a reprise of frequent comparisons of the United States to Rome in its last days.19 Even within the agricultural sector imagined to be the basis of a stable republic, the connection of midwestern producers to the eastern seaboard by railroad left farmers vulnerable to international economic trends, transatlantic agricultural depressions accompanying the transatlantic agricultural market. The rise of agrarian unrest alongside class divisions contributed to a confrontational politics in the 1880s and 1890s whose sources seemed unlikely to disappear. William Graham Sumner, a social scientist who struggled to introduce Spencer to the curriculum at Yale, expressed the widespread conviction The Nationality of Expansion

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that the world had changed beyond expectation in a remark that “the traditions and usages of past ages are broken, or at least discredited,” requiring “new institutions” that reject “tradition and prescription.”20 In the new reflections on history and society that emerged following the Civil War, such changes in economic and social life typically wore the joint label of “complexity.” Although the word was taken from Spencer’s theory of social evolution, in use its impact derived not as much from present society as from the perceived loss of the “condition of primitive purity” that was supposed to have existed earlier in the century. That is, its primary connotation was loss. (The joke of the preface of The Gilded Age is its reversal of such a narrative of the fall.) The appearance of “complex relations” was gradually taken as a sign that the United States would soon suffer from the social divisions and strife once thought to have been left behind in the Old World. As the comparisons to Europe suggest, the complex society of the Gilded Age was considered to have a pattern that could be grasped by historical reflection. Tropes of circulation, intercourse, and exchange were central in the representation of the origins and of the contemporary manifestation of these previously unseen economic and social relations. One aspect of such reconsiderations of the course of the history of the United States was a concerted attempt to represent the formation and unity of the American nation as the result of improved intercourse and exchange. As in Japan, the impact of evolutionary views of social development was significant.21 The consolidation of a national market in the United States in the 1850s also played a subtle role, however, as both an object of reflection and the source of a vocabulary for representing national history as the history of circulation. William Seward gave voice to such a resurgence of liberal historical imaginaries when he told the Senate that “the nation that draws the most materials and provisions from the earth, fabricates the most, and sells the most of productions and fabrics to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the great power of the earth.” Economic growth and national destiny had been connected in the Jacksonian view of history, too, but as part of the nation’s growth into space.22 Moreover, where the republican political economy underlying the Jacksonian view considered population growth the force behind social development—as in the feared shift from an agricultural to a manufacturing stage—increasingly the activity of circulation itself, driven by new technologies and networks of transportation and exchange, was regarded as its cause and means.23 88

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New views of history in the United States shared this impulse with histories of civilization in Japan, where Fujita stressed the role of transportation and communications technologies in the formation and development of society. While in Japan the notion of intercourse stressed interpersonal relationality, a relative emphasis on circulation in the United States shifted the focus to the structures through which circulation proceeded, with a consequent shift in the moral content of the activity. As in Japan, such developments in social thought constituted a departure in the way that society was conceived. In this new perspective, the American nation was not only self-instituting, as in earlier visions of a spiritual or democratic contract, but also self-generating.24 Society was in a dynamic state of continual change rather than the ongoing realization of fixed agrarian ideals. “Complexity”—especially the complexity of contemporary networks of exchange—was not simply a condition of post–Civil War society but rather both the means and the end of social development. Although often viewed with suspicion or alarm, complexity gained the endorsement of history and was acknowledged as an ambiguous sort of progress. A second prominent issue in post–Civil War reconsiderations of U.S. history was how to conceive the unity of a nation composed of widely disparate regions and social groups. Intellectuals decried the heterogeneity that resulted from complex networks of intercourse and exchange as a threat to democracy, and their discussions of the perils of heterogeneity therefore tended to include discussions of democracy’s future. Such discussions were not simply—or even primarily—concerned with political theory. In the same way that complexity stood for the loss of a supposed antebellum simplicity, the threat to democracy often stood for the loss of an equally idealized homogeneity. Calls to save democracy often were calls to expel or forcibly Americanize heterogeneous groups, including not only immigrants but also socialists and union organizers, who were seen to be exerting a foreign influence on native labor. The rise of such ascriptive nationalism (in Rogers Smith’s phrase) had a deep impact on historical thought.25 The new representations of history that appeared in the period went beyond celebrating the emergence of a national consciousness (as George Bancroft had celebrated in his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, 1834–74) to argue that the nation’s history itself contained mechanisms for eliminating social heterogeneity. In my examples, Strong proposes a model based on racial supremacy, and Turner one that connects Americanization to the frontier. The Nationality of Expansion

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Broadly speaking, these two responses can be seen to reflect conflicting racial and civic visions that run through arguments on national identity in this period.26 They have in common the assertion that progress in national circulation, intercourse, and exchange will ultimately create the soughtafter homogeneity by exerting a nationalizing influence on the populace. A final important characteristic of Gilded Age representations of history was a gradually strengthening, if grudging, interest in locating the history of the United States in a general narrative of world history. Such broad narratives, even when they reserved a privileged place for the United States, relinquished the idea that the country would escape from the historical patterns seen elsewhere. The work to put the United States in the world was the result not only of the crisis in exceptionalist thought but also of the consolidation of the world market and the system of nation-states, a reaction already observed in Japan. “Ideas, commodities even, refuse the bounds of a nation. . . . This is true especially of our modern world with its complex commerce and means of intellectual connection,” Turner writes in “The Significance of History” (1891), echoing Fujita’s vision of trade in goods and knowledge. For this reason, Turner says, “local history must be viewed in the light of world history.”27 Gilded Age intellectuals typically negotiated between national and world history according to two strategies. In the first, the history of the United States was an extension and further development of a process that began in Europe, as in the Teutonic germ theory of American democracy espoused by the historian Herbert Baxter Adams and the related AngloSaxonism of Strong and the historian and philosopher John Fiske.28 In the second, the country’s history was the separate manifestation of universal processes that could also be observed in the countries of Europe. Turner’s argument on the role of the frontier in social development pursued the latter strategy while attacking the first and its tendency to put New England at the center of the history of the United States. Neither strategy was wholly new: earlier historians such as Bancroft made the realization of Teutonic origins a basic part of the history of the nation, while republican political economy considered social development to follow recognizable patterns.29 Bancroft, however, stressed the separate destiny of the United States, overseen by a “favoring providence,” and republican thought hinged precisely on the contention that North American conditions made it possible to delay, if not stop, society’s movement between developmental stages.30 With the world pressing in, the new views took

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the position that “American” conditions were the reason that universal historical processes took the particular course they did in the United States. Such views of the history of the United States therefore were not exceptionalist in the sense usually applied to the many earlier narratives that asserted a break with the patterns of social development in Europe. This may seem an unlikely assertion to make about Strong and Turner, Strong believing fervently in American destiny and Turner insisting throughout his career that the settlement of the North American West was the key to the country’s history. In their efforts to explain why phenomena akin to those in Europe were appearing in the United States, however, the two authors struggled with the exemplarity of Europe in a way that resembles the attempts of Japanese intellectuals to distinguish between the universality of civilization and Europe’s status as the currently most civilized region of the world. Certainly Protestant destinarianism, national vanity, and alarm over social antagonism inspired hope that the United States might yet chart a separate course, but setting the issue of exceptionalism aside, I would argue that the preeminent problem was how to explain the interaction of local conditions and the global structures in which the United States was ever more visibly embedded, the systems of markets and states that were transforming Europe as they transformed the rest of the world.31 Such representations of national history continued to give prominent place to the expansion of the space of circulation, a tendency that gives these representations a paradigmatic instability and allows for the constant reappearance of social difference. Difference reappears chronically in the imagined interiority of national history, to use the terms developed in the previous chapter. The threat of dissolution that results can be kept in suspension only by a movement toward the future that is limited, however, by the nation’s borders in space. In examining the structures and operation of such representations of history in the United States, I use The Gilded Age as an entry to the issues. As a satire, the novel depends on the existence of a reified language—the rhetoric of circulation—which we may take as an indication of the wide recognition of such a rhetoric at the time. As Twain and Warner lampoon this rhetoric, they bring to the surface a connection among intercourse, territorial expansion, and the health of society that they take quite seriously. Josiah Strong seizes on the connection to predict an annihilation of social difference in the nation and the world through the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race across the earth. Turner, in contrast, pursues a solution to the problem of social

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difference within the space of North America, only to seemingly prove that the closure of national space renders such a solution impossible. The ultimate return of all these writers to the question of the role of territorial expansion in the history of the United States points to deeper antinomies in attempts to represent the nation as a space of circulation. Heterogeneous as sources, they jointly reveal the reach and the limits of Gilded Age representations of national history as they confront the boundaries of the national community.

Bringing Land to Market in The Gilded Age The satire of speculation and corruption in the post–Civil War period that is the best-known side of The Gilded Age is laid over a seriously intended narrative of social progress via advances in transportation and communications technologies. In this narrative, the extension and perfection of networks of intercourse through technological advance allow the realization of the nation’s latent character, including a national vigor that has distinct moral connotations. Speculation is made possible by improvements in circulation but nonetheless is an aberration that threatens the nation’s moral health. Warner, an established sentimental novelist, and Twain, trying his hand at the novel for the first time, identify both social progress and the threat to it with land and the transformations of the character of land as it is incorporated into the national space of circulation. Advances in transportation are the key to the transformation and bring about a “revolution” in worldly affairs. Early in the novel, after astonishing his wife with the news that he has quietly bought up land in East Tennessee, a ne’er-do-well named Si Hawkins steadies her by revealing his aim. It is sometime in the 1830s: “Nancy, you’ve heard of steamboats, and maybe you believed in them—of course you did. You’ve heard these cattle here scoff at them and call them lies and humbugs,—but they’re not lies and humbugs, they’re a reality,” says Si. “They’re going to make a revolution in this world’s affairs that will make men dizzy to contemplate. . . . And this is not all, Nancy—it isn’t even half! There’s a bigger wonder—the railroad! These worms here have never even heard of it—and when they do they’ll not believe in it. But it’s another fact.” Si’s revolution, he believes, will take place particularly in the pocketbook of his children. When steamboats and the railroad draw near the family’s Tennessee land, its true value will be recognized: “Pine forests, wheat land, corn land, iron, copper, coal—wait till the railroads come, 92

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and the steamboats! We’ll never see the day . . . but they’ll ride in coaches, Nancy! They’ll live like the princes of the earth; they’ll be courted and worshiped; their names will be known from ocean to ocean!”32 The family’s faith that the latent value of the land Si has purchased will become manifest when it is reached by networks of transportation forms the basis for the central plot of The Gilded Age, which culminates in a congressional scheme for the government to purchase the land as the site of a technical college for the advancement of the Negro. The central events of the novel unfold through the promise of the extension of the networks of circulation to which Si refers. The promise becomes the vehicle for speculations of all kinds, most put in motion by a feckless dreamer named Beriah Sellers. Despite Si’s talk of commodity production (wood, grain, ore), actual goods move rarely in the novel, people more often, but information ceaselessly. Fittingly, the key point of transition in the theory of history that the novel offers is the advent of rail transportation and telegraphic communication. After Si reunites with his friend Sellers in Missouri, the two prosper by trading mules in New Orleans, moving the beasts of burden (themselves means of transport) downriver by paddle boat. Si also keeps ahead in local commerce by subscribing to weekly and semiweekly newspapers (54, 55). By 1868, when the events leading to the intrigue to sell the Hawkinses’ land begin, the stakes of the game have changed dramatically: now railroads, not mules, are the focus of speculation, and even daily newspapers are thought to move so slowly that a Senator Dilworthy, at the heart of the plan, has the editorials of the New York papers transmitted to Washington by telegraph (300). The result of the extension and perfection of the mechanisms of intercourse and exchange in the novel is “commercial and industrial and religious prosperity,” in Dilworthy’s words, an open-ended, rising curve of activity that rewards the shepherds of public opinion in New York and Washington and, somewhat incidentally, also contributes to the uplift of society’s benighted (153).33 This rather ambiguous increase in prosperity results from the integration of Wall Street, Washington, and speculators in the different regions of the country.34 The wife of one senator informs Si’s daughter Laura, for example, that the formerly antagonistic representatives from North and South now have “all sorts of common interests,” explaining that “My husband sometimes says that he doesn’t see but confederates are just as eager to get at the treasury as Unionists.”35 Progress in The Gilded Age thus proceeds not simply by a quantitative multiplication of exchange but by a qualitative integration of previous partial networks, The Nationality of Expansion

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including the weak state apparatus of the federal government, to create a single national space of circulation. The financiers and corrupt politicians who are the real movers in the scheme to sell the Hawkinses’ land dominate because of their ability to mount “operations” on a national scale. For the characters of The Gilded Age, such national integration is the realization of a unity that already exists in a latent state of anticipation. In this view, networks of circulation do not create the national space so much as allow it to become the single space that by nature it should be. The geographic rationalism that marked Jacksonian rhetoric, asserting that the geography of North America made its western areas naturally a part of the United States, thus resurfaces with a liberal vocabulary.36 Sellers, while promoting a scheme to divert a railroad extension to the Missouri hamlet of Stone’s Landing, tells his Eastern protégé Harry Brierly that “the Almighty never laid out a cleaner piece of level prairie for a city; and it’s the natural center of all that region of [yet-to-be-planted] hemp and tobacco.” Sellers’s engineer is quick to confirm, “There’s Stone’s Landing been waiting for a railroad for more than a thousand years, and damne if she shan’t have it.”37 The greatest point of reference for this paradigm of latency and realization is the “fallow” land occupied by Native Americans. Fallow in this circumstance does not mean that the land is unused, but rather that the practices of its use are not those of capitalist agriculture. In this theory of history, any territory that lies outside networks of capitalist circulation is empty by definition and perhaps from this point of view does not even exist except in its potential to enter the market. Only by integration into networks of circulation does such territory enter history and thereby become part of the nation as it naturally should. As in Japan, the dichotomy in liberal theories of history between civilization and savagery or barbarism is spatial as well as temporal. Applied to North America, such a theory of history locates Native American peoples—whose land one Gilded Age journalist says was seized “in the interests of civilization”—outside a space of national history that thereby becomes defined in part by race (252). Such a racialization of the space of history is an aspect of the rearticulation of liberal historical imaginaries in the context of a settler society, where conquest was typically legitimated by theories of racial hierarchy. I examine this issue in greater depth in Strong’s Our Country but for the moment observe that while customs and manners are obstacles to the movement of history in Japanese histories of civilization, in The Gilded Age race places one either inside or fully outside history. 94

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Twain and Warner identify the market in land as the key to the process of national integration. A clown who often speaks the truth, Sellers describes the situation succinctly to Harry and Philip Sterling, another young easterner, on their arrival in the West: “The whole country is opening up, all we want is capital to develop it. Slap down the rails and bring the land into market” (107–8). From a certain point of view, Sellers is speaking quite literally: in a view of history as progress in intercourse, the frontiers of the market are epistemologically fixed. Nothing exists outside them. “Fallow” land, rather, is brought inside the market and made to circulate through the process of expropriation and speculation on its value. Geographic rationalism justifies the seizure of land but ultimately does not explain the source of value, which as Karatani Kōjin observes is produced in a closed and ultimately self-referential system of signs.38 Sellers fittingly scoffs at the effort under way to return the U.S. dollar to the gold standard or any other anchor of value.39 The satire of Sellers and other speculators in The Gilded Age shows Twain and Warner to be uneasy with the notion that value would have no referent other than itself. Their resolution to the problem, through a Horatio Alger–like subplot involving Philip, restores a moral foundation for value that reflects the influence of republican views of commerce. In so stabilizing value, they also provide a moral foundation for the space of national history. Philip, left without a profession after the wealth promised by Harry and Sellers evaporates, exemplifies a profound social change. “It was not altogether Philip’s fault,” Twain and Warner write, “that he was in this position.” Philip’s predicament is that “he was born into a time when all young men of his age caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old.” Seductive examples abound: “He might have been a ‘railroad man,’ or a politician, or a land speculator, or one of those mysterious people who travel free on all railroads and steamboats, and are continually crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic, driven day and night about nobody knows what, and make a great deal of money by so doing.”40 Twain and Warner suggest that society faces the danger that the feverish omission of work will become systemic. A complaint by Sellers’s wife, who must serve raw turnips for dinner until his operations pay off, further spells out the problem: “We live in the future most too much,” she tells her husband (195). For Twain and Warner, speculation not only avoids work but misidentifies value with its future. The normative relationship of the present to the future in capitalism—in which work and self-denial The Nationality of Expansion

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lead to wealth—breaks down, debasing what is tangible in society and the economy. Twain and Warner propose to literally reground value in land whose worth depends on labor. Philip, having shaken off his fever and studied geology and engineering, digs for coal on undeveloped land that a Quaker investor, Eli Bolton, owns in western Pennsylvania—a scientifically based plan in which he shows unshakable faith. When speculators put Bolton in bankruptcy, Philip buys the land for pennies and carries on, finally swinging the hammer himself, until he finds the vein. Philip returns to Bolton all but his small original interest in the venture, and Bolton’s daughter Ruth accepts Philip’s proposal to marry. Meanwhile the scheme to sell the Hawkinses’ Tennessee land to the government fails when Dilworthy is exposed as corrupt, and Si’s son Washington, vowing to begin his life over with “good solid work,” lets the land go to auction to pay for back taxes (425–26). The resolution of Philip’s subplot reestablishes a proper orientation toward the future and provides a model for others to follow. Other aspects of the resolution reveal the dimensions of the refoundation of national values that Twain and Warner propose. Philip’s father is apparently deceased—he explains his plans to go west to his mother and an uncle—and Harry too consults with an uncle rather than a father about his aspirations to get rich (100). The lack of a father seems to make them especially susceptible to the seductions of speculation, as if freed from an expectation to work. The closure of Philip’s plot fittingly returns him to the family, as husband and eventually a father himself. Note, however, that the reformed world remains essentially homosocial: the world of work, like that of speculation, consists of transactions among men. Philip’s wife Ruth and Washington Hawkins’s sister Laura suffer for leaving the home and trying to enter the world. Before marrying Philip, Ruth tries to pursue a medical career, but at the cost of her health. As Philip nurses her, she discovers the happiness of dependence. Laura’s end is worse: seduced by a married man and mocked by the crowd when she tries to support herself with a lecture tour, she finally dies of unhappiness (436–37, 419–21).41 That both pay a price for attempting to live independent lives shows that the moral cure Twain and Warner offer for speculation depends on returning women and men to an order founded not just on work but on patriarchal authority. The national subject that emerges not only through the novel’s description of the integrative work of circulation but also through its solution to circulation’s excesses is, as in Japanese histories of circulation, gendered male. 96

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Such a solution to the problem of speculation clearly reflects what Louis Budd has called the novel’s “genteel economics.”42 The novel’s call for a return to work and family offers a type of moral closure, but no fundamental critique either of the problem of value in capitalism or of capitalism’s contradictions, which had been appearing in the form of violent labor struggles since the mid-1860s in the very coal-bearing areas of Pennsylvania where Philip makes his fortune. In the context of the present discussion of liberal historical imaginaries, it is even more important to see that Philip’s success is still based on faith in the positive social effect of the extension and integration of networks of circulation. Far from discrediting this vision of social evolution, The Gilded Age merely warns against its more extreme applications and reprocesses it for further consumption. The value of the coal-bearing land will be realized when the railroad builds a spur to it—which it will do at its own expense, since the vein is proved. Philip has done what Sellers promised to do: bring the land to market. Philip has essentially tapped into a vein not of coal but of surplus value, which he will inject into the restless, ever-expanding circuits of value. It is worth noting that the laborers extracting the value of the land likely would be immigrants, themselves injected into the national space as a solution to the unrest of “native” miners.43 Unacknowledged in The Gilded Age, the presence of “aliens” in the space of the nation becomes a major concern for Strong and Turner.

Our Country and the Mission of Exchange Like The Gilded Age, Josiah Strong’s 1885 missionary tract Our Country assigns a central role in its theory of history to the extension of networks of circulation and the acceleration of the movement of goods and ideas through them, sharing especially the assumption that integration and acceleration of intercourse lead to national unity. In Strong’s version of the liberal historical imaginary, however, the United States is a superior—in fact, historically unprecedented—space of circulation, and the formation of this space therefore is a privileged stage in a single process of world history. This aspect of the destinarian theme in Strong’s work reflects the increasing tendency in the late nineteenth century to place the history of the United States in an overarching narrative of world history. Even the book’s subtitle—Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis—indicates, however, that Strong’s confidence in the historical mission of the United States is permeated by a sense of impending disaster. Our Country warns that the The Nationality of Expansion

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increasing perfection of intercourse in the space of the nation produces division as well as unity, most visibly in the form of unassimilable immigrants. Strong’s solution to such social difference is to define the nationalhistorical space in terms of race and to predict that the Anglo-Saxon race will subjugate or obliterate other races through its civilizing capacity, that is, through the inescapable force of history.44 In the opening of Our Country, Strong identifies three watershed moments in history, “toward which the lines of past progress have converged, and from which have radiated the molding influences of the future.” These moments are the Incarnation, the German Reformation, and the end of the nineteenth century, “second in importance to that only which must always remain first,” the birth of Christ.45 Each marks a turning point in the gradual destruction of barbarian isolation by the progress of civilization, which for Strong is the knitting together of men into close, complex relationships. Strong’s epochal moments appropriately correspond to three “civilizing instrumentalities” that he finds at work in his own era, Christianity, the press, and steam power. These respectively “bring together men’s hearts, minds and bodies into more intimate and multiplied relations,” he explains. “Christianity is slowly binding the race into a brotherhood. The press transforms the earth into an audience room; while the steam engine, so far as commerce is concerned, has annihilated . . . nine-tenths of space.”46 Although Strong wrote Our Country to raise funds for missionary work in the western United States, Christianity is not the driving force in its theory of history. (Strong observes only in passing that the Christian religion is an “excitant” that pushes men to act on their own behalf at the same time that it awakens them to responsibility for others.) In keeping with the New Theology that dominated Protestant thought at the time, he assumes the immanence of God in the world and sees progress as the worldly manifestation of Providence, effectively accommodating the assertions of sacred mission in many earlier views of the history and future of the English colonies and the United States, from the Puritans through Bancroft, to contemporary theories of social evolution.47 In contrast, Strong is irrepressibly enthusiastic about the significance for mankind of technological progress. “The press and telegraph, by bringing many minds into contact, have ministered marvelously to the activity of the popular intellect,” he writes. “Isolation tends to stagnation. Intercourse quickens thought, feeling, action. Steam has stimulated human activity almost to a fury. By prodigiously lengthening the lever of human power, by bringing the country to the city, the inland cities to the 98

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seaboard, the seaports to each other, it has multiplied many-fold every form of intercourse.”48 The impact of steam technology is not limited to the quantitative increase of intercourse, however, but precipitates a qualitative change in society: “At the beginning of this century there was little travel. Men lived in isolated communities. Mutually ignorant, they naturally were mutually suspicious. In English villages a stranger was an enemy. Under such conditions there could be little exchange of ideas and less of commodities. Buxton says: ‘Intercourse is the soul of progress.’ The impetus given to inter-communication of every sort by the application of steam was the beginning of a new life in the world” (2).49 Similarities of this passage to Japanese histories of civilization attest to the ubiquity of liberal historical imaginaries at the end of the nineteenth century. Strong’s assessment of steam power recalls Fujita’s examination of the “power of water,” and like Fujita, Strong equates ideas and commodities as tradable objects. The transition Strong charts from village isolation to wide “intercommunication” could easily be mistaken for remarks by Fukuzawa on the civilizing effects of kōsai. Strong shares too the conviction inherited from eighteenth-century liberalism that progress in “intercourse” results in an improvement of human behavior. Secular progress has a moral telos, and the transformation of networks of circulation, the means of progress, has a moral content that transforms its agents. Strong’s language leaves little doubt that he is employing the rhetoric and vocabulary of the historical imaginary already observed at work in The Gilded Age and the genre of history of civilization in Japan. As in these other texts, the category of the nation-state has a privileged role both as an explanatory category and as a spatial delimiter. For Strong, the United States, and particularly the New West beyond the Mississippi, is the culmination of the tendency toward quicker and more complex exchange. While commerce in Europe must run a gauntlet of customhouses, frontiers, and languages, Strong observes that in the United States, “Here are thirty-eight nations, so to speak—and soon to be half a hundred—enjoying perfect freedom of intercourse, with but one language and one currency, with common interests and common institutions” (114). Strong’s implication is that the United States is one nation rather than thirty-eight precisely because of such “perfect freedom of intercourse.” The parallel structure of Strong’s declaration—language and currency, interests and institutions—echoes the pairing of ideas and commodities in the passage quoted earlier and indicates the importance that Strong places on the media of exchange in the process of national integration and consolidaThe Nationality of Expansion

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tion. But as his hopeful comment on the increase of the states also indicates, the achievement of unity depends not simply on holding media in common but on expanding their reach, on the incorporation of as yet isolated territories into the shared national intercourse. Here the integrative trope of intercourse necessarily implies territorial expansion, not merely the destruction of internal barriers as it does in Japanese histories of civilization. Note, moreover, that the Jacksonian idea that expansion in space would protect the nation from time has disappeared. The nation’s moral character and indeed destiny will be realized in time through expansion of a national-historical space. The result of the continuous expansion and perfection of national intercourse that Strong predicts is an equally limitless increase in what Senator Dilworthy from The Gilded Age calls “commercial and industrial and religious prosperity.” The fruits of prosperity will not be reserved for the American nation alone, however. They will transform the world in a widening wave of commercial vigor: “While our manufactures are growing, our markets are to be greatly extended. Steam and electricity have mightily compressed the earth. The elbows of the nations touch. Isolation—the mother of barbarism—is becoming impossible,” Strong declares, adding enthusiastically that “the mysteries of Africa are being laid open, the pulse of her commerce is beginning to beat. South America is being quickened, and the dry bones of Asia are moving; the warm breath of the Nineteenth Century is breathing a living soul under her ribs of death. The world is to be Christianized and civilized” (14). Strong’s phrasing underscores the impact of the late-nineteenth-century consolidation of world markets on the representation of national space. Like the Japanese authors of histories of civilization, Strong posits relations between nations (spaces of integrative circulation) as relations of exchange. The spatial progress of civilization, he predicts, will quicken circulation in the moribund peoples of the world and result in mutual uplift through the mechanism of the market. Yet the distinction between integrative and differentiating intercourse is malleable in Strong’s vision of the role of the United States in the world. The course of American history entails not simply a realization of the internal, latent unity of the United States as a nation but also a transformation of all nations and their relations with each other by the nation that, at the vanguard of history, has developed the most advanced mechanisms of circulation. What Strong considers the unique role of the United States in the world follows from the country’s status as the culmination of the 100

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world-historical movement toward complex social relations. He writes that “as civilization increases, as society becomes more complex, as laborsaving machinery is multiplied and the division of labor becomes more minute, the individual becomes more fractional and dependent” (139). Drawing on arguments from the time connecting the demands of civilization to nervous exhaustion (such as George Beard’s American Nervousness, 1881), Strong says that the increase in complexity and dependence places particular strain on the nervous system, whose resilience is the final arbiter of the capacity for progress. In light of the fact that “the roots of civilization are the nerves,” Strong reasons, “other things being equal, the finest nervous organization will produce the highest civilization” (169).50 Such a superior nervous organization belongs to what Strong calls the AngloSaxon race and to the branch of the race in the United States in particular: “Our national genius is Anglo-Saxon, but not English, its distinctive type is the result of a finer nervous organization, which is certainly being developed in this country.” On the basis of such evidence, Strong asserts that “we [Americans] may reasonably expect to develop the highest type of Anglo-Saxon civilization” and will triumph in a coming “final competition of races” for control of the world (168, 175). Strong thus explains the special role of the United States in the world through the category of race, which he believes operates on the scale of the world rather than of the nation. I discuss race as a problem in the representation of national time in a later chapter. In the context of the present discussion of national space, note that as in The Gilded Age, race defines the border of history, and the movement of the border in North America and the world is the index of history’s unfolding. The origin of the process, and therefore of the American nation, can be located in England and ultimately in Germany—as the theory of Teutonic origins held—without eliminating the distinct place of the American nation as such. Although Strong’s departure into issues of race would seem to contradict the privileged status of the nation-state in liberal theories of history, his argument for the racial superiority of the United States follows directly from such theories’ assumptions about the formation of nations.51 The purported superiority of “Anglo-Saxons” follows from their superior abilities in exchange and intercourse. The difference of Strong’s vision from earlier destinarian views of the United States follows from liberalism as well. Where earlier arguments about the republic, its people, and their mission held that North American conditions would support popular virtue and impede a downward spiral of worldly change, in Our Country virtue, naThe Nationality of Expansion

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tional mission, and secular history coincide in a single ascending movement of which the history of the United States is the final and highest stage. As the culmination of the historical process of extension of the networks of human intercourse and the acceleration of flows within them, the national space of the United States still remains unique for Strong because it is the space in which perfect freedom of intercourse is realized in the world. Its formation is unique, however, as the end of a single process that encompasses the entire world, not as a break with worldly history. The universalistic thrust of Strong’s racialized and nationalized revision of the thesis of translatio imperii, the westward course of empire, thus lies precisely in the fact that he sees the formation and unification of the national space of the United States as an event of unparalleled worldhistorical significance. After examining Turner’s appropriation of theories of social evolution, which presents the history of the United States as an iteration of the universal rather than its culmination, I return to examine Strong’s ultimate prediction of a battle of races in Our Country from the perspective of the perils that circulation produces.

The Work of Turner’s Frontier Frederick Jackson Turner’s early essays on the North American West, founding texts of “Progressive history” in the United States, are at once a response to the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon destiny proclaimed by writers like Strong and an exploration of other possibilities in the narratives of intercourse and social evolution that underpin Strong’s representation of national history.52 Within the conceptual frame of liberal imaginaries of nation formation, Turner’s work illustrates a second possibility for situating the history of the United States in the history of the world. Where Strong’s narrative places the United States at the end of a single worldhistorical process, as its millennial culmination, Turner represents the history of the United States as the result of a universal process of social evolution that no society can delay. What Turner calls the “peculiarity” of the United States is the existence of multiple instances of the same universal process dispersed in different parts of the territory claimed by the nationstate, an adroit if circuitous way of adapting a theory of history derived from eighteenth-century stage theories to the pattern of development of a settler society. Tropes of circulation and exchange remain the key to representing national space for Turner, but the problem of the unity of the 102

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nation and its space becomes all the more pressing as the disparate evolutionary tracks proliferate. Turner’s essays, particularly “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” first delivered as an address at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, are usually considered to be concerned with the future of democracy in the United States. In fact, they are overwhelmingly concerned with the formation of national unity and the transformation of immigrants into “Americans” who will be democracy’s foundation. Turner’s famous declaration in “The Significance of the Frontier” that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development” is not especially innovative when considered in a world context.53 On the one hand, Turner’s interest in the impact of the natural environment on social evolution was in the mainstream of nineteenth-century social thought and resembles the importance that the early-nineteenth-century Russian historian Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev, for example, placed on “empty space” in the formation of a “Russian” national character.54 On the other, Turner relies on stage theories that began to appear in eighteenth-century Europe, in his case borrowed from the contemporary Italian economist Achille Loria by way of Richard Ely.55 In Turner’s formulation, civilization in North America has proceeded through five stages: hunting and fishing, herding, primitive cultivation, intensive cultivation, and industrial production. Each stage brings more advanced mechanisms of communication and exchange. Turner uses this sequence in two ways. One is to tell the common east-to-west story of the history of the United States as a story of networks of circulation: “The Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader’s ‘trace’; the trails widened into roads, and the roads became turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads,” Turner explains. “Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex maze of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous.” Turner concludes the passage by saying that “if one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country,” or as he puts it later in a pithy phrase, “Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation.”56 The Nationality of Expansion

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The innovation of the “Frontier Thesis” is not Turner’s application of these stages to the United States as a whole, however, but a fracturing of the story made possible by a perceptive understanding of the spatial logic of stage theories, particularly the assumption that each stage manifests itself uniformly across physical and social geography. Early in “The Significance of the Frontier,” Turner remarks that “all peoples show development; the [Teutonic] germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the United States we have a different phenomenon.”57 The key to the history of the United States would seem to be the declaration that development there is a “different phenomenon,” but the seemingly dispensable statement that in “most nations” development takes place in a limited area is more important. Turner proceeds to divide the United States into a series of such “limited areas.” He thus accepts the proposition of bounded development established in histories of civilization in Japan by the split between integrative and differentiating tropes of intercourse, but asserts that in the United States the spatial limits of the developmental process have been subnational. The stages of social development can easily be traced in the coastal settlements of the Atlantic, Turner says, “but we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier.” Turner argues that the colonization of the North American interior produced multiple, staggered processes of social evolution stretched across the continent. The evolutionary process recurs as what Turner calls the “frontier line” moves westward, but the same process recurs in each new area. The perceived peculiarity of the history of the United States is not the process but the recurrence: “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.” Turner thus concludes that “the true point of view of the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.”58 Turner identifies five successive frontiers that served as “natural boundary lines” in U.S. history, and by implication, five separate instances of the 104

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process of civilization.59 He elegantly finds that when considered together, the disparate stages write in space the entire five-stage course of human development: “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution,” passing from the “savagery” of the Indian and the white hunter through a zone of ranch life, then areas of unrotated crops, intensive farming, and finally manufacturing. The page increasingly becomes a palimpsest as one moves eastward, with earlier stages overwritten by later ones.60 As in Japanese histories of civilization, the primitive is located both in the past of “civilized” areas and elsewhere, in still-backward regions. In Turner’s case, such a temporalization of geography allows him to assert a determinate relation among the regions of the United States. By mapping the space of the United States as stages of civilization, Turner is able to explain differences among the regions, in particular the differences of economic and political interest that were clear at the time in the rise of Populism, as differences in degree of civilization.61 Turner explains away the unevenness of capitalist development by dividing national-historical space. Although Turner acknowledges significant differences among sections of the United States, by insisting that the same historical process takes place in each he is able to maintain that the differences are not inherent. Indeed, Turner argues that each time the historical process begins anew it produces conditions for a metamorphosis that he believes will lead eventually to national unity. He calls it Americanization, in keeping with the popular vocabulary of the day. For Turner, the transformation of immigrants into a new people depends on what he considers a uniquely “American” quality of the frontier. Unlike European frontiers, which run between dense populations, Turner says that the frontier in North America “lies at the hither edge of free land” and therefore is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”62 The idea of the frontier as an “edge” belies the reality of so-called frontier areas as middle zones but is consistent with the sharp delimitation between interior and exterior that results from the inversion that creates national history. The frontier’s status as the edge of civilization has significant consequences for those who arrive there: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization,” Turner says. The settler arrives “European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought,” but the wilderness “strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and moccasin. . . . Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts The Nationality of Expansion

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the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox fashion.”63 “Americanization” thus begins as regression: in Turner’s own terms, every “recurrence of the process of evolution” brings a “return to primitive conditions” that forces the European settler to recommence his or her own development, now as an American. (The regression is unintentionally comical in Turner’s depiction, but this should be forgiven, since most nineteenth-century theories of civilization begin with such a mythical primal state.) What makes the general process of civilization take the particular path of producing Americans, Turner argues, is the North American environment, and particularly the fact that beyond the frontier lies only “empty” free land. For this reason, the outcome “is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs. . . . The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”64 The farther the frontier moves from the Atlantic coast, the more American is the result. Turner’s vision of a series of “civilizing processes” stretched across the continent thus accounts for the continual transformation of colonists and immigrants into Americans. Interestingly, Turner says that frontier Americanization severs the settler from his or her own past. He writes in “The Significance of History” that immigrants “have come to us historical products, they have brought us not merely so much bone and sinew, not merely so much money, not merely so much manual skill, they have brought with them deeply inrooted customs and ideas.”65 In the essay on the frontier, he reveals the solution: “The bonds of custom are broken” at the frontier, which thus is “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.”66 The forgetting that accompanies frontier regression produces what Turner calls the “composite nationality” of the American people: at the frontier, immigrants are “Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.”67 Turner’s characterization of customs and ideas as obstacles that must be overcome echoes the campaigns of Fukuzawa and other apostles of civilization and enlightenment in Japan against what they considered the outmoded habits of the Japanese people. In both cases, social change appears as not only a process of civilization but also one of nationalization through a transformation of the subject’s attitude toward the past, a topic I explore in part 2 of this book. Where Japanese intellectuals concerned themselves with attitudes toward the nation’s own past, however, Turner confronts what he sees as the “foreign” pasts of immigrants, a view of nation and history typical of a settler society. Indeed, in Turner’s argument, the moment of escape from “the bondage of the past” is simultaneously an induction into an American history. 106

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In Turner’s narrative, the frontier has a curious double status as both the origin and the telos of the American nation: it is simultaneously where “Americanization” begins and the place where “American” as a national identity is made manifest. As an explanatory category, the frontier can support this paradoxical status only as long as it is “open” and moving, that is, as long as the other side of the frontier is “empty.” John Juricek has shown that the idea that the area beyond the western border of the United States was empty “free” land did not appear until late in the nineteenth century, a point that can help us understand the status of the frontier in Turner’s essay as both beginning and end. For most of the nineteenth century, the United States was considered to be bordered on the west by other countries—Indian Countries, with which the federal government signed numerous treaties. (Contra Turner, the idea of the frontier therefore did not differ greatly from that in Europe.) The meaning of the frontier as the beginning of “free” land appeared after the government had ceased dealing with Native American peoples as treaty-making groups, and after the idea of the frontier as an area of military or cultural confrontation with Native Americans had faded.68 Turner, however, in keeping with the new sense of the word, maintains that the American nation has never met any other “growing peoples” in its expansion and that the frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Turner’s distinction between the “primitive conditions” on the civilized side of the frontier and the supposed savagery on the other amounts to a theoretical distinction between an “American” space of history (marked by progress from the primitive to the civilized) and an empty space, outside history, where social evolution does not occur. In Turner’s theory, the area beyond the frontier is outside history by logical necessity, because it is in the act of bringing these lands into the space of history that Turner’s American nation gains the origins and telos of his narrative of nation formation. This analysis of the status of the frontier in Turner’s theory of history should leave little doubt that “The Significance of the Frontier” is concerned primarily with Americanization in an era of complexity, rather than with the end of freeholder democracy, as scholars of his work often assert.69 Turner accepts the idea that a supply of free land—that is, its seizure—had a formative influence on the society of United States, and he connects it to the rise of democracy.70 He sees territorial expansion as an aspect of social evolution, however, the reason for the “American” variant on the universal pattern, not as a means to slow the evolutionary process. Moreover, Turner replaces the republican idea that expansion would The Nationality of Expansion

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protect the polity from corruption with the idea that it would create an Americanized nation. For Turner, democracy depends not on cultivation of virtue but on the success of Americanization. What Turner’s theory of history really aims to account for, then, are the conditions for such homogenizing Americanization. Positing such conditions dictated the well-known shift in the point of view of Turner’s history from the Atlantic Coast—that nest of difficult complexity—to the western states and territories. Turner’s use of universalistic theories of social evolution to chart the nation’s development in time rather than explain its escape from it, however, is clear evidence that, like Strong’s polemic, his narrative of the formation and consolidation of the United States as a nation is not exceptionalist in the usual sense of the word. What is peculiarly American about the history of the United States for Turner, the existence of multiple processes of civilization, in fact is what shows the process itself to be universal. A comparison to Strong is instructive: where Strong puts the history of the United States in the world as the last stage of a single world-historical process, Turner describes it as one history among others that are, in their basic stages, essentially the same. And yet one must observe that the essential aspect of the history of the United States for Turner, Americanization, can occur only if the historical process can continually recommence. Like Strong, Turner creates a theory of national history premised on continual expansion of nationalhistorical space, because only expansion can provide the conditions for the continuous nationalization of the populace. His theory too imagines an end, albeit an unhappy end brought about by the exhaustion of public lands in the West and the “closing” of the frontier. I turn now to address the question of why territorial expansion is such an essential feature of the logic of history for Strong and Turner.

The Perils of Circulation I argued in the previous chapter that the logical inversion that makes it possible to represent history as a continuous story of national becoming produces epistemological boundaries around the history of the nation, and the process of self-realization is therefore defined as an internal one. While Strong and Turner accept the idea that history is nationally bounded, they see the expansion of physical borders as a key aspect of national history, the only means to realize the unity of the people that is the telos of the historical process. For Strong, territorial expansion is part of 108

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the extension and perfection of mechanisms of intercourse, considered to be an inherently unifying development. For Turner, expansion is the necessary condition for Americanization. The reasons Strong and Turner gravitate toward the question of expansion become clearer still if we consider their arguments on the past and future of the United States from a different angle. For both, territorial expansion is the solution to social divisions existing in the present that are the obverse of the unity they seek. In an unhappy realization for both, however, the movement of history, of which expansion is a part, appears to create new social divisions. The paradox prompts Strong to embrace the idea of a racial apocalypse flowing across the globe, while Turner hints gloomily at the prospect of endemic social division within a nation that has consumed its empty spaces. Both, however, imagine mechanisms for the effacement of social difference in the historical development of the nation and in the process replace the expropriation of western lands and the integration of capitalist networks of exchange with the accomplishment of national unity. The millenarian themes of Our Country leave little doubt that its confident declaration of national expansion is shot through with a grudging recognition that the mechanisms of progress carry the seeds of its destruction, a combination typical of Protestant thought in the Gilded Age.71 “Modern civilization is called on to contend for its life with forces which it has evolved,” Strong warns readers.72 In his straightforward phrasing, these forces are “perils.” The central portion of his tract is dedicated to cataloging, with the aid of statistics, their rise and effect on the nation. Strong’s examination of the first of these perils, immigration, illustrates the direct link he draws between the process of civilization and the emerging threat to it. An invasion of “Goths and Vandals” in the 1880s has been propelled by “attracting influences” in the United States, “expellent influences” in Europe, and increasing facility of travel. Chief among the attracting influences is the prosperity of the United States; among the expellent, the despotism of Europe, which runs counter to the progress of civilization toward popular government. Strong thus implies that both are the result of the more perfect freedom of intercourse of the United States. Easier travel, the third cause of the “gulf stream of humanity” entering the United States, is the result of the extension of networks of circulation that lies at the center of Strong’s theory of history (30–36). The peril of immigration therefore results from the same process of civilization that Strong champions in his demonstration of the destiny of the United States. Darkly predicting that “so immense a foreign element must The Nationality of Expansion

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have a profound influence on our national life and character,” he blames immigration for the growth of intemperance, the Mormon population, Catholicism, socialism, and the urban masses (40, 43). As Strong’s enumeration of the elements threatening America suggests, the consequence of immigration and other perils is a national fracturing at the expense of the “whole population,” the constantly invoked base line of his statistical comparisons. He significantly describes the problem as a fracturing of national space, warning, for example, that “there is among our population of alien birth an unhappy tendency toward aggregation, which concentrates the strain upon portions of our social and political fabric. Certain quarters of many of the cities are, in language, customs and costumes, essentially foreign. Many colonies have bought up lands and so set themselves apart from Americanizing influences” (44). Strong similarly describes Catholics, Mormons, and social classes as separate states within the nation (53–54, 61, 106). When he criticizes immigrants for resisting Americanization, he asserts a connection between Americanization and a phantasmally homogeneous national space. The discussion of “perils” in Our Country thus brings to light a contradiction in Strong’s treatment of progress in circulation in the history of the United States. Although he frequently presents the perfection of circulation as the positive movement of history, he concedes that it produces dangerous social complexity. Complexity brings heterogeneity, the greatest peril in Our Country. Following the ritual of the day, Strong says that immigrant “aggregation” threatens democracy, but throughout his discussion of civilization’s perils, he gives less attention to the protection of democracy than to the need to destroy “these several dangerous elements [which] are singularly netted together, and serve to strengthen each other” (142).73 If the perils of Our Country are the result of the antinomies of its theory of history, Strong’s prophecy at the book’s end of a “final competition of races” emerges as an attempt to resolve such antinomies by predicting an apocalyptic end of history and a Malthusian destruction of heterogeneity in the United States and the world. When Strong inserts the new categories of race and competition into a narrative of progress that ostensibly encompasses all of humanity, a split appears that parallels the split of tropes in histories of civilization in Japan: circulation within a race and competition between races. Arguing that the United States will be “the great home of the Anglo-Saxon, the principal seat of his power,” Strong writes that “with the wider distribution of wealth, and increasing facilities of intercourse, intelligence and influence are less centralized, and 110

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peoples become more homogeneous; and the more nearly homogeneous peoples are, the more do numbers tell.” Because “America is to have the great preponderance of numbers and of wealth” among Anglo-Saxons, it will gain “the scepter of controlling influence” (165, 166; Strong’s italics). Where before, the benevolent expansion of intercourse and exchange was expected to encompass the world, here Strong limits its scope to one race, implying that separate processes of integration occur within other races. Once homogeneity is achieved among Anglo-Saxons, the United States will gain “controlling influence” over England and other nations of the race because of its superior freedom of intercourse, which produces greater numbers and greater wealth. The United States thus is the culmination of a process of race evolution. Strong’s prediction of a coming battle between races is the logical counterpart to his delimitation of social evolution as a process within races. “The time is coming,” Strong says, when the world will “enter upon a new stage of its history—the final competition of races, for which the AngloSaxon is being schooled.” As population pressures resources, “the mighty centrifugal tendency, inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States, will assert itself,” and “this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth” (175; Strong’s italics). It bears stressing that “race” and “competition” are not explanatory categories in the theory of history of Our Country. Rather, they emerge as the resolution of the self-generated problem of heterogeneity by labeling the heterogeneous as racially other and outside a racially bounded process of social development. As if in recognition of such a transformation of national history into the triumph of a race, at the end of Our Country the word “Americanization” is replaced by “Anglo-Saxonization.” The descendants of immigrants now are “certain to be Anglo-Saxonized,” as is all of mankind (163, 178). Perhaps to calm troubled pacifists among his readers, Strong writes that “to this result no war of extermination is needful; the contest is not one of arms, but of vitality and civilization” (176). The outcome of the contest is nonetheless already clear: “Whether the extinction of inferior races before the advancing Anglo-Saxon seems to the reader sad or otherwise, it certainly seems probable.” Anglo-Saxon vigor may be “God’s final and complete solution of the dark problem of heathenism among many inferior peoples. The Nationality of Expansion

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Some of the stronger races, doubtless, may be able to preserve their integrity; but, in order to compete with the Anglo-Saxon, they will probably be forced to adopt his methods and instruments, his civilization and his religion.” This result seems so certain that Strong declares there is little doubt that the Anglo-Saxon will “dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind” (177, 178). Such a momentous achievement, one seems expected to believe, will mark the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. The contributions of Strong’s argument to nativism, racial oppression, and imperial aggression in his own time and later eras hardly need to be pursued further. What should be recognized, however, is the extent to which his racist millenarianism derives from the contradiction between the assumption in liberal imaginaries of history that progress in intercourse creates unity and uniformity, and abundant evidence in Strong’s time that “complex” intercourse and exchange were producing not unity but social division, heterogeneity that in the logic of such imaginaries can only destroy the nation. What Strong argues in his vision of the future is that the nation will achieve unity at the moment of its end: racial apocalypse, the culminating moment of the history of the United States and the last stage of the history of Anglo-Saxons, will bring an end to the history of nations and initiate a continuous present in which all social difference has been eradicated. In Strong’s case, the general orientation toward the future of national history takes the form of eschatology. The eschatological turn in Our Country certainly owes much to currents in Protestant thought at the time, but it also offers a disturbing example of the difficulty that national history has in addressing social difference as anything but a threat to be overcome. Turner’s early essays form a response to the problem of heterogeneity that is apparently inclusive and nonantagonistic, yet they reach an impasse similar to the one Strong confronts in Our Country. In Turner’s case, the solution to the contradictions of intercourse lies not in the future but, in a certain sense, in the past: in the mythical origin that is the frontier. The implications of the “closure” of national space in Turner’s narrative of the history of the United States are so prominent that they have dominated discussions of his early work, giving the sense that Turner was concerned primarily with endings.74 In the declaration at the end of “The Significance of the Frontier” that “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history,” there is indeed a suggestion, echo112

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ing Strong, that the process of civilization has bred its demise.75 The main force in the nation’s history has made itself inoperable by succeeding to the point of “closing” the frontier. But such a sense of an ending must be tempered by a recognition that in his early work Turner was concerned with understanding present problems through the lens of the past. As he declared in a well-known passage from “The Significance of History,” “Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.”76 Turner’s argument on the frontier is an example of such an approach: it is, without doubt, an explication of the history of the United States, but more importantly it is an attempt to explain why certain problems visible in the 1890s had not appeared before.77 Two such problems are important to understanding the relationship between national history and national space with which this chapter is concerned; together they shed light on the status of the frontier as both origin and telos in Turner’s work. The first of these problems is that in an era of complex networks of circulation, the bodily vectors of “history” move. Recall that Turner describes immigrants, along with their customs and ideas, as “historical products.” Because of the support advances in transportation give immigration, “we meet Europe not only outside our borders but in our very midst.”78 The extension of networks of circulation has therefore created a situation in which multiple histories exist in one place: in the person of the immigrant, foreign histories subsist inside the borders of the United States. So long as a western frontier is “open,” however, conditions exist for the forgetting of such foreign histories and the rebirth of immigrants as Americans. Recast as a problem of the penetration of the nationalhistorical space of the United States by foreign histories, Turner’s concern with Americanization shows interesting parallels to Fukuzawa’s warning of the danger of the mixed residence of money. Both are prompted by a recognition that the pathways of intercourse in modernity little heed the borders of nation-states. (Recall, moreover, that Fukuzawa’s phrase came from contemporary debates on the commingling of foreigners and Japanese.) From the beginning of his career, Turner fittingly seized on historical instruction as a means of continuing the process of Americanization after the conditions for frontier regression disappeared: only such instruction could provide for the continuing destruction of the foreign histories brought inside the United States by immigrants. In this light it should be clear that the social importance that Turner gave to the work of historians did not come from a Herder-like belief in the historian as The Nationality of Expansion

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national prophet but was an extension, on a more abstract level, of his concern with the transformation of the space of the United States into a space that is properly national. The second problem of national space with which Turner is concerned in his early essays is the divergence of the economic and political interests and “ideals” espoused by the various sections of the country. Such divergence cut straight to the assumption in liberal views of history that the extension and perfection of networks of intercourse knit nations together. If the divergence of interests in fact results from structural inequality, such as that between the industrial and financial centers of the northern manufacturing belt and the primarily agrarian and debtor regions of the South and West, then this assumption is proved false. Although Turner blamed the most prominent expression of divergent interests in his time, Populism, on the comparatively primitive stage of civilization prevailing in the New West, historicizing such differences did not make them any less real: Turner warns in “The Problem of the West,” written following William Jennings Bryan’s nomination as the Populist and Democratic candidate for president in 1896, that the struggle of “contending ideals” is “a social problem on a national scale.”79 The reason is that as a form of social organization rather than an area, the West incorporates “enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience.” As the frontier moved, the frontier quality of local ideals in successive areas was compounded, making the New West “preëminently a region of ideals, mistaken or not.” Turner’s phrasing suggests the problem that the New West poses for the nation: the persistence of the ideals of past social stages in a region where “the conditions of settled society are being reached with a suddenness and with confusion.”80 Thus while Turner maintains that the frontier itself has worked consistently to efface sectionalism among new arrivals (by making them American), the durability of frontier “ideals” makes frontier regions into sections and therefore perpetuates national disunity. The ingenuity of Turner’s description of North America as a series of staggered subnational processes of civilization is to propose mechanisms by which the problem of disunity among sections of the American nation is put into suspension. If the differences among sections are due to relative differences in the degree of development within distinct processes of social evolution, then they are not inherent to the nation-state as a political form, or to capitalism as an economic form, but rather can be explained as a problem of time. To be sure, the more backward sections cannot be expected to “catch up” to the more advanced, since progress is open-ended 114

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for Turner. But by the same token, as long as the frontier is “open” and new processes of civilization can begin, sections that are more primitive will constantly appear. As a result, no single section is fixed in a backward position vis-à-vis the nation as a whole. The relations among sections are mediated through the generalized pattern of social evolution, meaning that sectional differences have no lasting consequence while the frontier is open. Turner thus dispels problems of space by transforming them into problems of time, a precise reversal of the republican view that a society could avoid developing in time by expanding into space. The rather tortured logic resembles the treatment of barbarism in Japanese histories of civilization. In that genre, the proposition of barbarism existing elsewhere in the world served both as proof of Japanese progress toward civilization and as guarantee that Japan would not lose its particularity as it pursued the civilizational ideal, because Japan would be perpetually between particularistic barbarism and universal civilization. In Turner’s essays, a similar logic placing the regions perpetually in-between produces a situation in which the nation as a whole avoids descending into particularistic regionalism so long as the westward movement of the frontier supports the movement of history. If this is not an erasure of disunity, it is at least a means by which Turner can defer recognition of disunity’s structural causes.81 Although Turner’s use of the census report from which he concluded that the frontier was closed has often been criticized, “closed space” is not a question of how and when for him but rather an entire interpretation of the social problems of his era. (He shared this interpretation with proponents of colonization in France, whose work is a topic of the next chapter.) With the mechanisms for the suspension of sectional difference broken down, the sections stand in unmediated, direct relation to each other, and the problem of diverging economic and political interests among them becomes unavoidable. While the progress of southern and western sections toward the stage of industrial civilization occupied by the Northeast will continue, these regions now stand in an unequivocally backward relation to the industrial and financial centers. Turner evokes the problem succinctly at the end of “The Problem of the West,” suggesting that henceforth the nationalization of the United States will be more overt and tumultuous: “This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of heterogeneous materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals and social interests, having passed from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the continent, is now thrown back upon itself, and is seeking an equilibrium. The diverse elements are being fused into national unity. The forces of The Nationality of Expansion

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reorganization are turbulent and the nation seems like a witches’ kettle.”82 The phrase “thrown back upon itself” prompts the question of where Turner’s heterogeneous people had previously been leaning. The answer, as I have suggested earlier, is that this “people,” and in fact Turner’s entire idealized resolution in the past of late-nineteenth-century social problems, leans on the origin-telos of his narrative of American history, the frontier, and on the premise that continuous expansion would keep national disunity perpetually in suspension.

A Space of Crisis Certainly one of the strangest qualities of Turner’s resolution of the problem of disunity is that he cannot imagine it succeeding in his own day. Nonetheless it is worth comparing the manner in which Turner imagines the achievement of national unity to that embraced by Strong. For Turner, an American identity has its origin in the moment of frontier regression. This is a civic and consensual origin, in contrast to Strong’s racial and coercive one, in the sense that it is a transformation each person undertakes willingly. Yet these early essays convey the sense that the nation is only unified, most purely American, at the moment of its primal formation. Thus Turner must find conditions that constantly reproduce the nation’s birth—not in the past but in the present. Turner finds the unity he seeks by turning to the past, but in a peculiar strategy that brings the past into the present, which by itself is inadequate to the task, he argues that they jointly open toward the future as a movement in which social difference is obliterated, albeit voluntarily rather than by force. It is a seemingly hospitable vision, for all its strained temporal logic, so long as one does not acknowledge that the voluntary Americanization of the European immigrant is founded on the perpetual seizure of land and the forcible removal of its occupants. Here, in fact, Turner’s vision converges with Strong’s, being simply based on an originary and unacknowledged violence rather than a loudly proclaimed final annihilation. Strong and Turner thus offer two unexpectedly similar responses to what were perceived to be the problems of the nation in the late-nineteenthcentury United States. One looks to the future for the moment in which the perils dividing the nation will vanish; the other finds this moment in the reenactment of the past. Their rhetoric of the present crisis is tied to the idea either of something that has been lost or of something that is yet to be gained, but in either case the solution is located in a different era. 116

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History is understood to be the path to it. National history seems to be defined by the poles of unity and its loss. The similarity that such alarm over internal division bears to the exhortations to mobilize that form an undercurrent in Japanese histories of civilization suggests that such appeals are neither simply products of the circumstances in which the new Japanese state found itself nor manifestations of the appearance of “complexity” in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Rather, they appear to derive from assumptions in national history about the unity of the nation and the relationship of such unity to the unfolding of time. Whether unity is presented as something that has been lost in the past or something that must be gained (or regained) in the future, this type of jeremiad therefore seems to be endemic to national history in general. The historical space of the nation is apparently founded in such a notion of crisis, a phenomenon that must be inherent to the inversion that establishes it. Nativism and xenophobia of the sort seen most clearly in the work of Strong are detritus produced by the representation of national history, rather than aberrations in it. We can understand this phenomenon more deeply by considering it from two perspectives, first the way in which national history transforms structural problems of capitalist society into temporal problems of the nation, and second the relationship of territorial expansion to the tropes of integration and differentiation that establish national space. Turner’s essays and Strong’s missionary tract deploy the liberal rhetoric of intercourse to represent the expropriation of western lands, the reorganization of space by railroads, the incorporation of communities into national and world markets, to wit, the entire dramatic economic and social transformation of the Gilded Age, as a movement in which the nation realizes its true character. By attributing a national and even popular quality to the expansion of networks of capital, Turner claims—in the name of the nation—the territory of the nation-state as a space of free capitalist circulation. Strong claims the whole world as such a space in the name of the most representative nation of the Anglo-Saxon race, a natural extension of the logic. This is ostensibly a drama of national awakening, concerned with the formation of citizens, but it effectively naturalizes the movement of capital as the perfection of the nation’s communication with itself. In the process, social problems caused by the structure of nineteenth-century capitalism—such as uneven development, the formation of classes, the disruption of community by migration in search of work—are transformed into problems of the nation that are to be solved The Nationality of Expansion

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by the movement of its history. Resistance to such “solutions,” whether in the form of Populism, socialist labor movements, or attachment to foreign customs, is categorically dismissed in the name of history, which will steamroller objections as the nation realizes itself in time. The proposition recalls the way that campaigns of civilization and enlightenment in Japan legitimated themselves by invoking the ineluctability of social evolution. In both countries, objections to the organization of society by capital are recast as obstacles to the unfolding history of the nation, and their existence threatens the nation itself. The insistent return to territorial expansion as a motif for national history, from the satire of The Gilded Age to the work of Strong and Turner, points us to another source for the rhetoric of crisis: the unsteady relationship of integration and differentiation in liberal philosophies of history. Logically, these two tropes would seem to limit each other, exerting a mutually restraining force that would maintain an alignment between the space of national history and the territory claimed by the nationstate. Together, they would seem to place the nation in the world in a clearly delimited position. Yet they do not, and we can find the symptom of this insufficiency in the figure of the immigrant, who emerges in Strong and Turner as an incarnation of the movement of borders. As “foreigner within,” the immigrant demonstrates by his existence that neither integration nor differentiation fully succeeds. There is nothing inherent in either of the tropes or the space they establish that provides fixed territorial boundaries for the nation. Sellers’s call to “bring the land into market” in The Gilded Age evokes the source of the problem particularly well. In its constant, restless deterritorialization of the world, capitalism erases any stable referent that the nation has to physical territory. We can see Strong and Turner trying to negotiate the situation by creating narratives of the history of the United States that put territorial expansion at its center. Turning to the France of the Third Republic, we find intellectuals using a similar logic of circulation and space to confront disunity and a seeming halt to the nation’s progress in time.

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Chapter 4

Decline, Renewal, and the Rhetoric of Will

The sense pervading the work of Strong and Turner that the nation is in peril arises from an instability in the epistemological space of the nation that makes it difficult to represent the American nation as a secure community. I turn now to examine the representation of national space in the opening years of the Third Republic in France, where ideas of decline and regeneration assumed the status of master signifiers for debate on the health of the nation. Faced with a humiliating defeat by Prussia in 1870, the uprising of the Commune and its bloody suppression in 1871, and the persistence of political, religious, and class divisions that left the new government in a precarious position until 1877, intellectuals commonly spoke of a decadence that was overtaking the nation and searched anxiously for the foundations of renewal. While Claude Digeon has named this anxiety “the German crisis of French thought,” the phenomenon was not rooted only in the defeat by Prussia and calls for revenge.1 The rhetoric of decline also decried social divisions as causes of the military debacle and popular uprising, while the rhetoric of regeneration focused as often on internal reform or colonial expansion as on the reconquest of the “lost” provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.2 The dyad of decline and regeneration typically appeared with the support of broad narratives of national history. Observations of French decadence were meditations not simply on the present but on the formation and character of the French nation. Remedies for the national decay built on these meditations to offer new versions of the future. Such alarm might seem surprising because unlike their counterparts in the United States and Japan, the French intellectuals who warned of the nation’s demise were in the heart of a region that dominated the world. Although France lagged Britain in industrial production, it wielded con-

siderable international financial power. Moreover, despite the drop in stature in Europe, France retained considerable weight in international politics, which it used to expand its empire in the coming decades. Damage to a different sense of the centrality of France may better explain the depth of the conviction that the nation was rapidly declining: the frequent use of the history of France, first among European equals, as a model for theorizing the evolution of civilization. Although the work of Spencer tended toward England as a type, the examples of Comte and Marx testify to the importance of France in schemes of social evolution and to the special significance of the revolution of 1789 as a paradigmatic event. In the terms used in chapter 2, France often served as the theoretical subject in such conjecture on social development, even when it was not named. Such theories identified the history of France with a universal pattern of development. The particularity of France was that it exemplified the universal as the universal manifested itself in history. An early work by Jules Michelet, Introduction to Universal History (Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 1831), illustrates the role of such a view of France in representations of French history. Writing shortly after the fall of the Bourbon Restoration and the establishment of the liberal July Monarchy in 1830, Michelet says that the title of the book could as well be Introduction to the History of France, because—in a phrase quoted earlier— his country will henceforth be “the pilot of the ship of humanity.”3 With echoes of Hegel, Michelet traces the gradual victory of liberty over fatality in human history, beginning in Asia and ending in Europe. Europe is uniquely fertile terrain for the development of liberty because in the continent as a whole, the various fatalities of geography, races, and inherited civilizations balance and annul each other. Yet most of its countries remain prey to their own natures. France alone embodies all the tendencies of the continent and neutralizes them within itself: the central region of “French France” assimilates the German France of the Rhine, the Spanish France of the Pyrenees, and so forth, making it “the most European” of countries.4 France thus combines all the qualities of humanity and is the purest manifestation of its historical movement toward liberty. The “social generality” of France gives it a mission to teach “the Word of the social world” to other countries, which will recognize France as the “pontificate of the new civilization” and imitate it.5 In comparison to Strong’s millenarian essentialism, Michelet’s privileging of France and French history does not hinge on the idea that France is unique because of qualities no other nation has; rather, France assimi120

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lates qualities that other nations have in parts and pieces. The special position in history that Michelet constructs for France thus depends on a certain spatial logic. France exists in, and by virtue of, the entire complex of relations of nations in Europe, and by the same logic, Europe has an analogous position in the world as a whole.6 France’s destiny to lead Europe, and Europe the world, results from a position in the larger space that is both particular and universal. The argument is as replete with hubris as American messianism, but not only on account of Michelet’s romantic excess or his quasi-religious republicanism. (A similar staple of conservative thought considered France uniquely universal because of a special relationship to the Catholic Church.) The argument could be made seriously only in a region exerting such power in the world that its might could be seen as proof of its universality. Even the special role Strong gives the United States in the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon, we have seen, is anchored in Europe. Before turning to the problems in historical thought that appeared when the army of social generality was routed by mere Germans, we should observe several differences from the situations in Japan and the United States. In both of those countries, intellectuals concerned about the fate of the nation could not avoid confronting the relationship of their national history to the universalistic models circulating at the time. The question of whether the nation was converging with, or diverging from, the theoretical norm seemed to hold the key to understanding the past and therefore the future. Although the general pattern of development was a theoretical matter, it was also considered to have a concrete manifestation—in Europe. The belief that European societies were on the leading edge of a historical process traced by all nations supported the connection between Europe and the universal. The evidence was the uneven distribution of political and economic power in the world, that is, Europe’s political and economic hegemony, which was the reason for trying to discern the place of one’s nation in the general pattern of development at all. In Michelet’s Introduction, however, there is no discrepancy between France and the universal: in his view even the Restoration was a temporary setback in France’s mission at the helm of humanity. At certain moments in the nineteenth century, then, French intellectuals could maintain that they were living in the universal and living the universal as the movement of French history.

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Reconsidering French Universality Uncertainty about this view of French history accumulated in the decades leading to 1870. By the end of the July Monarchy, Michelet’s own tone shifted from confidence to recrimination. In The People (Le peuple, 1846), Michelet warns that France is divided between the people and the rich, the latter incapable of devotion and sacrifice, and is sinking like Atlantis. His call: “One people! One fatherland [patrie]! One France! . . . Let us never become two nations, I beg you. Without unity, we perish.”7 On the eve of the fall of the Second Empire, the liberal journalist Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol reprised Michelet’s alarm: “Sit ut est, we can say of France, et non erit—if it remains as it is, it will cease to be. Yes, as harsh as this truth might seem to our pride, it is our national existence that is at stake.”8 Although Prévost-Paradol’s prophecy is titled The New France (La France nouvelle, 1868), it focuses more on the national pathology than on the remedy. Prévost-Paradol singles out moral decay, especially the unwillingness to sacrifice particular for general interests, as the source of France’s many problems. He concludes that if France does not reform, it and the entire world will fall under the domination of Anglo-Saxons emanating from England, the United States, and Australia, Strong’s missionaries of destiny.9 After the events of 1870–71, the rhetoric of decline and regeneration became general. The dyad affected views of the centrality of the national space of France in two ways, which were in a sense external and internal. The Defeat was widely attributed to the Prussian schoolmaster, thought to have transformed a race of poetic dreamers into “Mohicans graduated from the Polytechnic,” in the words of Louis Blanc, a historian and veteran of the revolution of 1848.10 The very idea that Germans had educated themselves for conquest dealt a blow to the ideal of a universal civilization led by France. Few intellectuals would relinquish the universalistic view, however, producing strained attempts to reconcile France’s special place in the world with the rise of particularist nationalism. In the first volume of Europe and the French Revolution (L’Europe et la Révolution française, 1885), the historian Albert Sorel argued that although the principles of the Revolution were universal, the new era that it inaugurated was “the advent [avènement] of nations.”11 The Revolution’s universality was that it made way for multiple particulars. Sorel’s ambivalent position reflects the common conviction that the principle of nationalities, which both liberals and Napoleon III endorsed during the Second Empire, had to be abandoned lest French nationality, in the singular, be lost.12 122

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Reassessing the position of France in Europe also brought an inward turn and numerous reflections on the internal composition of the nation. The meditations were often rooted in broad narratives of national history. Ernest Renan justified his survey of French history in The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France (La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, 1871) with the comment that “the history of France is a whole so well bound together in its parts that one cannot understand even one of our contemporary sorrows without searching for its cause in the past.”13 Renan’s phrasing indicates the extent to which the meaning of “regeneration” depended on its counterpart, decline: regeneration was a process of freeing the future from the mistakes of the past, rather than a truly new beginning.14 For Hippolyte Taine, such a stance meant rejecting the Revolution and the revolutionary tradition in politics entirely in The Origins of Contemporary France (Les origines de la France contemporaine, 1875–93). Even in less-extreme examples, the issue of popular participation in politics was pressing because of the Commune and prompted historical reflection.15 The cult of memory that formed around Alsace and northern Lorraine— encouraged by works such as Paul Déroulède’s Soldier’s Songs (Chants du soldat, 1872), which told the heroism of resistance in verse—reveals the ways that this variety of historical brooding was also a meditation on injuries to the national space. Even arguments on regeneration that did not call for reconquest of the provinces connected the nation’s future to problems in its spatial composition. Such arguments broadened outward from the lost provinces to the heterogeneity of French regions (a common republican preoccupation), poor provincial transportation and education, and calls to mobilize not for continental ambition but for colonization. In this respect the rhetoric of regeneration marked a turn from history (associated with decline) to space. One reason was the difficulty of discussing the Revolution, whose domination of historical writing I examine in a later chapter. Unlike history, space could be treated in seemingly unpolitical terms. Another follows from the spatial preoccupations of the view of history that made France the location of the universal in the world. The faltering of France opened a gap between France and the universal of the type faced by intellectuals in Japan and the United States. By this logic, France’s setbacks indicated problems in the composition of national-historical space that had to be addressed for the nation to heal itself and regain its position in the world. French intellectuals undertook two important tasks when they searched for new means to represent the nation and its place in the world. The first Decline and Renewal

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was to reconceive the unity of the nation in terms that did not immediately recur to a political position. Although France housed a large population of workers from other European countries and had effectively become a country of immigrants, immigrant assimilation did not have the important place in conceptions of national unity that it had in the United States. In the 1880s, debates on an “invasion of foreigners” exempt from taxation and the draft propelled changes to laws on naturalization and the nationality of children born of immigrant parents.16 The anti-immigrant xenophobia contributed to the Dreyfus affair at the end of the century and to right-wing defenses of nationality based on “land and the dead,” in Maurice Barrès’s phrase. Nonetheless the figure of the immigrant did not become the kernel of an argument about “race suicide” and the protection of the native stock as it did in the United States. The fate of the idea that the true French people was descended from Gauls illustrates the different place of genealogy in the developing rhetoric of national unity. This assertion, associated most with the historian Augustin Thierry, supported republican arguments during the Restoration and July Monarchy that the Revolution was an uprising of commoner Gauls against a Germanic aristocracy. (The argument, which remained popular during the Second Empire, reversed one made in the eighteenth century by Henri de Boulainvilliers that the aristocracy ruled rightfully because it was descended from the conquering Franks.) Although the phrase “our ancestors the Gauls” became a commonplace in textbooks during the Third Republic, the idea of Gallic ancestry did not develop in republican ideology into a fully elaborated racial conception of the nation. Instead it supported a distinction between a Gallo-Romanic culture in France that was open to all who embraced it and a Germanic pseudoculture in France’s eastern neighbor.17 The view of France as a common culture in which anyone willing to be “French” could participate suggests, in broad outlines, an essential aspect of early Third Republic arguments on national unity: the tendency to represent the nation as the product of a common act of will, a “daily plebiscite” in a well-known phrase from Renan.18 The nation was said to be sustained by voluntary commitment by its “members,” that is, by the inhabitants of the territory claimed by the nation-state. The argument implied that commitment to each other as members of the nation surpassed any political differences. In the rhetoric of will that supported such visions of national unity, the problems of the French nation were caused not just by a weakening of individual will but also by the dissolution of the collective ensemble of will: a 124

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failure of the nation’s relations with itself that in liberal historical imaginaries is a failure of integration. One of the most important state projects of the 1880s can be seen as a concrete manifestation of such a view of the problem: the establishment of mandatory free primary education. The period is justly called the “Age of Education” in France, when instruction in topics practical and moral was considered the solution to virtually all social problems and schools were charged with transmitting the unifying patriotic sentiment considered the source of German strength.19 Such a nationalization of the child produced educational bestsellers such as A Tour of France by Two Children (Le tour de la France par deux enfants), a reading manual first published in 1877 by Augustine Fouillée under the pseudonym G. Bruno, which was a mainstay of secular and religious schools until well into the twentieth century. The book’s subtitle, “Duty and Fatherland” (Devoir et patrie), testifies to the fact that primers of this sort did not seek only to edify. They also aimed to create a circulation of patriotic sentiment among graduates of the primary school. Alongside crafting new notions of unity and the means to create it, intellectuals dedicated themselves to creating new openings toward the future after the diminution of France’s continental power. In the years immediately after the Defeat, such work was focused on Alsace-Lorraine, whose return would be a sign that regeneration had begun. Republicans and the antirepublican Right coexisted in this meditation on shame and revenge until the 1880s.20 An alternative emerged when republicans led by Jules Ferry, the architect of the new educational program, embraced colonial expansion as the route to national glory. Prévost-Paradol and others preached colonialism as the solution to national problems in the closing years of the Second Empire.21 It was elevated as a cause for the Republic in On Colonization by Modern Peoples (De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes), written by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu for a competition in 1870 and published as a thick volume four years later. Propelled by the work of Leroy-Beaulieu and other colonial propagandists, in the 1880s the government established protectorates in Tunisia, Annam, and Tonkin and extended French domination southward in Algeria, where immigration from metropolitan France (especially by refugees from Alsace-Lorraine) had been growing since 1871. Unlike the antirepublican nationalism of Déroulède and Barrès, which focused increasingly on the problem of decadence, colonialist nationalism tended toward wild optimism according to which possessions outside Europe would compensate for every weakness of European France.22 Charles Lavigerie, the archbishop of Algiers and a Decline and Renewal

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principal proponent of immigration from Alsace-Lorraine, declared: “In France all seems finished. In immense Africa, on the contrary, everything is beginning.”23 Colonial propagandists wrote of releasing France from the constraints it suffered on the Continent and characterized colonization as the recommencement of national history, using a language familiar from liberal historical imaginaries: the liberation of circulation and the progress of civilization. Commitment to colonization was frequently presented as a commitment to national regeneration in general. Castigation for disregard of the empire went hand in hand with such calls for commitment, forming a rhetoric of will regarding the national future parallel to that in arguments on national unity. The emerging arguments on national unity and on new national futures alike tended toward the suggestion that active management of circulation, in both its physical and spiritual manifestations, was the proper means to address the failings of the nation and establish the conditions for unity and the recommencement of national progress. Every circulation implies a space: in its treatment of problems of circulation, the rhetoric of will evinces a commitment to managing the space of national history. Where the commencement of circulation is the genesis of national history, commitment to the management of national-historical space is its regenesis or regeneration. We can trace the appearance of this dual structure, which has a characteristic vocabulary of a “new” or “second” France, to the appearance of a gap between France and the universal after the events of 1870–71. At the same time, the dual structure appears to be an important strategy for managing dissent. In what follows, I take Bruno’s primer A Tour of France as an example of arguments for unity based on voluntaristic commitment to the nation. For examples of new visions of the national future, I turn to several key texts by early propagandists for colonization and one of the more grandiose colonial projects, a proposal to create an inland sea in the Sahara. Both the project of imagining conditions for national unity and that of imagining new national futures ultimately propose the management of national-historical space as an escape from the burdens of French history found in the political and social divisions and continental setbacks of the period. The colonialists’ arguments on the necessity of territorial expansion recall Strong and Turner, as Bruno’s concern with the nationalization of the child echoes the rhetoric of Americanization in the work of these and other American authors. We also return, however, to the attitude of the “civilization and enlightenment” intellectuals in Japan, where we first 126

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encountered education of the backward masses and active intervention in the process of national history as the essential elements of a solution to the national crisis.

A Tour of France by Two Children: Circulation and Commitment Arguably the founding example of a classic Third Republic genre, the pedagogical narrative, A Tour of France was widely adopted upon its publication in 1877, and its success was ensured when primary education became obligatory in 1882. Published in seeming anticipation of just such an event, and cannily written to offend neither republicans nor Catholics, the book gradually assumed the status of a cultural monument because its of longevity in the schools. The innovation that endeared it to students was its form: a clever blend of economic geography, patriotic didacticism, and a picaresque adventure story.24 The combination made it an unmatched evangelist for the political and economic ideology of the republican regime. The story of A Tour of France amounts to an appropriation of the form of the bildungsroman in an era when schools were charged with socializing children and indoctrinating them with diligence and love of the nation.25 The primer recounts the journey from childhood to maturity of two young Lorrainians, André and Julien, fourteen and seven years old, who in 1871 leave their town of Phalsbourg in search of a lost uncle. Phalsbourg is in the “amputated” portion of Lorraine, and a year remains for inhabitants to declare French nationality and move across the new border. The boys, whose mother died young, lost their father when he was hurt fighting fires during the Prussian siege. With his last word—“France!”— the father abjured his sons to remain French. Because they cannot emigrate alone, however, all hope remains in finding the uncle, who is thought to reside in Marseilles. What follows is in many respects a search for a substitute father, not for uncle Frantz so much as for France, as the literal translation of patrie as “fatherland” suggests.26 That the boys are orphans underscores the dispossession and longing they suffer until their search is over. In keeping with Bruno’s use of the bildungsroman form, the narrative reaches closure when the boys gain secure identities and occupations: settled on a farm near Chartres, André will work as a locksmith in a nearby town, while Julien, after finishing school, will be a farmer. The narrative closure coincides with the acquisition of family, house, and nation, a moral triptych in the manual that resembles the resolution to the Decline and Renewal

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crisis of speculation in The Gilded Age, where the fatherless Philip, having made his fortune and acquired a wife through hard work, offers a model for national refoundation. A Tour of France puts the brothers’ story in the service of its mission by making pedagogic episodes a basic aspect of the movement of the narrative. On their town-to-town itinerary, André and Julien observe their surroundings but also find themselves instructed by knowledgeable adults about what they are seeing. Each stop includes a tripartite lesson: instruction in practical knowledge (for example, cheese making in the Jura region), economic geography (the trade in cheeses), and morals (the importance of cooperation among dairy farmers).27 The journey serves to render the whole of France, and particularly its economic geography, visible and comprehensible to the two boys. Such visual immediacy is then refracted by interpretative prisms of which the nation is the last and most important, making the brothers’ trip a version of the picaresque tour that Benedict Anderson notes is a common vehicle for representing the nation as a social totality.28 The content of episodes of instruction is therefore consistently subordinated to a higher education in the nation, as children of the nation. As a retired schoolteacher says in Epinal, near the beginning of the trip, “Julien . . . the honor of the fatherland [patrie] depends on what her children are worth. Apply yourself to work, educate yourself, be good and generous. May all the children of France do so, and our fatherland be the first among all nations.”29 The connection the teacher draws between education and the rank of France among nations reflects the contemporary belief that education contributed to the Prussian victory in 1870. Note, however, the stress she places on Julien’s resolve: it is not enough for him to love France; he must commit himself to it through dedication and self-sacrifice. As the boys develop such commitment, their movement becomes a trajectory for national regrowth: childhood in A Tour of France is a figure for the possibility of national renewal, and education a figure for its realization. The process of rendering the nation visible that forms the center of A Tour of France unfolds through a dialectic between modes of transportation and nodes of productive activity. (It is no coincidence that the book appeared around the time republicans were laying plans to create a national market through transportation projects.)30 The argument that the nation is formed by the expansion of economistic intercourse among its members, seen in the work of Fukuzawa and Turner, for example, is transformed here so that the crucial activity is not circulation itself but rather a 128

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conscious recognition of the phenomenon of circulation as national. The connection begins to appear in Bruno’s description of the boys’ tense passage into French Lorraine: It was near morning that they finally reached the pass.   Finding themselves on the other slope of the mountain they suddenly saw the French fields extending to their feet, lit by the first rays of the dawn. . . . They lifted their souls toward the heavens, and with deepest gratitude to God they murmured:   —Beloved France, we are your sons, and we wish to remain worthy of you all our lives!   When the sun appeared, setting the summits of the Vosges aglow, they were already far from the frontier, out of all danger. Holding each other by the hand all the while they walked joyously on a French road, marking their pace like young conscripts.31 When primary education became compulsory, readers of A Tour of France might indeed have felt like conscripts, but what is notable is that upon crossing the frontier the boys put themselves on not just a road but a French road that leads to both their own education and national renewal. Crossing the border to reach this road demonstrates their commitment to France, which henceforth takes command of their education by providing a seemingly endless series of benevolent adults to help them on the way. Time the boys spend with one such mentor illustrates the role that nodes of production, the second part of the dialectic, play in making the nation visible. A trader named Monsieur Gertal takes them on a horsedrawn circuit from Besançon to St. Etienne, revealing a network of economically specialized locales linked by lines of transport and communication. Such a network forms the basis for a national division of labor in Bruno’s representation of the nation and its social order. The towns, departments, and provinces that the boys visit are identified by particular economic activities, almost all artisanal in method: production of clocks in Besançon, wine in Burgundy, pots, cutlery, and lace in Auvergne. Commentators have often remarked that this is a nostalgic and distorted picture of France, at a time when industrial production was well established in certain areas and capital dominated economic life.32 There is more at stake than economic nostalgia, however. Bruno takes a pre-Smithian approach to the division of labor: unlike Adam Smith, who considered the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” the cause of economic specialization rather than its result, Bruno presents specialization as the expression Decline and Renewal

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of a regional identity prior to trade and comparative advantage.33 What becomes visible to the brothers on Gertal’s circuit is the essentialized economic identity of each part of France. To the extent that the different regions’ activities are innate rather than the result of specialization, the division of labor reflects the essential interdependence of the nation as a whole. In this sense, the division of labor revealed to André and Julien as they travel through France defines a national interior that consists of a reunion of small producers and of the regions in which they live. Bruno’s phenomenology of circulation produces a seemingly preexistent totality, “France,” that forms the ground for the mutually dependent nodes of productive activity that the brothers glimpse on their voyage. The totality of the nation projects its constituents (regions, individuals) and appropriates them to itself in a process called the realization of national unity. Although these constituent parts appear to have separate identities, their existence as interdependent parts of the nation is implied by the logic of national history. Michelet’s assertion in Introduction to Universal History that France is the sum of the characteristics of its regions moves toward such a vision of organic interdependence accomplished through the movement of history. The image of the nation that emerges in A Tour of France, however, both places greater stress on the accomplishment of unity and, in its hortatory tone, shows itself less confident that such unity will be accomplished without intervention. The presumption of unity raises the specter of its failure and produces the call for complementary and antagonistic differences alike to be actively reconciled at the level of the nation. For Bruno, such reconciliation proceeds through exchange of patriotic sentiment among natives of the different parts of France. While the brothers are crossing from Marseilles to Cette on a coastal trading ship, an argument begins over which part of France is superior. Sailors make the case for Provence, Nice, and Corsica, and Julien for Lorraine, when André breaks in: “Let us say that the entirety of France, the fatherland, is for all of us the dearest thing in the world.” The crew responds in unison, “Bravo! Long live France!” and the captain, “Long live the French fatherland. . . . When it comes to loving or defending her, all her children are of one heart.”34 In this resolution of the dispute, the crew maintains its various provincial loyalties while affirming among itself the mutual sentiment of loyalty to the nation. Such celebrations of regional diversity amid national unity were typical of school manuals during the Third Republic.35 Through the captain’s allusion to the confrontation with Prussia, 130

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Bruno drives home the lesson of mutual dependence. In the last instance— national survival—every difference must submit to the nation, albeit as a positive affirmation of belonging.36 Differentiation forms the highest demand for integration. It is no coincidence, one must note, that in this scene such integration is accomplished by exchange of sentiment among the members of the male crew. In the homosocial world of circulation in A Tour of France, women are only accessories in the nation’s rejuvenation, their role limited, as the example of the schoolteacher in Epinal attests, to encouraging boys and men to serve the fatherland. Bruno’s stress on education in the reconciliation of differences transforms what could be a static view of the nation into a philosophy of history. The argument of A Tour of France is not that Corsicans and Lorrainians must get along or perish together but that they must become French at the same time that they are (inherently) Corsican and Lorrainian. The space that the manual defines through the national division of labor thus becomes a space of national history proper at the moment when André and Julien begin the tour that transforms them and the student-reader into French subjects. Here the network of roads that the brothers travel and the network of schools are isomorphic: extending the network of roads initiates a circulation of goods among regions, and the network of schools a circulation of knowledge and patriotic sentiment among members of the nation.37 By contrast, anything that blocks free circulation— such as speaking in dialect, a bad habit Bruno dissects in a visit to Dauphiné—is contrary to the history of national becoming. The problematic is easily recognizable: in Japan and the United States, too, isolation was seen as “the mother of barbarism” (in Strong’s phrase) and an obstacle to history. In A Tour of France the perfection of circulation among members of the nation opens the possibility of a unity of will in common dedication to national regeneration and progress. The message of interdependence and obligation resounds in the conclusion of the brothers’ travels. Having found Frantz and officially gained French nationality, they travel to a farm near Chartres whose owner, a friend of the uncle, proposes that the three make the farm their home. To his friend’s declaration that “we no longer will be anything but one family,” Frantz responds, “We all will work, each do our own part. If the war has filled the country with ruins, it is up to all of us, children of France, to efface this sorrow by our work, and to make fertile this ancient French land which never is ungrateful to the hand that cares for it.” Overjoyed “to see himself at last with a fatherland [patrie], Decline and Renewal

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a house, a family,” Julien runs into the courtyard of the farm and shouts, “I love France!” a sentiment that echoes from the hillside.38 In this moment, the boys’ physical tour and their patriotic education converge in the re-creation of a social compact.39 The boys’ itinerary reveals the organic unity of the national division of labor, while their education leads them to recognize the moral obligations that arise from such unity and to commit to fulfilling them. The closure of the narrative in this sense opens toward the future: with André’s and Julien’s education complete, regeneration will begin. Bruno’s representation of the path to reconstructed unity in A Tour of France reveals a number of parallels to the ongoing debates in Japan and the United States. Bruno shows a similar interest in describing the nation as a product of material and immaterial circulation, from roads and the exchange of goods to education and the exchange of patriotic sentiment. While she exalts the identity of regions, Bruno also exhibits a certain hostility toward anything that blocks free circulation, recalling the antagonism of civilization and enlightenment thought in Japan toward custom, as well as the warnings of Strong and Turner against the persistence of foreign habits and foreign histories within the American nation. The importance that Bruno ascribes to education in eradicating such obstacles to progress is the obverse of such hostility and also has its counterparts in the other countries. Another important parallel appears with respect to the United States: the conflation of disunity in the nation with geographic divisions in the territory of the nation-state. All these parallels suggest that the point on which intellectuals in the three countries agreed most—that the nation was in crisis—derives from a certain shared manner of conceiving the nation. Bruno adds to this crisis formation a rhetoric of will that is in some respects a new element. Debates on the nation in France shift from issues of national genesis and progress to regeneration and the resumption of progress through reaffirmation of unity. Although an emphasis on voluntaristic commitment had been present in republican thought since the Revolution, the rhetoric of will in A Tour of France takes shape quite logically in this opening between national formation and reformation. The treatment of circulation is transformed subtly in the process: after the debacle of 1870–71, the initiation of circulation is no longer a primeval moment but rather a choice and commitment on the part of the individual. The decision of André and Julien to place themselves on French roads, which commences their education, becomes a moment of national origin 132

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that is reproducible by every subject of the nation-state. We can say that the moral aspect of circulation observed in representations of national history in Japan and the United States comes to the fore here as the result of the shift in argument from genesis to regeneration. The idea of the border, which becomes something to be crossed to join the nation, is also transformed, a point to which I return after examining the arguments on the national future advanced by advocates of colonialism. For the moment, however, one must consider whether the rhetoric of will that is so important to Bruno’s representation of the nation is limited to this period in France or simply an explicit expression of the undercurrent of anxiety, so readily apparent in Japan and the United States, about the possibility that the nation might not naturally form and achieve unity when the barriers to national intercourse are removed.

The Colonial Transport to Regeneration The revival of interest in colonial expansion in the 1860s closely followed changes in the community of geographers in France. Prodded by Jules Duval, a liberal economist, the Paris-based Geographical Society embraced colonization on the basis of imagined economic and political benefits to France and shifted its work from armchair geography and missions of exploration to the collection of practical, commercial geographic knowledge. Its membership grew rapidly, and in the 1870s provincial geographical societies began to appear, breeding more support for colonial expansion.40 In addition to building the ranks of the “colonial party,” the geographical movement contributed a lasting concern with the representation and analysis of colonial space. Advocates of the expansion and development of the empire commonly drew on theories of social development derived from liberal political economy and philosophy of history. The combination was considered a natural fit in the colonial project, as the title of one tract by Duval, On the Connections between Geography and Political Economy (Des rapports entre la géographie et l’économie politique, 1863), makes clear. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the most prominent proponent of colonialism in the 1870s and 1880s, brought to bear not only geography and political economy but also Saint-Simonian thought, long enamored with colonial projects, through the work of his father-in-law Michel Chevalier, a leading economist in the Second Empire. The numerous book-length arguments for colonial expansion that appeared from the 1860s to the 1880s display formal similarities that bear Decline and Renewal

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description as a genre. Their core is a geographic and economic survey of French colonial holdings, covering history, natural resources, and administration. Surrounding this core, in separate chapters and interjected analysis, are discussions of colonization in the abstract, the history of European colonization, and the history of the French state’s attitude toward its colonial possessions. The latter narrative drives relentlessly toward the conclusion that France made great progress in colonization until the late eighteenth century but disastrously neglected the empire after losing the Seven Years’ War to Britain. The overall structure of such books thus presents the case that colonization is essential to the growth of nations in general, criticizes the French state and the political class for ignoring the empire, and lays out a tableau of the colonies’ untapped potential. The message is clear: France must develop the colonies to restore its own health. The Defeat and the Commune pushed such arguments to the fore in the debate on regeneration, a shift that can be seen in the way that one Third Republic historian, Paul Gaffarel, transformed positions initially taken by Duval in his major work The Colonies and Colonial Policy of France (Les colonies et la politique coloniale de la France, 1864). Both writers argue that France must renew attention to its empire or risk losing it. Duval’s point is that French politics have been too focused on European ambitions: by returning to colonization, France can enjoy in the world the rank it already occupies on the Continent.41 Gaffarel’s book The French Colonies (Les colonies françaises, 1880) borrows closely from Duval (in some cases verbatim) but has an entirely different tone. The extension of French territory overseas “will console us for recent losses of which the memory will not soon fade,” Gaffarel says. In his view the response is clear: “Colonization must be encouraged by all means possible. Immediately recommencing this great work; sowing around our country new Frances [des Frances nouvelles] . . . there lies perhaps the greatest resource and the condition of our future regeneration.”42 From one means of gaining national honor, colonization was transformed into the only—and urgently necessary— means of national renewal. Behind such arguments was a conviction that the nation suffered a problem of closed space with repercussions greater than the territorial loss of Alsace-Lorraine. To Gaffarel the constraints on metropolitan France have created a “surplus of energy” that devours the nation from within, and cycles of recrimination that poison the nation for lack of an outlet.43 The spiritual possibilities of France can be reestablished only by allow134

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ing such energy to circulate externally. In Leroy-Beaulieu’s words: “Our continental politics, lest they bring us nothing but setbacks, henceforth must be essentially defensive. It is outside of Europe that we can satisfy our legitimate instinct for expansion. . . . [Colonization] is the only great undertaking that destiny allows us.”44 The similarity to the arguments of Strong and Turner on the consequences of exhausting “empty” land in North America is no coincidence: relying commonly on liberal theories of social evolution, all conclude that the closure of space stops social progress. The parallel in fact extends further in a privileged role given to Africa as solution to the closure of metropolitan space. Africa, the common argument went, would be for France what the North American West had been for the United States.45 Gaffarel thus muses: “When we surround Africa on the north by Algeria, on the west by Senegal, on the southeast by Madagascar, who knows the destinies that will be reserved for us?” He adds: “After having initiated Europe to political liberty, we will have the happy opportunity to initiate Africa to social liberty and to lavish upon it the blessings of civilization.”46 Gaffarel’s remark suggests two distinct ways in which colonialist writing applied liberal theories of social development. First, proponents of colonization argued that social development had stopped in some parts of the world, but colonization could introduce “savages and barbarians to the arts and faith of civilization,” in a phrase from Duval.47 Second, they maintained that colonization is an essential stage in the development of advanced societies, without which they stagnate. Thus for Leroy-Beaulieu, colonization is “one of the highest functions of societies that have arrived at an advanced state of civilization,” and for France “a question of life or death.”48 The genius—if it can be called that—of the emerging legitimation of colonial expansion was its combination of the argument on the development of the colonizing power with that on the development of the colony. In this view metropolitan regeneration could not succeed without expansion, and the social development of primitive peoples could not succeed without metropolitan intervention. In the process of such arguments, the “new France” encountered in the work of Prévost-Paradol becomes plural. Rather than the self-reformed France that was Prévost-Paradol’s goal in 1868, Gaffarel speaks of a proliferation of “new Frances” around the world. François Roudaire, writing to promote his project for a Saharan sea, similarly says that with the inland sea’s establishment, Algeria “would become a second France [une seconde France].”49 Gaffarel’s and Roudaire’s phrases suggest that colonization was viewed not just as a physical extenDecline and Renewal

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sion of sovereignty but as the reestablishment of a certain idea of France. France may no longer be able to claim that it is the universal nation, to be emulated by all others, but it nonetheless has the opportunity to sow reproductions of itself around the globe. The separate space of a new or second France played a peculiar role as proxy for the faltering metropolitan nation in the writings of colonial ideologists. These writers believed the reason that the social evolution of “barbaric” peoples stops is that the geography of the physical space they inhabit distorts the universal pattern for the development of circulation and therefore creates a malformed social space. Duval argues in On the Connections between Geography and Political Economy that the problem appears both when the absence of natural geographic barriers makes movement too easy, allowing nomadism, and when formidable barriers make it too hard, impeding trade with other areas. In the terms I have used, the first leads to a failure of integration and the second to a failure of differentiation. Both cause what Duval calls a “lag in social progress.”50 Barbarism is thus explained by geographic deficiency, through the familiar connection in liberal thought between intercourse and social development. The benefit of colonization for “backward” areas is the recommencement of social evolution through the correction of such faults of geography. Enormous faith that exchange alone would create progress thus prompted colonial administrators to favor infrastructure projects such as rail and telegraph networks over other types of colonial investment.51 The special attraction of Africa was reinforced by the belief that like the North American West—allegedly, in both cases—the continent was unmarked and empty land. In contrast to European rail lines, which passed through settled areas and had to be laid with political and social factors in mind, French planners considered both the North American transcontinental line and proposed African lines to pass through areas without any existing social structure. Planning could therefore proceed according to purely rational geographic and economic considerations.52 When rationally laid networks of communication and transportation were put in place, a complex society that was capable of exploiting African resources would appear. Despite the parallels that advocates of colonization saw between France and the United States, the type of geographic rationalism at work offers an instructive contrast. Geographic-rationalist arguments for westward expansion in North America purported to demonstrate that western areas were naturally part of the United States. Social institutions would emerge 136

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there once they were formally part of the nation. The geographic rationalism of the emerging colonial ideology in France instead held that the colonies lacked the geographic conditions for normal social development. Such development, according to these theories, had to be accomplished through the rational transformation and management of space. In such an agenda to save colonized peoples from the fatalities of nature, geographic knowledge becomes a tool for the rational planning and administration of “history” itself, where history is conceived as a space as well as a process. The object of colonial management is colonial space; the goal is the initiation, acceleration, and continuing regulation of the process of history within it. Leroy-Beaulieu, writing about the transformation of Arab society in Algeria, provides a felicitous name for the project: colonization is the acheminement à la civilisation of inferior races.53 The phrase can be translated as “transport to civilization,” but acheminement is more literally a “placing on the path.” The resonance with A Tour of France is striking: the act of placing oneself on a French road is the beginning of membership in the nation for André and Julien. But for them the act is one of selftransportation. In the new case for colonialism, shipping is the colonizer’s burden. Although liberal social imaginaries typically assume the social process to be self-contained, colonization for these writers means the administration of social evolution by Europeans on the behalf of peoples who have been unable to commence the process themselves. As in the ideology of civilization and enlightenment in Japan and Senator Dilworthy’s education of the Negro in The Gilded Age, so the peoples of the colonies are to be the object, rather than the subject, of social change. The reform of the space of the colony that such programs envision thus produces not a properly national space of history in the colony but an imperial space organized by racial hierarchy. Colonization forms a racial division of labor based on what Duval calls a “law of geographic psychology,” according to which the farther peoples move from their original “cradle,” the more difficulty they face adapting to new climates. Whites thus live naturally in temperate zones and blacks in the tropics, where they work as “precious auxiliaries” under white guidance. The “universal division of labor among the different races,” Duval says, is the source of harmony rather than conflict if the heart and spirit direct colonization.54 In Leroy-Beaulieu’s view, what binds such an imperial space is the “emigration of capital,” which unlike humans can thrive in any climate.55 Here we find Fukuzawa’s warning about the “mixed residence of money” turned on its head. For both Fukuzawa and Leroy-Beaulieu, capital is the greatest Decline and Renewal

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tool of imperialism. Its promiscuous adaptability threatens national borders for one, while the same quality makes it the medium of a benevolent global hierarchy for the other. But inasmuch as Third Republic champions of colonialism argue that colonization is a stage in the development of nations, the movement of history remains essentially national and the scheme of development universalistic. As in Fukuzawa’s endorsement of imperialism, colonization becomes proof that a nation has been able to advance along the universal path of development and is a “modern people.” The idea that the colony is a new or second France thus is more complex than it first appears. Although Leroy-Beaulieu asserts that “colonization is the expansive force of a people, its power of reproduction, its expansion and multiplication across space” (605), these writers do not argue that colonization is a simple extension of the national-historical space of an advanced society, like territorial expansion in the work of Turner and Strong. Rather, colonization involves the establishment of a subordinate historical space—what Leroy-Beaulieu calls “society in a state of infancy”—that is dependent on the historical space of the metropole (ii). Their progress is conjoined. This view obviously poses problems for the bounding of the national-historical space of the colonizer, which is no longer purely apposite to the spaces of other nation-states but also relies on the space of the colony for definition. Yet like the treatment of imperialism and barbarism in Japanese histories of civilization, in which the existence of barbarism outside the nation is the measure of progress within, the dependent social spaces of French colonialist writing ensure the position of France in the parade of progress. Even if France cannot easily claim to lead the world toward the future, it can at least claim to lead its colonial dependencies there. If creation of the subordinate historical space of the colony thus is vital to national regeneration, then managing the history of primitive peoples is in effect the management of metropolitan regeneration. Appeals for the nation to commit to one therefore also become appeals to commit to the other. Such arguments for colonization present several similarities to Bruno’s program for regeneration in A Tour of France. Like Bruno, colonial propagandists such as Duval, Leroy-Beaulieu, and Gaffarel call for a collective commitment to an equally collective renewal. These writers likewise focus on the active reconstruction of circulation, both physical and spiritual, as the means of renewal. But where Bruno focuses on internal relations and thus on the renewal of internal space, advocates of colonization argue that renewal will take place in the space of the colony and through 138

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the interaction of metropolitan France with that space. The contention that colonization must proceed because it is a necessary stage in the life of a nation has parallels, already mentioned, to Fukuzawa, for whom imperialism is a measure of civilization, and Strong and Turner, who imagine that national evolution halts when a nation’s borders are fixed. As in the case of A Tour of France, the significant difference from these examples is the concern of colonialist propaganda with regeneration. In Bruno the focus on regeneration is a source of the rhetoric of will that emerges to reconcile national formation and reformation. The idea that the colonies are “new” or “second” Frances introduces a new element to the rhetorical configuration. In the colonialist argument, regeneration is no less an act of will, but it occurs elsewhere and therefore produces a spatial double for the nation. When Leroy-Beaulieu says in the final pages of On Colonization that “a people that colonizes is a people that lays the foundations of its grandeur in times to come and of its future supremacy,” he moves the national future outside the boundaries of the nation (605). We can read this new configuration in several ways. The location of France between past barbarism and a managed future amounts to an assertion that whatever its present problems, France remains on the path of linear advance toward the future, its own transport to civilization. The assertion is homologous to one seen in histories of civilization in Japan regarding the production of particularity. In histories of civilization, however, the in-between position of Japan means that it can both advance toward civilization and remain Japanese. Moreover, while histories of civilization locate both past barbarism and future civilization elsewhere, they do not locate them in the same place: civilization is in Europe, barbarism vaguely in the parts of the world that are neither European nor Japanese. In contrast, by locating the future in the colonies rather than in Europe, French writing on colonization neatly avoids conceding the geographic position of the future to a European rival such as Germany or Britain. The strategy moreover preserves the idea of the universality of the French nation—within the limited domain of the space of empire. France remains the exemplar and agent of civilization within this space. The duplication of France indeed is the proof of its universality, proof that depends in the last instance on conquest. Yet the aspiration to manage the history of the colonies, rather than prove French universality on the Continent, is a significant shift in the conception of national-historical space. The aspiration to manage history is a final point of similarity between colonialist writing and A Tour of France, to which I now turn. Decline and Renewal

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The Borders of Community In A Tour of France, Bruno issues a command to unite in a community of will and maintains that such a community is the foundation of renewal. She presents the argument through a particular representation of the relations of the French regions to each other, in the form of a national division of labor, and ultimately through the reunion at the farm near Chartres, which forms a model for a nation committed to rebuilding. The evangelists of colonial expansion issue an equally strong demand for commitment and offer colonization as the vehicle for a regeneration that will take place outside France. Connecting the two programs is the idea of a delimited space for national regeneration where reformation can be administered as a second act to the nation’s formation. The forward-looking optimism of their position, however, is founded on a type of ultimatum: to enter the sanctuary of national regrowth, one must join the community of will. These programs for the future effectively define and police a community of will contiguous with the space in which regeneration is to occur. The existence of such a community requires that social divisions be set aside for the cause of the nation, and we can thus say that such a program of defining the community ultimately is a plan to manage political conflict, in which such divisions are rooted. The entire scene at the end of A Tour of France, where the new family vows its commitment to the future, demands to be read as a synecdoche for the nation: the unity of will achieved on the farm is a microcosm of the unity Bruno envisions as the basis for the regeneration of all France. The scene introduces another spatial figure into a philosophy of history that already has a strong spatial orientation, and thus begs the question of how this scene of reunion, the national division of labor that Bruno elaborates through the brothers’ journey, and the always lurking question of AlsaceLorraine are connected. The beginnings of an answer appear in another reference to national union in the manual, a caption appended to an illustration of the Place de la Concorde, which the brothers visit in Paris. The square first was named for Louis XV, who commissioned it in 1753, then was renamed Place de la Révolution in 1792 and during the Terror served as the place of execution for, among others, his grandson. In one of its final acts, the Convention (the assembly in place from September 1792 to October 1795) named the square Place de la Concorde, reflecting a post-Thermidor view that revolution must give way to union. Under the Restoration, the name changed 140

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once more to Place Louis XV, then Place Louis XVI, not to become Place de la Concorde again until 1830 with the establishment of the July Monarchy. A number of statues were added in 1836, following a plan that dated to the revolutionary era.56 The history of the square and its name thus tells some eight decades of the political history of France. Bruno’s caption, however, reads: “THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE IN PARIS.—The Place de la Concorde is the most beautiful and the most monumental of Paris. It is adorned with eight colossal statues in stone which represent the principal great cities of France, among which concord must reign.”57 Antagonistic factions become cities, facing each other across a square; the space of the square itself becomes an enactment of unity among them. The name of the square is another name for the space of the nation. This space and its name, moreover, are timeless: the square has no history but rather enacts a union that is geographic, not political. There can be little doubt and less surprise that Bruno avoided the history of the square to keep the difficult facts of French history out of the manual, as she did elsewhere.58 What is revealing is the route around history that she chose. In this transformation, political and social divisions become a “regional” problem. The question that follows is: What relationship among the regions will produce concord? These few lines of a caption offer a place to begin rereading the spatial figuration of unity in A Tour of France. Bruno’s representation of a France that is unified in and because of its diversity is not simply concerned with geographic relations among parts of France. Rather, the figure of unityin-diversity transforms the political and economic divisions that plagued the early Third Republic into spatial categories. Such divisions were multiple and overlapping, and the displacement is therefore overdetermined. (There would be no point in trying to map them onto specific regions, in a banal contention that conservative Catholics “equal” the Vendée, site of civil war in revolutionary times, for example.) What is important is that Bruno envisions the possibility of unity as a unity in space. Bruno’s formal resolution of the national ills literally maps out a tolerance and reconciliation freely undertaken among parties that disagree innately (they are fixed in place). France will have its parties, as it has its cities, facing off across the Place de la Concorde; what Bruno demands is that the square live up to its name and that all work for the greater good of France. Bruno’s economistic vocabulary, however, demands that such a transformation of social divisions into spatial ones be read as more than an enunciation of political tolerance. That the cities ringing the Place de la Decline and Renewal

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Concorde are fixed in place recalls the essentialized national division of labor in the economic relations of regions in A Tour of France. The preSmithian argument extends to people. Few people legitimately move in A Tour of France, despite the stress on circulation. The parties engaging in exchange pursue their occupations in one place while the fruits of their labor travel throughout the country. Beyond the few men who travel because it is their job to carry these products, only André and Julien move about freely, and the closure of the narrative puts an end to their exceptional mobility by establishing them in a place where they will live and work for the rest of their lives, in humble occupations to which they seem innately drawn.59 Keeping in mind that geographic and economic identity in A Tour of France are the same, the import of this strategy is clear: if geography is destiny, then class position has the same status and must be accepted. A peculiarly voluntary naturalization of relations of production in the name of national unity thus emerges from the transformation of social into spatial division in A Tour of France. Although the scope of the community of the nation is outlined by relations of exchange, Bruno ultimately bounds the community with a subjective attitude that is a mixture of will and acquiescence. That acquiescence is a condition of membership in the nation is paradoxically clear in the primer’s most important act of will: the brothers’ determination to cross the border from Alsace-Lorraine to France. Losing the nation is, as the entire narrative of the boys’ journey attests, the ultimate trauma; there is in this sense no possibility of resisting the call to join. The border between France and Alsace-Lorraine thus signifies more than a territorial boundary shifted by the Prussian defeat. Critics generally agree that Bruno was not a partisan of revenge against Prussia, and indeed, regaining the provinces has no role in the narrative resolution of A Tour of France, even though their cession to Prussia is the premise of the plot.60 Yet in an important way the provinces remain “lost,” not German: they are outside networks of national circulation (material and spiritual), out of reach of the schools of the Republic, cut off from the communicative movements through which Bruno constructs the totality “France.” Their character is purely negative, established in binary relation to the positive characteristics of the nation. They are, moreover, “prenational” in that this negative state precedes accession to nationality and participation in the nation’s progress, not just by these boys but by every subject. In this respect, the border that the brothers cross is a line between a space lacking nationality and the space of national history. If crossing the 142

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border by every subject is necessary for the nation to form—or reform— then the border is more than a physical boundary and in fact is constitutive of national history: a line around national-historical space that is not party to the movement of history but makes that movement possible. If every subject must cross it, moreover, then the border assumes a coercive quality: cross this and enter the time of the nation, or refuse and remain impoverished, ignorant, and orphaned. Directed toward the interior rather than the exterior, such a border marks the conditions of social reconciliation: to wit, the demand that all subjects set politics aside and ac­cept membership in the nation as the basis for individual identity and social order. Bruno thus asserts that the nation forms before politics and can regain its state of prepolitical grace through collective will. “AlsaceLorraine” in this sense is the name of a logically rather than physically external space in A Tour of France that exists as a warning against rejecting the community of the nation by, for example, attacking its actual political and economic foundations. In Turner’s essays, the frontier serves as both the origin and the telos of national history. Americans are created at the frontier, and the movement of the frontier marks the movement of history. The border in A Tour of France obviously does not move in the manner so important to Turner. There is, moreover, nothing on the other side of Turner’s frontier—its significance is its effect on the settler. Yet as in Turner’s essays, the border in A Tour of France does mark the origin of nationality: the national subject is created by crossing it. Moreover, the perpetual existence of an external space of prenationality is as crucial for Bruno as the perpetual movement of the frontier is for Turner. With her stress on the willed crossing of a border that is more ontological than physical, Bruno may arrive at a solution to the problem that Turner encountered in the “closure” of the North American frontier, toward which he was only able to gesture in his remarks on education as a means to continue Americanization. In the process, however, the apparent openness of Turner’s vision of nationality—available to all who collaborate in the expropriation of “free” land—is replaced by a more evident coerciveness in which acquiescence is the condition of belonging. While the advocates of colonization in the Third Republic have a different view of France’s future, their view of the task of national regeneration tends toward a similar argument on the necessity and means of restraining social conflict. The articles and reports written by François Roudaire promoting the creation of a sea in the northern Sahara are parDecline and Renewal

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ticularly revealing examples of the ways that proponents of colonization presented colonial space as a space for the management of a national history without politics. Colonial enthusiasts considered the Sahara, a gigantic void separating French holdings in North and West Africa, a particularly important obstacle to overcome.61 Explorers and scholars began entertaining the idea of creating an inland sea in the 1860s. Roudaire’s involvement began when he took elevations of the region of the chotts, a series of saline depressions between the Aurès range and the Sahara, on a cartographic expedition for the colonial army in 1872–73. He published the first of his prospectuses in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1874, arguing on the basis of his surveys that the chotts were below sea level and were the remnants of the Bay of Triton, a sea that made the region prosperous in ancient times. The lost sea—whose existence Roudaire claimed to have demonstrated from textual evidence—could be re-created by opening a canal from the Mediterranean to the easternmost chott, near the Gulf of Gabès on the southeastern coast of Tunisia, and simply letting the waters return to their former bed. The result would be a body of water fifteen times the area of Lake Geneva. After Roudaire’s initial account, a Saharan-sea lobby formed, including the influential figures of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had completed the Suez Canal in 1869, and Henri Duveyrier, the foremost French explorer and scholar of the Sahara.62 Roudaire received the gold medal of the Geographical Society of Paris and spoke to acclaim at the second International Congress of Geographical Sciences in 1875.63 Gradually questions mounted about Roudaire’s data (one of the major chotts was above sea level), not to speak of the project’s feasibility and cost. Amid claims that the project was “science fiction,” public enthusiasm for such ventures shifted to a plan for a railroad across the Sahara, then nearly vanished when an expedition for that project was massacred in 1881.64 The benefits of the project were as protean as the plan was implausible. First among these was creation of a new watershed that would soften the climate of Algeria and allow agriculture to flourish. Water transportation would improve the commercial climate as well by stimulating trade. Because the army would be able to establish and supply garrisons along its southern edge, the sea would speed pacification of the remote southern parts of the colony. Taken together, such benefits made the sea an invaluable instrument for introducing civilization to the region: sedentary, productive activity would replace savage, nomadic isolation. Such an accomplishment would be to the renown of the nation: Roudaire saw no 144

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contradiction in claiming that the project would benefit all humanity, but that France would reap the harvest of its glory. The mixture of economic, scientific, and nationalistic motives was typical of colonialist thought at the time.65 Roudaire begins his first proposal of 1874 by setting out a series of dichotomies between the northern and southern parts of Algeria. “Nowhere are the contrasts of nature more surprising than to the south of the province of Constantine,” he says. There the highest mountains in Algeria dominate the low sandy regions of the Sahara in a confrontation of “two opposed worlds”: on one side stretches a range of snowy peaks whose slopes are covered with pastures, forests, and “picturesque villages,” and on the other lies “a plain desiccated by a burning sun, a horizon without limits, a few oases lost in space.” To the north live “an industrious, sedentary people that loves the soil,” among whom “blond, blue-eyed types” are common; to the south, black-haired nomads “who have no other roof than their tent, no other work than their incessant march across the desert, no other resources than their herds of camels and sheep.”66 The worlds Roudaire describes are opposed by irreducible differences: vertical versus horizontal, pastures versus sand, fertile versus arid, blond versus blackhaired, et cetera. Supporting the dichotomies themselves is a logic of lack and absence that resembles the logic of the border in A Tour of France: the north has water, villages, purpose, and wealth; the south has none of these. Rather than possessing positive characteristics of its own, the south is marked only by the absence of the conditions necessary for civilization to install itself. The greatest of these deficiencies is any large, fixed geographic feature that would bound, divide, or otherwise define this space and bring an end to the inhabitants’ ceaseless peregrination. A lack in nature means a lack of society. In its simplest outlines, the correction of natural deficiencies that Roudaire envisions will involve a movement from one pole to the other of the various dichotomies in his description of the region: from arid to fertile, from nomadic to sedentary, and, most broadly, from blank and horizonless to delimited, determined, and ultimately controlled. Roudaire frequently describes the transformation in a military vocabulary, as when he declares it to be “fertility and life substituted for sterility and death, civilization repulsing fatalism.”67 The parallel between the repulse of fatalism by the sea and the military repulse of Kabyles and Arabs during the preceding decades is unmistakable: the construction of the sea effectively becomes a figure for the conquest of Algeria—of Decline and Renewal

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which the return of the waters would be “the crowning achievement.”68 Rather than driving back local peoples, Roudaire imagines the more momentous achievement of driving back the sterility and fatalism to which geography has condemned them. The connection is not merely rhetorical: as Roudaire describes the sea, seizing control not of territory but of the geographical organization of space is repulsing fate and replacing it with civilization. The opposition between civilization and fatalism in Roudaire’s reports is revealing for its reliance on the theories of social evolution embraced by Leroy-Beaulieu and other advocates of colonial expansion in the Third Republic. Civilization is a product of circulation in a structured space, that is, a product of history, while fatalism is the consequence of repetition, the “incessant march” across blank desert. The repulse of fatalism by civilization thus recommences a linear progress that categorically negates the aimless movement that overtook the peoples of the region with the disappearance of the Bay of Triton. The rescue will be accomplished through the creation of what is not just an artificial geographic space but a man-made space of history. The power to understand and control space becomes the ability to transform the character of colonial subjects by administering their history. Such power comes with obligations. Roudaire writes that upon glimpsing “the possibility of transforming sterile and unhealthy marshlands into a sea that would carry life and fertility into dismal and desolate regions,” he concluded it was his duty to dedicate himself to the project.69 Because indigenous peoples are unable to control nature—to transform their character—Roudaire and France must do it for them. Roudaire’s talk of duty raises the question of what his project would do for France beyond invigorating metropolitan commerce through trade with North Africa. It is no surprise that Roudaire’s proselytizing returns frequently to the idea of recuperating French prestige. “Current events,” he writes in 1881, “place upon us a duty to direct more than ever our efforts toward the development of our influence and our prestige in Africa. The project of an interior sea . . . cannot fail to command the attention of all those who concern themselves seriously with the grandeur and prosperity of France.”70 Clearly by creating “grandeur,” the sea would be a means to establish une plus grande France, the “greater France” that proponents of colonization considered the foundation of metropolitan renewal. In keeping with the vocabulary of colonialist argumentation, Roudaire describes the recuperation of French stature in terms of transportation and trans146

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mission: the project “would have immense repercussions all the way to the center of Africa, and would carry the influence and prestige of France there to a high degree.”71 That Roudaire’s phrasing here is nearly identical to his declaration that the sea would “carry life and fertility into dismal and desolate regions” reveals that the reform of colonial space and the regeneration of France are not simply parallel but actually the same process for him. The tangible circulation of goods that the sea would make possible becomes almost completely conflated with a quasi-material invigoration of spirit, as when Roudaire declares that “from the banks of the new sea, our accumulated influence and prestige would radiate toward the center of Africa.”72 Pursuing this language of the transmission and transport of grandeur, it is clear that for Roudaire the interior sea would make possible the regeneration of France through the extension and invigoration of national circulation—the integrative trope of intercourse fundamental to nineteenth-century representations of national history. Roudaire’s promotion of the sea as a means to establish a greater France therefore peculiarly imagines the transfer of the real activity and motor force of national history to the man-made space in North Africa that will have the sea at its center. The initiation of the process of social development there will be the key to resuming the movement of history in metropolitan France. Such a conclusion is supported by analogies that Roudaire makes between France, Algeria, the Mediterranean, and the Saharan sea on the basis of climate. Roudaire predicts that “the interior sea would be for Algeria what the Mediterranean is for France”; that is, just as the Mediterranean moistens and softens the dry winds from North Africa that would ravage southern French agriculture, so the inland sea will protect Algeria from the winds blowing directly off the Sahara.73 The analogy is more than an argument about climate: it positions Algeria as a parallel or even as a mirror of France. It is in such a role that Algeria will play a decisive part in French history. Roudaire’s contention (quoted earlier) that Algeria will become a “second France” after creation of the sea is merely the most direct statement of the position, which appears repeatedly in his writing on the project: France is stymied in Europe but can flower again in Africa if the continent’s hostile terrain is civilized in the likeness of the colonizer. Roudaire’s plan for the salvation of France can be read as a response to the problem of closed space, but the importance he invests in the reform of physical territory indicates that another sense of closure is also at stake. Roudaire’s legitimation of the sea as a means to establish a second France Decline and Renewal

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follows from a belief already encountered in colonialist writing that the process of social evolution can be isolated and managed, in a word, enclosed. Indeed, one suspects that the idea of colonization as the initiation of new social processes—shades of Turner—appealed precisely because colonization of such a type would make possible the scientific observation and manipulation of social relations and social development. The second France that evangelists of colonization such as Roudaire, Duval, Leroy-Beaulieu, and Gaffarel envisioned in the early decades of the Third Republic would be scientifically organized, rationally administered, and marked by consistent, linear progress. The key would be control over nature through the control of space. This is not just a matter of administering the history of the colonies, however. Characterizations of the colonies as “new” or “second” suggest that the real aspiration is to create a proxy for the management of the national-historical space of France, through which the internal conflicts and foreign debacles that have pushed the nation into decadence can be neutralized and prevented. In the relationship between colonial and metropolitan spaces of history in Roudaire’s project, therefore, an apparently diametrical reversal of the idea of colonization as the induction of savages to civilization emerges. The project is addressed less to North Africa than to identifying and correcting flaws in metropolitan France. Where metropolitan programs to create networks of schools and roads had to contend with messy social reality, Roudaire and those who laid the theoretical ground for his project idealize the colonial space of North Africa as lacking history and therefore—most importantly—as free of its burden. Untouched by the problems of the French past, this new space will be oriented solely toward the future. Movement forward will be rational and methodical and therefore a pure manifestation of the universality of France. Such progress no longer is possible in the metropole itself—or more properly, in the metropole alone, because continental politics and France’s own internal discord have brought the nation to a point where progress can be realized only through colonization. We can say, then, that the transfer of the location of the national future from continental France to the colonies is quite literally an attempt to escape from the difficulties of metropolitan history into a domain that, actual programs of colonial conquest notwithstanding, was to be founded not on politics or conflict but on rationality.

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A Nation before Politics In these writings promoting colonization and Bruno’s A Tour of France alike, transit from one space to another plays an important role in creating a rejuvenated nation free of political divisions. In Bruno’s case, what is at stake is transit from a nonnational space, cut off from the benefits of progress, to the community of the nation. In the case of the colonialists, it is transit from stagnant continental space to the colonies, which emerges as the “transport to civilization” of both colonized peoples and their would-be masters. In both, commitment to the nation brings such a transit from decline to futurity. The condition of passage, however, is that politics must be left behind. This is true whether the external space in question is what one leaves (for Bruno) or what one enters (for LeroyBeaulieu and his cohort). For each, membership in the community of the nation is logically prior to political conflict, and so, therefore, is national history. Politics can only impede history’s movement. Needless to say, there are evident differences: the ideal of technocratic administration in colonial ideology, illustrated most vividly in Roudaire’s project, tends toward a permanent surrender of politics in favor of governability, while Bruno’s idealization of the Republic at least implies the possibility of deliberation that does not imperil the nation, even if André and Julien never meet a member of the political class. Yet the common reliance on the idea of transit in the program of regeneration shows the extent to which advocates of colonial expansion and Bruno consider the exclusion of fundamental dissent from the historical space of the nation to be essential to national reformation and the proposition of a national future. Underlying the privileged position that such arguments give to national unity over dissent is the logic of nineteenth-century liberal theories of society, which, as seen in Meiji-period histories of civilization, construes social development as the expansion and perfection of networks of intercourse and exchange through the elimination of internal barriers. A split in the rhetoric of the Japanese genre between intercourse among members of one nation and members of different nations marks an inversion that endows this domain with historical interiority and naturalizes the nation as the spatial domain of social development. The delimitation of national-historical space that results is a means to place Japan in the world and describe its relations with imperialist powers as relations among nation-states. The strategy is supported, however, by an endorsement of imperialism that runs counter to these histories’ apparent ideal of soverDecline and Renewal

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eignty for every nation. Intellectuals in the United States of the Gilded Age, in contrast, rearticulate nineteenth-century systems of social evolution in the context of a settler society. For them, accounting for the movement of the physical borders of the country is an important challenge in crafting representations of national space. More crucial, however, is the challenge of explaining the formation of a national community from disparate elements. Efforts to chart the transformation of social complexity into a unified nation variously stress the obliteration of social difference by force (in the case of Strong) and by self-transformation (in that of Turner). Neither approach, however, produces a stable vision of community, a faltering that suggests an essential instability in the representation of the space of the nation in national history. During the first decades of the Third Republic in France, we find the common vocabulary of social development directed toward the problem of domestic and European political turmoil and the apparent demise of the ideal of France as the universal nation. The arguments on regeneration that appeared in the 1870s and 1880s amplify the hortatory, jeremiad-like stance seen in Japan and the United States to produce a rhetoric of will that stresses commitment to reversing the national decay. The political implications of the epistemological bounding of national-historical space, already seen in demands for self-civilization in Japan and Americanization in the United States, become most clear here: commitment to the nation as a form of community is the condition for entry into it. Note that such a commitment is, ultimately, a willingness to have history, that is, to become national. The nation and its members have such willingness in common: in this respect, the history of the national subject and that of the nation are one and the same. In such an ideological amalgamation of will and history, resistance to transformation, whether by lingering identification with a region or an immigrant country of origin, preservation of precapitalist customs, or rejection of the political settlement that founds the nation-state—its Place de la Concorde—amounts to a failure of both individual and national will, because resistance exposes heterogeneity in the space of the nation. We have encountered two characteristic reactions to the presence of such internal difference. The first is a sense of crisis so ubiquitous as to seem endemic to national ideologies, expressed as alarm that the “natural” formation and consolidation of the nation will be blocked by recidivists. The second consists of arguments for an active stance toward the nationalization of the people. A tutelary attitude toward the unnationalized masses is most 150

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typical in this case, but the threat of force is implicit, as seen in Strong’s prophecy of extermination and the ease with which theorists of French colonialism speak of pacification in the context of national reform. What I have referred to as a latent moral quality of intercourse and exchange in the rhetoric of national history comes to the fore in such arguments for active programs of nationalization. On its face, such “morality” is an obligation to other members of the nation or, in other words, is the so-called national bond. Membership in the nation is natural but must be affirmed by observation of the obligation. To ignore the obligation is to betray the nation. Analyzing the spatial rhetoric of national history, however, suggests that the truth of the obligation is a categorical rejection of any politics questioning the existence of the nation as a natural community or the priority of nationality over other forms of human relations. The frequently encountered charge in France during the Third Republic that the subject bears an obligation to the nation is founded on the idea of the nation as a community formed before politics. The moral quality of circulation and intercourse thus makes possible active programs for forming (or reforming) the nation as a community apparently without politics, as well as the stipulations for entry into the nation found in rhetorical formations such as the border with Alsace-Lorraine in A Tour of France. From this perspective, the epistemological delimitation of nationalhistorical space is a political operation, even as it denies that the nation has political, rather than natural, foundations. When this epistemological structure effaces the historicity of the nation-state as a political form and the nation as a form of community, the scope of dissent against these forms is dramatically restrained. Radical disagreement with political and economic settlements becomes a position without history, the sine qua non of legitimacy in this context. By definition such disagreement cannot “lead” anywhere and cannot become the basis of an alternative form of community. The representation of social space characterized by national inversion, that is, the establishment of a delimited space in which national history unfolds, therefore tends toward the obliteration of political dispute over the nation form. Examples from Japan, the United States, and France show, however, that such representations of national space are unstable and leave the naturalization of the nation only partially complete. The historicity of the nation-state cannot easily be effaced. I turn now from the problem of representing the space of the nation to that of representing its time, which is the domain of a second set of strategies for grappling with the historicity Decline and Renewal

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of the nation-state. Here the political ruptures through which the nationstate is established are the overriding issue because they hinder claims that the nation is of ancient origin and unchanging character. National history approaches the problem through narrative strategies that reveal several similarities to the techniques for delimiting national space just examined. Where national history’s representations of space displace dissent to a prenational space outside the nation, its typical narrative strategies relegate dissent to a prenational past that has been superseded. The motif of becoming national that we have already encountered in Turner and Bruno here is revealed as a temporally complex strategy for producing a single past, present, and future for the nation.

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Chapter 5

The Rupture of Meiji and the New Japan

The spatial operations of national history naturalize the division of the world into a system of nation-states and ultimately the nation-state’s claims on territories and the individuals living in them. I turn now to national history’s temporal operations, a set of strategies for locating the nation-state in time. Separating these two is heuristic: national history’s operations in space and in time are aspects of the same epistemology and contribute equally toward neutralizing objections to the political institutions of the nation-state or to the nation as a form of community. Scholars have explored ways that the temporal operations of national history construct origins and traditions since the 1980s, beginning with the work of Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm.1 The projection of origins into the distant past, through what Hobsbawm named “the invention of tradition,” endows nations with a history that is an important source of legitimacy for the nation-state. Behind the question of the origins that an ideology invents for an individual state, however, a more basic question arises: how is it possible for such origins to be projected into the past at all? National ideologies assert hoary beginnings for the nation, but Fukuzawa, Strong, and others who shaped such ideologies also represent the national state as the vanguard of history itself. Indeed, national history per se carries a contradiction between the agedness of supposed national origins and the novelty of the nation-state that is meant to rest on them. Because the nation-state is a modern political form, the attachment of ancient origins to it should seem so implausible as to be impossible. The question of what makes the projection of national origins possible thus is logically prior to that of the specific origins that an ideology projects, in the same way that the question of what allows the bounding of national

history is prior to that of the ways that an ideology addresses the physical boundaries of the state. The common view of the task of national history is that it must bridge the gap between the present regime and its predecessors, by connecting the Meiji government, for example, to the most ancient institutions of the imperial court in Japan, in order to efface its novelty and convey upon it the legitimacy of age. In reality the task is considerably more difficult. Rather than simply throwing a span across the gap of a revolution, linking to a past that resembles the present save in its incomplete development, national history must confront a heterogeneous past of institutions and identities that may resemble those of the present only remotely, if at all.2 Few of the elements of the past may be suitable for transformation into precursors; many may not be reconcilable with the present in any form. National history cannot simply erase such nonnational aspects of the past from its account of the formation of the nation because they would continue to emerge and contradict assertions that the nation’s rise began in the mists of time. National history must similarly confront a heterogeneity in the present, perhaps still more difficult to address, that Ernst Bloch identified as the problem of noncontemporaneity.3 Affective identities and social practices rooted in localities or occupational groupings, among others, remain visible in the present, contradicting declarations that “the people” exists in a condition of affective unity. Bloch’s work indeed suggests that the challenges that such past and present heterogeneities pose are one and the same, in that heterogeneity appears as a problem only in a view of history as a linear evolution that unfolds uniformly across physical and social geography. Heterogeneous development suggests the possibility of alternative views of history and the formation of communities. Neither arguments à la Hobsbawm that the invention of tradition produces a national past, nor arguments such as those of Anderson, or more recently Laura Berlant, that a sense of simultaneous experience among individuals produces a national present, adequately explain how such heterogeneity is contained and denatured.4 For national history, a genre of knowledge, the problem of heterogeneity must be solved in epistemological terms. The diverse, sedimented forms of identity, community, and social practice that exist in the early period of formation of nation-states and the new possibilities that appear in the interstices of the nationalized society, all of which expose the contingent face of the nation form, must be unrecognizable as such. 156

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That is, they must be recognizable only in subordination to the nation as the keystone of knowledge of past and present alike. The epistemological problem is solved by temporal operations in the space of national history that define the relationship of past to present as national past to national present and recast the various nonnational aspects of human life, whenever and wherever they exist, as stages to be surpassed or aberrations to be eliminated because they are obstacles to progress and unity. We can trace such operations by examining the forms that narrative takes in national history, in particular the caesuras that take shape through periodization and the recounting of climactic events. The mechanisms of such narrative are more complex than those of a linear story. Close attention to the ways that, in the terms of narratology, national history transforms story (events) into narrative shows that political ruptures play a crucial role, not as anomalies to be explained away by a bridging historical explanation but as barriers to be deployed against alternatives to the forms of state and community that emerge from them.5 The narrative forms of national history reveal that as an epistemology, national history is deeply antipathetic to time, if we understand time to reveal the historicity of the nation-state and the possibility of alternatives to it, that is, to reveal contingency and open potentiality. Prasenjit Duara observes that the linear, progressive conception of social change in nationalist views of history presents the nation as the subject of history in a process of increasing self-awareness, but that in such narratives the final accomplishment of national self-consciousness comes with the establishment of a national state, presented as the guarantor of the transparency of the people’s self-knowledge.6 The connection Duara identifies among epistemological transparency, the achievement of national selfconsciousness, and the nation-state is the crux of an essential political assertion carried by the form of national history that parallels assertions in the “content” of its narratives. The characteristic narrative strategy of national history locates alternatives to the nation-state and nationality in the past, as immature positions failing in self-knowledge that have been superseded and are therefore out of reach for the present. Such a strategy closes off elementary dissent in a manner reminiscent of the representation of national space in Bruno and the French colonialists. The caesura between immaturity and self-consciousness, which is marked by the advent of the state, fixes the relationship between the national and the nonnational as an irreversible relationship in history rather than a relationship in politics. The realization of national self-consciousness offers a priviThe Rupture of Meiji

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leged understanding of this history in which nonnational forms of identity and community are merely prenational in relation to the future that they promise and, unlike the present, incapable of full self-understanding. Resistance in the present appears to be literally anachronistic and fundamentally ignorant of the nature of society. When represented as such an awakening to self-consciousness, the political rupture in which the nation-state appears makes a positive contribution to the work of national history: alternatives are on one side of it (the past), and the nation-state is safely on the other. The idea may seem paradoxical, because as moments when the contingency of the nationstate is visible, such ruptures pose a problem in its legitimation. Recognize, however, that although national history cannot hide such events from view, it does not tolerate the appearance that they are less than foreordained. Instead of denying them, national history assigns them a specific meaning: the moment of rupture is the moment of national awakening, made to appear necessary through the form of the narrative itself. The assertion of necessity buttresses demands for collective service to the nation such as the rhetoric of will seen in Third Republic France. We can call such a narrative strategy containment, quarantine, or prophylaxis.7 The specters of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune in France indicate the importance of such ruptures in debates on the character of the nation and its future: to advance a particular representation of the “terrible year” of 1870–71 was to advance a political position. A Tour of France, whose young protagonists lose their claim to nationality because of the war and regain it as they travel in search of a home, also suggests that such a narrative structure was applied to the life of the individual as a mandate to embrace nationality as part of his or her socialization. The example of André and Julien points us to an important concept for understanding the temporality of national history, the idea of national allegory proposed by Fredric Jameson in his much-maligned essay “ThirdWorld Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” The work of allegory in representations of national history is not limited to emplotting the life of an individual as the history of the nation, in parallel motifs of developing self-consciousness. As a device centered on the relationship between two stories—two sequences of events in time—allegory is particularly suited to dealing with the challenge that contingency poses to national history. Close examination of the narrative forms of national history shows that allegory replaces time with a rhetorical structure that

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asserts the necessity of the rise of the nation-state. As the life of the individual is characterized by a youth of latent identity, a moment of awakening to nationality, and a present of mature self-awareness, so too is the life of the nation. Analyzing the way that national allegory moves between individual and national registers as it makes this assertion lets us define more precisely the orientation toward the future so evident in the work of Fukuzawa, Strong, and Leroy-Beaulieu. As Julien’s final exclamation “I love France!” shows, the register of national allegory concerned with the individual typically reaches an unambiguous narrative closure, but the corresponding closure of the register concerned with the nation exists only as a promise of the national unity that will have appeared by the time the unfolding of history is complete. The precise character of national history’s orientation toward the future is a future anteriority based on assertions about what “will have happened” when viewed from a later imagined moment.8 National history thus elaborates not an open-ended future but a near term defined by the development of national unity which is to be followed by the homogeneous, empty time of perpetual social and political harmony. The narrative mechanisms for organizing the relationship of the nationstate to the past in Japan, the United States, and France that I examine in this and the following two chapters show a common reliance on allegory, strategies of containment, and the construction of a future anterior in narrative form. Their instructive dissimilarities reveal differences not only in the “materials at hand” but also in the countries’ respective geopolitical positions. Because of the complexity of devising a distant past for a singular American people, for example, representations of the moment of awakening to nationality in the late-nineteenth-century United States differ from those in Japan and France, tending to focus on what Turner called Americanization. Far from indicating the exceptional status of the United States, however, the difference is characteristic of a settler society, where the affective identifications of immigrants are a locus of anxiety about national unity. Similarly for France, the major challenge of explaining the relationship of the Third Republic to the various revolutions and coups d’état since 1789 is a matter of the particular history of the French state, but also of its changing position in the international system of states. In Japan, to which I turn now, the difficulty of deducing the Meiji regime and its European-inspired reforms from the archipelago’s past was acute, all pronouncements that 1868 was a restoration notwithstanding. The prob-

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lem was the result of both the internal circumstances of the regime’s rise and the press of European imperialism on East Asia which transformed the order of power in the region.

Problems of the Past Although the histories of civilization that appeared in Japan in the 1870s offered new means to imagine the place of Japan in the world, the epistemological bounding of national-historical space could not solve all the problems of legitimation of the new regime because the past had been “in play” in Japanese political discourse since the early nineteenth century. The social diversity of the territory that the Meiji government now commanded also contributed to the problem of the relationship of the new state to the various pasts available for the construction of identities. Although historians such as Albert Craig argue that samurai exhibited a “domain nationalism” that could be scaled up to the level of the nation-state, other social strata held entirely different views of the political geography of the archipelago and therefore potentially quite different views of its history.9 Put more abstractly, the ways national history shaped space offered only partial solutions to problems of legitimacy for the nation-state in Japan and elsewhere. They had to be supported by parallel strategies for the management of time, which in Japan centered on ways to control the meaning of the cleft between political forms on either side of the divide of 1868, and between the social practices associated with the former regime and those urged by the new one. The politicization of the Meiji regime’s relationship to the past can be traced to early-nineteenth-century scholars of the Mito school such as Fujita Yūkoku, who used historical arguments to call for a restoration or revival (chūkō) of the prosperity of the realm through moral rectification. Although these writers’ goal was the reform of the Tokugawa shogunate, the rhetoric of restoration became the basis of demands to replace it with an emperor-centered state.10 In the Meiji state, pragmatists prevailed over true believers in imperial rule, but by accepting the mantle of restoration, they nonetheless broke with precedents for governance and previous views of the historical, as opposed to mythical, formation of political institutions.11 The unprecedented nature of the government’s programs, such as conscription, land-tax reform, and the construction of railroads, also drew debate to the issue because they positioned the “restored” state at the leading edge of social change. (That the year 1868 was referred to as 160

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Meiji 1, reflecting the government’s declaration of a new name for the era, could only strengthen the impression.)12 The arguments the state used to establish its foundation and to justify many of its reforms pointed in opposite directions, so to speak: one into the past and the other into the future. Supporters of the regime or its projects faced the obligation to produce the present and the promised future from the pre-1868 past in a way that restricted political dispute to policy rather than allowing it to contest the new government or the proposition of reform per se. Early efforts in this direction can be found in arrangements made in 1869 to continue the Six National Histories (Rikkokushi), a series of annals whose last volume had been completed some nine and a half centuries earlier. After several reorganizations, the group of scholars convened for the task began work on Record of the Restoration (Fukkōki, 1872–89) and Outline of Meiji History (Meiji shiyō, 1876–86) and ultimately created the foundation for academic historiography in Japan by combining Confucian and Rankean methods. Narita Ryūichi argues that the synthesis fundamentally connected the writing of history to the history of the nation-state.13 The new methodology did not lend itself to outlining a process by which the new political configuration could be said to have emerged from the past, however. The authors of histories of civilization began that project by putting the nation into the flow of history. It was their successors, liberal dissenters asking for democracy as well as progress, who completed it by creating styles of writing that could emplot history as the emergence of a unified people. Several such strategies appeared in connection with the Freedom and Popular Rights movement ( Jiyū minken undō), which began in the mid1870s as a struggle for samurai privileges but developed into a movement for democracy that overshadowed political life through the 1880s. Even the movement’s more radical factions shared many positions with the oligarchic government, for example, that the people needed reforming. Its political thought, however, connected reform to ideas of natural rights and narratives of progress. The activist-ideologue Ueki Emori, for example, argued that constitutional government was the inevitable outcome of social metamorphosis and that the reform of 1868 must be followed by a “second Meiji transformation” (Meiji daini no henkaku) in the near future, an idea developed by Maruyama Namasa into demands for a “second restoration” (daini no ishin).14 Like appeals for a “new” or “second” France, arguments for second events were arguments about wrong turns, in this case that the Meiji government had usurped what should have been the The Rupture of Meiji

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democratic outcome of the fall of the Tokugawa. Beginning in 1880, political fiction that advanced the movement’s views began to appear. As the movement collapsed in the mid-1880s under police persecution and restrictions on the press, such fiction continued the debate on the polity in the form of speculative future tales. One of the best known, Suehiro Tetchō’s Plum Blossoms in Snow (Setchūbai, 1886), establishes a complex temporality that advocates an English-style parliament by predicting a future of prosperity and social concord. The setbacks of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement left many suspicious of ahistorical doctrines of natural rights as the basis for political change. Writers associated with the Min’yūsha, a group formed by Tokutomi Sohō to publish The Nation’s Friend (Kokumin no tomo), a journal modeled after E. L. Godkin’s The Nation, turned to theories of social evolution to argue that the time for “commonerism” (heimin shugi) had come. Sohō and other Min’yūsha writers were particularly attracted to the possibility that, when applied to the past as political theory, evolutionary schemes would explain why civil and political liberties had not already developed in Japan and give reason to believe they would develop in the future. Political confrontation continued, however, on the terrain of theories of social evolution, which could be used to a variety of ends.15 The book that made Sohō’s reputation, The Future Japan (Shōrai no Nihon, 1886), drew on Spencer’s theory of social stages to show that the time for democracy had come, but Katō Hiroyuki convincingly if cynically used the same logic to argue the opposite. According to Katō, the theory of social evolution not only refuted the doctrine of natural rights but also showed that it was disastrous to introduce democracy to a country that, like Japan, had not reached the appropriate stage of development.16 The extent of disagreement should not be exaggerated: Sohō and Katō both considered protection of the independence of the Japanese state to be the foremost task of the moment. The shared assumption that the state, the people, and history were the touchstones of debate on the polity suggests the degree to which intellectuals of various political stripes looked to the past to explain the relationship of the nation-state to those it claimed as subjects. From the mid-1880s until the end of the century, much of intellectual culture turned away from the early-Meiji ideals of progress and civilization in a manner that reflected deepening preoccupation with the relationship of the present to the past. The assertion in the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education that “the bequest of Our imperial ancestors” must be observed “through all times without error and in all places without devia162

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tion” testifies to the extent to which this sea change pivoted on attitudes toward the past.17 Writers and artists revived disused forms, cultural propagandists like Shiga Shigetaka and Miyake Setsurei promoted “preservation of the national essence” (kokusui hozon), and historians constructed a “middle ages” (chūsei) of the late twelfth century to the mid-sixteenth as the source of a vigorous, masculine Japanese cultural identity.18 “MidMeiji” is now recognizable as an era of inventing tradition, including imperial rites, national holidays, and other devices to remember “a mythohistory which had never been known,” in Takashi Fujitani’s phrase. The state added the authority of new traditions to Japanese claims for sovereignty in “ceremonial rivalry” with European powers.19 The element of rivalry reminds us that the crafting of national history always proceeded with implicit reference to the histories of other nations. Thus the protagonist of Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” (“Maihime,” 1890) dallies with European culture as the source of a cosmopolitan self but ultimately embraces an identity as Japanese. Allegorically the story maps the same path for the nation. “The Dancing Girl” is evidence too that these apparently traditionalist currents were in fact modernist in that they were addressed to the transformation of identity. As they work to ascribe meaning to the rift between the present and the past, the works of liberals and modernist conservatives alike reveal a persistent concern to explain the position of the narrative observer vis-àvis the phenomena it observes. In the Japanese sources that are the focus of this chapter, Plum Blossoms in Snow, The Future Japan, and “The Dancing Girl,” the singularities of the past are linked by a linear process of internal accumulation of meaning oriented toward a later moment in which the historical narrator is located. Because the narrators of these texts are consistently located in a national present observing a prenational past, I take narrative structure as an entree to the temporality underpinning national history, which depends on an epiphanic moment when the nation becomes self-conscious. The political future tale Plum Blossoms in Snow offers a first way into analyzing such operations.

How to Write a Second Restoration The Meiji political novel, although frequently dismissed from the canon for relying on the styles and plot devices of Tokugawa fiction and of European writers such as Benjamin Disraeli and Alexandre Dumas père, was closely connected to attempts to devise new ways of representing history The Rupture of Meiji

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and parallel battles over the meaning of the events of 1868.20 Examples of the political novel’s concern with history abound: one of the best known, Yano Ryūkei’s Inspiring Instances of Statesmanship (Keikoku bidan, 1883–84), tells the story of young patriots in fourth-century Thebes who throw off the yoke of Sparta to establish a republican state, as a way of allegorizing the Meiji Restoration and the Freedom and Popular Rights movement. Following the reasoning of Georg Lukács on the historical novel in nineteenth-century Europe, Maeda Ai argues that the political novel was the true historical literature of the Meiji period. Where the historical novel gave narrative coherence to the social changes driven by capitalism in Europe, the political novel responded to a similar need in the political and economic upheavals of the early Meiji period.21 Meiji political novels were not limited to negotiating social change within one national territory, however. They also explored the relationship between a unitary Japanese history (which they were writing) and the histories of other nations including France, Russia, Spain, and Egypt, in addition to Yano’s Thebes.22 In the process, writers of political novels suggested that the histories of other countries could be abstracted as models for the history of the Japanese nation. The universalistic view of history in histories of civilization thus runs through the political novel as well, resulting in frequent assertions that Japanese history was or, if not, will have been an instance of a universal tendency toward the development of democracy. The argument depended on devices to represent the events of 1868 as a step toward the establishment of democracy in Japan rather than the restoration of an emperor-centered state. The desire to counter the latter narrative always underlay the efforts of political novelists to construct imaginative histories of democratic struggle.23 Suehiro Tetchō was an established liberal journalist when he tried his hand at the political novel with A Tale of the Future of the Year 23 (Nijūsan– nen miraiki) in 1886. The title refers to the year Meiji 23, or 1890, the year the government was to open an elected assembly. In the first part of the novel, two observers discuss the political world of Meiji 23: because of the foundation of an “imperfect Diet” ( fukanzen naru kokkai ), the assembly is riven by conflict and unable to pursue the national interest. When one of the men suddenly awakens at his desk at the Chōya shinbun (the newspaper where Tetchō wrote), the reader learns that the year is only Meiji 19, or 1886. The second half of the text is an expository critique of factionalism in the face of the unified oligarchy. The preceding dream of the future has been a way to bring urgency to the issues. The Year 23 quickly became a 164

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model, and more than twenty future tales concerned with 1890 appeared in the following four years.24 Critics often consider these tales’ popularity to reflect the democracy movement’s impasses, when the first political parties had dissolved and the government was imposing ever greater restrictions on dissent. The novels’ sketches of the future incorporate both a critique of present politics and a programmatic vision of the years ahead to counter expectations of rapid progress toward democracy.25 Tetchō weighed in again with Plum Blossoms in Snow in 1886 and its sequel Songbirds among Flowers (Kakan’ō) in 1887, explaining that where The Year 23 describes a sick man’s condition, the new books offer a prescription to cure him, by showing how to establish a “perfect Diet”—for Tetchō, a bicameral assembly on the English model.26 Like The Year 23, Plum Blossoms in Snow opens with a conversation between two unnamed gentlemen, a convention of Tokugawa-era fiction that attests to the reliance of the political novelists on received forms.27 Sitting in the home of one, they remark that it is the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Diet. The year is Meiji 173, or 2040. The guest, musing that “we truly have been blessed to be born into such a prosperous world,” enumerates the signs: Tokyo is covered with tall brick buildings and crossed by telegraph lines and steam trains; its harbor is filled with a trade that shames London and Paris; the country has a vigorous military, and its flag flies across the world. Politically, a revered emperor watches over a wise and experienced Diet, made possible by freedom of both press and assembly. “Our country, known throughout Asia up to a hundred years ago as poor and weak, and despised by the countries of Europe and America,” he declares, “was able to advance its fortunes so much in a short time because his majesty the Emperor was a virtuous ruler and early issued a proclamation founding a constitutional system of government.” Conditions quickly improved after Meiji 23, leaving the friends’ descendants with an everlasting debt of loyalty.28 The host concurs but recalls hearing from a grandfather that around Meiji 13 (1880), strife between the government and the people was high, with the situation so bad from Meiji 16 to 19 that political thought among the people died out. “These being such distant matters,” the host concludes, “we have not the slightest idea how the situation turned around and this blessed world came about.” The guest happily reveals that he has discovered two old texts describing the situation in vivid detail: a book called Plum Blossoms in Snow and its sequel, Songbirds among Flowers, about the lives of a prominent activist and his wife. He opens the first to its table of contents, and they begin reading.29 The Rupture of Meiji

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The story itself commences in Meiji 19 (the year when the historical knowledge of the gentlemen in the frame fails and Plum Blossoms in Snow appeared) and ends in Meiji 23 (the year the Diet opens), with the final scene of Songbirds among Flowers establishing the circumstances through which the guest of the frame discovered the books 150 years later. The frame and the story thus establish three temporal continua: a known past up to Meiji 19, an unknown past between Meiji 19 and 23, and an age of progress that begins in Meiji 23 and continues to the gentlemen’s present. The unknown middle continuum is Tetchō’s readers’ near future and the gentlemen’s past. Its events are filled in by the novel within the novel, through what is prolepsis from the perspective of the reader but for the gentlemen is the recovery of a source-based history. In a circular manner, the gentlemen’s impressive world is “proof” of the veracity of the history, which we discover is ultimately a political argument on how to achieve just such a golden age. The position of the gentlemen in the future thus establishes the authority of the novels’ assertions about the present political impasse. Note, moreover, that by giving the date of the frame as Meiji 173, Tetchō connects his happy future to the originary date of Meiji 1, through the second beginning of Meiji 23. The story of the near future concerns the political and romantic adventures of Kunino Motoi, a democratic activist, and Tominaga Haru, a beautiful and wealthy sympathizer. As a young man, Kunino left his home to seek a political career in Tokyo under an assumed name. There he met Haru’s father, a former samurai who wanted his fortune to benefit the nation, and became engaged to Haru, although he deferred meeting her until he had made his reputation. Afterward government persecution forced Kunino underground, and Haru lost both parents, leaving her with a photo of Kunino as a young man and her wealth in the hands of a maternal uncle. In Meiji 19 Haru attends a speech in which Kunino establishes himself as a man of political vision, but he has given up his alias, and an illness has changed his appearance. In an echo of Disraeli’s Endymion (1880), Haru—now going by her uncle’s surname—becomes Kunino’s benefactress, and romance flickers between the unknowing pair.30 The rest of the story resolves the mistaken identities as Kunino and Haru work for unity among the movement’s antagonistic factions, a project to which Tetchō dedicated himself in life.31 The photo finally settles all questions, and the uncle, moved by the couple’s chaste virtue, reveals a will by Haru’s father that gives nearly all of his estate to Kunino. They will live on Haru’s small inheritance and devote Kunino’s to the movement. Their joyful anticipa166

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tion of the wedding, we are told, “may even have been greater than that with which the people of our country in Meiji 18 or 19 awaited the coming of Meiji 23.”32 Songbirds among Flowers expands the drama of conflict and reconciliation to the nation as a whole, ending with a political settlement among moderates in the government, advocates of democracy, and progressive industrialists; the emperor’s gift of a liberal constitution; and the country’s first elections.33 The closing scene of Plum Blossoms in Snow is laden with support for the political positions that Kunino propounds in the novel: the union of a political intellectual and a wealthy heiress figures the alliance of the educated and propertied classes that Tetchō considered the basis for democracy in Japan. By this logic, their marriage lays the foundation for the second, democratic restoration for which many in the Freedom and Popular Rights movement called.34 Although it has been the object of much criticism, Jameson’s idea of national allegory still offers the most useful framework for understanding this kind of figure as it applies to the nation form. Jameson argues rather reductively that the experience of colonialism and imperialism, which define what he calls the “Third World,” has made “third-world culture” essentially allegorical. All third-world texts are allegorical, he says, in a specific way: they should be read as national allegories. In third-world literature, according to Jameson, “the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself.”35 Tetchō’s comment that The Year 23 was the diagnosis of a sick man, Plum Blossoms in Snow the cure, supports such a reading of the novel by highlighting its self-consciously allegorical nature. The ideologue Ninomiya Kumajirō, who wrote a preface for Plum Blossoms in Snow, was the first of many commentators to recognize this quality of the book in a comment that the “moral” (gūi) was appropriate to the times.36 Aijaz Ahmad and others have pointed out that Jameson’s argument depends on amalgamating large parts of the world into a “third world” whose only common characteristic is a history of colonialism. By this reasoning, literature that does not exhibit a nationalist response to such a history is exceptional and somehow inauthentic.37 That scholars have continued to turn to Jameson’s essay, however, attests that Jameson recognizes something whose importance Ahmad all but dismisses: the ubiquity of national allegories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Plum Blossoms in Snow and Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” are just two examples of Meiji-era texts that present an individual story as a figure for a national story in Japan, The Rupture of Meiji

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while The Gilded Age and A Tour of France by Two Children are evidence that such texts are also ubiquitous in the so-called first world, as Ahmad points out.38 Recent research by Doris Sommer and Katie Trumpener indeed suggests that national allegories constituted a worldwide genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.39 That writers like Tetchō acknowledged the allegorical aspect of their fiction compounds the importance of accounting for it. As a narrative problematic, it would seem, national allegory is characteristic not so much of a totalized third world as of the global system of nation-states and capitalist markets. As a corollary, we can anticipate that national allegories are always allegorizations of the nation in the world, addressing the geopolitical as well as internal conditions through which the nation-state comes into being, in the same way that national histories in general always tacitly refer to the histories of other nations through the mediation of the state and market systems. As Sommer has shown in nineteenth-century Latin American allegories of the nation, the romantic plot and the political plotting in Plum Blossoms in Snow depend on each other to the point that the desires for romantic and political union are coextensive rather than simply analogous.40 The circumstances that initiate the entwined plot tell us much about the stakes. Haru was drawn to the speech where she first glimpsed Kunino out of a conviction that “in today’s world women too need to know a little about politics in order to help men stand abreast with the countries of Europe and America,” she explains, repeating a common position of civilization and enlightenment thought.41 When Haru decides to support Kunino’s activities, however, she encloses money in a letter in which she disguises her handwriting as a man’s. With this step, Haru crosses a line from education to the active participation in public life that, in the world of Plum Blossoms in Snow, is reserved for men. The resulting disruption in public life drives the plot. When Kunino and his benefactress first come face to face in a country spa, they arouse the suspicions of Haru’s uncle and a rival of Kunino, who conspire to keep them apart by spreading rumors that Haru keeps lovers, among other tactics. Shocked, Kunino nearly rejects her before his principles force him to act against their enemies, thereby gaining both Haru’s hand and his political fortune. The disruption caused by Haru’s participation in politics propels Kunino’s success, but once that success is achieved, the question of Haru is settled by a narrative resolution that will place her back in the household. That the untangling of surnames is part of this resolution reinforces the sense that it depends on establishing a paternal authority identified with the nation. 168

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We can find at least three meanings in the betrothal, its interruption, and restoration, which each support Tetchō’s vision of Japanese democracy on the English model. Haru’s move into public life would be unnecessary but for the state persecution that forced Kunino underground and out of touch with her father. When her resources are back in his hands, the natural coalition between intellectuals and the propertied classes blocked by the state is restored. In this sense the betrothal figures a class alliance. In addition to such a figure of union, the betrothal marks exclusions in two different directions that indeed make the union possible. Inasmuch as the political alliance is directed against what Kunino calls “the unpropertied and ignorant lower classes,” the betrothal functions as an argument regarding the masses, who are to be governed rather than to govern.42 Moreover, Haru’s impending disappearance from public life mirrors the position of democratic moderates that women should be excluded from the franchise regardless of education or property. On this point, moderates were aligned with the Meiji state, which in 1890 banned women from political meetings and organizations in response to the prominent role of some in the campaigns for democracy.43 The passing of Haru from her father to Kunino shows both the containment of the masses and women and the means by which they are to be contained, a moderate liberal party. Three readings of the betrothal, but three that are mutually supportive: the elision of women and the masses conjures up the specter of an indiscriminate political desire—recall Kunino’s reaction to rumors of Haru’s promiscuity—that must be kept under control by responsible, male elites.44 That Kunino and Haru are engaged rather than married at the end of Plum Blossoms in Snow produces a fourth reading. Until their union, Kunino and Haru must defer consummation of their desire and indeed sublimate it as service to the nation.45 Those whose aim is national progress must likewise suppress their desire for universal suffrage and other promiscuous “extremisms” until the future of the nation is secure: in politics, prudishness is prudent. Allegorically, the betrothal figures a moment of national unity and awakening, but the element of self-restraint extends from Kunino and Haru to the nation as a whole and introduces an element of futurity—deferred desire—to the closure of a narrative that is already framed by a conceit set in a distant age. The importance of the allegory lies precisely in the fact that the plot of Plum Blossoms in Snow reaches a certain closure yet remains open and oriented toward the future. If we recall that the gentlemen’s “history” in Plum Blossoms in Snow has not yet happened, we can see that through The Rupture of Meiji

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their unfolding, national allegories create histories of things that do not yet exist: neither these histories nor the nations whose past they claim to tell exist before the elaboration of the allegory in narrative. We must set aside the view that allegory uses a “local” story to explicate another—for example, the story of what Jameson calls the “experience of the collectivity” of the nation. Accepting that such a collectivity exists apart from its narration would concede the allegory’s argument. Instead we should follow Sommer’s lead in turning to Walter Benjamin, who treated allegory as a dialectical movement between two registers of narrative rather than a structure of parallel explication. Benjamin regarded allegory not as an illustrative technique but as a form of expression that in contrast to symbol, apprehended in a “mythical instant,” exploits the category of time and is thereby able to offer a “secular explanation of history.”46 Through Benjamin’s analysis, we can see that one aspect of national allegory is a dialectical argument on the relationship between nation and national subject that proceeds through the movement between the histories that form each register. The arc in Plum Blossoms in Snow from mistaken identity to reunion encompasses at once the personal history of Kunino and Haru and an arc in national history from the weak and despised condition of the nation in Meiji 19 to the commencement in Meiji 23 of the prosperous era in which the gentlemen of the frame reside. In one register, Kunino and Haru have found each other; in the other, the nation has collectively found itself. If we consider the passage between registers, the novel’s contention is that survival and self-fulfillment for the subject come in union with something that is both greater and selfsame, and that the sum of such unions constitutes the survival and self-fulfillment of the nation. Clearly these are an active set of political assertions rather than the explanation of a situation that already exists. The very ubiquity of national allegories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates that far from being readily accepted, the assertions had to be represented, which is to say argued, through precisely this sort of narrative, which through its movement between individual and national registers produces an argument on the political constitution of the nation-state. We should note, however, that the stories in the two registers of national allegory do not reach closure in the same way. Although the story of Kunino and Haru is complete in their betrothal, the national story only reaches closure in the form of a promise that the national union sketched out as future history will in fact take place. Sommer observes that, conceptually speaking, national allegories in Latin America are written back170

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ward, from the point of view of their concluding reconciliation.47 The narrative structure of Plum Blossoms in Snow, which announces the fruit of the union before the story of Kunino and Haru begins, only makes the conclusion that we should draw clearer: although seemingly focused on creating history, national allegories are in fact obsessed with the indeterminacy of the future, which they harness through the promise of a unity to take shape in some later moment. The essential temporal opposition in the allegory, then, is between individual past and national future: what has happened for the individual will have happened for the nation. A blank but bounded expanse of time lies between, its content unclear but its outcome nonetheless determined. Far from limited to literary representations of the nation, such a mode of future anteriority characterizes national history in general as it works to transform contingency into necessity.

The History of the Universal in The Future Japan As stalwarts of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement carried on a virtual struggle through the future tale, a group of intellectuals centered on Tokutomi Sohō infused the political views of liberals in the democracy movement with a more complex view of social change. In the 1880s and 1890s, these historians captured a popular appetite for history fed by the need to make sense of the immediate, tumultuous past.48 The group, which included Takekoshi Yosaburō and Yamaji Aizan in addition to Sohō, was influenced by Japanese histories of civilization and so-called Whig histories from England, particularly the work of Thomas Macaulay. The Nation’s Friend, founded with proceeds from The Future Japan, became a venue for liberal historiography. The writing of history offered the hope of finding a basis for popular rights and democracy in the Japanese past, as forthrightly stated in the title of Aizan’s essay “Traces of the Development of Personal Rights in Japanese History” (“Nihon no rekishi ni okeru jinken hattatsu no konseki,” 1897).49 In their work the Minyūsha historians shared with liberal political novelists the desire to assign a specific meaning to 1868. Although their histories ascribed recent events to a long-term process of development, robbing the oligarchy of credit for them, it bears repeating that Sohō and his associates agreed with the government and its allies that protecting the sovereignty of the new state from what Sohō called the “Aryan race” was the crucial task of the moment.50 The preeminence of questions of national interest in Sohō’s early work—including the importance he gave the state in his theory of progress—contradicts the The Rupture of Meiji

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common view that he “converted” to nationalism in the late 1890s when he renounced laissez-faire commonerism for social intervention and imperialism.51 As the title of Sohō’s book suggests, assigning a meaning to 1868 concerned not only the past but also the future. (The title recalls PrévostParadol’s The New France and shares its sense of crisis.) As in Plum Blossoms in Snow, understanding the future from the perspective of the present is a difficult task. Sohō begins The Future Japan by quoting Louis XV’s pronouncement “After me, the deluge” on the future of France, adding the ominous gloss that “now the age of the deluge has come to our country, and we are already bobbing in the surging waves.” The flux has made the future of Japan all but incomprehensible.52 Drawing on motifs from the famous third chapter of Thomas Macaulay’s History of England (1849)— on changes to England since 1685—Sohō says that if one set townspeople from the era of Tokugawa Ienari down in the Ginza (Tokyo’s brick-paved district of civilization and enlightenment), they would be baffled by both city and people and unable “however they tried . . . even to dream that this was their so-called Edo.”53 Judged from the present, all that is certain is that such change will continue: today is an age of reform, and one can only say that “the future of reform is reform, after the deluge there is a deluge.”54 The most immediately striking quality of the first chapter of The Future Japan indeed is the sense of the post-1868 present as a state of permanent change endured to avert colonization. The appearance on the global periphery of such a sense of modernity as enforced impermanence, whose manifestation at the capitalist center Marshall Berman documents vividly in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, is an indication of the terms under which the Japanese archipelago was integrated into the world market and system of nation-states.55 To avoid colonization, Japanese society must enter a state of continuous disintegration and reformation of the social relations of production by ongoing revolution in the means of production. The “new” Japan differs from the old in this quality of incessant change, while its continued existence, Sohō suggests, depends precisely on the condition that such renovation never end. The first “deluge” of 1868 marks the commencement of this protean present and as such constitutes an immense rupture not only in politics but also in social existence and indeed in the perception of the social. Several points that the opening of The Future Japan has in common with Plum Blossoms in Snow attest that such a change in perceptions of the social was widespread. Underlying Sohō’s metaphor of the present 172

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as flood is the tripartite structure of past, present, and future planes that orders the frame of Plum Blossoms in Snow, which both authors connect to problems of knowledge. For Sohō’s narrator and the gentlemen of Plum Blossoms in Snow’s frame, the breadth of change makes understanding the arc of history both difficult and crucial: what must be done now can be known only from the perspective of history’s outcome. Although some have concluded on this basis that The Future Japan is essentially a future tale, the theory of social evolution that Sohō espouses allows him to map the path to the future with apparent precision and to present necessity, rather than the acts of heroic figures like Tetchō’s Kunino, as history’s motive force.56 In applying universalistic theories of social evolution to Japan, Sohō nonetheless introduces another sort of allegory to his book, involving the histories of European countries. Sohō drew most of the theoretical foundation for his argument on Japan’s future from Spencer’s Political Institutions (1882), the second volume of Principles of Sociology. Summarized, Sohō’s contention is that all societies evolve from a militant, aristocratic form to a productive, commonerbased form. All societies are composed of productive organs (seisan kikan), which cultivate the interior, and military organs (bubi kikan), which protect from exterior harm. Each begins with an economy that exists principally to support military organs, creating a bellicose, aristocratic social organization, but the reliance of the aristocracy on productive organs for support gives the productive organs autonomy to evolve toward industrial production, ultimately founding a peaceful social organization centered around commoners. Such societies are characterized by a natural distribution of wealth (Sohō alleges) that puts it in the hands of those responsible for creating it, who become society’s leaders.57 Whether Japan will make the same transition depends on whether its social temper favors military or productive social organs. Sohō examines four criteria to determine this predisposition: the external social (i.e., geopolitical) environment ( gaibushakai shii no kyōgū), the inherent general tendency of society (shakai shizen no taisei ), the specific environment (tokubetsu no kyōgū) of Japan, and Japan’s present form (genkin no keisei ), which is considered in discussions of “the past Japan” and “the present Japan.”58 Essentially what Sohō aims to determine is how and why Japan has diverged from the “general tendency” of social development—the taisei to which his argument frequently returns—by considering what is inherent and what is historical in Japanese society. When Sohō appropriated Spencer, he ignored a problem in Spencer’s The Rupture of Meiji

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scheme to stress the linearity of social evolution and argue for the necessity of a commoner-led society. While Spencer maintained that all socie­ ties tend toward a productive, commoner-based form, he conceded that militant-aristocratic societies might continue to exist. (Germany seemed the exception to his rule.) Spencer’s theory was as much a synchronic typology as a diachronic line of evolution. For Sohō, militant-aristocratic society always is a predecessor, productive-commoner society its necessary successor.59 Although it may seem that the peoples of the Orient (Tōyō) face only the choice of which European people will be their executioner, Sohō says, all the countries of Europe are moving toward peace because the wealth that supports their large military organs pursues its own interests. Even Germany will change when the “sun of trade” (bōeki no taiyō) shines on it.60 Militant societies persist only because of obstruction (shadan) of the normal pattern of development. “The movement of commonerism races across the face of the earth like fire, like lightning,” Sohō declares. “This is the general tendency [taisei] of the nineteenth century. Therefore those who follow the trend [ikioi] will prosper, those who oppose it will perish” (138). Implicit in Sohō’s theory of social evolution is the problem, from which follows an evaluative judgment, that some regions of the world have strayed from the “universal” pattern observed in Europe and cannot avoid suffering for it. Sohō’s consideration of the inherent characteristics of Japanese society rejects the idea that Japan must suffer such a fate, but in doing so argues that the new Japan must break with “the most powerful tyrant”—the past (132). The persistence of militarism in societies is caused by “inescapable” conditions causing internal disunity or posing an external threat that demand strong military organs, but there are no such conditions in Japan. The country is endowed with one “nationality” or “national polity” (kokutai), one “race” ( jinshū), one set of customs, and one language. Its unity derives from mutual profit rather than military coercion, and surrounded by sea, it is free from foreign threats. Because of its “inherent unity” (shizen no ketsugō), Japan has an “inherent nationality” (shizen no kokutai). These and other conditions predispose Japan to follow the “inherent movement” (shizen no undō) toward development of a commercial society (139–44). Sohō’s assertions fly in the face of fact (such as the hundred years of civil war in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) but reflect the emergence in the 1880s of one consistent contention in modern arguments on the origins of the Japanese “people,” that a single people had lived in the archipelago since ancient times.61 Underlying his assertions is 174

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a distinction between what is natural or inherent (shizen) and what is manmade ( jin’i) in Japanese society that reflects the role that terms that might be translated as “nature” played in Meiji political thought.62 The distinction is especially important for Sohō’s philosophy of history: if what is inherent in Japan stems from timeless qualities, by implication what is manmade is historical. Because everything that is inherent in Japan supports the development of commonerism, history will explain why it has not appeared in Japan yet—indeed, history must take the blame. This is on the whole a curious position for an apostle of social evolution, but Sohō does not dismiss history tout court, just the history of Japan.63 When he finally turns to the history of Japan, Sohō attacks the Tokugawa regime for the “man-made restraints” ( jin’i no yokusei) it placed on the people’s proclivity for trade and seafaring, which obstructed social evolution by inhibiting not only trade but also the development of the division of labor. Tokugawa society was structured by the demands of military power to the point that the three Confucian castes of farmers, artisans, and merchants were transformed into a supply corps for the fourth, an unproductive aristocracy.64 Echoing Fukuzawa’s view that historically there was no “nation” in Japan, Sohō declares that in Tokugawa society “there is no people [ jinmin]. That is, there is no society established for the people, there is a people established for society, or rather for the lords and their samurai retainers” (163). Sohō’s contention that impediments on national circulation distorted the social structure suits perfectly the arguments of Bruno, Leroy-Beaulieu, and others in France who diagnosed their nation’s problems similarly. If the previous trend (ikioi) toward a commercial, commoner-based society had not been “obstructed in mid-course” (chūtō ni shadan suru koto), Sohō says, there would be no reason even to inquire into the inherent characteristics of Japan and its people. Fortunately, contemporary evidence makes the question moot: today the people of Japan are becoming “instinctively discerning, active traders and instinctively brave sailors” (148). The obstruction, then, can be unblocked: Japan’s divergence from the universal is not an inherent but a historical phenomenon. In a direct quotation from the Charter Oath, Sohō says that to restore Japan’s tendency toward developing a productive, commoner-based society, it must “rout the base customs of the past,” reasoning that “a temperament inculcated by habit can be changed by habit” (145, 146). The present is a battle of essential qualities against the past whose stakes are the future. Consisting solely of the Tokugawa period, what Sohō names as hisThe Rupture of Meiji

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tory in The Future Japan is unusually foreshortened, starting only in 1600 with the establishment of Tokugawa rule.65 Note, moreover, that this history is bounded tightly between the pre-1600 reign of inherent qualities and the present. The numerous negative comparisons to European history throughout the book strengthen the implication that the Tokugawa era was a deviant interlude between original purity and what must be a repentant here and now.66 The analysis of the Tokugawa past in The Future Japan thus clears the way for Sohō to represent 1868 as a return to the universal path of social development. Because Tokugawa Japan was feudalism without parallel, however, 1868 cannot be a transition from militant-aristocratic to productive-commoner society in the normal manner. Rather, 1868 appears as a massive break with the social forms created by the Tokugawa state, a renovation of society “scarcely rivaled in all the wonders of a thousand ages in the history of the Orient [Tōyō].”67 But even though Sohō insists that the break was driven by the “general tendency” of social evolution, he concedes that he has yet to read a history of the Restoration in which events “issue from ordinary causes and proceed to ordinary results.”68 The events that produced the Meiji state thus pose a basic problem of representation for Sohō that follows from the idea that they were a restoration of the universal. In contrast to his representation of the Tokugawa period, in which the upper samurai and their retainers are the obvious enemies of progress, Sohō’s representation of 1868 is markedly unclear. Ultimately the only agent is the “general tendency” of society: with the people divided against and despite itself, the pent-up force of evolution washes across Japan in the deluge that initiates the present. In an extraordinarily dense passage, Sohō writes: The world environment of production and the general tendency toward commonerism [heiminshugi no taisei ] spurred on our bakufu, spurred on our Minister Ii, spurred on our late lord of Mito and Fujita Tōko, spurred on our Sakuma and Yoshida alike, spurred on our Yanagawa Seigan, spurred on our Yokoi Shōnan, spurred on Aizu and Kuwana, spurred on the lord of Echizen, spurred on the two domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, spurred on Saigō, Kido and Ōkubo alike, and neither considering whether they were loyal to the bakufu or to the emperor, nor asking if they would expel the barbarians or open the ports, regardless of whether they were partisans of reckless adventurism or well-thought administration, melded and compressed these indi176

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vidual, disparate, self-interested, contradictory acts—all lacking cause and effect and relation—within a larger pattern, and leaving no trace of these brilliant and heroic, awe-inspiring elements, brought forth the crystalline form of a single new Japan. This new Japan is the very Japan of our present day.69 Sohō’s recourse to the “tendency” of social development to unify the events does deny the Meiji oligarchy credit for a restoration but results from a greater difficulty. The first half of this passage is a list, while the second is a series of concessions that the list cannot cohere without invoking the historical process itself as the agent of events. In a certain sense, 1868 seems to be unrepresentable in normal historical narrative: Sohō can only announce that the “single new Japan” emerged from events that resist explanation in themselves. From this point of view, the theoretical apparatus of The Future Japan seems only a deus ex machina. We should consider, however, the ways The Future Japan’s theory of social evolution surrounds and contains 1868 to give it a specific meaning. As the initiation of a productive, commoner-oriented present, 1868 is a moment when the disparity between Japan and the universal, caused by human obstruction of social evolution, disappears. But pace Spencer, the union of Japan and the universal does not take place in the text through the continuous operation of history in a process of development that is internal to Japan or the Japanese “people.” Whether or not Sohō intended to represent 1868 as Japan’s native transition from militant-aristocratic to productive-commoner society, it appears in the narrative as an abrupt intervention by the “general tendency” of social evolution.70 In this respect, history (as the Tokugawa period) is irrelevant to the overarching question of what is to come for the future Japan. Yet the seeming return of Japan to its nature announces that what is to come is the history of Europe: Sohō predicts for Japan’s future precisely the changes that European countries have experienced in their recent past. If, based on our reading of Plum Blossoms in Snow, we consider that Sohō’s theory of social evolution puts the European past and the Japanese future into an allegorical relationship in which it is possible to read one through the other, we can see that the movement between allegorical registers explains how Japanese society shakes off the yoke of its history, recoups its allegedly inherent qualities, and resumes movement toward the universal telos of social development. The dialectical movement between the known history of Europe and the unknown future of Japan thus proThe Rupture of Meiji

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duces a promise of the establishment of commoner democracy in Japan as the resolution to the deluge of the present. Curiously, 1868 becomes the end of Japanese history and the recommencement of a universal history that has already happened elsewhere. Although the events of 1868 remain basically inexplicable, the similarity to the situation in Plum Blossoms in Snow, where a blank in historical knowledge is filled in from the perspective of the future, suggests that such a failure of historical explanation may have a positive function in the narrative strategies of national history. To further explore the ideological work of such a rupture, I turn to Ōgai’s story “The Dancing Girl,” where the narrative arc of The Future Japan is reproduced in the life of the national subject.

Mori Ōgai’s Resentful Narrator Ōgai’s short but complex story is a recollection of the protagonist’s affair with a young woman while a student in Germany, written aboard a ship that has paused in Saigon. Under pressure from a friend, the protagonist, Ōta, has abandoned the girl and agreed to return to Japan. Like the other stories of the so-called German trilogy, based on Ōgai’s experiences and observations while studying medicine in Germany from 1884 to 1888, “The Dancing Girl” is written in a faux-classical idiom that ran counter to contemporary efforts to craft a written style based on oral speech forms, but it is nonetheless formally innovative. The brooding story, possessed of a tightly crafted aesthetic centered on first-person narration, is often cited as an example of the psychological and depoliticized fiction that succeeded the political novel after the demise of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement. The formal innovation, in fact, advances a political argument that critics typically overlook: the necessity of accepting nationality as a primary form of subjective identification and rejecting alternative identities as illegitimate. “The Dancing Girl” is a forceful expression of efforts to transform the populace of the Japanese archipelago into a nation mobilized with a commonly held purpose, efforts that demanded the reimagination of social relations. “The Dancing Girl” joins this struggle by linking nationality to the story’s particular narrative form, that of a récit, a narrowly focused firstperson retrospection. In exploring connections between “The Dancing Girl” and problems of literary form in the Meiji period, Kamei Hideo observes that the story’s form identifies the style of the narrator with the sensibility of the protagonist, the narrator’s earlier self. Description in 178

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the story can thus focus closely on elements that explain changes in Ōta’s sensibility without having to account for the location of the narrative enunciation, a problem that writers had encountered in trying to adapt Tokugawa-period narrative styles for the representation of individuated subjectivity.71 In “The Dancing Girl,” such changes reveal the inevitability of the narrator’s accession to nationality in a movement that is clear in retrospect though turbulent at the time. Although critics commonly read “The Dancing Girl” as a narrative of the establishment of the “modern self” (kindai jiga), they do so at the cost of ignoring the specifically national quality of the self that emerges through Ōta’s struggle.72 Despite the apparent triumph of the national, Ōta suffers a lasting resentment related to a choice he is forced to make at the climax of the story between his lover and his nation. The resentment remains as a trace of the conflict and coercion that marked the establishment of a national (and modern) subject in Japan during the Meiji period. The central formal device of “The Dancing Girl,” through which the present-day Ōta casts his eyes back on the past, interestingly resembles the structure established by the frame of Plum Blossoms in Snow and the first chapter of The Future Japan. In all these works, the narrator is separated from events by a temporal gap that explains not only the location of the narrative locution but also the source of the narrator’s knowledge of the events it recounts—in Tetchō the democracy campaigns, in Sohō the Tokugawa period—which are history in relation to its present. Other aspects of the story, including references to problems in diplomacy and “matters of state” (kokuji), reveal Ōgai to be engaged with the same debates on the polity and the universality of social forms as Sohō and the political novelists.73 The significance of the similarity is confirmed by the fact that the period of action of the story corresponds to the government’s most stringent efforts to suppress the Freedom and Popular Rights movement and by indications that the movement’s failure factors in Ōta’s crisis of identity. Ōgai’s contributions in his medical career in debates on public and military hygiene are ample evidence of his concern with issues conceived on a national scale.74 “The Dancing Girl” constitutes a similar intervention, not only in its themes but also in its formal elaboration of a temporality that conveys a necessity to the advent of the nation-state and its dominance over the inhabitants of the territory it claims. The récit of “The Dancing Girl” opens aboard the ship that is carrying Ōta back to Japan from Germany. Ōta’s traveling companions are passing the night on shore, leaving him alone in the second-class lounge. He muses The Rupture of Meiji

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that on his outbound trip five years ago, he devoted thousands of pages to a diary of his observations, but during his return journey the notebooks that he bought have remained blank. He continues: “Truly, the I who is returning to the East now is not the I of long ago who sailed to the West. In my soul I am deeply unsatisfied with learning, I have learned the pains of this sad world and the unreliability of people’s hearts, but even more, I have come to understand the caprice of myself and my own heart. What was good yesterday is bad today—to whom would I confide my fleeting sensations? Perhaps this is why I have not written a diary. No—there is another reason.”75 After this denial, Ōta reveals that the cause of his silence is a “hidden resentment” (hito shiranu urami) that has clouded his heart since leaving Germany.76 An external resentment might be dispelled with poetry, he says, but his resentment is so deeply carved into his heart that everything he reads and sees recalls it. Ōta resolves to set down the outline of his story on this solitary night. The story that follows, framed by the scene on ship, begins with Ōta’s early childhood and moves quickly to his first days in Berlin. The frame of “The Dancing Girl” thus establishes a temporal gap between the narrative present (the night in Saigon) and the narrated present (the events of the inner story). The temporal divide provides the basis for a parallel opposition of narrating subject and narrated object (Ōta in Saigon and Ōta in Berlin) that is typical of the récit form, in which subject and object are the same except for a crucial difference in the knowledge held by each. It is a difference of self-knowledge, which explains the particular mode of writing that Ōta adopts on this evening: in contrast to the diary of his outward journey, concerned with the world, this account is concerned with his former self. The narrative aims to explain how the present Ōta gained the embittered self-knowledge through which he is able to recount the events of his time in Germany. Indeed, the significance of all past events, and thus the meaningfulness of the narrative itself, inhere in their contribution to the formation of the present. In closing the gap between past and present, the narrative traces what is to be an upward and inherently meaningful movement from a latent self to its realization. In “The Dancing Girl” this movement would be an apparently perfect allegorical reproduction of the classic story of the nation’s recognition of itself were it not for the hidden sentiment to which Ōta confesses. By Ōta’s own declaration, the story that commences with his resolution to write is meant to explain his lasting resentment. It passes glancingly over his childhood—with his father deceased, he was raised by his 180

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mother—and early career as a bureaucrat, then slows at the point when his superiors sent him to Berlin to study politics and law. (Ōta himself fancied becoming an important politician.) He recalls that he spent three years “like a dream” studying in the university, but that he came to feel that having spent his life honoring the will of his father, following the instructions of his mother, and working to please his superiors, he was “nothing but a passive, machine-like character who didn’t know himself.” 77 His mother tried to transform him into a living dictionary; the head of his department, into a living compilation of the law. In response, Ōta turned to studying the “spirit of the law” (hō no seishin) and eventually abandoned law for the “sweet land” (satōkibi o kamu sakai ) of history and literature.78 Ostracized by the other Japanese students in Berlin for his diffident attitude, he found solace in a poverty-stricken girl, Ellis. Ōta writes that his intercourse (kōsai) with the girl initially was “pure,” limited only to paying for the funeral of her father (saving her from prostitution) and supplementing the income as a chorus girl with which she supported her mother.79 Soon, however, he began teaching her proper German and German literature—a reverse-Orientalist Pygmalion—and drew the envious attention of the other Japanese students.80 Discharged from his post under a cloud of scandal, he found work as a journalist and moved into Ellis’s household. His relationship with Ellis deepened, and one day he discovered she suffered morning sickness. With her pregnancy, the narrative begins an inexorable movement toward crisis. At this critical juncture near the end of 1888, Ōta writes, a friend named Aizawa, who had helped him find his position as a correspondent, arrived in Berlin with a diplomat, Count Amagata. (The name is a transparent reference to Yamagata Aritomo, founder of the Japanese army, opponent of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement, and prime minister when “The Dancing Girl” was published.) Aizawa introduced Ōta to Amagata as a translator and pressured him to end his relationship with Ellis. Ōta recalls that his “weak heart” did not give him the wherewithal to refuse, but he neither broke off with Ellis nor told Aizawa of her pregnancy.81 After some months, Amagata unexpectedly proposed that Ōta return to Japan with him and put his talents to better use. Aizawa had assured the count that Ōta had no dependents. Ōta writes: “I couldn’t deny what seemed to be the case. I paused for a moment, but it was hard to contradict Aizawa, and the thought that if I didn’t cling to this hand I would lose my homeland [honkoku] and sever the path to reclaiming my honor, that my body might be buried in the sea of people of this vast European metropolis, pierced me The Rupture of Meiji

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heart and soul. Without the least moral character, I answered, ‘I shall do as you ask’” (58). Unable to face Ellis and feeling that he was an “unpardonable criminal,” Ōta left Amagata’s hotel and wandered the winter streets for most of the night (59). When he returned home, he lapsed into a deep fever. Awakening after a blank of several weeks, he discovered Ellis haggard and transformed. He writes that he learned later that Ellis went mad when Aizawa revealed Ōta’s decision to her. The story concludes, “Ah, it would be hard to find another friend in the world as good as Aizawa Kenkichi. But in my mind, there remains even to this day a bit of me that hates him” (61). Opening forward with the phrase “even to this day” (konjitsu made mo), Ōta’s final declaration arrives at the present in which he composes his account. With the source of his resentment revealed, he returns to silence. Although the narrative present invoked in the opening of “The Dancing Girl,” Ōta’s moment of writing, and the narrated present, Ōta’s life in Berlin, gradually converge as he recounts the events, it is important to see that the two never converge completely: they are separated by Ōta’s delirium, which he knows only by hearsay.82 His awakening marks the beginning of a permanent state that includes the moment of writing, but the delirium stands between this state and Ōta’s former self (hence the sense of a great passage of time). The subject therefore remains distinct from its past, despite the formal premise that Ōta’s life history is a narrative of the emergence of the narrating subject. Such a temporal difference between past and present forms the basis of several dichotomies: youth versus maturity, irresponsible freedom versus responsible submission, thus idealism versus realism, and finally cosmopolitanism versus nationality. The first term of each pair exists in Ōta’s past. The second terms are latent in the past, waiting to come to fruition, but their latency is visible only from the perspective of its realization. As in Plum Blossoms in Snow and The Future Japan, the past can be understood only in terms of the telos of its unfolding. It is clear from the issues at play in Ōta’s audience with Amagata—the loss of his homeland, the possibility of death in Europe—that nationality is the primary basis of identity for the subject that the narrative of “The Dancing Girl” produces. In Balibar’s Althusserian terminology, Amagata interpellates Ōta in the name of the nation, enforcing belonging in two senses: to the collectivity and to oneself.83 As a consequence, all affective relationships—such as love for another—must be subordinated to the subject’s relationship to the nation, not only as a matter of loyalty but also as 182

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one of self-identity. (Indeed, Ōta’s identity is secured in a bargain among men, at the expense of a woman: the sexually other is the nationally other.) As Kamei observes, the récit form is the crux of such a narrative of emergence for Ōta. It is also the crux of an allegory in which the récit projects a parallel narrative of the nation coming to self-consciousness that is told by the nation collectively. Like Plum Blossoms in Snow, the tendency of national allegories to work conceptually backward, with their resolving moment of national unity in mind, is inscribed literally in this story’s form: Ōta’s entire history is retrospective and written only to explain his mature, nationalized subjectivity. The nation’s history, likewise retrospective, exists only to explain its unity. That “The Dancing Girl” inverts the situation in Plum Blossoms in Snow, narrating the loss of love with a foreigner rather than its realization with a fellow Japanese, confirms that national allegories allegorize the nation not only in its relation to itself but also in its relation to the world. The obstacles to Ōta’s and Ellis’s relationship dramatize a conceptual conflict between cosmopolitan universalism and national particularity, while its enforced demise stages the nineteenth-century political conflict between the European and North American imperial powers and peripheral states and its attendant demands for national mobilization. Intertwined with the argument on the relationship of subject to nation that “The Dancing Girl” advances through Ōta’s history, we can find another argument on the relationship of individual history to national future that characteristically emerges through the movement between allegorical registers. Ōta’s history unfolds through the story’s initial differentiation between a narrated present of latent nationality and a narrative present in which the manifestation of nationality is complete. As in the case of Plum Blossoms in Snow, the immediate register of the allegory—the story of Ōta’s transformation—reaches closure, while the end of the story of the accomplishment of national unity is posited as something to come. The movement between Ōta’s drama and the drama of the nation projects a unity that will appear through the accumulation of individual accessions to nationality like Ōta’s. Considering that Ōta is able to tell the history of his transformation only from the point of view of its completion, however, the movement between allegorical registers implies that like Ōta, the nation will—and will only—be able to tell its history after its collective unification. The allegory of the nation that “The Dancing Girl” elaborates, therefore, is organized by a future anterior sense of what will have happened, a temporal structure in which the present of the nation’s youthful The Rupture of Meiji

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incompleteness is to be the past of the imagined future of national unity, in the same way that Ōta’s youth is the past of his mature, nationalized subjectivity. Thus while “The Dancing Girl” seems to differ from Plum Blossoms in Snow and The Future Japan in the fact that it is retrospective in the normal sense, occupied with past events rather than with the history of the future, Ōgai’s story too is proleptically concerned with imagining an age of national unity to come. Ōta’s personal narrative could therefore be expected to be a triumphal one. What was unknown is known; a mission only haltingly understood now is manifest in the very identity of the subject. Allegorically, the story moreover imagines a future present as a moment of unified national will. Yet the narrative closes on a note of resentment and a sense on Ōta’s part that he has committed an unpardonable crime. The important role that a layered temporal structure plays in the narrative of “The Dancing Girl” should prompt us to ask whether Ōta’s resentment in the present stems from his relationship to his nonnational past. That past and present do not completely converge in Ōta’s confession deepens the suspicion: why don’t the two strata converge, if the allegorical story of national unity depends on such a convergence? The beginnings of an answer lie in the strict temporal line that “The Dancing Girl” draws between national and nonnational filiations, which can help us understand the nature of Ōta’s resentment and who exactly is the victim of his offense.

The Perpetual Present The unusual degree of similarity in the temporalities of these three works, which each explain the nation’s past and present from the epistemologically privileged perspective of its future, prompts the question of how such a temporality is connected to the legitimation of the nation as a form of community and the nation-state as its political guarantor. These works’ structures reflect many aspects of the temporality of modernity as Peter Osborne defines it: valorization of the present over the past as an epistemological standpoint, openness toward the future, and tendential elimination of the present itself as a transitional point between past and future.84 Plum Blossoms in Snow, The Future Japan, and “The Dancing Girl” can help us complicate the definition, however, because here the epistemologically privileged present lies in a future constructed either in narrative form or as a theoretical premise, while the past is a distinct present characterized as a moment of national dilemma that is the reader’s 184

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own: Tetchō’s era of political confusion, Sohō’s flood, and the choice Ōgai poses between the saving hand of the nation and death by drowning in the European metropolis. Because the idea of reading the past to discern the future contained in it shapes these works not just conceptually but also formally, such a variation on the temporality of the modern must support their argument that the present is saddled with a crisis that will have been resolved in the future provided the proper choices are made. What is at stake, I suggest, is the transformation of fundamental opposition to the nation form and the nation-state into a historically disqualified curiosity out of reach of the present. We glimpsed such a strategy in the stress Turner places on the immigrant’s shedding of his past, and in the work of the border in A Tour of France to position nonnational identities in a space without history. These three Japanese examples let us see that it is a strategy for managing dissent rooted in motifs of rupture that play as central a role in the temporality of national history as the “national inversion” plays in its spatial bounding. We can begin exploring the contribution of such a temporality to dispelling problems of legitimation and dissent by comparing the positions of the reader of Plum Blossoms in Snow and the gentlemen of the frame vis-à-vis the period Meiji 19 to 23 (1886–90) when the events of the story occur. Until the gentlemen discover the novel and its sequel, this era is the unknown, distant past for them; for the reader, it is the unknown near future. Precisely because it is unknown for the gentlemen, such a proposition of the near future constitutes a political opening for the survival of the democracy movement in the face of government persecution. Plum Blossoms in Snow and its sequel Songbirds among Flowers effectively call for the reader to take responsibility for such a future by following Tetchō’s programmatic lead, a version of the rhetoric of will in Third Republic France, encountered once again in the context of national crisis. But though the dearth of knowledge in the frame about the period of the story suits Tetchō’s desire to cast it as a period of political possibility, the potential content of the near future is hardly left undetermined. This period exists only in relation to the political harmony that is to be its culmination, after which history is the routine clocking of cabinets and cargoes. The story of Kunino and Haru defines the period’s content in detail, culminating in a second Meiji reform or second restoration to take place at its end. The work of the allegory is to determine the content of the future, not in the sense of divining it but rather by establishing and limiting it, as Jürgen Habermas has observed of narratives of progress in general.85 The Rupture of Meiji

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Thus this structure reopens an imaginative space for political action but delimits it sharply: in Meiji 23, political possibility will end (from the perspective of the gentlemen in the frame, has ended), to be replaced by a progress whose path will be (has been) as predictable as it is uninterrupted. Wresting political agency from the oligarchy apparently brings an anxiety about true political possibility that the frame is at pains to control. At the heart of such an attempt to contain possibility is the epistemological authority that Tetchō contrives by shifting the point of enunciation of the narrative from the moment of political possibility itself (Tetchō’s present) to the known future after Meiji 23. By shifting the point of enunciation into a determined future, the frame of Plum Blossoms in Snow circumscribes such possibility and “proves” that there is but a single path to the future. The movement toward the goal of Meiji 23 in Tetchō’s novels is strangely self-extinguishing: the agents of history in Meiji 19, political intellectuals would seem to ultimately remove themselves from the arena of true politics, in the sense of debate over fundamental social arrangements, and become managers of an autonomous progress. No doubt this appearance is due in part to the reliance of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement on direct appeals to the emperor to establish representative institutions against the wishes of the oligarchy.86 Such appeals did not demand true popular sovereignty, presuming instead the surrender of political agency once the proper imperial decision had been made. The importance of the temporal divide of Meiji 23 in the form of Plum Blossoms in Snow—as both the culmination of struggle and the beginning of historical knowledge—indicates, however, that there is more at work than deference to imperial authority. Indeed, the resemblance of the depoliticized future in Plum Blossoms in Snow to the ideal of a technocratically managed history in French colonial ideology suggests that the temporal divide of Meiji 23 serves a purpose analogous to the spatial displacement of history from the French hexagon to the “second France” of the colonies. By presenting the events between Meiji 19 and 23 as the prehistory of a known future, Tetchō removes political dispute from the constitution of the nation: politics precede the promised moment of national unity but do not enter it. The different possible readings of the betrothal of Kunino and Haru, as the formation of a political alliance and as the exclusion of women and the masses from it, indicate that the strategy for representing history that emerges from the conceit of the frame of Plum Blossoms in Snow is directed as much against those who are to be managed in the golden age as against the oligarchy, Meiji liberals’ rivals to be history’s 186

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managers. The temporal divide of Meiji 23 is central to such a strategy because it shelters the society fostered by the perfect liberal Diet from dissenting points of view, whose time is over. The ultimate target of such maneuvers, however, is not Meiji 23 but Meiji 1: not 1890 but 1868. By presenting the year of the opening of the Diet as a new beginning and a second restoration, Tetchō’s future history seeks to wrest the origin of the new nation-state of Japan from the hands of the government and its first “restoration.” (As in France, regeneration follows generation.) Displaced to Meiji 23, the new origin casts the events of the 1850s and 1860s as simply steps toward liberal democracy and asserts that the political positions of those days—from imperial loyalism to peasant demands for “righting the world” ( yo-naoshi)—by definition have no place in the future. We can say, then, that the final aim of the narrative structure of Plum Blossoms in Snow is to establish 1868 as the forerunner of the liberal democracy Tetchō desires, rather than as an end in itself, as supporters of the new government would have had it. The assertion depends on the authority of a narrative frame that, by occupying the future, commands the political struggles of the Meiji period as a history whose outcome is political and social harmony. Because the fanciful future of Plum Blossoms in Snow “proves” nothing, we should invert the proposition by putting it right side up: the authority claimed by national history inheres in its promise of future unity, as the solution to the crisis that it declares in the present. The temporal structure of The Future Japan similarly works to contain dissent but widens the strategy’s scope to include those who object to the routinization of social flux that Sohō valorizes as modernity. Despite Sohō’s declaration that the new Japan took crystalline—fixed—form in 1868, The Future Japan argues that the great transformation is far from over. Turning to his own age, Sohō writes that in any era the present is “a battlefield where elements of the past and elements of the future collide and come to blows with each other,” because “in a society that maintains order in its progress,” the distance between the world of the past and the world of the future is slight. This must be particularly true in Japan, where the speed of change has left elements of the feudalism of hundreds of years earlier and the civilization of hundreds of years later rubbing shoulders in the same society. The present Japan is the scene of their clash.87 Yet Sohō’s greatest fear is that his readers might lose interest in the match: “People of Japan [Nihonjin], do not be satisfied. The work of reform is not even half complete. . . . If you doubt this, I pray you ask the demon in your breast.”88 The Rupture of Meiji

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Such a call to reject the past suggests the importance of 1868 in The Future Japan in dividing the old from the new. In Sohō’s insistence on diachronic stages rather than synchronic typologies in his social theory, social institutions and practices of daily life that are not consistent with his definition of the new Japan are irredeemably associated with the “old” and deviant Japan of the Tokugawa period. Because his theory maintains in Spencerian fashion that social structures have an organic unity, any elements of past society that have survived the obliteration of their supporting context necessarily must perish. In rhetorical terms, therefore, the apparent impossibility of representing the events of 1868 in a way that connects them to a continuous Japanese history—an apparent failure of representation—serves the positive role of casting social practices antagonistic to Sohō’s definition of the universal, or even to the idea that a social universal exists, into the degenerate past, quarantining them through the unbridgeable divide between past and present and branding those who would perpetuate them as enemies of the future and thus of the nation. By separating Japan conclusively from its “backward” history, the gap between the present and history in The Future Japan founds the political and economic order that Sohō envisions. In the present that Sohō pins between past and future, the people must constantly remain vigilant against the old Japan—this enemy within—lest it contaminate the new. The struggle must go on even within the individual through self-vigilance, as national subjects ask “the demons in their breasts” the truth of their allegiance. If they vacillate in following the “general tendency of the world [tenka no taisei],” Sohō warns, “the blueeyed, red-bearded race” will invade Japan, drive its people into the sea, and establish its own commoner society. “Fearing this, I pray that we pursue the fierce spirit of the great restoration-reform speedily and decisively to its end. If we do not succeed in doing what Westerners have done, Westerners will aspire to do it in our place.”89 Sohō’s warning—the final passage of The Future Japan—reproduces from the other end of the gun Strong’s prediction in Our Country that Anglo-Saxons will eliminate races that do not flatter by imitation. The warning suggests that when Japanese intellectuals appropriated theories such as Spencer’s, the practical meaning of “general tendency” was not the abstract pattern of social evolution but the reality of European hegemony: if peripheral states such as Japan did not submit to the universal voluntarily, the imperial powers would accomplish the same by other means. But in making the manifestation of such a “tendency” a necessary part of social development, Sohō natural188

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izes the establishment of liberal capitalism in Japan as the inevitable outcome of history. In so doing, he naturalizes the continual transformation of social relations by state and capital, the “deluge” with which The Future Japan begins, as the normal condition of society. On the one hand, any objection to remaking everyday life in the name of progress is a throwback; on the other, because flux is the normal social state, the fruits of national mobilization will always be yet to come, the time for vigilance never past. Sohō’s Japan is always one day after 1868, the enemy always at hand. We should reconsider the meaning of the common theme in national history of the nation gaining self-consciousness in light of the way that the admonition to break with the past disqualifies alternatives to Sohō’s vision of the future. In The Future Japan only those who understand that the general tendency of social evolution is toward capitalist democracy understand the nation’s future and are thereby able to save it. As a product of the nation’s self-consciousness, this view is fully of the present; other views in their misunderstanding of the future belong to the past and are incomplete. The division, which is both political and epistemological, is marked in The Future Japan by 1868 as a rupture initiating the knowing present. But the motif of rupture suggests that the theoretical apparatus of The Future Japan cannot fully explain the emergence of the epistemologically privileged present from the ignorant past any more than it can explain the events of 1868 as the emergence of a native liberal regime from the ruins of the bakufu. The motif of rupture is politically productive but also reveals the limits of the ability of national history to transform the past into a prefiguration of the present. The example of “The Dancing Girl” suggests the extent to which such an aporia between past and present is inscribed in the proposition of national history per se, even when it sets liberal universalism aside. The lapse of memory that Ōta suffers during his fever plays a crucial role both in the story of “The Dancing Girl,” as the aftermath of Ōta’s crisis, and in its narrative discourse, as a formal device that separates the narrating from the narrated self. From the analysis of Plum Blossoms in Snow and The Future Japan, we can anticipate that the caesura in form and content in Ōgai’s story sequesters the various identities available to Ōta in his youth from his mature, national self. The choice that Ōta faces between his homeland and Ellis suggests that the resentment to which he confesses at the beginning of the story is connected to his accession to nationality. The offense that he resents, however, is not against Ellis or the unborn child. It is an offense against The Rupture of Meiji

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the romantic ideal of self-cultivation that becomes his self-image in Berlin. Ellis becomes a part of Ōta’s fantasy only as a disciple whom he can instruct in the ways of culture. While she is central in the fantasy’s collapse—Ōta introduces himself to Ellis as a “dependentless foreigner,” but she encumbers him with child—his resentment has a different object.90 As the story’s closing line shows, Ōta’s resentment is first of all directed toward Aizawa, who forced him to reject his ideal in favor of nationality and service to the nation, and perhaps after that toward the state, which Aizawa and Amagata as diplomats represent. But Ōta confesses to hating Aizawa. His resentment, properly speaking, is directed toward his former self for acquiescing to the state’s coercion.91 In this deep narcissism, the crime against Ellis is not even recognized as such. When Ōta cradles her “living corpse” at their parting, he is cradling no one but himself.92 Underlying Ōta’s choice of nationality over self-cultivation is a rejection of the early-Meiji belief that the pursuit of universal civilization was compatible with the protection of national particularity. Ellis becomes pregnant in late 1888, and thus Ōta returns to Japan in the first part of 1889. His five-year sojourn in Berlin corresponds to the period of the government’s greatest persecution of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement and to its efforts to draft a constitution, unveiled in February 1889, that centralized power in a bureaucratic state.93 The politically ambitious Ōta was apparently meant to contribute to this project: he traveled to Europe to study the law and politics of Prussia, the foundation of the new German empire and the model most favored by the oligarchy and the authoritarian factions that oppose Kunino in Plum Blossoms in Snow. The interest in the spirit of the law that stirs in Ōta, in contrast, recalls the stress of intellectuals like Fukuzawa on the spirit of civilization and, along with the echo of Montesquieu, makes clear reference to early-Meiji liberalism and its view of civilization as a universal social stage.94 Such universalism also contributes to Ōta’s efforts to tutor Ellis in literature: the universality of art lets an Oriental lead a poor metropolitan to the “sweet land” of self-refinement that lies beyond culture and class. Ōta’s choice, therefore, is between preserving belief in a civilization that transcends its material location and accepting a national identity and national mission that are explicitly tied to the state. The politicized terms of the choice— according to which nationality and universal civilization are opposites— are set by the state itself. The retrospective structure of “The Dancing Girl” thus pushes universalist idealism into the youthful, naive past in the manner that Plum 190

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Blossoms in Snow and The Future Japan banish authoritarian politics and resistance to capitalist rationalization. We can understand the role of the collapse of universalism in Ōta’s resentment by returning to his account of the audience with Amagata, where he recalls his fear that if he did not cling to Amagata’s hand, he would lose his “homeland” and be buried “in the sea of people of this vast European metropolis.” We can read the sea in this passage as a metaphor for the loss of subjective differentiation: lacking both internal divisions and self-defined external boundaries, it suggests the dispersion of individual identity. In a telling extension, the sea in turn is a figure for the European city, the locus of universal civilization in early Meiji thought. (Ōta recalls that in his early years in Berlin, he had experienced the central area around Unter den Linden as “a sea of light,” or, shall we say, of enlightenment.)95 In contrast, the metaphor in the crucial scene of “The Dancing Girl” gives a different meaning to the European capital: not as universal but cosmopolitan, in a negative sense conveying most of all the lack of nationality. From the point of view of Ōta’s mature subjectivity, immersion in the city means not participation in the universal but the loss of nationality, which he regards as the primary basis of identity. By grasping Amagata’s hand, Ōta emerges from the sea with a clearly differentiated subjectivity. His transformation recalls that of André and Julien in A Tour of France, where the border between France and Alsace-Lorraine draws a line between the space of national history and a purely negative space lacking nationality. Like the border in Bruno’s textbook, Amagata’s offer has a coercive quality: the stipulation of Ōta’s state-sponsored salvation is an offense against himself. If the temporal blank of which resentment is the lasting trace constitutes Ōta’s mature subjectivity by cordoning off his political “naiveté” from the present in which he has accepted the state’s gift of nationality, then to understand the ideological work of the temporality of “The Dancing Girl,” we should read the gap of Ōta’s delirium literally: in his painstaking reconstruction of life history, the moment when alternatives in politics and identity were lost cannot be remembered. The destruction of such alternatives, which in “The Dancing Girl” occurs through the intervention of the state, cannot be made into history. But if this blank is a trace of the inadmissible coercion of the nationalization of subjectivity, it also is a trace of the inadmissible historicity of the nation-state, of the sort already encountered in Sohō’s troubled representation of the events of 1868 and Tetchō’s displacement of that year to 1890. Far from indicating a breakdown in narrative, or what Homi Bhabha calls a crisis of significaThe Rupture of Meiji

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tion, the unrepresentability of such gaps seems fundamental to the naturalization of the nation-state, as a prophylaxis against the contamination of the present by nonnational alternatives, which are transformed into an unrepeatable past, but also as a denial of the historicity of the nation-state in the mechanisms and conditions of representation.96 It seems national history cannot represent the contingent origins of the nation-state because the proposition of national history itself disallows such representation. Analysis of Plum Blossoms in Snow, The Future Japan, and “The Dancing Girl” shows that the narrative structures of national history work to quarantine alternatives to the nation as a form of community by displacing them to an unrecoverable past. The structures also disclaim the historicity of the nation in their mechanisms of representation. Rupture plays a key role in these operations, both as a theme and as a feature of narrative. The gap in historical knowledge in Plum Blossoms in Snow, the unrecoverable causality of 1868 in The Future Japan, and Ōta’s lapse of memory in “The Dancing Girl” are all important aspects of the stories that Tetchō, Sohō, and Ōgai tell about the nation. In narrative terms, these same instances of rupture differentiate the individual and national registers that jointly form national allegories. If we take Ōta’s transformation in “The Dancing Girl” as an example, the individual register ends in the subject’s mature present, which is initiated by a painful accession to nationality. The self-awakening of the nation as a whole has yet to occur, leaving the national register open. In this respect, the rift in the narrative of “The Dancing Girl” indicates the nation’s incomplete reunion and the subject’s estrangement from the plenitude of belonging. The promise of future unity that inheres in the national register is also a promise that this estrangement will disappear, making painful choices such as Ōta’s—to which we could add Tetchō’s and Sohō’s admonitions to take responsibility for the future—unnecessary. The closure of the national register would thus mean the disappearance of the rupture that separates subject from nation. But though “The Dancing Girl” concludes with the implicit assertion that Ōta’s sacrifice of his ideals to serve the nation may not always be necessary, the fact that rupture is a structure of narrative in national history, not only a theme, suggests that such a day can never come. Indeed, if a narrative rupture is essential to establishing and distinguishing the two registers, then it must also be essential to establishing, in the terms of national history, what a national subject and a nation are. There can be no national subject and no nation in national history apart from the ruptures that establish them in representation. Although national history promises 192

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a future of unity, such a future can never arrive because coercion and resentment—the thematic referents for the rift in form—are implicit in the formation of nation and national subject alike. On the contrary, the promise of the future reiterates the necessity of sacrifice through the spurious pledge of its relief. Ultimately, then, the openness of the national register appears actually to be a kind of postponement, with the rupture that differentiates the registers marking the beginning of a perpetual present of crisis whose end will never arrive. Although the temporality of national history would seem to isolate and contain dissent through these operations, before turning to the example of the United States we should consider ways in which these operations break down. The bifurcated structure of national allegory is frequently accompanied by what seems to be a contrary rhetoric of seconds and doubles. Examples are the first and second restorations in Plum Blossoms in Snow, the “I of long ago” and the present I in the opening passage of “The Dancing Girl,” and the old and new Japan in The Future Japan. Mapped onto past and present, these pairs perform political labor by quarantining dissent and, like the “second France” of French colonial ideology, presage the rectification of the national crisis. As mobile motifs, however, they can suggest not progressive advance but serial repetition, the possibility that the new Japan may not differ significantly from the old, a problem that is aggravated by the assertion that 1868 was the restoration of an originary regime. From this perspective, rupture separates firsts from seconds without establishing difference. We can take the intrusion of such rhetoric into what we might call a temporality of restoration in Japan as a sign of the difficulty of constructing histories that produce a present in which nationality is the primary basis of identity, guaranteed politically by a national state, from a past that contains divergent possibilities. Turning now to ways that the formation of the nation was represented in the United States, we find similar structures of temporality—including the use of the future anterior and formal ruptures to establish a national past, present, and future—applied to the ideological problems of a settler society, with concomitant difficulties concerning immigrant pasts and the country’s relation to its former colonial master.

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Chapter 6

Americanization and Historical Consciousness

In the representation of national history in Meiji Japan, rupture was both an event—the “restoration” of 1868—and a structure of rhetoric. Incorporated into narrative, rupture becomes a moment of national awakening and a boundary between a national present and a prenational past. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, the problem of the relationship of the nation to its past to which the motif of rupture responds did not center solely on a political event. Although the historiography of the recent civil war was hotly contested among popular and academic historians alike, the problem of the past also encompassed questions of what can broadly be called “settlement”—immigration and the expropriation of Native American lands—and the relationship of the United States to England. In light of the common assertion in national history that the nation is both ancient and modern, we can see that the construction of a past for the American nation faced another difficulty too: the political undesirability, if not impossibility, of positing temporally distant national origins within North America when the only communities with deep pasts faced dispossession and genocide at the hands of the state that such origins were to legitimate. Connecting the nation to a history was thus a complex proposition. To be sure, this was a problem that had existed since the emergence of a sense of American nationality earlier in the century. It was moreover a problem produced by the epistemology of national history: the imperative to trace deep roots for the American nation, regardless of the relatively short history of settlement, has force only within a problematic that says all nations have such roots. The idea was nonetheless accepted as common sense at the time. As intellectuals negotiated the problem, the

historical consciousness of the national subject emerged as a significant issue in representations of national history. Promoting a particular form of historical consciousness became part of national history’s mission, in an argument that the key to national growth and unity was not a shared history—a shaky proposal in a state founded by migrants—so much as a shared attitude toward history. Accession to nationality, the common motif for the nationalization of the subject, thus included the subject’s adoption of the nation’s collective history as its own, founding the fictive ethnicity of the nation on the fiction of a communal experience. Although the subject was obliged to embrace the history of the nation, however, that history was typically associated with a putative race—the “Anglo-Saxon” or “English” race, in the idiom of the times. National history thus offered a racial organization for belonging beset by ambiguities as to whether the subjective will to join the nation trumped lineal descent. The stress on shared attitudes toward history, moreover, produced corresponding anxieties that the subject might refuse to adopt a collective view of history or that conditions in the United States might even block its emergence. In such anxieties, rejection of history was identified with social disorder. It will be helpful to recall some of the points made in an earlier chapter about the conditions under which national histories are constructed in settler societies. Hegemonic groups in such societies typically identify the metropolitan power as their origin and are associated with political and legal institutions built on the metropolitan model. Because of their close association with the national state, such groups are often regarded as the center of the nation, with indigenous peoples and migrants from other areas occupying outlying positions in a racial organization of national belonging because of their differing descent. Finally, as the example of Turner shows, in the historical discourse of such societies, “settlement” is not merely an event but a structure of discourse that explains the genesis of the nation. Where representations of 1868 in Meiji Japan obscured the origin of the “restored” state in a coup d’état, representations of settlement in the United States abetted a similar forgetting of the founding of the state in the transformation of indigenous lands into private, capitalized property. The tendency in settler societies to define national character in relation to an “original” colonizing race with a history both inside and outside the territorial boundaries of the nation is the source of particular problems because it raises the possibility that the nation’s history is only part of the continuing history of the “imperial” race. If, on the other hand, the hisAmericanization and historical consciousness

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tory of the nation is wholly distinct from that of the former metropolitan power, not only the origins of the nation but the political legitimacy of the dominant settler group and the racial organization of nationality come into question. That nationality must be considered in some way exchangeable in a settler society—the first settlers’ mythic adoption of a new nationality being the model for later rhetoric of immigrant rebirth—casts further doubts on national particularity. A tension between the dominant settler group’s myth of metropolitan origins and the heterogeneous histories of other inhabitants is the counterpart to such problems of external definition: even if the history of the nation is distinct from that of the metropolitan power, how can the nation’s history be singular? Although all attempts to construct national histories struggle with such heterogeneity, the problem is acute in settler societies, where the idea of a common destiny frequently emerges as a solution to the lack of a singular past. Such doctrines do not necessarily reach the grandiosity of Manifest Destiny in the United States and in fact can be expressed in narrowly particularistic terms, but the difficulty of positing a state of primordial unity shifts the stress in calls for national unanimity to the future in a way that differs from the proclamations of “returning forward” in ideologies of national progress in Meiji Japan.1 The temporality of national history in the latenineteenth-century United States tended to link the national future to ideas of conversion involving the acceptance of shared views of history. The national future thereby became charged with creating the perception of a common past.

The Difficulty of a Heterogeneous Past The late-nineteenth-century view that the society of the United States was growing increasingly “complex” inspired new attempts to represent the formation of national space but also forced attention to the place of different settler groups in the nation’s history. The rise in particularistic definitions of nation and citizenship after the mid-1870s, following the relative racial egalitarianism of the period immediately after the Civil War, further affected representations of national history. Arguments that restricted membership in the nation to people bearing specific characteristics—typically Protestant “Anglo-Saxons”—or that prescribed gradations of membership on the same basis, supported and gained support from similarly restricted narratives of history. Conceptions of race in the United States had been changing since the 196

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1840s, when Irish immigrants drawn by the demand for labor provoked the descendants of earlier settlers to reconsider offering citizenship to all “free white persons,” as the naturalization law of 1790 stipulated. Many of the emerging arguments against immigration distinguished among different white “races” and expressed doubts that all were as capable of selfgovernment as Anglo-Saxons. By the 1880s, as immigration from southern and eastern Europe increased, whiteness was commonly considered to include many European races of differing value to the United States, which were nonetheless one in their difference from Africans, Native Americans, and Asians.2 Anti-immigrant organizations, successors of antebellum nativist groups, formed beginning in the late 1880s and attempted to limit immigration through literacy tests and other means.3 The consensus that the nation would be sapped by “beaten men from beaten races,” in the words of Francis Walker, economist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, generated policies from restrictions on European immigration and a ban on immigration from China to the institutionalization of second-class citizenship for African Americans as legislatures and courts stopped protecting civil rights conveyed by law in the Reconstruction era.4 In the racial organization of nationhood and citizenship that resulted, Anglo-Saxons were members without qualification, while others belonged in degrees. Theories of racial evolution popularized by figures such as John Fiske—lecturer, historian, and president of the Immigration Restriction League—supported arguments on degrees of belonging. Beyond giving racism the imprimatur of science, the idea that races evolved through competitive differentiation provided a historical foundation for a racist social structure that explained the elevation and debasement of evolution’s winners and losers.5 Comparing recent immigrants to those of earlier eras, Walker thus declared that “centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us.”6 Evolutionary arguments were also used to show that some races were so different from whites that the natural rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence did not apply to them. On these grounds, the anthropologist Daniel Brinton pronounced the “black, the brown, and the red races” permanently unfit to exercise what were formerly considered the Rights of Man.7 The universalism of the Declaration of Independence and other documents of eighteenth-century political thought could not be ignored, however, and worked against complete exclusion, in a significant contrast with the more restrictive sense of Afrikaner identity that produced the Republic Americanization and historical consciousness

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of South Africa, for example.8 Typically, however, only the inferior white races, if any, were considered capable of evolution toward the full exercise of political rights. Nonwhite races would require permanent benevolent rule, their exclusion being part of the rationale for the inclusion of nonAnglo-Saxon whites.9 The impact of changing ideas of race on the ways that intellectuals imagined the history of the nation can be seen in the work of the emerging cadre of professional historians. Historians writing for nonacademic audiences, such as John McMaster and Edward Eggleston, responded to the “drum and trumpet history” of earlier eras with some of the earliest efforts at social history in the United States.10 The university-trained “scientific” historians, in contrast, devoted most of their attention to the evolution of political institutions, particularly those of early New England, which they associated with an Anglo-Saxon race said to have originated in northern Germany.11 Herbert Baxter Adams, who trained in Germany and led the influential graduate program at Johns Hopkins, wrote that “the town and village life of New England is as truly the reproduction of Old English types as those again are reproductions of the village community system of the ancient Germans.” The New England colonists were “merely one branch of the great Teutonic race, a single offshoot from the tree of liberty which takes deep hold upon all the past,” in Adams’s view.12 The institutional focus put Anglo-Saxons at the center of national development. It also offered reasons they should remain there: by concentrating on institutional evolution rather than upheavals such as the Revolution (a fight between “race brothers”), this approach to writing history stressed continuity over change.13 Alterations to the apparently immemorial racial order would betray the nation’s foundations. Many literary allegories of the nation from this period are concerned with unity among different regions of the country, but their narrative solutions take place within the “greater whiteness” that unified the various white races when defined against black, brown, yellow, or red. John De Forest’s novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), often considered the first example of literary realism in the United States, is about a young New Orleans woman courted by an old-family New England lawyer and a Virginia gentleman during the Civil War. (Both men fight on the Northern side, the first against slavery and the second against secession.) Over time the secessionist of the title becomes a “federalist” and then a supporter of the Union, marries and leaves the dissolute Virginian, and ultimately weds the New Englander, who will shelter and 198

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support her and her son. The three central characters all regard African Americans with patriarchal contempt, making the resolution of the plot a reconciliation among whites in which Northern whites will rejuvenate their Southern brethren and whites together will oversee the lives of free blacks. De Forest’s allegory of reconciliation is an early intervention in the historiography of the Civil War that reflects the persuasive role given representations of history in arguments on the composition of the nation.14 Other allegories, including many of the novels of Henry James, address the place of the American nation in the world and are similarly attentive to problems of historical consciousness. In James’s The American (1877), for example, a self-made man’s bitter encounter with a family of French aristocrats pushes him toward an inner development of national values whose keystone is a rejection of the weight of history on individual identity. The pedagogic projects that surrounded ideas of Americanization in the late nineteenth century supported such an identification of national character with a way of seeing history.15 Unlike a common experience of history, a view of it could be taught. In contrast to projects of nationalization by pedagogy in France, where the goal was to transform regional and class identities into a sense of nationality, one could say that the aim in the United States was to rid the subject of one history and provide it with another. Such a transformation was normative and inegalitarian, carrying an unstated distinction between Anglo-Saxons’ experience of the nation’s history and other white races’ adoption of it that legitimated restrictions on participation in the political process. Yoking together a particularistically defined race and political principles theoretically open to all willing to transform themselves frequently resulted, however, in a millenarianism in which—as already seen in Josiah Strong’s Our Country—a racialized chosen people was to convert the world. Indeed, the United States differs from many other settler societies in a tendency toward millenarian views of the future that ultimately derive from Puritan views of history.16 The complex contribution of Puritan historical rhetoric to the temporality of national history in the late-nineteenth-century United States is readily evident in one of Fiske’s most famous works, American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History (1885), in which national unity is produced through the confluence of a secular history of institutional development and a quasi-sacred history of the nation’s Anglo-Saxon character. The idea that the American nation was sustained by a shared view of its past was not new in the late nineteenth century, but the focus of the arguAmericanization and historical consciousness

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ment had shifted. Confronting the secession of southern states, Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address that “the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself,” concluding with the famous declaration that “the mystic chords of memory . . . will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”17 Connecting these passages is the idea that the Union is legitimated by the memory of its perpetuity. In Lincoln’s view, rejection of that memory, as in the case of secession, is an aberration. Writing sixteen years later in The American, James identified such rejection of history as a phenomenon in the history of the United States, and thus a factor in its development. James treats his iconic protagonist’s unwillingness to recognize the weight of ancestry on social relations as a fundamental difference between the United States and Europe. By the 1890s, such a rejection of history was seen by some as a domestic political peril. On the eve of the election of 1896, when the Populist William Jennings Bryan ran for president, Woodrow Wilson warned that the past was “discredited” among the masses, who saw it as their “enemy.”18 Arguments linking national unity to a shared view of history thus were accompanied by a corresponding anxiety that the national subject might refuse such a view. James and Wilson link the possibility of such refusal to a national faith in self-creation, but we can fairly speculate that the attendant anxiety arises from a recognition that the history of the early English settlers of North America—its “Anglo-Saxons”—was not the history of most of the inhabitants of the United States. Notions of conversion, which mediated between belief in a specific American identity and the necessity in a settler society of treating nationality as changeable, responded to such anxieties. Among many ideas from the period, two that stand out are conversion to a set of political principles and conversion to a race, the latter conveyed in the argument of John Burgess, a political scientist who trained historians at Columbia, that immigration by inferior races should be limited to “Aryanized” individuals.19 The emergence of the idea of racial conversion, supported both by cultural definitions of race and by Lamarckian notions of inheritance, seems overdetermined in light of efforts to define the nation in terms of a whiteness within whiteness. The idea of conversion to political principles might seem to have followed easily from Enlightenment universalism but also included a racial element. Because the political institutions of the United States were frequently considered products of long-term evolution (rather than philosophical abstraction) and associated with the 200

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history of the Anglo-Saxon race, to become “American” by adopting the principles of the country’s institutions meant recognizing the central role that Anglo-Saxons were said to have played in their foundation and development. Wilson’s writings on U.S. history from the 1890s take the argument to its logical conclusion. For Wilson, Americanization ultimately meant adopting neither a set of political principles nor the characteristics of a race but a view of history in which that race was the source of the nation’s political vitality. Wilson’s formulation solves a chief difficulty in representing national history in a settler society: in the place of a common origin for members of the nation, it puts a common view of history. To explore the place that attitudes toward history played in conceptions of American nationality, I start this chapter by examining a novel—The American—that expresses doubts as to whether a properly historical apprehension of social relations can develop in the United States. Turning to Fiske’s American Political Ideas, I consider the argument that the American nation was an offshoot of the “English race.” Fiske’s use of Puritan rhetorical forms supports a narrative of the history of the United States as the realization of a quasi-sacred racial destiny through the secular history of settlement. Wilson’s historical writings make an argument that remains implicit in Fiske: the future elimination of divisions in the nation depends on unanimous acknowledgment that the nation was constituted in and through the history of English settlers. The misgivings that James evinces about historical consciousness in the United States reach a high pitch in Wilson’s work, with the promise of unity and the threat of disunity alternating as the recto and verso of performative enunciations of national history. James, Fiske, and Wilson exploit the idea of conversion to suggest that national history advances through the Americanization of Americans, not just of immigrants. In James’s novel, the motif of conversion gives structure to an allegorical relationship between individual past and national future in the manner already explored in Plum Blossoms in Snow and “The Dancing Girl.” Wilson’s work allows us to revise this argument on the role of allegory in national history. In Wilson’s essays, conversion negotiates the relationship between individual and national pasts by marking a moment of emergence when the individual enters the general history of the nation through an act of will in which the nation’s history becomes the subject’s own. Here the history of the nation becomes a model for that of the individual, rather than the reverse.

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The Conflict over History in The American James was deeply interested in the issues of national identity and the subject’s consciousness of history throughout his career, but in his early works he notably engaged with contemporary developments in ethnography and historical writing to grapple with these problems. James’s identification of Christopher Newman as a “national type” at the beginning of The American, the first novel he wrote after moving to Europe, reflects his extensive reading in ethnography in the 1870s.20 Ethnographic typologies provide the foundation for the confrontation of types in the social comedy that dominates the first part of the novel. In essays from the time such as “The Art of Fiction,” on the other hand, James frequently drew analogies between the novel and “scientific” historiography to legitimate his work by association with that of the new professional historians.21 The American incorporates both interests, resulting in a hybrid narrative form. Although Newman appears as an ethnographic type at the beginning of the novel, his personal trials dominate its latter melodramatic half and become the basis for a painful education. With the element of change thus introduced, we can read Newman’s personal history as an allegory for a national education that connects morality and attitudes toward history. A self-made millionaire named for Columbus, Newman arrives in Paris in 1868 in search of a “new world” after a vaguely described career in business in the western states. (He ascribes the decision to depart to a sudden moment of disgust with a plan for revenge on a rival in the stock market, experienced upon awakening from a nap in a New York hack.) A remark to a pretty copyist in the Louvre that he plans to buy “a great many pictures” presages a comment to the wife of an American friend that he also plans to acquire a magnificent spouse, “the best article on the market.”22 Elizabeth Tristram introduces Newman to the daughter of an aristocratic family, the Bellegardes, who allow him to court despite their distaste for his commercial background. Newman pursues the daughter, Claire, with blithe disregard for the Bellegardes’ belief in the justice of social hierarchy, meanwhile becoming friends with the younger son of the family, Valentin, a dilettante for whom Newman offers to arrange employment in the United States. The contrast between Newman’s desire to acquire Claire but transform Valentin indicates the gendered dynamic of the plot, in which the United States is associated with forthright masculinity and Europe with the guile of Urbain, the elder son and head of the Bellegarde family, Claire being the unsullied object they compete to possess.23 202

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Presenting Newman to their legitimist, ultramontane circle is the straw that breaks the Bellegardes’ backs, and Urbain and his mother end the engagement with a neat distinction between the liberty they gave Claire to accept Newman and the familial authority they exert to forbid her marriage. (Critics commonly note that the novel abruptly shifts genre at this moment, from social comedy to melodrama.)24 After witnessing Valentin’s death from wounds in a duel, Newman succeeds in entering the family keep near Poitiers. Claire says she will enter a convent rather than break with her family, however. Learning that Claire’s father died in suspicious circumstances, Newman hatches a plot to blackmail the family into allowing the marriage; when Claire stands firm, he resolves instead to expose Madame de Bellegarde to the charge of murdering her husband. Upon putting the plan in motion, however, he suffers a moral “somersault” and relents.25 After months of traveling listlessly, he returns to Paris and burns the letter that is his evidence. Newman’s second rejection of revenge parallels his first, but in contrast to the upwelling of disgust he experienced in the taxi in New York, this decision is reached through conscious reflection on the value to himself of reprisal against his antagonists. Like many of the examples of national history that we have examined, the conflicts that propel the plot of The American are structured by a chain of dichotomies, from individualism versus family hierarchy to democrat versus royalist and doing versus being, which recur to the root terms of self-made man and aristocrat. The dichotomies establish the representative status of the antagonists, defined against each other as national types. (Their names assist, setting the American “new man” against the urbane Urbain and the other well-groomed Bellegardes.) In his fiction of the late 1870s and early 1880s, James frequently explored American character through such contrasts with characters from Europe.26 In the simplest view, the novel tells a story of a good-natured American victimized by scheming Europeans. Contrary to common interpretations that consider Newman to revert to his original nature in the novel’s final scenes, however, Newman does change, by consciously embracing a moral position that previously was instinctual. Read as national allegory, Newman’s evolution as national type reproduces the common motif of national comingto-consciousness, here staged on explicitly moral ground in the manner of the moral character of circulation in Japanese histories of civilization and the vision of solidarity in A Tour of France. The allegory hinges on an examination of the place of the nation in the world that likewise recalls “The Dancing Girl.” Newman’s transformation could scarcely happen were it Americanization and historical consciousness

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not for his encounter with Europeans. It is nonetheless a self-transformation, punctuated by the pair of awakenings he experiences in New York and Paris. Earlier observations of the central relationship between individual past and national future in national allegory let us see that James’s novel projects a future consisting of a national moral evolution that is Newman’s transformation writ large. The contest of The American is fundamentally a struggle over who will determine Newman’s identity, and secondarily Claire’s. In his first dinner with the Bellegarde family, Newman is “not himself” for the first time in his life, having resolved to meet any demands of social appearance made of him. After the meal, Urbain says that he and his mother expect Newman will make the discreet changes necessary to become “one of ourselves.”27 Despite his unease, however, Newman consistently believes that he and Claire can determine their own identities, or more accurately, that he has the power to determine his own and induce Claire to change hers. The end comes when the family shows that it has the power to determine the identities of all as far as the engagement is concerned. The Bellegardes’ decision stems, significantly, from their view of the weight of Newman’s past on his present character. The mother explains to Newman that “it is not your disposition that we object to, it is your antecedents,” while Newman reveals his misunderstanding by promising that he will be “any sort of person” the Bellegardes want (758, 760). Newman’s desperate confidence in his ability to make himself into someone else stems precisely from his disregard for his lineage, and his belief that he can remake Claire from his disregard of hers. Despite their initial optimism, the Bellegardes’ great estimation of lineage in contrast leads them to conclude that Newman will always be “commercial.” Although on the surface the clash might seem a conflict of values, between what James crudely describes as democracy and feudalism, the outcome suggests that it is fundamentally a conflict between two forms of historical consciousness. Madame de Bellegarde tells Newman that “my power . . . is in my children’s obedience,” and indeed the life of the children’s generation is shaped by the authority that its antecedents exert (757). The family’s Parisian mansion dates to 1627, which Valentin says is “old or new, according to your point of view,” but the family history begins in the ninth century. It entirely determines the opportunities open to the younger son: he may either become a papal soldier or “turn monk” (594, 607). Claire’s fortunes are restricted by the fact that in a thousand years, no daughter has married into the petty nobility, much less the bourgeoi204

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sie, and she too considers joining an order to be her only other option. Claire tells Newman that she was “not made for boldness and defiance” but rather “to do gladly and gratefully what is expected of me” (619, 789). The expectations she faces flow solely from family history. Her mother and Urbain (who is writing a history titled “The Princesses of France Who Never Married”) are effectively writing her life (618). The particulars of Newman’s own life, in contrast, are unclear. Most of the concrete details are concerned with the period after the awakening in what he calls the “immortal, historical hack” in New York—a taxi whose description fits because effectively it is the beginning of the history that The American tells (535). Despite the Bellegardes’ interest in his “antecedents,” we learn nothing of his father and of his mother only that she died when he was young. When Newman explains the source of his fortune to Tom Tristram he says simply, “I have worked!” while the narrator’s only lengthy excursion into Newman’s life before Paris describes it as “an intensely Western story,” involving enterprises that are “needless to introduce to the reader in detail” (532). (Newman eventually reveals that they included ventures in copper, railroads, oil, leather, and washtubs [545, 598].) The explanation that follows is largely an account of traits that Newman possesses, rather than his deeds: Newman “had been” enterprising, adventurous, and reckless, a reflection of the fact that he “was” a born experimentalist, then and now (533). Often-observed chronological problems compound the sense of casual mystery around Newman’s past. His appearance in the novel as a typical and allegorical figure overshadows such inconsistencies, however.28 Indeed, the problems are trivial because in Newman’s view his history speaks only of whom he has made himself and has no bearing on whom he will make himself henceforth: the sole content of his history is self-invention. From this point of view, the conflict of “national” values in The American is rooted in irreconcilable senses of history: Newman’s self-definition depends on rejecting history as a determinant of individual or social identity, while the Bellegardes consider history’s force to extinguish any possibility of individual choice or self-making. R. W. B. Lewis points out that Newman is one of a series of seemingly newborn protagonists in James’s novels whose lack of history contributes to the innocence with which they encounter the world.29 Recognize, however, that Newman does have his own history, with its own periodization: his life until the ride in New York, during which “his sole aim in life had been to make money,” and his life between then and his second rejection of revenge at the end of the novel.30 Americanization and historical consciousness

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During this history, Newman rejects the idea that history weighs on his identity or his relationships with others. This is to say that in Newman as an iconic figure, James presents such rejection or willful ignorance of history as a factor in the history of the United States, indeed as the primary characteristic of how American nationals conceive of themselves and their social relations, and thus the central characteristic of the American nation. (The utter lack of details about his family compounds the contrast with “European” attitudes.) In Newman’s second awakening, James announces a moral position that would derive from what he considers a typically American attitude toward history. James’s formulation may seem obvious, because the history of European settlement in North America is relatively short, or in keeping with the insights in the German philosophy of his time that historical consciousness is a historical phenomenon. James’s quandary, however, is how to explain the existence of an American nation (which he does not question) in the face of the common wisdom that nations take full form only in passage through time. His choice of storied aristocrats as French national types shows that James fully accepts the notion that European nations have deep historical roots, in an attitude best characterized as postcolonial awe. From this point of view, American nationality is insufficient or premature for its lack of history.31 But rather than concede the argument, James turns its premises to say that national character is determined not by the nation’s past but by its relationship to the past, thus distinguishing between what he called the “thin and impalpable” history of the United States and consciousness of it.32 James comes close to viewing the nation as a purely epistemological formation, although he considers the point only directly applicable to the United States, not to the European nations where national past and national character appeared inseparable. The idea that American nationality derives from blindness to history plays an important role in James’s treatment of Newman’s project to turn Valentin into a productive, independent man—that is, to Americanize him. In response to Newman’s efforts at “conversion” (as he ultimately imagines the task) Valentin complains that he lives beneath the eyes of his mother, but his problem more broadly is domination by inherited expectations. As a Bellegarde, he may not go into business or politics or find comfort by marrying a rich commoner, restrictions that his family enforces.33 (In the dichotomies of the novel, the contrast between Valentin’s passivity and Newman’s determination renders Valentin foppish, if not effeminate.) As little sense as it makes in such circumstances, Newman’s faith in gainful 206

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self-invention increases when he discovers Valentin engaged in amorous rivalry over the copyist from the Louvre, which ends with the duel that kills him. As Valentin warms to the idea of “a trunk full of dollars,” the consistency with which Newman equates success, freedom, and money is revealed as quasi-religious dogma: “Newman’s imagination began to glow with the idea of converting his bright, implacable friend into a first-class man of business. He felt for the moment a sort of spiritual zeal, the zeal of the propagandist” (741). The stipulation of Valentin’s conversion, however, is that he eschew history. Valentin avers that he has no choice but to fight the duel, which he defends as “a remnant of a higher-tempered time” to which one should cling. Newman predictably argues that the customs of Valentin’s great-grandfather are irrelevant, making the connection that he draws between self-definition and the rejection of history clear (750). Valentin must give up history—forget his forebears as Newman has—to become American. His refusal to do so is his demise. Newman preaches the gospel of self-definition, wealth, and disregard for history as a complex of values which all people of other nations may adopt. By observing Newman’s spiritual zeal, James observes the importance of such universalism to national identity in the United States. In contrast, “European” nationalities in the novel exclude the possibility of conversion because of the connection they assume between nationality and history. Newman’s universalism resembles that of Michelet in Introduction to Universal History, in which the particularity of France is to exemplify the universal. To Michelet, however, French universality was exemplified in its history. For James’s representative American, the universality of the United States is not historically determined. Although James presents Newman’s view as itself a historical belief, Valentin’s tragically tawdry end shows that Newman was right to try to take him away, and as Claire’s misfortune unfolds, the justice of Newman’s position only grows, even as its naiveté is confirmed. The increasingly melodramatic representation of events proves the oppressiveness of history and validates, rather than undermines, Newman’s rejection of it. Newman’s final transformation, indeed, shows that his blindness to history has a peculiar merit when he makes it into a conscious moral position. James’s positive treatment of national parochialism shows the development of his “international theme,” which by late in his career argued for the possibility of transcending one’s nationality without giving up its positive characteristics.34 Newman’s failure with Valentin and Claire, however, raises the question of how a person of another nationality might become American, given history’s inAmericanization and historical consciousness

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escapable weight. At this point, the question of Americanization turns from Valentin and Claire to Newman himself, when, as Peter Brooks has shown, the melodrama of love and revenge turns into the melodrama of consciousness well known from James’s later works.35 We can read James’s allegory of the nation most clearly in the novel’s conclusion, but I turn first to Fiske’s American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History to consider a competing view of origins that in contrast privileged the historical relationship of the United States to Britain.

The English History of Fiske’s America Although nearly forgotten now, Fiske was a celebrated lecturer and one of the most widely read historians of his time. The reasons for his prominence and later neglect are the same, that he was a dynamic synthesizer who wrote for a general audience: his early philosophical works, such as Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874), drew heavily on Spencer, Darwin, and Comte, while his historical works, including the acclaimed Critical Period in American History (1888), relied on authorities from George Bancroft to Francis Parkman and John McMaster. American Political Ideas, which originated in a series of lectures Fiske developed in 1879 on the subject of “America’s place in world history,” displays his attraction to the theories of the Anglo-Saxon origin of U.S. political forms that dominated the historiography of his time. With a knowledge of evolutionary theory, philology, and geology, Fiske was able to give a depth to such arguments on origins that Herbert Baxter Adams and his students at Johns Hopkins could not.36 Fiske was on the one hand highly optimistic about the ability of the “English race” (his preferred term) to remake the peoples of the world in its image and on the other opposed to trends and policies that threatened the descendants of English settlers in their first foothold of New England, most notably becoming the honorary president of the Immigration Restriction League upon its founding in 1894.37 In American Political Ideas, Fiske proposes to illustrate the political principles of the United States through their relationship to the general process of political evolution, of which it is “one of the most important and remarkable phases.” He begins with the New England town meeting— “lineally descended from the village assemblies of the early Aryans”— and ends with the prophecy of a federal world union.38 American history does not begin with Jamestown, Plymouth, or the Declaration of Independence, Fiske says, but “descends in unbroken continuity from the days 208

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when stout Arminius in the forests of northern Germany successfully defied the might of imperial Rome.” Washington and Lincoln are “noblest” seen as the heirs of Montfort, Cromwell, and Pitt the Elder; the battles of Yorktown and Appomattox are the culmination of “the good fight” that began at Lewes and continued at Naseby and Quebec. By recognizing that “the two great branches of the English race” share a common mission to establish a civilization higher and a political order more permanent than any before, Fiske says, “We shall the better understand the true significance of the history which English-speaking men have so magnificently wrought out upon American soil” (7–8). The image Fiske suggests of the Germanic chief Arminius in the halls of Congress brings to mind Turner’s description of immigrant regression on the frontier. The similarity is as important as the difference: Turner says that anyone can become American through the experience of dropping “the garments of civilization” and plowing with a sharp stick, Fiske that the most representative American is determined by his descent, but both imagine the national character forming in a moment primitive in condition if not distant in time. Such an imagined origin plays as important a role in their representations of national history as Sohō’s proposition of an original trading and seafaring Japanese people and the step that André and Julien take from the mists of the Vosges onto French roads in A Tour of France. To support his view that the history of the United States represents the unfolding of a racial character born in German forests, Fiske outlines a genealogy beginning with the mark, a community described in Tacitus’s Germania (98 CE), through the English parish to the New England township, the part of the United States “most completely English in blood and traditions” and yet “most completely American” for its illustration of the political ideas that give the country its world-historical significance (18). The mark, an agricultural community defined by territory but populated by a single kinship group, was governed by an assembly called the markmote that resembled the New England town meeting “in all essential respects,” Fiske says, implying a similarity both in scale and in determination of membership by descent (41). When Germanic tribes migrated to England, which in Fiske’s view had been little affected by Roman ideas and institutions, the mark and mark-mote evolved into the manor, the parish, and their institutions of self-government (46, 48, 50).39 In North America, Puritans had only to cast off the ecclesiastical and lordly terminology to create a town meeting that was “founded in immemorial tradition, but revivified by new thoughts and purposes” (49). What Fiske Americanization and historical consciousness

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frequently refers to as the “peculiar circumstances” of North America allowed a grand experiment in federal democracy as settlers “of the same race and speech” brought the political training of their history to an allegedly unoccupied continent (91). In this version of North America as a space without history, the continent is the ground for the culmination of a racial evolution that began elsewhere. Fiske’s history of political institutions thus is the vehicle for a vision of racial destiny. “Manifest Destiny,” the last of the three chapters of American Political Ideas, announces that with a continent-sized federation now achieved in North America, the mission of the “two great English nationalities” of England and the United States is to democratize, federalize, and pacify the world.40 The ability of the English race to absorb and mold “slightly foreign elements” into a political type “first wrought out through centuries of effort on British soil” lets it embrace the mission without endangering its own essential traits.41 The achievements of the race in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific attest that “the work which the English race began when it colonized North America is destined to go on until every land on the earth’s surface that is not already the seat of an old civilization shall become English in its language, in its political habits and traditions, and to a predominant extent in the blood of its people” (143). Continental Europe will become federal as a matter of survival, and in an enthusiastic rephrasing of a glum observation by Sohō, Fiske declares that the question facing “barbarous races” is whether they will transform themselves or cease to exist (115, 150). The resulting global federation will be a United States stretching from pole to pole, “a world covered with cheerful homesteads, blessed with a sabbath of perpetual peace” (152). The idea that the final stage of history would be pursued jointly by brethren of the English race reflects the transformation in views of AngloAmerican relations under way in culture and diplomacy as well as historiography.42 Acts of states become accomplishments of the race for the benefit of humanity. Thus the English conquest of North America, crowned by the defeat of France in the battle of Quebec, “was unquestionably the most prodigious event in the political annals of mankind” because it represented the next step in spreading the principles of Teutonic government in the world.43 As a struggle “sustained by a part of the English people in behalf of the principles that time has shown to be equally dear to all,” the Revolution advanced, rather than interrupted, the mission. The outcome showed “an astonished world” that “instead of one there were 210

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now two Englands, alike prepared to work with might and main toward the political regeneration of mankind.”44 Fiske’s declaration that the war produced “two Englands” reproduces formulations already seen in Japan and France—a second Restoration, a second France—and thus suggests that his racial explanation of the history of the United States draws on a temporality common in national history, protestations of the peculiarity of North American conditions to the contrary. Fiske’s program to make the world English also resembles Newman’s plans to Americanize Valentin in The American. I return to these points about temporality and conversion, but we should first consider the logic of the English origins that Fiske gives the American nation. In Fiske’s proposition that the political habits of the “English race” are the source of the political institutions of the United States, the inherent character of the race is present at the moment of its formation but can only be fully realized in the exceptional conditions of England and North America, where the evolution of Teutonic institutions is unimpaired. Regardless of Fiske’s enthusiasm for the nonteleological Darwin, the outcome is determined from the start: the story is one of revelation and realization rather than open-ended change. The rhetoric of the story operates through correspondences: parish and township, vestry meeting and town meeting, England and North America as untouched places, and the Channel and the Atlantic as barriers, insulating Englishmen and Americans from “the enemies of their freedom.”45 The correspondences are geographical with the exception of the parallel political institutions, which Fiske considered to be closely related to geography. The geographical quality of the correspondences is one indication that Fiske does not simply treat their terms as historical stages in a sequential relationship. Each is also a distinct manifestation of essential qualities of the race, corresponding to each other on this extratemporal basis as well. The historian Edward Channing, a contemporary of Fiske, criticized proponents of Teutonic origins for mistaking analogies for identities and thus assuming a direct relationship between ancient and contemporary institutions where none existed.46 Channing was correct, but the structure of correspondences in American Political Ideas is notable for more than its mistakes. Students of the religious thought of the United States will observe that the structure of correspondences in American Political Ideas resembles the typology of New England Puritan historiography, which associated the secular history of the colonists with episodes from the Bible or events in the lives of biblical figures, in a relation of prefiguration and fulfillment, Americanization and historical consciousness

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or type and antitype.47 (The meaning of “type” in Puritan hermeneutics should not be confused with James’s ethnographic use of the word, although in Fiske’s work, too, types are associated with nations.) Sacvan Bercovitch has shown the political significance of Puritan typology through a close reading of Cotton Mather’s biography of John Winthrop, “American Nehemia” (“Nehemius Americanus,” 1702), in which Nehemia, who led the Jews out of Babylon and was their governor in the rebuilt Jerusalem, is a type for the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Typology brought together secular history, as discerned through worldly evidence, and the history of redemption, as discerned through hermeneutic analysis. By referring secular history to the history of redemption, it imposed a sacred telos on secular events. In the Puritans’ premillennial theology, such eschatology was focused on anticipation rather than completed events: the millennium was in the future, progress toward its realization was unfolding in the present, and the biblical past, understood typologically, explained the process.48 The New England Puritans were the elect agents of such progress, and the space of North America was consecrated to their secular-sacred activity.49 In Fiske’s rhetoric of correspondence, England and the United States have a similar relationship of type and antitype. Read as typology, the Anglo-Saxon exodus to England and establishment of self-government there prefigure the transit of English colonists to North America and the establishment of self-government on a greater scale. Such a typology refers the secular history of the United States not to the history of Christian redemption but to a quasi-sacred, ongoing history of Anglo-Saxon self-government in which the United States is an elect nation. The conjointly secular and sacred endeavor it has undertaken is oriented toward a future in which history will effectively end with the submission of nonEnglish races and a democratic millennium. (In Richard Drinnon’s acute observation, the Puritans’ Calvinistic deity, already made Unitarian and Jacksonian by Bancroft, becomes a Darwinian with a Teutonic accent.)50 The appearance of this version of Puritan typology in Fiske’s work is not surprising given a longtime interest in reconciling Christianity and the secular narrative of evolution.51 But pace Bercovitch, who regards such a view of history as a “New England Way” that develops into an “American Way,” this was not the only view of history present in the colonial and early national periods of the United States.52 (The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian views, which I discuss in chapter 3, provide obvious counterexamples.) The similarity to representations of national history in countries without 212

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a Puritan heritage—such as the relation of prefiguration and fulfillment in the idea of first and second Restorations in Japan—is a further sign that one should not confuse the parallel between Fiske and Puritan historiography with a static national characteristic or “way” but ask instead why the structure of typology was useful and to what end it was used. The two threads of history in American Political Ideas emplot time in radically different ways. The political history of the English race is linear, commencing in the German forests and leading to Fiske’s present era and onward. The quasi-sacred history of its self-governance, in contrast, is irruptive: federal democracy can potentially emerge in the world at any time but, before the end of history, does so only partially. In the latter irruptive temporality, partial manifestations such as the mark-mote and the town meeting have an unmediated relationship to federal democracy in its ideal form, while they are related to each other as worldly manifestations of the ideal rather than stages of evolution. The irruptive temporality provides the telos of the linear history of the English race: by accomplishing its redemptive mission, when secular and quasi-sacred history converge, the race fulfills all the potential and obligations of its character. Together, the two temporalities create the perspective of future anteriority: when American Political Ideas refers the linear history of the race to the irruptive history of “freedom,” it refers the present to the future—to history’s end in world democracy—and explains it in terms of the future. Viewed in this manner, the structure of correspondences in American Political Ideas resembles the relationship between the registers of national allegory, in which a completed individual story reveals the content of a national story that will reach completion with the accomplishment of unity. The resemblance lets us see that national history operates through the commingling of the linearity of its chronology with an irruptive temporality concerned with national character. In national history, the nation can emerge fully into secular history at any time but does so incompletely until the conclusion of its worldly evolution. We have encountered such a hybrid temporality before, in Plum Blossoms in Snow, for example. The lengths to which Fiske went to create a deep history for the American nation make it particularly recognizable in American Political Ideas. The history of England is not only an allegory for the history of the United States in American Political Ideas, however, because England also serves alongside the United States in the racial mission. That English history is ongoing confuses the parallels Fiske establishes between English antecedent and American successor and reveals some difficulties in Fiske’s Americanization and historical consciousness

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attempt to create an origin for the American nation. Despite Fiske’s demonstration of the primacy of the English race in the United States, the history that American Political Ideas tells is peculiar for producing “two Englands,” not a singular America. The phrase might be a flattering attempt at rapprochement but departs from Puritan typology, where the antitype always supersedes the type. In Fiske’s scheme the United States does supersede England as the achievement of self-governance on a larger scale and yet does not, because England continues to pursue a mission identical to that of the United States. The proliferation of “branches” of the English race, which would only accelerate, diminishes the singularity and the elect quality of the American nation: the United States becomes one among many Englands which are ordered not by the conjointly temporal and figural logic of typology but by a logic of equivalence. Fiske’s effort to define the American nation in terms of racial history unintentionally reveals that nations are formally identical in the matrix of their relations to each other, all professions of uniqueness aside. The rhetoric of seconds in American Political Ideas also reveals the unstable relationship the nation has with the past that it creates for itself. In Fiske’s work, the United States emerges as a copy more perfect than the original: larger, freer, more English than England. Temporal order disappears from their relationship, revealing the rhetoric of American secondness as an argument on the nature of the polity similar to that expressed in the narrative form of Tetchō’s Plum Blossoms in Snow. Yet the structure leaves the present curiously unconnected to the past that Fiske creates for it, which is elsewhere in the world. One can sense the disconnection in the fact that ultimately it seems less important for Fiske that the United States is a second England, a successor, than that England can serve him as a vessel into which he can project a legitimating origin for the present political and racial order, as, effectively, a second United States. That Fiske resorts to such reasoning-by-correspondences indicates the difficulty of asserting a unitary history for the nation that would replace the various pasts of the territories and subjects of the nation-state. Woodrow Wilson’s writings on the history of the United States, recognizing the significance of the problem, continue the search for such a unitary history but highlight a different solution than Fiske’s seemingly scientific demonstration of the Englishness of America: the subject’s acceptance of a common unitary history offered as the condition of membership in the nation.

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Wilson and the “Risk of Newness” Although Wilson occasionally heaped sarcasm on Anglo-Saxonism and the Teutonic germ theory, he shared with Fiske and others of his time the conviction that “Englishness” was the foundation of the political institutions of the United States. Like Fiske, Wilson regarded the Revolution as a further rooting of the principles of English liberty in North American soil, “a work of preservation” rather than destruction.53 While Fiske focused on the capacity of the “English race” to absorb settlers of other races, however, Wilson’s historical writing in the 1890s tended toward the assertion that national unity depended on non-English immigrants, freedmen and freedwomen, and political and economic dissenters accepting as their own a national history centered on the history of economic and political elites. Wilson’s restricted history preserved the predominant definition of the nation through racial hierarchy that we have seen in Fiske. Wilson’s belief that an acquired consciousness of history determined national character, on the other hand, reveals affinities with Henry James. Like James, Wilson worried that conditions in the United States hindered the development of a properly historical understanding of the nation and its place in the world, and he considered differences in historical consciousness, appearing within the nation rather than between nations as in The American, to be sources of social conflict and threats to the nation’s existence. Wilson turned to the writing of history in the 1890s after publishing on law, politics, and administration. Two book projects—Division and Reunion (1893), a history of the period 1829–89, and the five-volume History of the American People (1902)—and a number of essays recount large expanses of the history of the United States in digest form. Wilson continued publishing on politics and compiled notes for a never-written Philosophy of Politics but struggled with the theoretical abstraction his magnum opus would require. One reason for turning to history seems to have been the opportunity to uncover the native political practice he hoped to theorize. Wilson was particularly concerned to show that the emergence and development of the “national idea,” that is, the idea of being a nation, was the primary factor in the course of the history of the United States, in order to argue that the political and economic conditions determining the nation’s growth, rather than legalistic reasoning based on the Constitution, should be the foundation of administration.54 Although Southern historiography of the Civil War was an important target of this argument (particularly in Americanization and historical consciousness

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Division and Reunion), Wilson’s focus on the development of the national idea also advanced his contention that the nation’s evolution would not fully be accomplished without proper apprehension of its history. Division and Reunion, written for both general readers and students, illustrates the role Wilson gave to views of history in the development of the nation. Wilson says that by 1829, when the book begins, “colonial America” had become “national America,” a country seeking to “express her new life in a new course of politics.”55 Familiar economic logic explains the transformation: “constant intercourse and united effort” through the growth of railways, manufacturing, and trade encouraged the development of common opinions, manners, and goals. (Wilson presents the growth of the West as the summation of the process, revealing the influence of conversations with Turner.)56 Slavery “condemned” the South to an agricultural economy, however. Because of its economic stasis, in the South the “national idea” never displaced the original conception of the Constitution as a compact between sovereign states under which secession was legitimate.57 Although the immediate source of the conflict between North and South was the expansion of slavery, the ultimate cause thus was that their views of the Constitution belonged to different periods in the life of the nation. The ties that bound the regions into a nation, however, were not “lawyer’s facts” but “historian’s facts,” Wilson explains. The Northern position was not superior legally or morally but had been validated by history. The South was overwhelmed by what Wilson calls “the great national drift” because it was unable to recognize that history had changed the nature of the union.58 Fortunately, in Wilson’s view, the restoration of the “natural, inevitable ascendancy” of Southern whites after Reconstruction began to mend the regional divide, delivering a nation with “a sense of preparation, a new seriousness, and a new hope,” that is, a sense of past, present, and future now held in common.59 The argument presents both war and reconciliation as the consequence of evolving views of a national history that is premised, one should note, on the denial of full citizenship to African Americans. Wilson’s essays of the 1890s similarly stress the role of historical consciousness in national evolution. His frequent retelling of the history of the United States in large-circulation magazines such as the Atlantic meant to convey not just the facts of history but the broad conditions and stages of the nation’s movement toward self-consciousness. Thus although Wilson was a product of Adams’s prestigious seminar at Johns Hopkins, he confessed that his chief interest in history was gleaning “object-lessons for 216

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the present” and spent little energy on original research.60 Rhetoric and narrative were as important as facts in such an approach to history, and the essays share several rhetorical turns and narrative tacks, including the repeated assertion that the nation’s union with itself is incomplete, a selfconscious turning to the past to find forces that have unified it so far, and a motif of anticipation and fulfillment in the steps Wilson charts from the disunity of the past toward the unity of the future. Wilson opens “The Proper Perspective of American History” (1895) by observing that most histories of the United States have been written by New Englanders who regard “our national history” as the expansion of their region.61 A look to the past shows, however, that the growth of the West was the key force in the country’s development. Southerners and easterners were transformed in the West into members of a nation, not a section. The rise of Andrew Jackson—a degenerate episode in the view of many New England historians—marked the definitive appearance of a nation that “with all the haste and rashness of youth, was minded to work out a separate policy and destiny of its own.” Henceforth the West set the pace and determined the issues for the entire country (545, 553–54). The transformation nonetheless remains incomplete. The career of Abraham Lincoln—“a national man presiding over sectional men”—teaches that as the East grew old, it became sectional and lost the “wider view” possessed in the West (557–58). With westward expansion now over, the time has come for the East to learn from the West and broaden its perspective to that of a hemisphere. At the essay’s end, Wilson urges the readers of the New York–based Forum to recall the time when the East was a national frontier. If we are able to “resume and keep the vision of that time,” he concludes, “we shall renew our youth and secure our age against decay” (558–59).62 In “The Making of the Nation” (1897), the idea that union is incomplete is even stronger. Wilson asks: “Is the history of our making as a nation indeed over, or do we still wait upon the forces that shall at last unite us? Are we even now, in fact, a nation?” The answer is unhappy: “we still wait” for the nation’s “economic and spiritual union.”63 The Populist movement shows that the rise of the West was the birth of a “region apart” with its own sectional interests (contrary to Wilson’s view two years before). The South lacks the rounded economy that would make its people aware of the interests they share with other sections, while the East is now “more like the old world than the new” (2, 4). As in “The Proper Perspective,” Wilson turns to the past in search of hope for the future. The middle third Americanization and historical consciousness

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of “The Making of the Nation” is a compressed historical narrative from colonial times to the present, in which successive stages of recognition of common interests are interrupted by moments when disunity threatens to return. Wilson refers to this sketch as a “familiar story” that illustrates “the invariable process of nation-making which has gone on from generation to generation, from the first until now” (8). If history is a guide, the “sectionalization of the national idea”—because of which the nation means one thing in Kansas and another in Massachusetts—will be overcome, and “we shall at last be one people” (3–4). In the meantime, however, the nation lies “unfinished, unharmonized, waiting still to have its parts adjusted, lacking its last lesson in the ways of peace and concert” (10). Wilson’s stress on the nation’s unfinished state shifts the achievement of national harmony and union to the future, creating a present of crisis between future and past. The temporality of his “familiar story,” however, has many layers. Through motifs of anticipation and fulfillment, Wilson creates successive futures, ending with the reader’s own. “The Proper Perspective,” for example, remarks that when settlers crested the eastern mountain ranges, stretching ahead were “the regions in which . . . they were to make the great compounded nation whose liberty and mighty works of peace were to cause all the world to stand at gaze.” For “this great process of growth by grafting, of modification no less than of expansion,” he continues, the colonies were only “preliminary studies and first experiments.”64 Through Wilson’s combination of the past tense with an infinitive—“they were to make”—the passage becomes a description not just of landscape but of the future of a past moment: the entire expanse bears meaning in relation to epochs not yet traversed by the settlers.65 The epochs of fulfillment, however, are finished from the perspective of Wilson and his readers, for whom the making of the compound nation and the causing of awe are completed events. If these futures are in the narrative’s past, the narrative present is the more distant future in which such things already will have occurred. We thus find here the familiar structure of the future anterior, shifted so that the reader resides momentarily in the moment of achievement. At the essay’s end—which is to say, in the present—the motif of anticipation and fulfillment turns the reader to face his or her own future. The future tense of the closing line—“we shall renew our youth and secure our age against decay”—makes the present a time of anticipation whose own fulfillment is yet to come. “The Making of the Nation” illustrates still more clearly how Wilson punctuates history to turn the reader to face the nation’s future. In Wil218

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son’s periodization, divisive crises or reappearances of separate interests always follow stages of consolidation and unification.66 Thus a sense of separate security returned after the Seven Years’ War, localized politics under the Articles of Confederation succeeded the Revolution, Jeffersonian federalism interrupted the formation of a “new common consciousness” that began with the framing of the Constitution, and strife over the expansion of slavery followed the Jeffersonians’ own use of the federal government to expand the national territory. The most recent wave of self-awakening came during the Civil War, when slavery (which stood in the way of a “homogeneous national life”) was abolished, “national sentiment” grew in the North, and the nation “was fused into a single body.”67 The narrative stops here: the present moment, by implication, is one in which disunity threatens to return. Such a structure charges national subjects, individually and collectively, with discovering the commonalities through which they are to move the nation forward to the future. In “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” a speech delivered at the newly named university in 1896, Wilson calls this burden “the compulsion of national life.”68 The rhetoric and narrative form of Wilson’s work let us deepen earlier observations on national history’s proposition of the future, which is so frequently accompanied by an appeal for sacrifice in the present. Every invocation of the future in national history interpellates the national subject with a political obligation. Because the obligation is phrased in terms of the future, the subject that national history founds is shaped by its relationship to the collective future far more than by its relationship with fellow subjects in the here and now. Yet the nation is, in Wilson’s phrase, “not yet of one mind.”69 In his works Wilson names a host of threats to unanimity, including Populists, advocates of the free coinage of silver, moneyed interests that oppose it, abolitionists, immigrants, learned and unschooled “radicals,” and scientists, in addition to sectionalism.70 The fundamental source of such perils, however, is the nation’s improper understanding of its history. In Division and Reunion Wilson says that the time has come to discuss slavery “without passion” by questioning the extremity of charges of moral guilt laid against the South by Northern abolitionists. Such levelheaded discussion is possible now, he says, because North and South have grown together since the war.71 (That the remark refers to relations among whites attests to the politics of the “national” point of view he urges.) Wilson strengthens the connection between national harmony and a national perspective on history in “The Proper Perspective,” where he complains that national Americanization and historical consciousness

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histories written in the East have “smacked strongly of a local flavor,” the narrow perspective making it difficult to understand either the course of U.S. history or how it differs from the histories of European countries.72 By appealing for readers to “resume and keep” a vision of the time when the East was a national frontier, Wilson urges a perspective in which each locality understands itself in terms of its place in the history of the nation as a whole. Such a perspective would offer a solution not only to sectionalism in the apprehension of history but also to sectional disputes in the present. Wilson’s pedagogic project assumes that his readers will willingly adopt such a national perspective on history once shown it. Comments in “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” on those who refuse to learn reveal another aspect of his rhetoric. The entire address, given two weeks before William Jennings Bryan stood for president as Democrat and Populist, admonishes Princeton men to resist the “uneasy hope to change the world.”73 Wilson warns that the United States suffers a perpetual “risk of newness” whose danger is nearer now than even in times when armed revolution threatened.74 “We are in danger of losing our identity and becoming infantile in every generation,” Wilson says, because we are “always as young as the information of our most numerous voters.” The danger, he declares, “does not lie in the fact that the masses whom we have enfranchised seek to work any iniquity upon us, for their aim . . . is to make a righteous polity. The peril lies in this, that the past is discredited among them, because they played no choosing part in it. It was their enemy, they say, and they will not learn of it. They wish to break with it forever; its lessons are tainted to their taste” (459). Beginning with a communal we, the passage divides into an us and them with the introduction of mass enfranchisement. The narrower we had a choosing part in the past and took its lessons to heart, while they rely on present-minded “information.” Wilson speaks of the masses, but lack of a choosing part admits many to the crowd, former slaves and recent immigrants in addition to miners, factory workers, and the farmers in the Populist ranks. They reject history’s lesson that subjects must live in anticipation of the nation’s completion and suppress their differences in the present. In Wilson’s view, it is the duty of the college to keep such lessons alive by acting as an “organ of recollection” and “seat of vital memory” (458). Wilson’s unapologetic elitism offers the college as the source of a politicized memory, scarcely disguised as collected wisdom, to stave off mass infantilism and its intemperate reforms. Social concord will emerge if all 220

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national subjects accept as their own a history in which the narrow we of the elite plays the central role. Wilson is forthright in declaring that facts are only a means to an end in this project. The “real and proper object” of the study of history, he says, “is not to expound, but to realize it, consort with it, and make your spirit kin with it, so that you may never shake the sense of obligation off” (459). Put another way, the nation’s birth and rise is a historical fact, but spiritual kinship with its history, rather than the history itself, binds the subject to the nation. Wilson’s stress on spiritual filiation highlights the way that his view of American nationality—and those of James and Fiske as well—relies on notions of conversion and offers an opportunity to begin considering its politics.

Americanization and Historical Consciousness For Wilson, kinship with history is the ground for kinship with other members of the nation. The fictional kinship of nationality thus depends on the subject’s adoption of a specific filiation with history—a specific attitude toward it—that encompasses the subject’s view of his or her own history. We saw in the previous chapter that the narrative premise of “The Dancing Girl” is Ōta’s reconsideration of his personal history, impelled by his traumatic acceptance of the state’s gift of servitude. Examples from the work of James, Fiske, and Wilson give further support to the idea that in national history accession to nationality appears as an act of conversion to a particular view of the history of the nation and one’s place in it. In these examples, the Americanization of the subject population of the United States is crucially joined to the attitudes toward history of both the foreign and native born. Americanization, we can say, is both an event in history and, for the nationalized subject, a transformation of the consciousness of history. To return to James’s novel, recall that Newman’s plan to make Valentin into an American and claim Claire as his wife hinges on changing their attitudes toward their personal and family histories. Inherited social expectations propel Valentin into a duel, however, and the family blocks Claire’s engagement as a hazard to the family’s reputation. If history thus intervenes to determine the siblings’ fates, it is no surprise that this is the point in the novel when the Bellegardes most pointedly scorn Newman as a historyless American. It is also a crucial turning point in the history that is The American. Although the succeeding part of the novel concerns Newman’s efforts to free Claire, the focus gradually shifts away from his Americanization and historical consciousness

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plans to convert her and Valentin toward a conversion that Newman experiences himself when he abandons his plan to destroy the Bellegardes’ reputation. Urbain curiously anticipates the transformation by pleading with Newman not to sully the murdered father’s name and warning that Newman will expose himself as well to condemnation if he proceeds. The next day, Newman experiences a dramatic change of heart—“He seemed morally to have turned a sort of somersault”—when he is on the verge of revealing the secret. Newman does not decide to save the father’s reputation, however, but rather decides that others’ opinions of the Bellegardes matter little to him; he does not decide to keep his own reputation clean but rather feels disgust with himself for nearly stooping so low.75 The “moral somersault” parallels the sudden feeling of disgust with revenge that drove Newman from New York to Paris and set the plot of The American in motion, but Newman’s final rejection of vengeance is notable for the conscious reflection on his position in the world that it inspires. After half a year of anguished travel, Newman returns to Paris with the idea of remaining there forever to mourn Claire. The sight of the barren walls of her convent releases him from “ineffectual longing,” however, and his feet lead him to Notre Dame. There he remembers the Bellegardes, but only as “people he had meant to do something to.” James adds: “He was ashamed of having wanted to hurt them. They had hurt him, but such things were not really his game. At last he got up and came out of the darkening church; not with the elastic step of a man who has won a victory or taken a resolve, but strolling soberly, like a good-natured man who is still a little ashamed.”76 At this point Newman has consciously grasped the principle behind the change of heart that ended his plan for revenge. The scene that follows, when Newman burns the letter exposing the murder, is among the most discussed in the novel but is simply the outcome of Newman’s moment of reflection in the cathedral. While the Bellegardes win their battle over reputation and family authority, Newman gains the ability to consciously determine his own moral standing, an achievement in an entirely different struggle. What results is the Americanization of the novel’s iconic American, not through the material gain that Newman offers Valentin but through moral reflection. In Newman’s Americanization, the naive rejection of the weight of history on human relations becomes a conscious national virtue. Newman’s rejection of history is responsible, paradoxically, for many events in the Americanization that he experiences in James’s fanciful Europe. James’s insistence on placing Newman’s attitude toward history 222

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in his history as a force in his moral development is ultimately responsible for turning the novel from an ethnography of nations staged as social comedy into an allegorical reflection on their moral character. The coming-to-consciousness of innate character is the telos of both registers of the allegory, Newman’s transformation and the still-incomplete transformation of the nation. The key to his accession to “mature” American moral character is the realization that his dismissive attitude toward history—including his plan to destroy the storied Bellegardes—reflects not a simple desire for self-invention but rather a moral position in the world that the plan threatens to destroy. The element of ethnographic typology remains in the fact that Newman’s character—the character of the nation—does not change but rather becomes more clearly manifest as history proceeds. Nonetheless that Newman’s realization takes place in a church signals that it is indeed a moment of conversion in which Newman gains a deeper understanding of his seeming lack of history as a factor in his own history and in his relations with others. Allegorically, James underscores the force of an “American” disregard for history in the history of the nation and its relations with other nations. The American appeared before anti-immigration campaigners popularized the idea that the United States was receiving “beaten men from beaten races,” as Francis Walker put it. Newman’s project of Americanizing Europeans, and James’s depiction of Newman’s own Americanization, accordingly pay little attention to the issue of large-scale immigration.77 Fiske’s definition of an American nation centered on the “English race” is an example of the constellation of ideas that emerged in the wake of mass immigration, which asserted that the capacity for self-government was determined by degrees of whiteness and nonwhites were relegated to partial citizenship. One might ask why Fiske speaks in American Political Ideas of people of other races—and ultimately the world—becoming English rather than American. Recognize, however, that for all his talk of global destinies, race is primarily a means for Fiske to talk about the nation. The attention Fiske lavishes on the “English” as a multinational race gives him a way to redefine a distressingly multiracial nation, through an argument that demonstrates the superiority of those he considers the whitest of whites. History is crucial to the demonstration: the correspondences between the United States and England in American Political Ideas legitimate Fiske’s definition of the nation around “English” whites by associating them with the central thread of world history. Although the English race and its history are obviously created to support Fiske’s definition of the Americanization and historical consciousness

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American nation, in his scheme of world history they appear to precede and encompass it. The crucial conclusion is not that the United States will share a role in the fate of the world (although the idea may have thrilled Fiske and his audiences) but that as the English race reigns supreme in the world, so must it reign in the United States. For Fiske, the racial conversion of becoming English thus means accepting the seeming evidence of the history he constructs and the argument on racial domination it carries. Some national subjects are American by descent. Others can become American by becoming English, that is, by adopting the political habits and ultimately the gamut of social practices of a mythical community, small-town New Englanders. Fiske’s version of Puritan typology can again help us understand the process of joining the nation that he envisions. Like religious conversion, becoming English is an irruptive moment and part of the quasi-sacred history of federal democracy. Because it involves adopting behavior that exists in secular history, it also means joining the political history that reaches from the German forests to the United States by way of England and New England. Fiske shifts opportunistically between definitions of race by descent and by acquired behavior, however, showing that he does not intend accession to this national history to be open to all. In Fiske’s view, “kindred” races (inferior whites) may become fully English, while others can only acknowledge the historically ordained supremacy of the English race in the United States. Fiske’s efforts to define the nation around the history of a specific group, I suggest, are typical of national history’s response to the social heterogeneity of settler societies: members of a stratum historically associated with the institutions of the state become the actors of history. Fiske seems to have been less willing than Strong to speak and write publicly of genocide, but the implication of the constellation of race, nation, and history in his work nonetheless remains: the lesson of the nation’s history must be demonstrated by force to those who are reluctant to learn.78 Like Ōta’s choice between Japanese identity and cosmopolitan death in “The Dancing Girl,” accession to nationality may be a forced conversion. Wilson too presents the adoption of a specific view of history and its actors as the essential vehicle of national progress and the end to discord. Distinguishing between “the existence of facts” and “consciousness and comprehension” of them in “The Making of the Nation,” Wilson asks readers: “Shall we not constantly recall our reassuring past, reminding one another again and again, as our memories fail us, of the significant incidents of the long journey we have already come, in order that we may 224

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be cheered and guided upon the road we have yet to choose and follow?” Only by repeatedly analyzing “our past experiences,” he continues, can he and his readers form an image of “our life as a nation” sufficient to guide them.79 Through the “reassuring past,” Wilson would escape the clash between elites and dissenters that he describes in “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.” The collective we of the passage opens itself not only to those who have had a “choosing part” but to anyone who seeks the comfort of the history that “The Making of the Nation” offers. The disappearance of the nation’s them into its we depends on collective acceptance of this single comforting history, as the rest of the passage illustrates. “The future will not, indeed, be like the past,” Wilson writes. “And yet the past has made the present, and will make the future. It has made us a nation, despite a variety of life that threatened to keep us at odds amongst ourselves. . . . It has taught us how to become strong, and will teach us, if we heed its moral, how to become wise, also, and single-minded.”80 Agency in the making of the nation shifts conspicuously here from the nation and its members to “the past.” Even more curious is the dual role that the past plays: it “has made us” a nation and “will teach us” to become single-minded, that is, to achieve the spiritual union that the nation still awaits. The common story of the nation’s formation and gradual achievement of self-consciousness now explicitly incorporates an epistemological dimension. The nation’s history culminates in its understanding of itself in historical terms, and such understanding lays the ground for a unanimity which all may join provided they set aside the “uneasy hope to change the world.” When Wilson tells the nation’s history in his essays, he incorporates the epistemological transformation that he urges into their form, as an incantatory performance of unification. In acts that Wilson characterizes as collective recalling and reminding, rather than instruction, his narratives carry a we of historian and reader through epochs of consolidation and episodes of disunity to the present, finally placing on the reader, as noted earlier, the burden of responding to the nation’s incompleteness.81 The performative quality of Wilson’s pedagogic project reveals another phase of the work of national allegory. Following Benjamin, the previous chapter described national allegory as a dialectical movement between individual and national registers. When analyzing Plum Blossoms in Snow, “The Dancing Girl,” and The American, I focused on one portion of the dialectic, the movement from individual to national register through which an individual history emerges as a model for the history of the nation. Wilson’s essays offer an example of movement from the national to Americanization and historical consciousness

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individual register, through which, in contrast, the history of the nation becomes a model for the history of the national subject. The recital of national history in Wilson’s works urges, even predicts, the individual’s accession to nationality as his or her adoption of a commonly shared (if selective) view of history. The national register of history up to the reader’s day—for Wilson, the still-incomplete development of the idea of being a nation—projects a future in the individual register in which the subject will adopt the nation’s history as its own and in this way further the nation’s making. This aspect of the dialectic projects an individual future, but because it projects the same future for every individual, it also projects a unanimity without which the nation is incomplete. While the movement from national to individual register is especially apparent in Wilson’s historical essays, the movement from individual to national register more prominent in works of fiction such as The American, it should be clear that the entire dialectic is present in all national allegories. The apparent closure or openness of one or the other register reflects the phase of the movement at a given performative moment, which as a whole mounts the argument for the necessity and inevitability of unity. National allegories interpellate subjects with the responsibility to resolve the nation’s present crisis through such a movement from national to individual register. As the history of the nation becomes the history of the individual, so the future of the nation becomes the individual’s own, and the present crisis a crisis in the subject’s being. Signs of this aspect of national allegory are abundant, from Wilson’s essays to the potted history of The Future Japan—which gives force to its final exhortations for collective resolve—and the convulsions of being that Ōta and Newman experience in “The Dancing Girl” and The American. A moment of crisis in the present is the premise of the obligation conveyed by the allegories’ invocation of the future, with the past telling how the crisis will have been resolved. The entire structure is a way to organize time that has little to do with development or progress, although past, present, and future are essential terms of the vocabulary in which it is expressed. The idea that the present is in crisis—perpetually—seems as important to the structure as the motif of rupture between past and present, which, as seen earlier, is essential to differentiating the registers of national allegory. If the adoption by all national subjects of a common view of history offers the solution to this unsolvable crisis, however, one must ask what happens to other histories, which are intolerable intrusions in the movement toward unanimity.

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The Nonhistory of Dissent The American, as noted briefly, is unable to explain how someone of another nationality might become American: when Newman fails to Americanize Claire and Valentin, the novel turns to concentrate on Newman’s own melodramatic Americanization instead. The shift in genre avoids an anomaly in the national typology of the initial social comedy, in which all nations but the American one are defined by their history. Making a history out of Newman’s disregard for history, however, goes no further toward explaining how others could shed their own histories to become American. Fiske’s presentation of the United States as a second England encounters a related problem of distinguishing the history of the two nations within the history of the English race. The logic of equivalence observed earlier in Fiske’s rhetoric of seconds suggests the difficulty of establishing the history of any nation as truly unique and defining. Writing of domestic dissenters, Wilson forthrightly dismisses alternative views of history as nonhistories, simply rejections of a national history that by definition is singular and autonomous. Nonetheless the alarmism of Wilson’s essays indicates that the challenge that other histories pose to national history’s representation of the nation’s becoming remains acute. The challenge is not merely one of logic but appears also as the possibility that the subject will reject the lesson national history preaches. The possibility of such refusal appears real, considering that James, Fiske, and Wilson go out of their way to identify discrepant views of history as the source of social conflict and assert that they can result only in personal unhappiness and political turmoil. Electing the history of the nation as one’s own appears to be part of what Wilson calls “the compulsion of national life.” The position responds to the problem in the latenineteenth-century United States of articulating the relationship of the varied histories of a large foreign-born population to the history of the nation. Arguing that national kinship is based on a shared attitude toward history overcomes differences in individual histories, making it unimportant whether one shares familial kinship with English settlers or whether one has taken part in the development of kinship ties into a “national idea.” The obligation to set aside one’s history and embrace that of the nation, moreover, renders the histories of individuals and nonnational communities invalid as the basis for a politics demanding fundamental changes to the social and economic foundations on which the community of the nation is erected. In a narrative of collective becoming, dissent from ecoAmericanization and historical consciousness

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nomic injustice or racial oppression is merely “infantile” because it lacks any historical legitimation. Fiske’s history of the English race in North America offers a straightforward example of the politics of such an obligatory election of history. American Political Ideas concerns itself with the history and destiny of a race in the world, but its political significance lies in the legitimating history it creates for a racialized political order in the United States. The supposed fact of the centrality of the English “race” in the history and future of the country proves the justice of this order, in which the precondition of political participation is acceptance, by becoming English, of its racial foundations. Fiske’s history legitimates the disfranchisement of those who refuse to become English by asserting that such dissenters refuse to recognize the verdict of history. His energetic promotion of such a view of history through lectures and essays thus dismisses dissent from institutionalized racism and hierarchies of citizenship in the United States as a form of historical illiteracy. Wilson makes explicit such an exclusion of dissent from the nation’s “reassuring past.” The ultimate source of the discontent roiling the nation, Wilson says, is that the masses did not have a “choosing part” in the nation’s history, which is at heart the history of the idea of being a nation, moving inexorably toward a moment when the nation will be “of one mind.” In such a history, dissent violates the national idea at every moment because it divides the nation. For Wilson there can be no history of dissent in the United States, properly speaking, just a succession of misguided dissenters, including Jeffersonians, secessionists, abolitionists, proponents of radical Southern reconstruction, and, most recently, Populists. The reassuring past replaces dissent with the familiar assurance of a future in which all wrongs will have disappeared. Accepting the history that Wilson constructs, then, means acquiescing to the present for the sake of the national idea that is both the theme and motor force of history. For Wilson such an insistence on unity extended to attacks on sectionalism in historiography. James, too, was much interested in the historian’s impartiality, although his choice of representative figures shows a willingness to choose facts to suit a point. Setting aside the choice of Newman’s French antagonists—a legitimist rather than a veteran of 1848, for example—consider that Newman is an egalitarian of opportunity, not of condition, who offers money as a substitute for breeding.82 The melodrama of his struggle relies in part on a tacit argument on the justice of replacing aristocratic “feudalism” with capitalist acquisitiveness. When 228

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James offers a sui generis millionaire as the American new man, however, he omits the past behind the scarcely mentioned sources of the hero’s fortune: conquest and expropriation of territory, speculation in natural resources and rights to the public domain, capitalization of the products of land and labor. James’s ambivalent attitude toward Newman—who is naive in his rejection of history but correct in his view that it oppresses— should be understood as the avoidance of such a past. When James offers Newman’s personal education as a national allegory, Newman’s rejection of the weight of history on social relations confirms a blindness toward any alternative to the history-blind capitalist here and now. Such a blindness becomes, of all things, a virtuous force in national history. The moral progress that the novel projects for the nation rests on a progressively more general forgetfulness that society might take another form, while the problems of capitalist modernity become problems of uneven moral Americanization—disregard for fair play—that will solve themselves in the passage of time. Even in his most difficult hour, Newman fittingly reflects that he is happy to be rich.83 At this point we can make more extended comparisons of the argument and form that national history takes in the work of James, Fiske, and Wilson to the strategies commonly found in Japan during this period. The rhetoric and narrative structure of national history in post-1868 Japan displaced dissenting positions to the past. Those who objected to the remaking of Japanese society in the name of the nation were charged with failing to understand that history is a process that cannot be resisted. Dissenters were thus faulted not for rejecting history but on the contrary for being too attached to the past. In the United States, in contrast, Fiske and Wilson went to great lengths to attach the present to a determinate past. Although James seems to have endorsed a native disregard for the past, he considered its appearance and development to be significant events in the history of the American nation and the basis for the evolution of the national character. In these arguments on the national past, present, and future, the progress of the nation only extends and confirms a structure of community implicit in the arrival of English settlers. The Puritan motifs of Fiske’s history of the United States give a clear example: in American Political Ideas both the character and quasi-sacred destiny of the nation are implicit in every event of its history. National character and destiny do not change but rather become more fully manifest. Similarly, the nation’s allegorical education in The American brings the national character into consciousness rather than changing it, while in Wilson’s work the Americanization and historical consciousness

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future will bring both the achievement of the unity that is implicit in the nation’s beginnings and the allegiance of all national subjects to the story of that unity’s realization. Such arguments about the essential character of the nation and its manifestation in the world recall the arguments on “returning forward” addressed to the events of 1868 in Japan. The political contexts in the two countries gave a fundamentally different cast to the problem of the individual’s relationship to the past, however, and spawned significantly different temporal structures in representations of the nation’s history. What I referred to as a temporality of restoration in Meiji Japan divides the new Japan from the old and makes it possible to depict resistance to the reorganization of society by state and capital as anachronistic because rooted in the social forms of the preceding era. In this structure the present confronts an objectified past from which it has emerged through traumatic struggle in a restoration of both the character of the nation and the universal pattern of social development. Although ubiquitous, the structure is related to a specific event, the establishment of the Meiji state, which remains a referent for the structure even when it is not explicitly invoked. The less evident the traces of 1868 are in this structure, in fact, the more effectively it propagates as common sense the perceived need to sever modern Japan from its “premodern” past. Precisely because of its ubiquity, moreover, the structure intimates that such a task remains unfinished: the nation must remain mobilized against the vulnerabilities exposed by its backwardness. Motifs of conversion are as common in representations of national history in the United States as motifs of rupture in Japan. Their referent is a moment of arrival, no less mythic than 1868 as an imperial restoration, that encompasses both a territorial claim and the first instance of conversion to an American nationality. The pair constitutes the foundation of what we could call a temporality of settlement in narratives of national history in the United States, with its own characteristic structure. Texts from The Gilded Age to “The Making of the Nation” show that the structure has three essential parts: a prearrival state of emptiness or latency, an absolute beginning of arrival, and a linear history of territorial expansion and the development of national character, that is, the history of the Americanization of land and people. The relationship among these parts is not temporal: according to this structure there is no time before arrival, only expectation. Rather, the nontemporal relationship among them is the basis for organizing time as national history. Although the first act of 230

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settlement is the structure’s ultimate referent, in the historical imaginary that derives from it, every immigrant disembarkation and every seizure of land has a dual status: as an event in the linear history that commences with English colonization, and as a reproduction of the structure itself, in which disembarkation and settlement recommence the process of Americanization. Note, moreover, that each instance of conversion and expansion anticipates another, as seen most vividly in the grammar Wilson uses to describe the passage of settlers through the passes of the eastern ranges. Emplotted through this structure, every achievement is a beginning, and every beginning implies an unachieved destiny. Such a temporality presents the process of national unification as always only just begun, even when an enthusiast of Teutonic origins like Fiske finds the birth of the nation in the first-century forests of Germany. A structure of perpetual beginnings performs two sorts of ideological labor. First, it abets continual misrecognition of the role that the expropriation of land and the forcible Americanization not only of immigrants but also of Native Americans and Africans, and indeed of “original” settlers themselves, played in the country’s history. It places these acts, regardless of when they occurred, before the beginning—the perpetual beginning—of national history. Further evidence of the antipathy of national history toward time: the contingent foundations of the nation in such acts are not excluded from the historical narrative so much as they seem never to have existed. The endless innocence often remarked in the encounters of the United States and its nationals with the world surely stems from such denial. The corollary of such endless innocence is that if the nation is always newborn, the accomplishment of its destiny is always distant. Representations of national history in Japan in this period commonly asserted that problems in the relationship of the nation to itself would be resolved when the foreign threat had been repelled. Attachment to the pre-Meiji past was said to divide the nation at its moment of crisis. Examples from the United States presented the perils facing the nation as internal rather than external: freed slaves, immigrants, angry farmers and miners, whose presence spoke not only of social heterogeneity but also of heterogeneous pasts. In an ever-innocent nation, such pasts disappear, while the resolution of dispute in the present is referred endlessly to the future. In this logic national unity is both means and goal: the nation will be able to solve the problems that divide it—problems of social, economic, and political inequity—when the nation is no longer divided. If the logic is circular, the Americanization and historical consciousness

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political effect is nonetheless clear: keeping in mind that settlement, like rupture, is a structure, we can see that such deferral is perpetual, because while many things may serve as events to mark the internal threat—immigrants, communists, Muslims—the threat itself remains a permanent feature of the nation’s past, present, and future. Turning now to examine the problem of the Revolution in representations of national history in Third Republic France, we find that such efforts to deny a history to dissent ultimately concern themselves not with the origins of the nation but of the state.

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Chapter 7

French Revolution, Third Republic

The republic founded in France in 1870 faced different problems of beginnings than those that marked the representation of history in the United States. The necessity of accounting for settler origins in the United States produced a rhetorical structure of continuous beginnings and ever-distant destiny in which accession to nationality meant a change in historical consciousness. Circumstances in France, in contrast, made the origins of the state a preeminent problem in the representation of national history. Despite what might be implied by the replacement of a Second Empire by a Third Republic, there was no revolution in 1870 in the sense of a widereaching change in social and economic relations. Although the change in political relations was significant, the Bonapartist state collapsed without the intervention of republicans, who exerted tenuous control over the new government only because of divisions among the opposition. Republicans prevented a social and economic revolution in the following year, moreover, by invading Paris and putting an end to the uprising of the Commune. And yet the conservative republicans who dominated in the early decades of the Republic inherited a myth of origins concerned with a founding rupture, the revolution of 1789. The idea and rhetoric of revolutionary rupture informed historical representation and political argument for and against the Republic and was a crucial issue in its legitimacy, regardless of the regime’s nonrevolutionary beginnings. To say that conservative republicans simply inherited the Revolution as a myth of origins understates the complexity of the situation. By likening the Commune to the action of urban crowds during the First Republic (1792–95), monarchists and Bonapartists forced the history of the Revolution onto republicans to discredit them. The Left, including veterans of the revolution of 1848, had its own idea of what the Revolution had been

and what revolution might be, forcing conservative and moderate republicans to take positions for or against different phases of the Revolution that could be interpreted as popular uprisings. Thus assaulted from right and left, it would have been impossible for republicans to create a different myth of origins if they had wanted to. When they willingly appropriated the Revolution and the First Republic as forebears, therefore, republicans were forced not only to explain the relationship of their regime to this originary rupture but also to counter the explanations offered by their rivals. The struggle was simultaneously over the definition of the new regime and over the definition of the Revolution: these questions were virtually identical. The perspective of the international system of states suggests further reasons that the work of national history in this context would differ from its labor in Japan and the United States. The Prussian victory in 1870 allowed Bismarck to declare the formation of the German Empire and considerably diminished French power in the system. The existence of a French state was not in doubt, however, reflecting the high degree of “stateness” that Charles Tilly observes in western Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, as the result of convergence in the formal characteristics of governments. Western European states were relatively centralized and differentiated from nongovernmental institutions; political rights were concentrated in them, and they cooperated in maintaining the system of interstate relations through mutual recognition of sovereignty and efforts to extend the system to the rest of the world.1 In 1789 the position of the French state in the system underwent a major change that ultimately set conditions for the emergence of new European states—such as Germany and Italy—that had not previously existed. During the Revolution and the several other reinstitutions of the state up to 1870, however, there was never a question that the French state would cease to exist. Such longevity is one reason for the often-observed centrality of the state in conceptions of the nation in France.2 Any regime claiming power in the name of the nation had to explain its relationship to the long history of the state. For republicans, the Revolution was obviously the crucial episode in this history, but the attention they paid it stemmed in part from the French state’s secure existence in the system of states that the monarchy helped to create through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Disputes over the proper form of the nation thus easily took the shape of disputes over the history of the state, rather than the nature of “civilization,” the standard that came to the fore during Japan’s integration into 234

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world political and economic systems, or the racial composition of the people, the focus of debates in the settler society of the United States. For conservative republicans and monarchists, who each considered the transformation of the state the crucial event in the fall of the social institutions of the old regime, such disputes devolved to disputes over the history of the Revolution. Republicans often charged their opponents with recidivism, not for resisting the force of social evolution, as in Japan, or of Americanization, as in the United States, but for trying to return the state to its prerevolutionary form.3 The absence of immigration from the arguments is especially revealing given the growing number of immigrant workers in France at the time. That a national identity emerged in France well before mass immigration began is only the beginning of an explanation, because this was true of the United States as well.4 Because the issues addressed through debate on the Revolution—the origins of the state, the relationship of state and nation, the conditions for national unity, etc.—were not posed in terms that acknowledged the reality of immigration, there was simply nothing to be gained by taking it into account. The focus on the state did, however, push other issues forward. In addition to arguments on the form of the state, state violence and the violence of those resisting the state were prominent issues, with the mass executions of 1793–94—the Terror—at the forefront of debate. Closer examination of the situation in France reveals that, paradoxically, the focus on the history of the state generated arguments for unity that did not rely on political history—in the case of the Revolution, the history of violent conflict over the state—but instead devised alternative ways to emplot the formation of national unanimity.

The Presence of the Past In the debate on decline and regeneration that followed the defeat by Prussia and the Commune, republicans argued that the foundation of the Republic would be the basis for renewal, with the Right predicting the opposite.5 The great presence of the past in political discourse informed the way such disputes were fought: intellectuals argued both the causes and cures for the nation’s affliction through panoramic narratives of history, frequently beginning in 1789. The volley of attacks against republicans that Hippolyte Taine launched with the first volume of The Origins of Contemporary France (Les origines de la France contemporaine, 1875) thus identified the Revolution as the cause of the present crisis.6 Prominent French Revolution, Third Republic

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republicans such as Eugène Spuller—lieutenant of Léon Gambetta, the hero of the republican resistance to Prussia—responded with essays and reviews defending the Revolution in The French Republic (La République française), the newspaper of Gambetta’s circle that Spuller edited.7 For decades the combat over the Revolution had been so intense that NumaDenys Fustel de Coulanges, a prominent historian of the ancient world, complained in 1872 that the writing of history had become “a kind of permanent civil war.”8 In the decades that followed, the Revolution became the site of proxy battles whose real points of contention were in the present, including the laicity of the state, centralization, suffrage and mass participation in politics more generally, and the ownership of means of production. The history of the Revolution had occupied a central place in political discourse since the Restoration of 1815. Two currents that emerged in the 1850s and 1860s were particularly influential among republicans. Auguste Comte’s view of the Revolution, popularized by Emile Littré in Conservation, Revolution, and Positivism (Conservation, révolution, et positivisme, 1852), presented the Revolution as a positive step in social evolution, praising its achievements in a manner that did not require supporting the Terror or its architects, the Jacobins. The political and philosophical meditations of Edgar Quinet in The Revolution (La Révolution, 1865) directly attacked justifications of the Terror on the basis of internal and external “circumstances.” Many of the founders of the Third Republic were influenced by Comte’s interpretation of the Revolution, which they encountered in the 1860s, often through Littré. The debate between Jules Ferry and Alphonse Peyrat that erupted after publication of Quinet’s The Revolution was similarly formative for republicans like Ferry who wanted to expel endorsements of the Terror from republican thought.9 Such criticism of revolutionary violence was also an expedient means to criticize popular insurrection and the aspiration for social and economic equality, including the Commune and its ideals. The declaration of Alphonse Thiers, the Republic’s first president, that the Republic “will be conservative or will not be” summed up the position of Gambetta, Ferry, and other founders.10 From this point of view, the Commune was the product of a faith in popular revolution that had weakened the first two republics, allowing the return of despotism, and had to be killed off before it undermined the third. Allegations of such a malignance supported the views of Gambetta and Ferry that the participation of the general citizenry in politics should be limited to elections.11 The criticism that “radi236

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cal” (relatively progressive) republicans levied against conservatives from the mid-1880s onward was appropriately expressed in terms of the Revolution, too, for example, in Georges Clemenceau’s proclamation that the Revolution was a “block” from which nothing—including the Terror— could be subtracted.12 The new regime’s use of history for legitimation extended to commemorative events. Organized conviviality at the state funerals of Thiers, Gambetta, and Victor Hugo and the first official celebration of Bastille Day in 1880 aimed to transform the image of the Parisian crowd from insurrectionary throng to orderly assembly of citizens.13 The greatest commemoration was the revolutionary centennial, whose events lasted from May 1889 to September 1892. (The founding of the First Republic was thus in, the Jacobin regime out.) Countercommemorations organized on both right and left challenged the government’s management of these and other events.14 The goal was nonetheless clear: by making the Revolution and eminent republicans the property of public tribute, such events promoted a history that was a ground for reconciliation and thus intervened against the view of French history as a history of conflict and popular struggle. A broader culture of commemoration, and ultimately a new view of the nation as a community that lived by preserving tradition rather than overthrowing it, supported such efforts.15 Controversy over the history of the Revolution affected the development of the field of historical writing, with critics initially outrunning supporters. Taine’s well-known critique was supported by a historiographical network anchored in Catholic universities whose center was the Review of Historical Issues (Revue des Questions Historiques), established in 1866 to promote rigorous scholarship among Catholic historians on the conjoint model of German methods and the tradition of ecclesiastical history in France.16 The first such journal for secular scholarship, the Historical Review (Revue Historique) appeared in 1876 as part of efforts to professionalize the field. Defense of the Revolution, however, was largely limited to classics such as Michelet’s History of the French Revolution (Histoire de la Révolution française, 1847–53) and new histories written for popular audiences until the appearance of The French Revolution (La Révolution Française), a journal launched in 1881 to publish both scholarly and popular articles as groundwork for the centennial.17 In 1886 the Paris municipal government established the first course in revolutionary history, at the Sorbonne, and installed as instructor Alphonse Aulard, who became editor of The French Revolution the next year and moved the journal in an exFrench Revolution, Third Republic

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clusively scholarly direction.18 Although some describe the academic institutionalization of history as a marriage of convenience between historians and republican statesmen, defending the Revolution while professionalizing the writing of history made perfect sense in republican logic, whose positivism equated the Republic with scientific knowledge.19 Dispute over the representation of history extended far beyond the ranks of historians and like the political debates frequently connected the Revolution, the events of 1870–71, and the present state of the nation. The duo of Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, who had criticized the Second Empire through novels set in the Revolution such as Madame Thérèse (1863), continued to turn out fictional histories including History of the Plebiscite (Histoire du plébiscite, 1872) on the origins of the FrancoPrussian War. In the Rougon-Macquart series (1870–93), Emile Zola produced a twenty-volume critique of Second Empire society, finally reaching the war and the Commune in The Debacle (La débâcle, 1892). Since the Second Empire, a growing Catholic revival in literature had challenged such republican realism, for example, in Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Sir Des Touches (Le Chevalier des Touches, 1864), a historical romance set in the royalist counterrevolution in Normandy.20 The current eventually produced Maurice Barrès’s novels of “national energy” (1897–1902), antirepublican social fiction presented as contemporary history. A wide range of writers produced accounts of the Commune, from the disparaging reports by Théophile Gautier in Pictures of the Siege (Tableaux du siège, 1872) and Maxime du Camp in The Convulsions of Paris (Les convulsions de Paris, 1878– 80) to defenses including Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871 (Histoire de la Commune de 1871, 1876) and Jules Vallès’s novel The Insurrectionist (L’insurgé, 1886). Hugo’s Ninety-Three (Quatrevingttreize, 1874), a meditation on both the Commune and the Terror, reflects the preoccupation with the relationship between them that pervades many of these interventions, whether for or against the Republic. Conflict over history thus kept the idea of conflict in history in the foreground of historical debate. Henry James’s Newman might well have concluded that if Americans suffered by making too little of the past, French nationals suffered by making too much of it. Some figures from the period, in fact, seemed to agree. Amid skirmishes over the Revolution and other episodes of the French past there are efforts to separate the nation from history, through other means of imagining the formation of national unity in time. These include memory, elective lines of descent, and the idea of a revolutionary legacy that is distinct from its political history. 238

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An early example appears in an open letter that Fustel de Coulanges published in October 1870, between the fall of the Second Empire in September and the capitulation of the Government of National Defense in January 1871, in which he rejected the definition of nation by race and language because they are historical phenomena. The occasion of “Is Alsace German or French?” (“L’Alsace est-elle allemande ou française?”) was a series of open letters by Theodor Mommsen, like Fustel a historian of the classical world, on the Franco-Prussian War. Mommsen’s first two letters argued that Prussia was acting defensively, but the third, written in late August when Prussian victory seemed sure, asserted that the principle of nationality gave Prussia the right to seize Alsace. Mommsen’s rationale was that by race and language the population of Alsace was historically German.21 To this assertion of “the old right of the strongest,” Fustel responds, “When we speak of the present, let us not fix our eyes too greatly on history. Race is of history, of the past. Language too is of history, the remnants and the sign of a distant past. What is current and living are wills, ideas, interests, affections. History perhaps tells you that Alsace is a German country, but the present proves to you that it is a French one.”22 Present sentiment, Fustel says, defines nations: “Men feel in their heart that they are one people when they have a community of ideas, or interests, of affections, of memories and of hopes. . . . The fatherland is what one loves [La patrie, c’est ce qu’on aime]. It might be that Alsace is German by race and by language, but by nationality and the sentiment of fatherland, it is French.”23 Fustel significantly points to memories and hopes as components of the community of the nation in explicit distinction from “history.” We can say that memory is concerned with the past, as hope is with the future, but like will and affection exists in the present. Once Alsace entered this shared present—in 1789, Fustel maintains, not when Louis XIV annexed it in 1648—history no longer had claim on it.24 Indeed, in Fustel’s letter, entry into the nation seems an escape from history. Fustel aspired to make his discipline a “pure science” like physics or geology, and his comments on the civil wars of historiography argue for a cease-fire, not a retreat from the study of history per se.25 His distinction between the facts of the past and a sentiment of national unanimity that exists both because and despite of those facts is typical of the period. The works of Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, and republican historians who wrote to popularize their view of the Revolution repeatedly reveal such attempts to distinguish between a history of conflict and other ways that the nation can achieve unity. Hugo’s Ninety-Three searches for such a process through French Revolution, Third Republic

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allegories of the family; Renan’s “What Is a Nation?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’un nation?” 1882), through reflections on memory; and popularizing works such as Alfred Rambaud’s History of the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Histoire de la Révolution française, 1789–1799, 1883), through a presentation of the Revolution in terms of its “works.” These various ways of separating history from the formation of national unity allow the management of conflict and violence: the violence of the Commune and the Terror, but also the violence of continuing political divisions and indeed the day-today violence, symbolic and physical, through which the economic and political formations of modernity enforced their regime. This is not to say that violence was dispelled. On the contrary, the import of the management of the history of violence was that reconciliation would be obligatory and, if necessary, imposed by the state whose legitimacy such strategies meant to establish.

“We have seen these ways again” Hugo’s Ninety-Three was the product of a lifelong interest in the Revolution and the subject of a decade of periodic research. He began writing the novel, set during a republican campaign against the royalist rebellion known broadly as “the Vendée” for the region where it began, abruptly in early 1872 and completed it in little more than six months. The immediate impetus was Hugo’s defeat in a run for the National Assembly, but critics agree that Hugo’s experiences after the fall of the Second Empire and the rapid evolution of his attitudes toward the Commune, from disgust with the uprising to sympathy for those who took part, were major forces in the novel’s composition.26 The novel contains a number of implicit references to the era. Like the Third Republic, the First Republic of Ninety-Three fights a civil war in the shadow of a threat from the east, royalist forces attacking France from across the Rhine. Like the Communards, the rebels of Hugo’s Vendée take hostages, and when their cause is lost, they set fire to a library, echoing the burning of several libraries during the last days of the Commune. During the revolt the overwhelming number of rebels are killed, while some are able to flee and a few are caught and will be subject to republican justice, again in parallel to the last days of the Commune and the weeks that followed. Crucial differences between Hugo’s era and the Revolution appear, however, in the antagonists’ treatment of each other. Describing the partisans’ summary executions of republicans, the narrator comments that 240

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“we have seen these ways [moeurs] again,” the novel’s most direct observation of similarities between the eras.27 Yet in its denouement, the leader of Hugo’s rebel band saves his hostages from death—unlike the Commune, when around sixty hostages died—knowing that he will be captured in the process. The republicans’ general, who has already shown clemency toward the peasant soldiers of the resistance, sets their chief free in recognition of his act, in contrast to the Versailles government’s killing of some twenty thousand Communards. The ending, then, is a novelistic reiteration both of Hugo’s condemnation of the acts of the Commune and his public demand that the Republic amnesty the Communards who survived. Parallels such as these all identify the antirepublican movement in the Vendée with the socialist Commune, and the First Republic in the phase most cherished by the nineteenth-century Left with the conservative Versailles government, in an apparent inversion of the political principles at stake.28 The novel’s apparent endorsement of the Versailles government’s war on the Commune, moreover, contradicts Hugo’s vaguely socialist republicanism, leaving the nature of Hugo’s reflection on the Commune in Ninety-Three a significant question. The parallels between the civil wars of Paris against the Vendée and Versailles against Paris indicate the extent to which Hugo considered the events of 1793 to be a problem in historiography with vital implications for the present. The enormity of “this appalling minute, ’93, greater than all the rest of the century,” Hugo’s narrator says, demands that one stop to meditate on the events. The critical issue is whether “the revolution will be the justification of the Terror,” in the words of Cimourdain, a deputy of the Committee on Public Safety, or whether on the contrary one should fear that “the Terror shall be the calumny of the revolution,” as Gauvain, the republican general whom Cimourdain is charged with watching, worries.29 As in many of Hugo’s works, a date becomes a proper noun: ’93 names a historiographical problem concerned not just with past events but also with their interpretation.30 The expansion of the meaning of the digits beyond chronology also suggests ways that ’93 becomes part of a rhetorical structure for representing the relationship of the Third Republic to past and future that Hugo desired. The structure makes an argument on the present—specifically the republican state’s treatment of dissidents— by establishing the parallel narrative registers characteristic of national allegory. We will see that the history that Hugo creates for the Revolution argues that revolutionary insurrection has no place in the nation and projects a future in which internal antagonisms will vanish. French Revolution, Third Republic

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The novel’s political reflections on the Terror are organized around two stories that explicitly raise the question of the future in relation to the common motif of accession to nationality in the writing of national history.31 The first is a story of politics and indeed can be read as political history. In the spring of 1793, the Marquis de Lantenac slips into Brittany from the Channel Islands to organize the rebellion. Although he escapes detection, warrants for his death signed by Gauvain have been posted throughout the region. Lantenac is quickly joined by royalist irregulars. In his first act of war, he massacres soldiers from a republican battalion, kidnaps three children whom the battalion has adopted, and leaves their mother for dead. Shifting to Paris, the narrator describes the revolutionary fervor of life under the Convention (the assembly in place from September 1792 to October 1795, which abolished the monarchy and founded the First Republic) and then introduces Cimourdain as he is ordered to Brittany to monitor Gauvain and apprehend Lantenac. (Later Gauvain is revealed to be Lantenac’s great-nephew and heir; Cimourdain, a former priest, was the orphaned Gauvain’s tutor and cultivated his republican principles.) In Brittany, Gauvain forces Lantenac to retreat to a tower, where he locks the children in a library loaded with tar, straw, and a fuse leading to his last holdout. When the republicans take the tower, Lantenac and his men are able to escape through a hidden door, their rear guard setting fire to the library. The children’s mother, who has crossed and recrossed the countryside since the massacre, arrives on the scene just as the fire takes hold. Hearing her cries, Lantenac returns to the tower, saves the children, and is captured. After a night of anguished reflection on his great-uncle’s actions, Gauvain helps him escape. Gauvain is tried and, after a final interview with Cimourdain, is executed with the guillotine his teacher has brought from Paris. At the moment the blade falls, Cimourdain shoots himself, and the novel concludes with the observation that “these two souls, tragic sisters, took flight together, the shadow of one mingling with the light of the other.”32 Hugo says that Cimourdain embodies 1793 and Lantenac monarchy.33 Gauvain, the son not of Cimourdain’s flesh “but of his spirit,” lies between the former priest and his great-uncle on one of the grand antinomies that structure the novel’s system of thought. The struggle Cimourdain calls “more than a war in the fatherland [patrie]” because it is also “a war in the family” thus is waged over whether the family of the nation will be defined by lineal or spiritual filiation, lineal filiation supporting a monarchy, spiritual filiation a republic.34 Cimourdain, one of many republican converts in 242

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the novel, has been sent to ensure that Gauvain’s own conversion holds.35 We have indeed “seen these ways again”: the idea of spiritual filiation resounds in A Tour of France and its rhetoric of will, and spiritual filiations also compete with lineal descent in examples from Japan, in which Ōta is compelled to reject Ellis and his unborn child, and from the United States, in which Newman campaigns to rescue Claire and Valentin from family ties. We have also seen that the national subject’s apparently free choice of filiations is hardly so. Gauvain is no more able than others to escape the obligation of belonging, which is enforced on pain of death. The dichotomy between monarchy and republic is complicated by a series of arguments between Cimourdain and Gauvain over the means and ends of the Revolution that ultimately is a debate on the legitimacy of state violence. Cimourdain defends the Terror as necessary and avers that in times like theirs, pity can be a form of treason. Gauvain maintains that “the revolution is concord, not dread,” but affirms that he will execute Lantenac when he is caught: in a neat turn of phrase, Gauvain says that even though Lantenac is his parent, or relative, France is his grande parente, a grandparent bigger than lineal families.36 Lantenac’s sacrifice to save the children forces Gauvain to decide what principle he wishes his chosen parent to stand by: the “revolutionary absolute” that demands Lantenac’s death or the “human absolute” that he believes Lantenac honored in saving the children (428). By freeing Lantenac, Gauvain affirms the precedence of moral principles over political means. Significantly, neither Gauvain nor Hugo explains how Cimourdain’s actually existing “republic of the absolute” might become the “republic of the ideal” Gauvain imagines. Rather, as he sinks into an increasingly mute meditation on the eve of his execution, Gauvain explains to an inquisitive Cimourdain that he is thinking of “the future,” where presumably contradictions between political history and political ideals will have disappeared (466–67, 473). The now familiar promise of the future recurs in the second story of Ninety-Three, concerning Michelle Fléchard and her children. The narrative arc from kidnapping to liberation begins and ends with acts by Lantenac. This arc is enclosed, however, by one that begins earlier, with the republican battalion’s adoption of the children, and ends when the battalion’s sergeant receives them from Lantenac’s hands, passed through a window of the burning library. The latter arc of separation from, and reunion with, the Republic is anchored by an assertion of paternity. The children’s biological father was a royalist killed by the republican army. When the battalion’s sergeant asks Michelle her own political opinions, French Revolution, Third Republic

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however, she responds with incomprehension. To the question “What is your fatherland [patrie]?” she makes the same blank reply, although she admits to having a “country”—her pays of Brittany—observing that the sergeant is from France. He is stupefied—if not the same country, “it’s the same fatherland”—but Michelle is oblivious to matters of nationality or politics (36–37). The lack of both father and fatherland is resolved at the end of the scene: placing his hands over the group, the sergeant declares the three young ones “the children of the battalion of the Bonnet-Rouge.” To Michelle he says, “Come, citizen”: she too is inducted, willy-nilly, into the family of the nation (45). As the scene of adoption shows, the arc of paternity concerned with the relationship of the children to the Republic has a privileged place in the family’s story. Although Michelle searches for the children after their abduction, Hugo presents her maternal commitment to them as natural. If the point is not clear in her lack of political opinions, the narrator drives it home by saying that the maternal instinct is “divinely animal” (287). The Republic’s attachment to the children, in contrast, is based on considered choices: the sergeant proposes the adoption to his soldiers, and they agree by shouting, “Long live the Republic!” (45). Paternity is the active factor in parentage in Ninety-Three: the nation seeks out its children, while mothers simply have them. Children are in danger, moreover, until they are in the arms of the state: in this sense, the end of the family’s story is the most important point of closure in Ninety-Three. It does not matter that Lantenac lives, because the children already have a father to protect them; in any case, with Gauvain dead he has no heirs. In such moments of narrative closure, children are commonly associated with the future. (The narrator indeed comments that the children of revolutionary Paris are “the boundless future.”) By recovering the Fléchard children, the Republic secures a future that was in peril, a point reinforced in a comment by Gauvain that by abolishing feudalism, the Revolution founds the family: a system that is divided is replaced by one that unites (147, 435). The foundation, however, is only a beginning. With the accomplishments of the Convention, the narrator declares in a curious phrase, “The future of today began [l’avenir d’aujourd’hui commença]” (193). The phrase suggests two different sequences of temporal planes. One consists of a past before 1789, a present of the Revolution, and “the future that is today,” to wit, the narrator’s era. The other consists of a past before 1870, a present that is the narrator’s era, and “today’s future,” the future of the narrator’s present. Each underpins an allegorical register, 244

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with the individual register concerned with Gauvain, Michelle, and the other characters projecting a national register concerned with reconciliation in Hugo’s own present and future. The first register provides the temporal scaffolding through which Hugo argues that the confrontation of political positions among Gauvain, Cimourdain, and Lantenac will not endure. Lantenac’s type will fade from the world. The deaths of Gauvain and Cimourdain, however, propose a different kind of ending and beginning. Although Hugo argues through Cimourdain that the Terror was necessary to the Revolution, he also asserts through the pair’s death that the age of the Terror is over: bounded, singular, a condition for, but not a part of, the future that follows it. Gauvain has this future in mind when he submits to Cimourdain’s justice. He dies for the age of the children. As in Plum Blossoms in Snow, then, the first allegorical register of Ninety-Three strictly delimits an era in which fundamental political dispute is possible, and excludes such dispute from eras that are separated from it by linear chronology: revolution has no place in the future, that is, in the narrator’s time. In this linear relationship between the First Republic and the Third, the Revolution becomes an extraordinary event whose alleged excesses need not taint all republican forms of government. The narrator’s comment that “we have seen these ways again” concedes, however, that the political issues at stake between Cimourdain and Gauvain have not been settled. The reference to “our” time shifts the debate forward and into the national register of the allegory, where the reader faces an open future in the form of the fate of the Communards. If the Revolution is irretrievably over, then the violence employed to protect the Republic during the Revolution must also be left in the past. So too, the allegory goes, must the violence of the recent civil war be left behind. By thus joining a case for clemency to the assertion that revolution has no place in the present, the allegory of Ninety-Three makes an argument on how to get from the disputatious present to a pacific future. Note, however, that the novel presents the republican “today” as the future of the Revolution only by skipping over decades of dark days for republicans in France. The allegory does not explain why the Third Republic would not face the similarly dim future implied by the parallel structure of registers. The allegory alone cannot resolve the political questions that the novel raises, a problem that Hugo ultimately addresses by moving beyond historical analogy to imagine other mechanisms for forming a harmonious national community. Although unease about the relationship of the First French Revolution, Third Republic

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Republic to the Third plagued republicans like Hugo, when we turn to the case of Ernest Renan, we find that such disenchantment with history was not limited to republicans alone.

Renan: Violence Is History Since Benedict Anderson’s discussion of “What Is a Nation” in Imagined Communities and the appearance of an English translation in the collection Nation and Narration, Renan’s essay has achieved quasi-theoretical status in Anglophone studies of national identity. Its best-known contention, that for a nation to form and survive, national subjects must forget parts of the past and nourish others as collective memory, is frequently read as a general statement on national ideologies.37 The issue of memory has been fertile ground for scholars of nationalism, but many aspects of Renan’s argument are so connected to the political climate of the Third Republic that reading the essay in a vacuum risks misunderstanding their political significance. The essay, first presented as a lecture in 1882, is laced with references to the fall of the Second Empire, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the rise and annihilation of the Commune, and, most importantly, the Revolution. Ultimately the essay argues for a perspective on the national past that isolates violence, especially the violence of the Revolution, as “history,” in distinction from a present founded on shared memory. In Renan’s argument, history, rather than forgetting, emerges as memory’s semantic opposite. The argument shares much with Fustel’s stress on shared sentiment as the foundation of nationality. Renan displaces intranational strife to the past, where it may be “forgotten,” in a way that also recalls the strategies in Ninety-Three for managing the violence of civil war, regardless of the political differences between the republican Hugo and the constitutional monarchist Renan. Renan’s contention that nations cannot survive without adopting a shared memory moreover bears a remarkable resemblance to the arguments on historical consciousness in the United States, particularly the work of Wilson. These comparisons offer better possibilities for drawing broad conclusions about national ideologies from the essay than do abstractions of its argument into theory. The ideas in “What Is a Nation” were not wholly new in Renan’s work. Political pieces he wrote around the time of the Franco-Prussian War offer some of the same views, although not assembled and developed in the form they took in the lecture at the Sorbonne. “The War between France and Germany” (“La Guerre entre la France et l’Allemagne”), written during 246

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the war and published in September 1870, shortly after the fall of Napoleon III, and The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France (La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France), published in November 1871 after France’s “terrible year,” both speak of the will of a people to live together, a key point in “What Is a Nation.” “The War between France and Germany,” like “What Is a Nation,” imagines the foundation of a European federation to balance national antagonisms. In Intellectual and Moral Reform, Renan says that a country ( pays) is a “soul,” something he says of the nation in the later essay; and despite his antirepublican views, Renan adopts the pragmatic stance that constitutional questions must be “adjourned” in the present crisis, a point he tacitly reiterates in “What Is a Nation” by avoiding the issue of the legitimacy of the Republic.38 In all these works, Renan consistently approaches political issues through historical investigation (a proclivity Wilson later displayed). He thus says, in a passage from Intellectual and Moral Reform quoted in an earlier chapter, that “one cannot understand even one of our contemporary sorrows without searching for its cause in the past.”39 In this reflection on decline, Renan laments that “even legend has seen itself fatally injured,” myths about the First Empire, for example, crumbling with the Second.40 The suggestion that losing legend is perilous for nations is perhaps the most important point to reappear in “What Is a Nation,” in the form of the argument for the construction of a common memory. “What Is a Nation” begins with a warning against the error of confusing race and nation by attributing a sovereignty like that of “actually existing peoples” to ethnic or linguistic groups.41 Like Fustel, Renan rejects race and language as definitions of nation because they are historical phenomena. Races are “historical facts” that appear and disappear but have no application in politics, while languages are “historical formations” that do not constrain their speakers’ choice of the family with whom they live and die (233–­34, 236–37). To the list he adds the similarly historical phenomena of religions and frontiers. (He dismisses a fifth possible foundation, common economic interests, with the comment that “a customs union is not a fatherland [patrie],” a jibe at the legal origins of the German Empire [237–40].) Nations do have histories, but they are “rather new” things dating only from the Germanic invasions of Europe in the fifth century, Renan says (224–25). Their histories moreover reveal the elimination of the factors commonly thought to define them. The states established following the invasions forced a “fusion of populations” that included both a mixing of races and the adoption of the language of the French Revolution, Third Republic

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conquered by the conquerors. Thus despite their violence the “mold” that the conquerors imposed became over centuries “the mold of the nation itself.” As a result, by the tenth century all the population of the kingdom of the Franks had become French, original race and language notwithstanding (226–27). Renan warns, however, against dwelling on such early events. “Forgetting” and even “historical error,” he says, “are an essential factor in the creation of a nation.” As a consequence, progress in historical studies can be “a danger for nationality” because it sheds light on “the acts of violence that have taken place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most beneficial.” Renan adds shortly afterward: “The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that all have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows if he is Burgundian, Alan, Taifale, or Visigoth; every French citizen must have forgotten [doit avoir oubliée] the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the massacres in the Midi in the thirteenth century” (227–28). Renan was one of the most celebrated historians of his era, yet he warns against digging too far into history and even condones historical error. The latter passage, moreover, contains a performative contradiction to which Anderson calls attention: when speaking of massacres in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renan assumes that his readers know events that they are supposed not just to forget but to have already forgotten.42 Renan’s formulation is intriguing for more than the contradictory connection of reminding to an admonition to forget. The similarity between the sense of completion conveyed by Renan’s past infinitive (avoir oubliée, “to have forgotten”) and that conveyed by the future anterior, so important to the grammar of national history, suggests that Renan’s argument for forgetting is part of a structure for giving national history a rhetoric and narrative form, not just a content, to manage problems in the relationship of the nation to the past. That this structure operates by separating past from present is clear when Renan links memory to the issue of consent. In a well-known passage, Renan declares that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things . . . constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories [un riche legs de souvenirs]; the other is the present consent [consentement actuel ], the desire to live together, the will to continue to use to advantage the undivided inheritance [héritage] that one has received.”43 The semantic distinction between history and memory that emerges in 248

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the juxtaposition of this passage with Renan’s dissection of “historical facts” such as race is essential to his solution to the problem of a divisive past. If, in keeping with this distinction, history involves knowing, memory remembering, then in the terms of his own lexicon, Renan does not contradict himself by assuming that his readers know about something like the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre while consenting not to remember it. Keeping in mind Renan’s remark on the danger of historical studies to national unity, one can conclude that knowing is dispassionately positivistic while remembering, forgetting, and consenting are “spiritual” matters related to the nation as soul. The national subject can know a historical event as fact without remembering it in the sense of being driven to antagonism. In this analysis, remembering and consent, moreover, would take place preeminently in the present, where the legacy of unifying memories is nurtured and maintained. Knowing has a more ambiguous character: while the act is of the present, its potentially harmful objects are best left in the past. The difference in the temporalities of knowing and remembering is the key to Renan’s strategy for isolating the violence of the national past and replacing it with consent. In “What Is a Nation,” “history” names a political problem: conflicts in the present whose various sides legitimate themselves by reference to conflicts in the past. Beneath the surface references to the Prussian annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in the essay, enmity over the rise of the Commune and the Republic’s response are in play (as they are in Ninety-Three), along with the disputes over the legitimacy of the Republic among republicans, legitimist and Orleanist monarchists, and die-hard Bonapartists that dominated the 1870s.44 All parties were able to appeal to different episodes in the past to justify their positions on historical grounds. Thus a significant subtext in “What Is a Nation” concerns the place of conflict in representations of the history of the French nation. Although Renan’s comments on the Germanic invasions overtly address the idea of French history as a struggle between Franks and Gauls, neither version of the thesis was politically significant at the time.45 The crucial event in this subtext is rather the history of the Revolution. An unexpected expression of praise for the Revolution for showing that a nation could exist “in itself” indicates its importance in Renan’s meditation on the sources of national cohesion and harmony.46 When Renan dwells on the violence in the invasions and the consolidation of the monarchy, he finds a means to deal with the violence of the Revolution at a distance, however. The history of revolutionary violence, even as it is known by all, must be French Revolution, Third Republic

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“forgotten” and replaced by memory, ideally by a memory of events as distant as possible whose issues—am I a Visigoth?—have no urgency in the present. The exhortation against remembering the Revolution applies across the political spectrum: memory, apparently, is above politics. And yet, of course, it is not. When Renan shifts his attention from history to remembering, he also moves from the problem of conflict to that of commonly undertaken “sacrifice,” from the violence one group does to another to something borne together. “The nation . . . is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions,” Renan writes. “Having common glories in the past, a common will in the present; having done some great things together, wanting to do more still—these are the essential conditions for being a people. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices to which one has consented, the ills that one has suffered.” Such a past is the stuff of “national memories” (souvenirs nationaux) (240, 241). In this formulation, sacrifice is remembered, unlike the violence that, as a matter of history, is known. Such sacrifice is both the result of consent and the condition of its maintenance, while violence can only be the basis for discord. But if the fount of remembrance admits only memories of sacrifice, then the nation will necessarily be unified in the present. All violence the nation has done to itself since 1789, from the abolition of the monarchy in 1792 through the massacre of the Commune in 1871, to say nothing of ongoing violence in the present, simply disappears, part neither of memory nor of consent. No fan of the Revolution, Renan does not assert in “What Is a Nation” that it produced an undivided people (the common republican contention) but rather says that one must proceed as if it had, by replacing a history of violence with memories of sacrifice. The position on the Revolution that emerges is as pragmatic as Renan’s position on the Third Republic: accept it as a fait accompli and the “mold” in which national unity will have to be formed. The recognition that neither the Revolution nor the Third Republic can be undone accounts for the detachment with which Renan speaks of memory and other matters of the spirit: we know what happened, but we must remember it otherwise. Such an attitude also informs Renan’s treatment of consent. In one of the essay’s most oft-quoted passages, Renan says that a nation is “a great solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices that one has made and of those that one is ready to make in the future. It supposes a past; it is summed up nonetheless in the present by a tangible deed: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue life together. The existence of a nation is . . . a daily plebi250

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scite, as the existence of the individual is a perpetual affirmation of life” (241). Renan’s hyperbolic metaphor (which recalls the rule by plebiscite of Napoleon III) obscures the coercive quality of “consent” in “What Is a Nation.” The ballot effectively has just one hole to punch: the only alternative to affirming life is death, which one must assume is also the only alternative to consent, for the nation and the national subject alike. The plebiscite’s only allowable outcome is unanimity. From this point of view, consent is acquiescence in such daily coercion. The central problem for national unity is not what is in the past but what will be let into memory through the charade of consent. The faith that Renan has in the memory of “common glories” seems nearly as great as the faith of Wilson in the American nation’s “reassuring past”: both writers, facing what they consider to be grave divisions in the present, plead for reconciliation on the grounds of a past remade as a story of union. As each argues that the adoption of a common history is the condition of national harmony, the subject’s attitude toward history emerges as a central issue: what to do with the pasts of those who will not forget? Yet even though debates over citizenship for immigrants became increasingly intense in France during the 1880s, immigration is absent from “What Is a Nation,” as it is from other efforts at the time to create a history for the French nation. Renan praises the “cult of ancestors” in “What Is a Nation” as an aspect of national memory, but despite the genealogical connotations, this is hardly an effort to privilege certain groups, in the manner of Fiske, because the place of immigrant pasts in national history does not seem to even occur as a problem to Renan (240). The pressing issue is rather the origin of the state, and crucially the relationship of the Third Republic to the Revolution. We saw that in Ninety-Three the allegory of Vendée and Commune, First Republic and Third Republic, works to separate “the future of today” from the revolutionary past. Renan’s separation of past and present as history and memory, violence and consent, shows a similar pattern. Turning to popular republican histories of the French Revolution, we find that this structure underlies an entire genre that divides the Revolution into its history and “works.”

The Revolution as History and Works As mentioned earlier, scholarly defenses of the Revolution lagged behind attacks on it until the 1880s. Republican histories aimed at popular audiences, however, appeared quickly after the establishment of the Third ReFrench Revolution, Third Republic

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public and in numeric terms were more abundant than works by critics.47 The energy of such work, appearing in cheap and often illustrated editions, grew in the late 1870s, and a host of popular histories appeared in the early 1880s. Only tangentially concerned with the emerging professional orthodoxy of historical writing, these works aimed to create an ecumenically republican representation of the Revolution that was suitable for mass consumption. Along with public education and commemorative ceremonies, they were an essential part of the republican strategy to insert a favorable view of the Revolution into the culture and politics of the Third Republic.48 An important part of their efforts was to distinguish, even in the organization of the books themselves, between the accomplishments of the Revolution and its political history. Like their work, the authors of these histories were on the cusp of the professionalization of the field. Eugène Spuller, who as noted wrote historical essays and reviews for The French Republic, succeeded Gambetta as a leader of conservative republicans and served as minister of foreign affairs and twice as minister of public instruction. Paul Janet, who wrote the anti-Jacobin Philosophy of the French Revolution (Philosophie de la Révolution française, 1875) and a history published on the occasion of the centennial, was a Kantian philosopher. Edouard Guillon wrote numerous popularizing works including A Short History of the Revolution (Petite histoire de la Révolution, 1884) while teaching in secondary schools. Alfred Rambaud, author of History of the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Histoire de la Révolution française, 1789–1799, 1883), was a professor of history at the Sorbonne and Ecole Normale Supérieure, coeditor of Ernest Lavisse’s multivolume history of France, chief of cabinet for his friend Jules Ferry, and, like Spuller, twice minister of public instruction. Even Alphonse Aulard, whose work is commonly taken as the beginning of academic historiography of the Revolution, was trained as a philologist rather than a historian and wrote frequently for popular audiences.49 Like Wilson in the United States and the popular historians who found a home in The Nation’s Friend in Japan, these writers seem to have considered the nation’s history too important to be confined to academic circles. New republican representations of the Revolution emerged against the background of classics such as Michelet’s history, which was reissued in a “national edition” by government decree in 1889.50 These classics, which also include the work of Henri Martin, expressed a view of the Revolution common among the republican opposition since midcentury: the Revolution was the result of the continuous struggle of the French “people” for 252

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liberty. Hippolyte Carnot, who had been minister of public instruction in the Second Republic, retold the story through the lens of 1848 in The French Revolution, a Historical Summary (La Révolution française, résumé historique), a two-volume paperback that first appeared in 1867 and was reprinted through the 1880s. New works such as Louis Combes’s Popular History of the French Revolutions and of the Insurrections and Plots from 1789 to Our Days (Histoire populaire des Révolutions françaises et des insurrections et complots depuis 1789 jusqu’à nos jours, 1872) extended the history of a popular revolutionary tradition to the present. Among conservative republicans, however, new views of the Revolution influenced by the “deontology” initiated by Quinet began to appear after the founding of the Third Republic.51 The reviews of historical literature published by Spuller and Georges Avenel in The French Republic reveal the search for new lines of intervention in the problem the Revolution posed. In the 1875 preface to his collected articles, Avenel says he has tried to restore the “philosophical and national” character of the Revolution by rejecting both foreign judgments and the “old molds” in which sectarians confined it. (His inspiration was the need to maintain the “national faith” in the face of the Defeat, the civil war, and the Royalist “witches’ Sabbath” against the Republic.)52 In the new works, the break in historiography was not total: the aged Martin wrote the preface for Guillon’s Short History of the Revolution and was vice president of the League of Education, the organization most important in popularizing new republican views of the Revolution; Carnot wrote the preface for Guillon’s companion volume History of the Consulate and the Empire (Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, 1884).53 In contrast to the earlier faith in the people and the progress of liberty, however, the emerging historiography presented a view of the Revolution that strikingly resembled the new regime that was being founded.54 Cognizant of the need for social reform yet suspicious of the rule of the masses, these popular histories were gradualist in their view of change and wrote a Revolution that in its principles was the same. These histories typically begin with a dissection of the old regime that demonstrates the inevitability of the Revolution by showing the faults of what preceded. In his Short History of the Revolution, Guillon declares that “to know the old regime is to understand the necessity of the Revolution, to measure the difficulties of its task and the grandeur of its works [oeuvre].”55 The critique frequently included assertions that the monarchy divided the people and imposed social stasis. Guillon says that “there was no nation in France” in 1789 in the sense of citizens with common interests French Revolution, Third Republic

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and rights, while Rambaud charges that under the old regime the nation was divided both vertically and horizontally: the maintenance of three orders (nobility, church, third estate) meant that France was composed of “nearly three different nations,” while the administration of the provinces perpetuated regional differences with the result that “France was not yet a fatherland [patrie].”56 In Rambaud’s view, restrictions on commerce and the existence of guilds moreover stopped the development of every type of production, while lack of public education left the masses in a state of barbarism.57 These complaints, rooted in the liberal imaginary of history, familiar from earlier chapters, assert that history had come to a standstill under the old regime. With the monarchy’s removal, the unification of the people recommenced. Edme Champion writes that the Revolution worked the “miracle” of unifying the provinces and “cemented the national unity for which the old regime left us only the materials. It made us a fatherland [patrie]. All the inhabitants of France recognized themselves as brothers in the cry they uttered together for eternal justice.” In an echo of Fustel and Renan, Champion adds that the bond that resulted was stronger than any ties of history, geography, or ethnicity.58 Rambaud says that “national unity, limned by the greatest of our kings, found itself consummated” in the Revolution, adding, “There were no longer anything but Frenchmen all having the same duties and the same rights.” In keeping with his critique of the old regime, he applauds the Revolution’s “emancipation of national labor” through the free circulation of agricultural goods, the construction of local roads, and the penetration of “instruction and light”—shades of Bruno—into the depths of the countryside through the establishment of primary schools.59 Presenting the Revolution as an act of national unity supported the efforts of historians close to the early republican regime to expel conflicts of class from the Revolution and identify the third estate with the nation as a whole. Like the conservative republic, their Revolution concerned itself with liberty, equality, and fraternity in the political domain alone.60 The common argument that the course of the Revolution was determined by internal and external circumstances, rather than by the attempt to impose abstract ideas (as Taine charged), similarly limited the scope of revolutionary principles.61 In keeping with this view, these historians champion the political and military leader Danton as a pragmatist, in contrast to the abstraction and sectarianism of the Jacobin Robespierre.62 The position reveals the impact of Comte, whose theory of history presented the Revolution as a step in a universal process of social evolution, 254

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in which a destructive phase beginning in 1789 was succeeded by a constructive phase in 1793 reflected most of all in the work of the Convention. Danton—in Comte’s view a practical politician with definite goals—was the incarnation of the constructive period.63 The linearity of such a view of the Revolution’s place in history also aided conservative republicans’ efforts to expel conflict per se from the nation’s history. If the Revolution was a step in a linear scheme of progress, it could not be repeated.64 Views on the Left that French history revealed a tradition of insurrection at the heart of the nation’s consciousness of self thus were erroneous. (Like François Furet a century later, these historians wanted eagerly to declare the Revolution over.)65 Janet argues in Philosophy of the French Revolution that “one must be faithful to the spirit of the Revolution, while repudiating the revolutionary spirit,” a point he apparently considered important enough to repeat verbatim in his Centennial of 1789: History of the French Revolution (Centenaire de 1789: Histoire de la Révolution française, 1889).66 Rambaud says the Convention was weakened by popular misunderstanding that the principle of national sovereignty conveyed the right to continual insurrection, a clear reference to the Commune.67 Even Carnot, the veteran of 1848, appeared persuaded of the point: the preface to a new 1883 edition of his history says that “our nation is not at all revolutionary: once the causes of its agitation have ceased, it distances itself from the men who would prolong it.”68 Instead of a history of struggle, these historians thus offered a Revolution that prefigured the Third Republic, which was its true successor and fulfillment. Rambaud’s assertion that “it is the spirit of the First Republic that inspires the new Republic” thus echoes Janet’s attempts to claim the “spirit of the Revolution” for the new regime while leaving out intervening explosions of the “revolutionary spirit.”69 The common declaration that the Third Republic was the “definitive” one reflects such attempts to identify the current republic with its predecessors while distinguishing it as the genuine manifestation of the Revolution’s ideals.70 This kind of position drew a line on the new regime’s left as well as its right: the Republic would be founded on the Revolution, but not on revolutionary politics. The contention that the Revolution was a singular event that later eras could fulfill but not repeat supported efforts to separate what conservative republicans claimed as the inheritance of the Revolution from the Terror, popular democracy, and other revolutionary “excesses” that they believed led to the demise of the First Republic and despotism. Central to the strategy is a distinction these histories draw between the “works” or French Revolution, Third Republic

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“labors” of the Revolution (its oeuvre or travaux) and its political history. Rambaud’s History of the French Revolution is divided into two parts, one titled “The Old Regime and the Works [oeuvre] of the Revolution,” which examines the faults of the monarchy and the benefits of the Revolution in a chapter devoted to each, and a second, labeled simply “History of the Revolution,” that comprises a political narrative in which the previously enumerated “works” are conspicuously absent. (Rambaud’s separation of works and history is an especially revealing example that I will examine closely.) Guillon’s Short History of the Revolution divides the history of the Convention into chapters on internal politics, “creations and reforms,” and the war against Europe.71 The accomplishments enumerated in the central chapter include the metric system, public instruction, and the legal reforms that were the basis for the Napoleonic Civil Code. Janet’s Centennial of 1789 offers chapters on the “labors” of the Constituent Assembly (July 1789–September 1791) and the “works” of the Convention that are separate from the political narrative, and devotes several pages of his conclusion to summarizing the Revolution’s “results.”72 This tactic for defending the Revolution appears to have been successful enough to prompt some opponents of the Republic to respond in the same terms, including Emile Ollivier, architect of Napoleon III’s late liberal phase, and Charles d’Héricault, the editor of the Catholic Review of the Revolution.73 Setting the works of the Revolution apart from the Terror and other “political” phenomena did not simply distinguish between ends and means but emplotted the past of the Revolution in a new way. Remarks by Rambaud show that the contrast between works and politics establishes a different temporality for each. “The ills it caused were passing; its benefits endure and will endure,” Rambaud says of the Revolution, but “if humanity, after many relapses, has stepped onto the path of indefinite progress, it is because the Revolution . . . broke down all the obstacles, cleared the roads of the future, and annihilated forever the old regime, for the profit not only of France but of all peoples.”74 Rambaud suggests that the works of the Revolution are the condition for progress itself, which has no end. The contrast with political ills could not be greater: they exist in the past tense, the benefits of the Revolution in the present and future. The benefits, moreover, are shared by all: “No one can present himself today as one of its victims, and there is no one who does not profit from its definitive triumph,” Rambaud asserts. Even its critics would not relinquish gains that he refers to as “the inheritance [héritage] of the Revolution,” to whose division friends and enemies are equally invited.75 The dichotomy 256

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between works and politics thus bounds politics by giving them a beginning and conclusion. The works of the Revolution, in contrast, are the ground for a victimless and profoundly depoliticized unity whose origin lies in the revolutionary period but whose manifestation is continuing collective benefit. The Third Republic is to inherit this legacy—what Martin calls “these foundations laid in the heart of the storm”—but not the divisive conditions that produced it.76 The dichotomy between works and history takes on additional significance when we consider that Rambaud associates inheritance with memory. Reflecting on the execution of revolutionary actors in the flower of their youth, Rambaud writes that “all this generation, condemned to a premature death, had before its eyes nothing but the infinite future, the immortal life of humanity. It will live eternally in the memory of men for having looked beyond the times [au delà du temps].” Their self-sacrifice imposes a burden: “In our prosperity, it is to the Revolution that we reaffirm the homage of our gratitude; in our trials, it is to the Revolution that we turn for inspiration and faith,” Rambaud continues. “Our fathers of 1789 and 1792, through their battles, through their suffering, through their life and through their death, made us what we are. We would be ungrateful if we did not defend their memory; unworthy if we let their inheritance perish.”77 If defending the memory of the men of the Revolution and maintaining the revolutionary inheritance are the same act, Rambaud opposes not only works but also memory to history in a way that unmistakably recalls Renan, with the same appeal to memory as a way of setting aside the differences embedded in history. Remembrance, homage, and gratitude, rather than political history, are to be the primary link from the present to the past. Rambaud’s comment that the men of the Revolution looked au delà du temps—beyond the times, but also beyond time—deepens the point. The works of the Revolution exist both out of time, free of history, and potentially in every moment through the acts of remembrance and homage whereby the subject may gain access to the common inheritance. The universality of works that belong to the entire future of humanity moreover conveys a specific obligation: the children of the “fathers of 1789 and 1792” are responsible for bringing the creations of the Revolution to their proper fruition. In the end, the argument on works in popular republican histories of the Revolution thus is an argument about the future, which is to say the historians’ own present. In one obvious sense, by asserting that the Revolution laid the foundations for the “definitive” form of the French French Revolution, Third Republic

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polity, the histories convey inevitability on a republic whose viability was in doubt well into the 1880s. This kind of historical logic is common, however. More significantly, by addressing the Revolution’s future—the present—in terms of inheritance and memory, these histories interpellate the reader with an obligation. Like Wilson’s essays, the histories that republicans wrote to popularize a new view of the Revolution use their narrative of the events that convulsed the nation to project an individual allegorical register that is concerned with the subject’s attitude toward history. (Rambaud’s explicit address to the reader in the passage just quoted makes the existence of this register unmistakable.) In their movement from the national to individual register of the allegory, these histories urge a specific attitude toward history and most crucially toward the present: the inheritance of the Revolution demands reconciliation from the generations of its future, because the Revolution bequeaths its works to the descendants of friends and enemies alike. By definition the act of remembrance is an expression of reconciliation, the replacement of history with what unifies. To honor the revolutionary inheritance is to eschew politics and achieve in the present the reconciliation that potentially is available in every moment.

New Filiations The stress on works in republican histories of the Revolution seems determined to give a tangible referent to memory and reconciliation: not simply shared experience but a common set of institutions. Rambaud, Guillon, and other historians writing for popular audiences assert that the political history of the Revolution has nothing to do with the works that form the basis of national unity, asserting in the process that representations of history that stress conflict misunderstand the nation’s character. Hugo and Renan too identify the past as both a political and historiographical problem. For Hugo, ’93 raises the question not only of the Terror and the civil war in the Vendée but also of the rise and suppression of the Commune, and the representation of the events of 1793 thus has significant implications for the legitimacy of the republican state. Speaking in broader terms, Renan asserts that history per se has the potential to keep long-concluded conflicts open as festering political sores. Hugo offers a different kind of narrative, the plot of Ninety-Three concerned with the Fléchard children, as an alternative to a history of conflict, while Renan argues for the construction of a body of memories that could sub258

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sist alongside historical knowledge. In both cases, the targets again are politics that cite the past through narratives of French history as a history of dispute and discord. Closer examination of all three strategies shows that they work to expel politics from the foundation of the state, not just the life of the nation. As the examples of Fukuzawa and Sohō in Japan and James and Wilson in the United States show, such efforts to dissect common attitudes toward history and replace them with views calibrated to the nation’s present (and perpetual) crisis were not unusual. The heavy presence of the Revolution in political discourse accounts for the intensity of the effort in France. One must nonetheless note that neither Hugo, Renan, nor the popular republican historians of the 1870s and 1880s rejected the connection between nation and history. Rather, all sought a way of narrating the formation of national unity over time that could coexist with a divisive political history. Different degrees of reflection emerge. Renan says flatly near the end of “What Is a Nation” that “nations are not anything eternal.”78 They began and will end, even if they are necessary for the moment. Hugo and the republican historians, in contrast, evince little doubt that the nation is everlasting, but differ over the terms of belonging: Hugo suggests that misguided monarchists and socialists deserve forgiveness, while the historians associated with the conservative republican regime expect fealty to their narrative of the Revolution. Amid such differences, the alternatives to political history that these writers propose all rely on ideas of filiation whose analysis brings the running discussion of gender in this book to a close. In Ninety-Three, as discussed earlier, the children of Michelle Fléchard lose their royalist father and are adopted by a battalion of the republican army. Allegorically the loss of a father—a king—is followed by the gain of a patrie, or fatherland, in much the same way that André and Julien find a new family and home at the end of A Tour of France. Although Lantenac threatens the new parentage, ultimately he concedes by passing the children from his burning feudal seat into the battalion’s arms. With the future securely republican there is little doubt that the conflict among Lantenac, Gauvain, and Cimourdain will disappear over time. Because the future of 1793 includes the reader’s own time, one can conclude that the entire plot is a way to assert that everyone is a “son of the Revolution,” in a common republican phrase.79 The idea of inheritance that Renan and republican historians use in connection with their promotion of memory relies on the logic found in French Revolution, Third Republic

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Hugo’s act of adoption. The words such as héritage and legs (legacy) at the heart of the program signify the property of the father and thus imply a father or, once again in this case, a fatherland. For the republican historians, the Revolution is the locus of such paternity. All who come into the world afterward are its offspring, like it or not: their filiation with each other therefore derives from their common status as the Revolution’s heirs. Renan’s case is more complex and illustrative because he rejects specific sources for the nation. The nation rather comes into being through acts of remembrance that draw on the “legacy of national memories” that are its collective inheritance. These are acts of remembering something that does not exist apart from the acts themselves. Unlike the false filiations of race and language, such a filiation thus exists only in the present as a collective deed. Although republican historians identify a single collective act—the Revolution as act of the “people”—for veneration, their call for the remembrance and veneration of revolutionary works places similar stress on the present. The nation could not exist without the Revolution, a past event, but it can nonetheless perish if filial piety flags in the present. Returning to Hugo, in this light the choice Gauvain faces between lineal and spiritual forebears, Lantenac and Cimourdain, is misleading. Spiritual filiation too is a kind of lineal filiation where fatherland replaces father. It bears repeating that neither Gauvain nor the children can freely choose between parent and what Gauvain calls the “grandparent,” France: Gauvain dies for his unwillingness to completely renounce the filiality of the old regime, while the children are converted as their mother faces fixed bayonets. The suggestion in Ninety-Three, “What Is a Nation,” and republican histories of the Revolution that the nation is a community of children who create their father perhaps explains the ubiquity of parentless men in the literary sources this book examines: from Philip in The Gilded Age and André and Julien in A Tour of France, through Kunino in Plum Blossoms in Snow, Ōta in “The Dancing Girl,” Newman in The American, and finally to Gauvain in Ninety-Three, male protagonists whose parents are dead or absent abound. For these orphans, the relationship of father and inheritance seems reversed. Commonly if one rejects the father, one loses the inheritance, but here it is the opposite: reject the inheritance and lose the fatherland as consequence. One may not like what one receives, but one must accept it all as a stipulation of belonging. That belonging in these allegories is an activity by and among men attests to the homosociality of the constitution of the nation in national history, first traced in Japanese histories of civilization at the beginning of this book. Although 260

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fathers are absent, the stipulations attached to belonging amount to a paternal law that demands ongoing consent. The alternatives to political history that Hugo, Renan, and the popular republican historians propose thus depend on an idea of filiation in which the nation is the direct descendant of a past that exists only in the present, in the form of an elected inheritance determined by the theater of obligatory consent. The subject lives among pieces of the past—in the form of its legacy—but without unmediated access to it. Eras of combat and upheaval, most importantly that of the Revolution, are connected to the present by acts of veneration and gratitude rather than by a history of conflict and thus are unavailable to be cited as sources for contemporary struggle. While representations of Japanese history from this period displace alternatives to the nation and nation-state to a premodernity separated from the present, in France the operation involves binding the present to the past through a type of linear chronological relationship— inheritance—in which obligation expels dissent. The past is what the nation receives, not what makes it act. If all of this works to assert that conflict—especially the Revolution—is over, then one must observe a further consequence: the historicity of the present regime disappears in the announcement of the nation’s obligation to its past. Such a stance informs the positions regarding the Terror, the Commune, and conflict in general that emerge in these works, which identify insurrections of differing periods and intent with each other while presenting counterattacks on them as the defense of unity. Hugo’s example is illuminating. Ninety-Three is well known as a novel structured by antitheses—Lantenac and Cimourdain, Paris and the Vendée, and so forth—that cancel each other to provide a resolution of a higher order. The result is what Priscilla Ferguson calls a “politics of transcendence” that depoliticizes by dissolving ideological opposites into a larger whole.80 Considering that the novel is a meditation on the Commune and its fate, it is remarkable that Hugo equates what should be the grandest opposites of all, Commune and counterrevolution. Although the one encompassed anarchism and socialism, and the other royalism and clericalism, in NinetyThree they are identical as uprisings that divide the nation. The point has been difficult to grasp for critics who want to find a progressive argument in the novel (and therefore see the revolutionary army as the Communards’ allegorical counterpart), but numerous details mentioned earlier liken the Commune to the rebellion in the Vendée.81 The justification Hugo offers for the Terror and the war in the Vendée thus applies equally French Revolution, Third Republic

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to the “bloody week” of the Versailles troops in Paris and the execution or exile of supporters of the Commune. What the Vendée and the Commune have in common—that they threaten the state, the guarantor of the nation’s integrity—is a characteristic that supersedes all others, and Hugo thus presents the suppression of both as equally necessary. Although Ninety-Three is a historical novel, in the end Hugo does not make his argument on the Commune or the Vendée through historical reflection. On the contrary, the novel’s antitheses replace sustained examination either of the Vendée rebels’ objections to the Paris government or of the Communards’ objections to Versailles.82 In the place of such a historical argument we find figural correspondences: Vendée to Commune, insurrection to insurrection. Unlike the antitheses, these pairings cross periods, and their terms do not cancel each other. Instead they become equal by virtue of their antagonistic relationship to their respective republics. The movement between registers in Hugo’s allegory, from Cimourdain, Lantenac, and the children to Versailles, the Commune, and the future of the Third Republic, thus contributes to the depoliticization of national belonging readily apparent in the registers themselves. Because this movement proceeds through paths other than history, putting the Commune and Vendée together as if they were coeval, it collapses linear time as it collapses political difference. The result is to lift the state, not just the nation, out of history. The First Republic and the Third correspond in nontemporal fashion, as their enemies do, becoming avatars of a single ideal republic that responds with equal force and virtue to any threat to its existence. The ultimate consequence of the allegory, then, is to depoliticize the state. By identifying the Commune with the Vendée, Hugo ejects fundamental questions (Should the French state be a monarchy? Should each receive according to his or her needs?) from the formation of the polity. What remains is an argument on the preservation of the state alone as the precondition for the preservation of the nation. A figural relationship between the two republics also plays a significant role in the work of popular republican historians of the Revolution. These histories offer the First Republic as the forerunner of the Third but assert that the legitimacy of the Third, like the First, lies in its dedication to progress. The state’s devotion to progress is above politics, and thus the argument on works justifies the Terror and the war on the Commune through correspondences similar to those in Ninety-Three: both republics defended the conditions for social development by clearing what Rambaud calls “the roads of the future.” The identification of the two repub262

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lics implies that the Third Republic does not have a beginning, only other figurations. An inspiration for the strategy may have been the tendency of the revolutionaries of 1789 to model themselves after Rome, but Fiske’s American Political Ideas offers a fruitful contemporary comparison. As we have seen, the correspondences between the United States and England in Fiske’s work establish a motif of anticipation and fulfillment that gives the history of the United States both secular, linear, and quasi-sacred, irruptive qualities. Rambaud’s praise of the actors of the Revolution for looking both “beyond the times” and “beyond time” similarly conveys on the republican state both a provenance in the unilinear history of progress and a redemptive universality that can manifest itself in subsequent eras given the proper conditions, fidelity and gratitude for revolutionary works. Although history shows the foundation of a “first” republic, therefore, the republican state does not have a history of the sort that makes monarchies and insurrections repeatable. This kind of strategy to dehistoricize and depoliticize the state reaches a more general and abstract form in Renan’s reflection on the nation, which conflates all instances of violence in the past as things to be forgotten, all examples of shared sacrifice and glory as memories to be exalted. As in Ninety-Three, the strategy succeeds by establishing correspondences without respect to era or political significance: the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which strengthened the monarchy and the church, and the Revolution, which attacked both, are the same as events that divide the nation if not forgotten. That Renan equates all glories and joys, all sacrifices and regrets, in the domain of memory is even clearer in the fact that, aside from the several allusions to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, Renan scarcely specifies any events as the source of such sentiments: they exist as a single pool of “national memories.” The domain of memory and forgetfulness is thus composed of a lacework of correspondences in which events lose both their political and historical character and can be accessed and amalgamated in any manner desired, bearing meaning only on the basis of whether they harm or help to form a unified nation. Thus although Renan rejects the idea that nations are eternal, the activity of remembering that he urges nonetheless produces a nation that is outside time and inherently free of conflict. Renan’s demand that we remember one thing while knowing another is the greatest blow he strikes for the depoliticization of the nation and its state: state violence in the name of the nation remains in full view and yet willfully out of mind.

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A State beyond History Examples from Hugo, Renan, and the republican historians show that the rhetorical and narrative structure they apply to national history is central to the project of depoliticizing the nation and the state’s claim to it. The linear and figurative elements of the structure, which one could call a temporality of succession because of the way it asserts relationships of both inheritance and serial correspondence, support representations of the formation of national unity that are centered on filiation and memory. The search for such an alternative domain for unanimity was propelled by the practice on both right and left of citing the past to advance political struggle in the present, with the Revolution as the iconic conflict to be protected and pursued or reversed. The fact of the Revolution was undeniable but its inspiration could be transformed into homage, the “people” defined by veneration for the Revolution instead of commitment to continue it. Of these writers Hugo is most willing to engage with the received rhetoric and ask if insurrection after 1789 is legitimate, concluding in favor of the state. Renan in contrast is intent on banishing both transformative conflict and its reactionary inversion (in which popular unrest is the source of all social ills) from the realm of memory in which he would found the nation. Republican historians such as Rambaud, Guillon, and Janet must take a more problematic position, because they seek to discredit popular uprising in the present yet establish connections between the First Republic and the Third. Despite the attempt to bring the Revolution into the present through its works, such a strategy risks resuscitating the idea of ongoing revolution by transporting its politics forward as well. One conclusion to draw from the difficulties that republican historians faced is that national allegories are never crafted in a vacuum: their political efficacy depends on how well they reshape existing rhetorics of nation, which in France gave particular prominence to the Revolution. Similarities to representations of national history from the United States and Japan suggest that the rhetorical and temporal form that historical representation took in the first decades of the Third Republic was not simply the result of political conditions in France, however. The use of epochal divides to quarantine political possibility, the tendency to talk about the nation’s history in terms of its future, and the identification of attitudes toward history as a political problem in France in this period have parallels in the United States and Japan. In light of the preoccupation with 264

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the nature of the connection between the First Republic and the Third, a comparison to Plum Blossoms in Snow is especially helpful. As seen earlier, the structure of temporal planes in Tetchō’s novel, where the period between 1886 and 1890 is bounded by a known past and a known future, maps out a specific political “history” for the four years ahead. In doing so, the novel circumscribes the possibility of radical political change. Instead the novel’s form offers an argument for a liberal “second restoration” that will complete the first restoration of 1868 and open a golden age of uninterrupted prosperity. The strata of time that Hugo establishes in Ninety-Three through the allegory of children and declarations that “the future of today” began during the Revolution similarly ascribe a specific character to the Revolution’s future, Hugo’s present. The present is to be a time of clemency and unity, but one that begins after threats to the Republic have been— from the perspective of 1793, will have been—put down. Hugo’s characterization of the children of revolutionary times as the “boundless future” reinforces the point: because they are not the Revolution but its descendants, these children will live what the Revolution made possible, rather than what it was. Popular republican histories of the Revolution likewise project a Third Republic that is the First Republic’s future. In their case, too, the Revolution determines the character of its future through the works it made possible. These histories moreover ascribe an obligation to the present to protect the revolutionary heritage, with the admonition that further insurrection would betray, rather than fulfill, the debt. Although Renan does not explicitly characterize the present as the future of the past (as Hugo and the republican historians do), his argument on memory and the duties it imposes also unfolds within this perspective. In the domain of memory, past events make demands of the future, including reconciliation and mutual sacrifice, which the nation ignores at its peril. In all these sources, the past is oriented toward a future in which national unity will have been achieved, and projects a future in which such unity is mandatory. Effectively, then, these representations of history work to extinguish political dispute in the present through their arguments on the future of the past. I have argued in this book that the appeals national history makes for the voluntary abandonment of dissent are reinforced by implicit threats of state violence that make the choice obligatory. The recurring use of allegory to make such arguments should prompt us to consider the place of the state in allegorical emplotments of national history. The Meiji state’s French Revolution, Third Republic

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persecution of Kunino, the activist hero of Plum Blossoms in Snow, plays an important role in the plot by forcing him underground and delaying his union with Haru, that is, delaying the union of democratic intellectuals and the propertied elite that Tetchō considered the foundation of liberal democracy in Japan. The action of the state thus provides a motive force in the history that the allegory creates for the nation. Considering the work of Ninety-Three and republican histories of the Revolution to depoliticize the state through the stories they tell and the allegories of unity they create, we should consider whether national allegories ultimately are allegories of the state. If so, then this narrative form’s allegorization of the nation and its allegorization of the state begin and end in opposite places: national allegory—whether in fictional or historical narrative—elaborates a history for the nation but tendentially erases the history of the state, which as a consequence appears as merely an adjunct in the nation’s rise rather than as its master. The movement of history thereby becomes a national phenomenon, not dependent on the state, that can be used to define the nation in the present. A persistent anxiety about the future pervades such efforts to establish the character of the present by reference to the past, however. Hugo’s mordant comment on executions in the Vendée, that “we have seen these ways again,” admits the possibility that the rest will resurface too: defeat and despotism for the Third Republic as for the First. The example of Wilson’s “The Proper Perspective of American History,” which describes the regions where Americans “were to make” the nation whose accomplishments “were to cause” the rest of the world to stop in awe, clarifies the issues at stake.83 Although the passage describes the future of a past moment, it also outlines a completed and “reassuring” past for Wilson’s readers, knowledge of which would heal the nation’s divisions. The question of what was to follow was omnipresent in the unstable first decades of the Third Republic. But where Wilson could describe an irreversible movement by reference to territorial conquest, what lurked ahead of the Revolution—coups d’état, empires, monarchies, defeats—did not inspire as future or reassure as past. The various attempts in the work of republicans—Hugo and popular historians alike—to connect forward from the period of the Revolution to a new era beginning in 1870 try to bridge this gap of unhappiness for the nation and assert that it has returned to the path of progress. Because they appear in the form of figural correspondences as well as lines of descent, however, the links between the present of the Revolution and the 266

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future that is the present of the 1870s tend also to suggest a serial order of past presents and present futures whose chief characteristic is not progress but repetition. The serial quality is implicit in the temporality that these writers use to make the past into history, in which figural relations cut linear ones. The chief consequence is to weaken the assertion that the Revolution is over: if republics may repeat, so too may revolutions. The repetition that unfolds in parallel to linear history in these works does postpone the seemingly unmentionable question of what will follow, however. Once again “What Is a Nation” suggests the terms of the solution that results. Although Renan’s argument on memory, like the arguments on filiation and works, is addressed to the subjects of his fractious present, the mobile mass of memories imposes its burden on every succeeding present, producing a chain of present moments linked to each other only by the fact that each must become a memory to be cherished in turn. The ways that Hugo, Renan, and republican historians thus seem to empty the present and future of political meaning as they address the past can help us understand the politics behind a final similarity of representations of French history from the 1870s and 1880s to examples from Japan and the United States: the conviction that propagating a sense of national belonging and unity depends on instilling a proper attitude toward history in the subject. Such a conviction inspired work in Japan to introduce ideas of civilization and progress to the masses and prompted Wilson to ask how the attitudes of those who had had no “choosing part” in the history of the United States could be changed to end popular unrest. The campaign against the idea of French history as a history of conflict was driven by a kindred judgment that improper attitudes toward history blocked the development of the nation. The cheap, accessible editions that popular republican historians produced, which strove to replace a revolutionary spirit with reverence for revolutionary works, were the most visible manifestation of the attack. Hugo and Renan too contributed to this broad endeavor by outlining processes for the formation of a national unanimity separate from history as politics. Renan’s call to forget the violence of the Revolution and the monarchy, Hugo’s equation of insurrection on the right and left, and republican historians’ insistence that the Revolution bequeathed its works to friends and enemies alike cut to an issue implicit in new representations of national history in Japan and the United States. As significant as the gestures of Hugo and the popular historians toward republican principles—and even Renan’s allusion to plebiscites—may be, these arguments dedicate themselves in the last instance to legitimating French Revolution, Third Republic

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the authority of the state to act in the name of the nation. Their elaboration of a domain distinct from politics in which the nation overcomes its divisions conveys necessity on the advent of such a state as the nation’s protector. The logic of national history is in this sense only reason of state. Forgetful of the state’s own violence, the nation is to pay a debt of gratitude it can never fulfill for the order the state brings through the obliteration of alternatives to its regime.

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Conclusion

National History and Other Worlds

We have arrived at the point where we can ask whether the practice of national history in Japan, the United States, and France comprises three interesting but incommensurable examples or, as I asserted at the beginning of the book, a coherent epistemology inflected by differing positions in the world. Can we speak of “national history” as a single practice of writing or only of the writing of different national histories? Imbricated with this question is another: whether the strategies of writing that national history uses to represent the space of the nation, in each and all of the countries, form a coherent whole with the strategies it uses to represent the nation in time. That is, are the inversion that lies at the heart of national history’s treatment of space and the device of allegory at the heart of its treatment of time connected by an intrinsic logic, or is their appearance together coincidental? The book’s central chapters offer ample evidence that in the late nineteenth century, national history was indeed a widespread practice of writing with common strategies for naturalizing the reorganization of society by capital and state and the reorganization of the space of the world by the conjoined systems of global capitalism and the international state system. I want here to summarize and synthesize some of this evidence, first by reconsidering the spatial and temporal strategies of national history and their relationship to each other. The combination of inversion and allegory, I suggest, is a characteristic configuration because it makes it possible to assert a necessity for the relationship between state and capital that prevailed as the era of free-trade imperialism gave way to formal colonization and monopoly capitalism. The morphology of national history, the pattern in the variation of its practice, I argue, is the consequence of the relationship between capital and state at the local and global

levels. To understand such a morphology, one must regard “local” variations in international phenomena such as the writing of national history in the light of both specific and relational differences, that is, in light both of the socioeconomic conditions and intellectual genealogies specific to the locality in question and of the systemic, global conditions that connect localities and ultimately are responsible for the production of locality itself.1 Our early-twenty-first-century moment offers opportunities and challenges as we confront the task of understanding a phenomenon whose etiology is not congruent with the nationally bounded frames of knowledge that the phenomenon itself helps to establish. As seen in the first part of the book, in the late nineteenth century the spatial strategies of national history center on an inversion that bounds the space of history and organizes the world as an apposite matrix of nationalhistorical spaces. The inversion naturalizes the organization of the world into systems of national markets and national states and makes such an organization apprehensible and representable. The economistic rhetoric of liberal historiography at the time illustrates the work of the inversion well. The genre of history of civilization in Japan, for example, describes human social development through contrasting tropes of “intercourse,” one concerned with integration among subjects of a nation and the other with differentiation between them and the subjects of other nations. Jointly the two tropes limn a national border around the space in which social development occurs. Such rhetoric allowed thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi to imagine the emergence and development of civilization in Japan, which they believed would end the threat of colonization by European and North American powers. Josiah Strong and Frederick Jackson Turner used the liberal rhetoric of intercourse to represent the territorial expansion of the United States and its role in the creation of a homogeneous nation through the Americanization of settlers, while G. Bruno and proponents of colonization in France such as Paul Leroy-Beaulieu used it to imagine ways out of the discord and historical blockage they believed beset France after the “terrible year” of the Defeat and the Commune. The rhetoric of intercourse reveals a supporting epistemology that it relies on and reproduces. The “national inversion” that founds this epistemology presents history as a determinate process of development that is national in scope, characterized by an interiority according to which nations form and grow through endogenous etiologies. The diachrony that the inversion establishes as a trait of such interiority is the condition for representing the development and achievement of unity that national 270

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history offers as the telos of history’s unfolding. The inversion thus forms the basis of both the idea of a national origin—the point of history’s departure—and an orientation toward a future linked to the origin through a structure of latency and realization. Because the nation exists fundamentally through its history, anyone or anything that impedes the movement of history—immigrants, political dissent, attachment to outdated customs—threatens the existence of the nation itself. The epistemology in question thus presents the nationalization of human life as the inevitable consequence of social development and asserts moreover that the extent of such nationalization is the measure of a society. Relations between nations are determined by their respective states of development, and national history thereby explains the conditions reigning in the world of nations. Numerous examples reveal, however, that the epistemological boundaries that national history draws are unstable. In Japan, the United States, and France alike, imperial expansion consistently creeps into representations of history premised on purely internal development. Japanese histories of civilization, in elucidating the conditions for national sovereignty, endorse imperialism as an indication of progress. Representations of history in the United States tell an “American history” so closely linked to the constant extension of physical borders that the exhaustion of purportedly free land in North America indicates a historical stalemate and the beginning of the nation’s decline. The same assumption, that closed space brings national decadence, makes colonial expansion an essential part of the movement of French history. Although the national inversion posits a world composed of discrete national-historical spaces, national history thus tends to conflate the forward movement of history and the outward movement of boundaries to the extent that imperialism and colonialism appear as necessary aspects of the nation’s internal development. One could say that national history in this period thereby supplied an alibi for the wave of formal colonization that began in the 1870s, but to stop with this conclusion would miss the more basic point that the framework of historical interiority and apposite, otherly national spaces provided by the inversion cannot account for the systemic, rather than national, integration carried out through the international systems of markets and states. On the contrary, national history at this time frequently greets with alarm any sign that nations have neither the internal nor external sovereignty that it imputes to them. In acknowledging that capital disregards national borders, for example, Fukuzawa conceded that national space is National History and Other Worlds

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easily penetrated by a quasi-corporeal “resident” that refuses national identification. Strong warned of immigrants forming foreign quarters in the national interior, while debates over the “lost provinces” of AlsaceLorraine confronted the ease with which national-historical space is dismembered, assertions of its inherent unity notwithstanding. The “second Frances” proposed as a solution, where the nation’s history could be managed to avoid the setbacks suffered on the Continent, suggest an element of fantasy in national history’s efforts to represent the space of the world: in the face of the rapid deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the planet by capital and imperial conquest, national history proposes a seemingly comforting view of the world in terms of internal development and external rivalry. The temporal strategies of national history in the late nineteenth century rely on allegory and motifs of rupture to expel conflict and dissent from the nation and establish a specific pattern of development for the nation and national subject alike. The structure of allegory and rupture is conjoint: the allegories of national history hinge on moments of individual and collective accession to nationality that mark a rift in life and historical consciousness through which past is separated from present. Such ruptures contribute to frequently seen efforts to disqualify dissent by shunting the attitudes that support it, whether the youthful idealism of the narrator of Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” or the “revolutionary spirit” vilified by conservative French republicans, into the past. In many national histories, the irruptive moment when subject and nation recognize their obligation to the future indeed forms one boundary around a delimited period—such as the years from 1886 to 1890 in Suehiro Tetchō’s Plum Blossoms in Snow—when fundamental political dispute is permissible, after which it must give way to collective endeavor. Typically such periods of dissent are also identified as moments of crisis, adding weight to the appeals for commitment to a unified national future seen in Tetchō’s novel, Woodrow Wilson’s essays of the 1890s, Bruno’s A Tour of France, and Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three, among other examples. The mobility of the label of crisis in many of the sources examined here, however, suggests that in national history the “present crisis” is in fact perpetual, which is to say that the invocation of crisis is a fixed aspect of the rhetoric of national history, and the identification of crisis with the present a consistent feature of the way national history organizes time into strata of past, present, and future, potential, calamity, and harmony. The allegories of national history map specific paths from national 272

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present to future, further marginalizing alternative views of human community and the subject’s place in it. The parallel registers of individual and collective history found in works such as “The Dancing Girl” and Henry James’s The American trace the coming-to-consciousness of subject and nation through a dialectical movement in which the life of the subject figures that of the nation, the life of the nation that of the subject. Such a movement, I have maintained, creates a perspective of the future anterior in narrative form that advances an argument about what “will have happened” to describe a community that does not yet exist. As The American and Wilson’s essays illustrate well, attitudes toward history emerge as a central problem in such a structure. The moments of accession to nationality that punctuate these allegories mark shifts in historical consciousness in which a different view of the place of the self in the life of the nation emerges. The stories through which the allegories trace such changes in historical consciousness frequently hinge on conflicts over filiation—lineal versus spiritual descent—that reflect a deep ambiguity as to whether the nation is defined by kinship or subjective will. The conflicts over filiation, moreover, reveal a tendency to describe the nation as the product of homosocial transactions among men in which women, such as Haru in Plum Blossoms in Snow, play a catalytic but ultimately secondary role. That the allegories so often have a parentless male at their center and offer the nation as an elective father highlights the tendency frequently observed here to present membership in the nation as an inheritance which confers on the subject an obligation to the national future. Ernest Renan’s essay “What Is a Nation” and the histories of the Revolution written by Alfred Rambaud and other French republicans show that the obligation consists of compulsory reconciliation, mixing appeals to set dissent aside for the collective good with implicit threats of state violence against those who refuse. The structure of rupture and allegory has peculiarities that reveal its limits in transforming the diverse pasts of the territories and populations claimed by the nation-state into a single national history. The motif of rupture effaces the historicity of the present regime and the violence of its foundation. For this reason, however, the moment of rupture is fundamentally unrepresentable. I do not mean that national history is evasive about the recent foundation of the nation-state but that, as in the treatment of 1868 in Tokutomi Sohō’s The Future Japan, the moment of its foundation appears as only a blank because national history denies the National History and Other Worlds

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historicity of the nation-state in its basic mechanisms of representation. National history is thus left curiously unable to explain where nations come from, even as it asserts long histories for them: James’s “new man” Christopher Newman is indeed a national type, not only of an American but of nations in general as they appear in disjunct narratives of national becoming. Although national histories seek to establish linear and continuous stories of the nation’s path from origin to self-awareness, the coherence of their structure in fact derives as much from figural correspondences— between the first and second restorations of Plum Blossoms in Snow, the two Englands of John Fiske’s American Political Ideas, and the First and Third Republics of French republican historiography, for example—that introduce a quality of serial repetition to their representation of cumulative and irreversible processes. That such a serial quality creeps into national history perhaps accounts for the aporetic relationship between subject and nation in its narratives. National allegories would suture subject and nation through synecdoche—the nation is the subject writ large, the subject the nation writ small—but examples from “The Dancing Girl” to Wilson’s essays and Ninety-Three show them able to offer only the promise of such a union, a deferral rather than a fulfillment that reflects the demand to abandon dissent rather than a resolution of the contradictions of the nation as community.

The spatial and temporal strategies of representation employed by national history are entangled to an extent that leaves little doubt they are aspects of a single epistemology. (As I said at the beginning of the book, separating them is purely a heuristic move.) The diachrony and interiority established by the inversion that is the foundation of national history’s representation of space are necessary conditions for the narratives of development advanced through the devices of allegory and rupture. The organization of the world into a matrix of national-historical spaces, moreover, relieves the burden of explaining where nations come from: the world is naturally divided into them. In this sense, the temporal strategies of national history rely on its spatial strategies to establish not only boundaries but also basic conditions of temporality. Recognize as well that the perspective of future anteriority, through which national history posits an age when the divided nation will have become one, is critical to representing the territory bounded by the inversion as a space whose 274

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disunity is not inherent but rather will be overcome by the movement of time. The elaboration of an internal history, furthermore, stabilizes the definition of national-historical space by differentiating it from other such spaces. The spatial strategies of national history thus rely on its temporal strategies to establish essential characteristics of national space. The work of one group of strategies to mitigate problems of representation in the other reveals a more fundamental aporia noted in an earlier chapter: a contradiction between the proposition that nations are formally identical and the idea that nations are essentially different in character, as expressed in the paradoxical assertion that all nations are the same in that each is uniquely defined by its own history. That the spatial and temporal strategies are mutually articulated, however, even if the articulation produces its own contradictions, attests that the combination of inversion and allegory plays a fundamental role in national history’s representation of the space of the planet and the life of human communities. Yet even as national history’s spatial and temporal strategies are intertwined, numerous examples show that the spatial strategies work primarily to define the nationality of space in the presence of capital’s disregard for national borders while the temporal strategies work to legitimate the state by effacing its contingent foundations. That is, in this period the bounding of space in national history is particularly concerned with the movement of capital, while the emplotment of time as the life of the nation is particularly concerned with the origins of the state. If the amalgam of inversion and allegory characterizes national history in the late nineteenth century, perhaps it does so because the combination makes it possible to give a history—a historical necessity—to a specific and recent relationship between capital, state, and human community. By this reasoning, the confluence in national history of spatial strategies concerned with capital and temporal strategies concerned with the state is as significant as the appearance of inversions or structures of allegory, each of which have their distinct genealogies. In the face of the integration of the world economy and the consolidation of the international system of states, national history asserts that capital and state are accessories in the development of a community— the “nation”—that exists historically and ontologically prior to them. This is, of course, a fantastical and politicized assertion accompanied, as we have seen, by declarations that subjects who refuse to serve the needs of capital and state oppose history and endanger the nation’s very existence. It is nonetheless made possible by the form given to time and space by the practice of national history in the late nineteenth century. National History and Other Worlds

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If national history works to create a history for a recently established relationship between capital, state, and human community, then we can begin theorizing the morphology of national history—the ways this widespread condition of thought manifests itself in different parts of the world—with the proposition that the world economy, the international state system, and their synergistic relationship established the limits or conditions of possibility for the writing of national history in the late nineteenth century. We have already seen, however, that local circumstances, too, informed the practice of national history in different places. The question of the relation of the “restoration” government to the Tokugawa regime is evident even in the narrative form of representations of history in Japan, while the occupation of former imperial “buffer zones” deeply affected depictions of the past and future of the nation in the United States. Thus we should follow the first proposition with a second, that political and economic circumstances of a smaller scale, the local of the evolving global political and economic systems, mediated between the conditions of possibility for the writing of national history and its actual manifestations in diverse parts of the world. The morphology of national history, then, would be determined by the relation of capital and state at both the local and the global, systemic levels. Six relationships would be at stake, which we can visualize as the four sides of a square and its two diagonals: the relationship of local capitalism to local state, global capitalism to international state system, local capitalism to global capitalism, local state to state system, local capitalism to state system, and local state to global capitalism. Such a complex array is ordered both by a difference in kind (capital and state) and by a difference of part and whole (local and global), keeping in mind that global conditions define the relevant scale of the local—in this case, as national market and national state. The complexity is less daunting if, following Marxist genre criticism, we consider the array to consist of determinants rather than causes, that is, as factors determining the permutations of form that are possible rather than the specific forms that appear.2 Thus one would not argue that the large-scale movement of finance capital around the world in the late nineteenth century caused the writers of histories of civilization in Japan to imagine social life as a phenomenon of “intercourse,” much less produced the inversion that underlies the genre’s representation of space. Yet the deterritorialization of the world by capital propelled transformations in social relations that were scarcely representable in established frames. Intercourse, a concept and trope possessing a distinct genealogy in lib276

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eral thought, offered not only a means to represent such transformations but an opportunity to represent them as necessary to the life of the nation, an assertion ultimately made possible by bounding social development as a national process. By asserting such necessity, one should note, the genre also legitimated the Meiji state’s imposition of social “reforms” intended to speed the capitalist rationalization of the economy. Similarly, it would be implausible to regard the shifting balance of power in the international state system, marked most obviously by the Prussian defeat of France, as causing the structure of figural and serial correspondences between the First Republic and the Third that is so prominent in historical representation in France in the 1870s and 1880s. The origins of such a structure lie in the history of romantic allegory and republican thought. In the shifting international context, however, such a structure made it possible not only to legitimate the new republican state by association with the first but also to assert a specific cause for the nation’s international decline—a view of history that privileged conflict—and an identity for national subjects premised on an obligation to reconciliation and renewal. Such an obligation, we have seen, precluded dissent and thus also supported the exclusion of the working class from the political settlement on which the republican state was founded. In both examples, capital, state, and their global and local relationships form the conditions within which the content and the expressive form of national history emerge, the problems to which national history must respond, and the ways in which it does so. To overemphasize the structural relationship of capital and state in this late-nineteenth-century moment, however, would be to lose sight of the fact that the practice of national history in the three countries responded to changing conditions in what were evolving and uneven systems of capital and states. That is, to properly understand the forms that national history took in different parts of the world, we must think in terms of the “historical capitalism” (to use Wallerstein’s phrase) that eventually reached all corners of the world in a process of geographic extension rather than the ideal capitalism theorized by classical economics; we must think in terms of the actual structure of the state system as it formed and expanded from Europe rather than the abstract state of political theory.3 The “local pasts” that inform the writing of national history do so in the context of these larger pasts of the world. Freedmen and freedwomen, the black against which American nationality was defined as a hierarchy of whiteness, were in the United States as a consequence of the Atlantic triangular trade, an essential part of the capitalist economy in the eighteenth and National History and Other Worlds

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early nineteenth centuries. Although mid-nineteenth-century nativism in Japan had origins in eighteenth-century “national studies” (kokugaku), the force of its arguments for imperial restoration came from popular reaction against the Tokugawa state’s treaties with European countries and the United States. Colonial propagandists argued for renewal through the establishment of “second Frances” against the background of the prior wave of European expansion and with one eye cocked toward the history of Europeans in North America, whose rational expansion into “empty land” they hoped to emulate. We should not mistake the attempts of national histories to elaborate internal stories of national becoming for an actual insularity of nations: frequently national histories’ privileged materials are products of international forces. Indeed, that the Meiji state was established amid the wreckage of the Sinocentric diplomatic system and that the United States was formed through both the expansion and recession of European empires testify to the extent to which such international forces are responsible for the existence of nation-states themselves. Any examination of the creation of national histories that did not account for this reality, settling for a comparative rather a systemic, international approach to the problem, would tacitly accept the ideological notion that nations are singular entities. The challenge is to keep in mind such global structures without flattening the significant differences among localities. The approach I have taken in this book is to treat such differences as both specific and relational: specific in the sense that such differences are the consequence of “local pasts,” relational in the sense that their significance as differences is clear only in the context of changing conditions in the entwined systems of capital and states. Thus the campaigns of Japanese conservatives in the 1890s to preserve the “national essence” (kokusui), the Christian rhetoric of a chosen people that Strong and Fiske employed in the United States, and the melancholy attachment of French intellectuals to the idea of France as the universal nation have specific genealogies in “national studies,” religious migration, and the French Enlightenment that are essential to understanding the practice of national history in each country. Taken alone, each might suggest an exceptionalist tendency with local origins. Considered relationally, they suggest not only that every national ideology tends toward exceptionalism (a comparative conclusion) but also that the deterritorializing effects of the movement of capital and the tendency in the state system to treat every state as formally equivalent impel

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the proposition of a national identity—indeed, a national essence—seemingly prior to state and capital. Such a treatment of differences as simultaneously specific and relational would not privilege any example as a prior case or ideal type (as European examples are usually privileged) but would consider all examples through the mediation of a commonly shared world situation, a single modernity. The “world situation” in the late nineteenth century was obviously characterized by great unevenness—with Europe amassing vast political and economic force—and a great variety of local conditions, but constants nonetheless existed at the global level in the capitalist world economy, the international state system, and their relationship as freetrade imperialism gave way to the second wave of European colonization. In the view of modernity in terms of specific and relational differences that I have pursued in this book, therefore, there is no false opposition between the variety of local situations and the singularity of global conditions. Arguments on the one hand that the world is converging toward a homogeneous modernity defined by global capital or on the other that it is a collection of alternative modernities defined by local conditions (ultimately cultural) cleave toward one or the other pole of such an erroneous dichotomy between global and local, at the cost of grasping both the unevenness of the world political economy and the role of large-scale structures in defining place.4 If one of the tasks national history undertook in the late nineteenth century was to explain the position of the nation in the world and its relationships to previous forms of sovereignty and community, it is a given that the solutions it found would vary because the positions and the previous social forms were various. Yet because the positions were positions within a common, if asymmetrically experienced, conjunction of global capital and international state system, it is just as predictable that the solutions would reveal similarities in form. Intellectuals at the time struggled to understand the relationality of the shifting global situation, as we do now. The circulation of European works of social theory, history, and fiction, which accelerated as changes in the world economy and state system brought distant regions of the planet into closer contact, had a decisive impact. Numerous examples we have examined show intellectuals appropriating concepts, aspects of rhetoric, and narrative forms that circulated internationally and deploying them in representations of the history of their “nation”: Leroy-Beaulieu tapped the language of circulation from political economy to advocate the colonial

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regeneration of France, Turner reframed Achille Loria’s stage theories to explain the expansion of the United States, and Tetchō took motifs of marriage from Benjamin Disraeli to describe the establishment of democracy in Japan, among other cases in point. What circulated contributed directly to the rhetoric and narrative form of national histories, but the circulation itself also affected the ways that national history represented the place of the nation in the world. As I argued in chapter 1, the international circulation of ideas, rhetoric, and narrative forms, each with its own genealogy, transformed them into mobile devices for narrating the lives of nations, every replication assisting a process of abstraction that endowed them with a quality of universality. As such theories and devices of representation gained the appearance of universality, measuring one’s nation against the universal—the generic nation implied by the mass of techniques and theories—became a habitual gesture of national history. Such a gesture of comparison between nations is the most common means by which national history places the nation in a world thus fundamentally understood to be a world of nations. Observe, then, that as national history transforms world into world picture, such false universals obscure the systemic forces that produce nation-states as economic and political localities. One consequence of the increasing integration of the world in the late nineteenth century by global capital and state system was an increasing difficulty in recognizing such systemic integration as something other than the destruction of national particularity or, positively, the convergence of distinct nations toward a universal norm.

If national history is a wide-reaching epistemology, the question arises of how anyone—myself included—is able to recognize it as such. I have suggested two reasons, to which I add a third. Although national history works to label nonnational identities and social practices as anachronisms and shunt them into the past, their persistence in the present, along with the sedimented traces of past social formations, means that the novelty of the nation as a form of community remains in view. Like any other epistemology, this one also occasionally falters in its representations: the boundaries it draws are unstable, and its linear narratives are marked by serial repetition. National history becomes recognizable as an epistemology bound by its own logic at such moments of stumbling. The third reason pertains more specifically to the moment when this book was written, in the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the 280

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twenty-first. With the advance of transnational forms of capitalism and consequent changes in the forms of state sovereignty since the 1970s, gaps have opened between the world and the world picture that national history constructs that allow us to recognize the historicity of this epistemology consistently, rather than only at moments when its contradictions come to the fore. Indeed, as we are confronted with the task of describing the contemporary geopolitical moment—“globalization”—we may just now be developing the vocabulary to describe this epistemology of the past. How should we respond? If the conditions of our current geopolitical moment only now enable us to fully recognize an epistemology that emerged in the nineteenth century, then efforts to replace nationally organized forms of knowledge with an international history, world literature, or global cultural studies that only provided tours of the nations of the globe in the place of Bruno’s tour of France would do nothing but perpetuate the belatedness of knowledge. New conditions let us understand the strategies and the politics of the ways that novelists, historians, and social philosophers explained the relationship of state to capital and local to global in the nineteenth century, but incremental improvements in how that way of thinking described its world seem of limited value to us in ours. Instead we should recognize the changes in the geography of capital and state since the mid-twentieth century as an opportunity to rethink ideas of the social and social change in more fundamental ways, through a critical evaluation of the geopolitical organization of the world in our own time. The practice of national history in the late nineteenth century shows us that thinking about the space of the planet and the changes wrought on it by capital and state has a history that predates our current fascination with ideas of clashing civilizations and flat earths. It is a history from which we can draw lessons as we craft critical disciplines for the international and transnational study of human life. One such lesson, a crucial one, is that in the late nineteenth century the practice of national history naturalized the conjunction of capital and state that prevailed at the time, which was the result of intersecting processes of economic and political development on a global scale, as if it were the product of something quite different, the movement of nations toward self-conscious maturity. National history thereby legitimated the efforts of capital and state alike to transform human community. Today, amid the current fascination with global “flows” and calls to internationalize the disciplines, we face the danger that naively conceived international studies of culture and thought will similarly naturalize the conjunction of capital and state known as National History and Other Worlds

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globalization.5 Globalization may mean the demise of the nation-state, but as many critical commentators have observed, it is unlikely to mean the disappearance of states, which recent years have shown to be ready as always to discipline populations and seize resources in their own interests. Nor is globalization likely to mean the leveling of a geography of capital that in the first years of the twenty-first century, as in the last years of the nineteenth, supports a wildly uneven distribution of wealth and misery on the planet. A new, critical apprehension of the history of the planet as a human space must take this situation as guide and its elimination as goal. In parting, it may be useful to remember the penchant of national history to make arguments about the future via the past. The point Turner made with bravado in 1891, that “each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time,” scarcely raises an eyebrow now.6 Our task should be quite different: not to rewrite the history of the world as a history of our time but to decide, through the lens of the past, what future we want and make its history in the present.

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Notes

Preface 1 Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History.” 2 For two arguments on the recent vintage of the nation, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 10; and Greenfeld, Nationalism, 6. On the nation as historical exception, see McNeill, Polyethnicity and National Unity, 29. 3 Brubaker, “Rethinking Nationhood,” 5. 4 My models come from one tradition of Marxist criticism: Lukács’s The Historical Novel and Moretti’s The Way of the World.

1. National History 1 Fukuzawa, Sekai kuni zukushi, 597. 2 Ibid., 652–53. 3 For Fukuzawa’s views of China, see Sekai kuni zukushi, 593–95. The position appears most succinctly in the phrase “leave Asia and enter Europe” (datsu-A nyū-Ō) in his essay “On Leaving Asia” (“Datsu-A ron,” 1885). 4 Fukuzawa, Sekai kuni zukushi, 617–18. 5 Ibid., 610–11. 6 Ibid., 594, 581. 7 Ibid., 663–65. 8 Tilly, Big Structures, 147. Tilly offers a compressed elaboration of his views of the twin processes in pages 7–10. 9 In these considerations of the relationship between capitalism and territoriality, I am indebted to Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century and Rosanvallon’s Le libéralisme économique. 10 Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, 177–78. 11 Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade,” 13. 12 Magdoff, Imperialism, 29, 35. 13 For this point and the following discussion, see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 47–58.

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

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Tilly, “Reflections,” 15. Ibid., 27. Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia,” 52–55. On the legitimating function of the idea of a “society of states,” see Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia,” 60–64. Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” 150–51, 162. Tilly, “Reflections,” 45–46. Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea, 46. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 32–33, 144–58. William Gilpin, The Cosmopolitan Railway, Compacting and Fusing Together All the World’s Continents (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890). Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 130, 142–48, 155. Vance, Capturing the Horizon, 464; Ambrose, Nothing like It, 369. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon, 15–22. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 240–42. Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 155–56. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon, 19–22, 28. Segal, Atlas of International Migration, 54, gives an estimate of 9 to 11 million West and Central Africans taken as slaves to the Americas and Europe between 1500 and 1900. Castles and Miller, The Age of Migration, 53, estimates that 15 million Africans were taken as slaves to the Americas before 1850. The classic study is Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. Segal, Atlas of International Migration, 54. Ibid., 16. The estimate includes indentured servants. Castles and Miller, The Age of Migration, 61. Turner, “The Significance of History,” 22. Oz-Salzberger, “Civil Society,” 58–65; Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 39, 71, 76. On Tocqueville, Marx, and J. S. Mill, see Siedentop’s introduction to The History of Civilization in Europe, xxx-xxxvii; on conservative republicans, see Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot, 358, 363–70. Lectures on European Civilization, trans. Priscilla Maria Beckwith (London: John Macrone Whiting, 1837); General History of Civilisation in Europe, anonymous translator (Oxford: Talboys, 1837); General History of Civilisation in Europe, anonymous translator (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1839); The History of Civilization in Europe, trans. William Hazlitt the Younger (London: Bogue, 1846); General History of Civilization in Europe (New York: Appleton, 1842) (text identical to Oxford edition). Siedentop is incorrect to say in his edition of Guizot that Hazlitt’s translation was the first. Matsuzawa, “Kaisetsu,” 368. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 23; on the tendency to see Scott as originator, see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 130.

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40 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 11–12. 41 Joshi, In Another Country, 152, 154–61; Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 26–27, 52–56. 42 Maeda, “Meiji rekishi bungaku no genzō,” 3–4; Ueda, “Production of Literature,” 67, 77. 43 Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 182–85. 44 Roll, History of Economic Thought, 290. 45 Ibid., 383; Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 515. 46 Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 43; Morris-Suzuki, The History of Japanese Economic Thought, 48. 47 Craig, “John Hill Burton and Fukuzawa Yukichi,” 230–31, 235; MorrisSuzuki, The History of Japanese Economic Thought, 49–50. 48 Amin, Eurocentrism, vii. 49 See Macaulay, History of England, 1:210–11; McMaster, History, 1:2–3; Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 70–71. 50 On the importance of this distinction, see Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 8, 374–75. 51 Toby, State and Diplomacy, xxv. 52 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 8. 53 Duus, Abacus and the Sword, 15–21, 43–49. 54 Crawcour, “Economic Change,” 39–40; Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 94. 55 Crawcour, “Economic Change,” 40–41, 47. 56 Ibid., 42–44. 57 Crawcour, “Industrialization and Technological Change,” 84, 88–89. 58 Crawcour, “Economic Change,” 39–40, 47. 59 Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, 18–19, 21–27. 60 On the plight of such women, see Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, 173– 204. 61 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 26–29. 62 Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 1–2. 63 Ibid., 10–11; Bensel, Political Economy, xvii–xix. 64 Licht, Industrializing America, 181–82. 65 LaFeber, The New Empire, 10–12. 66 Bensel, Political Economy, 5; Licht, Industrializing America, 102. 67 Licht, Industrializing America, 127–28. 68 Bensel, Political Economy, 6–8, 12; Licht, Industrializing America, 181–82. 69 Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 55, 79, 91–92. 70 Licht, Industrializing America, 173. 71 Nord, The Republican Moment, 12–14; Elwitt, Making of the Third Republic, 19–20. 72 The precise makeup of the coalition is the topic of long dispute; historians since Hoffman have agreed on its contradictory and increasingly sclerotic nature. Hoffman, “Paradoxes,” 20–21. Notes to Chapter 1

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73 E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 203–10, 332–33; Nord, The Republican Moment, 190–92. 74 Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France, 89–90. 75 Caron, Economic History of Modern France, 3. 76 Ibid., 38–39, 91–92. 77 Ibid., 2–3; Noiriel, The French Melting Pot, 238–40. 78 Caron, Economic History of Modern France, 4. 79 Ibid., 41. 80 Lebovics, Alliance of Iron and Wheat, 24. 81 Ibid., 40, 88. 82 Noiriel, The French Melting Pot, 51–59; Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 113–26. 83 Lebovics, Alliance of Iron and Wheat, 99, 102–3. 84 Elwitt, Making of the Third Republic, 256–72; Lebovics, Alliance of Iron and Wheat, 160–83; on solidarité see Nicolet, L’idée républicaine en France, 371–74. 85 For a brief overview, see Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen, 35–38. 86 “Gokajō no goseimon,” 114–15. 87 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 21–26. 88 “Kyōiku ni kansuru chokugo,” 868–69; Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan, 32. 89 Tanaka Akira, Meiji ishin-kan no kenkyū, 51–59; Doak, “What Is a Nation,” 287–88. 90 See, among others, Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 86–89; Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 20; Dangerfield, Awakening of American Nationalism, 4. 91 Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 212–13. 92 Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 71–74. 93 Gossett, Race, 297–309. 94 Burgess, “The American Commonwealth,” 15–16. 95 Wald, Constituting Americans, 243–52. 96 Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 59–60. 97 Bell, Cult of the Nation, 10–12. 98 Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 227; Melville, White-Jacket, 506. 99 Girardet, Le nationalisme français, 30–31. 100 Renan, La réforme, 83. 101 Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 231–35, 240–41. On the racial argument, see E. Weber, “Gauls versus Franks.” 102 Digeon, La crise allemande, 102–3; Bell, Cult of the Nation, 75–76. 103 E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 112. 104 Girardet, Le nationalisme français, 26. 105 E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 9. 106 Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 348–49. 107 Northern historians, for example, mainly left the historiography of the Civil War to Southerners, nurtured by Burgess in his seminars at Columbia University. Novick, That Noble Dream, 80. 108 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 72–74.

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09 The classic study of the shift is Shively, “Japanization of the Middle Meiji.” 1 110 On developments in the Tokugawa period, see Najita, “History and Nature,” 638–45. 111 Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 67. 112 Takekoshi, Shin Nihonshi, 3, 132. 113 The Theban example is the topic of Yano Ryūkei’s Inspiring Examples of Statesmanship (Keikoku bidan, 1883–84). The genre of political future tales began with Suehiro Tetchō’s A Tale of the Future of the Year 23 (Nijūsan–nen miraiki, 1886), which I discuss in a later chapter. 114 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 1–6. 115 Dexter Arnold Hawkins, The Anglo-Saxon Race: Its History, Character, and Destiny. An Address before the Syracuse University at Commencement, June 21, 1875 (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1875). An influential example of the Teutonic germ theory was Adams, “The Germanic Origin.” 116 McMaster, History, 1:1–2. 117 Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, 182–86. 118 Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 250–51. 119 Robert Woltor, A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year A.D. 1899 (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1882). 120 Quotation from W. Wilson, “Making of the Nation,” 4. 121 For an overview, see Jullian, “Notes sur l’histoire.” 122 Taine, Les origines, 1:3–5, 295–96, 351. On medicine and psychiatry in Taine, see Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 67–72. 123 Janet, Centenaire de 1789, 277–78. 124 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 25. 125 Balibar, “The Nation-Form,” 86–87. 126 Letter from James to Henry Rutgers Marshall, 1899, quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, 81. 127 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 24–27, 37–38, 49. 128 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5. 129 On Kuga, Miyake, and their peers, see Pyle, New Generation, 53–75. 130 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 37–38. 131 My discussion of the relationship between the universal and the national is indebted to Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique.” 132 A helpful explanation of the concept of structural causality, derived from Althusser, is found in Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 35–43. 133 Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 46–47. 134 Winichakul makes this point eloquently in Siam Mapped; see especially 154– 56.

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Toby, State and Diplomacy, 23–52. B. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands, 12. Toby, State and Diplomacy, 171–72, 202. Ibid., 173, 211–13. Moulder, Japan, China, 92. Toby, State and Diplomacy, 202. Moulder, Japan, China, 93. Ibid., 97. On the Tokugawa state’s response, see Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan, 20– 23. Winichakul, Siam Mapped, 131, 138–39. Tang, Global Space, 2, 7; see also Stefan Tanaka’s discussion of the intellectual challenge of “synchronizing” diverse societies in New Times in Modern Japan, 19, 86. On the creation of a new diplomatic vocabulary for explaining the shape of the region, see Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea, 27–44. Miyachi, “Bakumatsu meiji zenki,” 510–11. On the tutelary attitude of civilization and enlightenment thinkers, see Howland, Translating the West, 40–42. Howland and others point out that both words in the phrase bunmei kaika were used as translations of the English “civilization” and other European-language cognates, and the customary translation of “civilization and enlightenment” is therefore erroneous (Translating the West, 38–40). I translate each word as “civilization” when it is used alone but use the customary translation of the two-word phrase to avoid confusion. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 19. Ibid. On the conceptual role the “West” plays in this type of universalism, see Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique.” Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 19. Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 52. Fukuzawa repeated the comment in Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 1875), one of the histories of civilization that are the topic of this chapter. Balibar, “The Nation-Form,” 93. Lie, Multiethnic Japan, 117–19. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 9–18. On campaigns to create uniform customs and identities, see Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan, 23–28. Ōkubo, “Meiji shonen no shigakukai,” 414. Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period, 59–66. Numata, “Shigeno Yasutsugu,” 278–80. Ienaga, “Keimō shigaku,” 422. Ienaga surveys the genre in “Keimō shigaku.” In English see Matsuzawa, “Varieties of Bunmei Ron.”

Notes to Chapter 2

28 See, for example, Craig, “Fukuzawa Yukichi,” 118. 29 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 9. A complete English translation is available as An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. David A. Dilworth and Cameron G. Hurst (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973). 30 Morris-Suzuki, “Invention and Reinvention,” 762. 31 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 57; Taguchi, Nihon kaika shōshi, 233. 32 On European sources see Matsuzawa, “Varieties of Bunmei Ron”; and Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment, 90–100. 33 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 27–29. 34 Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” 1–3. I take the distinction between universality and exemplarity from Derrida, The Other Heading, 24–25. 35 Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” 100–105. Thomas Keirstead’s discussion of the role of reflections on capitalism in the reconception of history during the Meiji period attests to the importance of such an economic imaginary in Japan; see “Nation and Postnation in Japan,” 235–39. 36 The character in question is read as majiwaru when standing alone as a verb. 37 Howland examines early attempts to translate the term in Translating the West, 153–64. On the sources of kōsai, see Schad-Seifert, “Constructing National Identities,” 53–55. In Japanese see the essential work of Saitō, Meiji no kotoba, 175–228; and Yanabu, Hon’yakugo no ronri, 53–86. 38 Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, 65–77, 113–16. 39 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 57. 40 Nishikawa, Kokkyō no koekata, 178. 41 Hirschman, Passions and the Interests, 48–66. 42 I am indebted to Hayden White’s pioneering work on historical rhetoric, but my use of “trope” to designate a constellation of words that have both literal and figurative meaning obviously differs from his use of the word in Metahistory to designate “a linguistic paradigm of a mode of thought.” For White’s theory of tropes, see Metahistory, 31–38. 43 Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 34–35. 44 Ibid., 48. Elsewhere in Outline of a Theory of Civilization, Fukuzawa uses kokutai as a translation for “nationality” as it appears in J. S. Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, hence my use of the English word to translate the Japanese one here. (I discuss the gloss of Mill later.) Other possibilities are “national polity” and “nationhood.” 45 Taguchi, Nihon kaika shōshi, 20. Ōkubo observes that Taguchi was the most resolutely materialist of the historians of civilization. “Meiji shonen no shigakukai,” 409. 46 Taguchi, Nihon kaika shōshi, 20, 125–26. 47 Ibid., 53–55, 70, 72. 48 Ibid., 153–54. Taguchi cites taxation in the Heian (794–1185), Kamakura Notes to Chapter 2

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(1185–1333), and Muromachi (1333–1573) periods as examples. Nihon kaika shōshi, 44, 156–57. Ibid., 233, 234. Fujita, Bunmei tōzenshi, 246. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 114–15. In “Tsūzoku minkenron” (1878), Fukuzawa employs a similar sequence to discuss the transfer of rights from the individual to ever greater corporate entities, ending in the nation. Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, 70–71. Shin, “Komyunikeeshon tekunorojii,” 127. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 116. Ibid., 208–10. Taguchi, Nihon kaika shōshi, 72. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 40–41. Fukuzawa’s source is the discussion of nationality in chapter 16 of Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861). Kang, “Fukuzawa Yukichi,” 369. Taguchi, Nihon kaika shōshi, 254. Fujita, Bunmei tōzenshi, 246, 248. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 273. Ibid., 275. Shin, “Komyunikeeshon tekunorojii,” 129. Taguchi, Nihon kaika shōshi, 244. Taguchi also was involved in the debates; on his role, see Oguma, Tan’itsu kokumin shinwa, 33–49. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 279–80. My explanation is based on Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin, a 1974 work on Marx. The argument on inversion and interiority will be familiar to readers of Karatani’s later work, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980; English trans., Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), on the “discovery of landscape” and the formation of psychological interiority in narrative in Japanese literature during the Meiji period. Karatani, Marukusu, 34–40. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 65, 67. Shiga Shigetaka, History of Nations, Specially Adapted for Japanese Students, supervised by W. D. Cox (Tokyo: Z. P. Maruya, 1888). I am grateful to Alexis Dudden for bringing this book to my attention. See Amin, Eurocentrism, 76–77, 109–11; and Dussel, Invention of the Americas, 66–67, 136–37. On such a tendency in anthropology, see Fabian, Time and the Other, esp. 1–35. S. Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, 108. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 220–21.

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Ibid., 263. Yoshino, “Fukuzawa Yukichi no chōsenron,” 43–62. Fujita, Bunmei tōzenshi, 242. Ibid., 260, 265. Kang, “Fukuzawa Yukichi,” 364–66. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 132–33. Ibid., 152–54. Ibid., 179–83. Taguchi, Nihon kaika shōshi, 41, 44, 91. Fujita, Bunmei tōzenshi, 254. On similar attempts to cast the Japanese woman as a repository of tradition, see Sievers, Flowers in Salt, 15. For this point, I am indebted to Barlow, “Theorizing Woman,” 181. Irigaray argues that an economy of “ho(m)mo-sexuality,” based on a taboo on unmediated sexual exchange among men, is the basis of patriarchal societies; for versions of the argument, see her “Women on the Market” and “Commodities among Themselves.” Kōsai did gain such a connotation during the twentieth century. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 294.

3. The Nationality of Expansion 1 See, for example, Tyrrell, “Beyond the View,” 168–72; and Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 26. 2 I take the definition from Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, “Beyond Dichotomies,” 3. 3 See Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 4; and Pettman, “Race, Ethnicity and Gender,” 70. 4 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 2, 35–36. 5 Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, “Beyond Dichotomies,” 20, 23. 6 I owe this point to Potter’s observation of the tendency in the historiography of nationalism to confuse the existence of political institutions with the existence of a sense of nationality. Potter, “Historian’s Use of Nationalism,” 72. See also Brubaker’s provocative essay “Rethinking Nationhood.” 7 Parkes’s occasion for coining the now ubiquitous phrase was the federation conference held in Melbourne in February 1890. 8 Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 94–99; Pettman, “Race, Ethnicity and Gender,” 75–76. 9 Brawley, White Peril, 2–3. 10 Tyrrell outlines a research agenda from this perspective in “Beyond the View.” 11 Bright and Geyer, “Where in the World,” 75–76. 12 McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 14–16, 82–85. 13 Ross, Origins, 23–24; Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 40. Notes to Chapter 3

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14 Ross, Origins, 25; Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 31. Ross and Stephanson, like McCoy, draw on the essential work of Pocock on American political thought in The Machiavellian Moment, 506–52. 15 Ross, Origins, 58. 16 Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, xxi. 17 On frontier anxiety, see Wrobel, End of American Exceptionalism, 3–25. 18 Ross, Origins, 57. 19 Strong, Our Country, 30. 20 Quoted in Ross, Origins, 58, from Sumner’s 1872 inaugural lecture at Yale. 21 Bannister, Social Darwinism, 57–78. 22 Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 29; Seward, quoted in Manifest Destiny, 61. 23 On population growth in republican thought, see McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 20. 24 I borrow the terms “self-instituting” and “self-generating” from Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, 70–77. 25 On ascriptive nationalism, see R. Smith, Civic Ideals, 3–6, and 347–409 on the Gilded Age. 26 I borrow the terms “racial” and “civic” from Gerstle, “Theodore Roosevelt.” Werner Sollors phrases the conflict in a similar, useful fashion as one between identities based on “descent” and “consent.” See Beyond Ethnicity, 3–19. 27 Turner, “The Significance of History,” 22. The essay was published in Wisconsin Journal of Education 21 (October–November 1891). 28 As discussed in an earlier chapter, the germ theory argued that the local and federal political institutions of the United States first appeared among tribes in northern Germany, were brought to Britain through tribal migration, and then were transported to North America by English colonists. For an overview of the germ theory, see Saveth, American Historians, 13–31; Horsman traces the formation of Anglo-Saxonist doctrines through the combination of ideas of race and providential destiny in Race and Manifest Destiny, 81–186. I return to these issues and the case of Fiske in chapter 6. 29 Ross, “Historical Consciousness,” 917–18; McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 18– 19, 26. 30 Bancroft, History, 1:4. 31 Although I am greatly indebted to Ross’s work, I think this is an essential restatement of the problem of exceptionalism in U.S social thought. See Origins, xiv–xv. 32 Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 27–28; Twain’s and Warner’s italics. 33 Dilworthy has decided to become the voice of Providence for the Negro because a Senator Balaam already is getting rich uplifting the Indian. Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 218–19. 34 Foner, Mark Twain, 73–74. 35 Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 268. 36 On geographic rationalism, see Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 43–44.

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37 Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 127. 38 Karatani, Marukusu, 34–40; see also my discussion of Karatani in chapter 2. 39 Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 306–7; and French, Mark Twain, 131– 32. 40 Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 349. 41 On this aspect of Laura’s fate, see Harris, “Four Ways,” 142–44, 151. 42 Budd, Mark Twain, 50–55. 43 Hungarian and Italian workers were recruited for the Pennsylvania mines, adding anti-immigrant agitation to the labor struggle. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 47–48. 44 Strong’s arguments on race draw on the theories of racial evolution commonly considered part of “social Darwinism.” Throughout this chapter (and chapter 6), I have avoided using the term because of the variety of meanings given it, and have tried to specify instead the ideas in play. On ambiguities of the term, see Bannister, Social Darwinism, xi–xii. 45 Strong, Our Country, 1. 46 Ibid., 69. 47 Maclear, “Republic and the Millennium,” 206–7. In Bederman’s view, the accommodation of millenarianism and evolutionary thought is an essential aspect of late-nineteenth-century ideas of civilization. Manliness and Civilization, 25–26. 48 Strong, Our Country, 69. 49 Ibid., 2. Strong may refer to Thomas Falwell Buxton, a British philanthropist and politician and a leader of the campaign to end the slave trade in Africa. 50 Strong cites Beard’s American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Putnam, 1881) directly on p. 71. 51 Gossett documents the role of racial ideas in the Social Gospel movement of which Strong was a part (Race, 176–97). 52 On the rise of Progressive history and Turner’s contribution, see Breisach, American Progressive History, 21–38. Turner’s Frontier Thesis sped the demise of the Teutonic Germ theory and Anglo-Saxonist historiography. Novick, That Noble Dream, 88. 53 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 31. 54 Bassin, “Turner, Solov’ev,” 499–500. For Solov’ev, the influence of the spaces of the Russian interior was negative rather than positive. 55 On Turner’s use of Ely and Loria, see Benson, Turner and Beard, 1–34. 56 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 40–41, 53. 57 Ibid., 32. 58 Ibid. 59 These are the fall line of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic (seventeenth century), the Allegheny Mountains (eighteenth), the Mississippi (first quarter of the nineteenth), the Missouri “where its direction approximates north and south” (mid-nineteenth), and together the Rocky Mountains and the arid Notes to Chapter 3

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tract running along the ninety-ninth meridian (in Turner’s present of 1893). Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 36–37. Ibid., 38. Turner dismisses Populism as an outcropping of “primitive society.” Ibid., 55. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 32–33. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 33–34. Turner, “The Significance of History,” 27. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 59. Ibid., 47. Juricek, “American Usage,” 21, 25, 32. See, among others, H. Smith, Virgin Land, 257–59; and Noble, End of American History, 22–25. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 53, 55. Moorhead, American Apocalypse, 240–41. Strong, Our Country, 111. On the threat to democracy, see Strong, Our Country, 43–45. In studies of historiography and intellectual history (as opposed to frontier history), Noble’s work is an obvious example of this tendency. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 60. Turner, “The Significance of History,” 18; Turner’s italics. Susman, “History and the American Intellectual,” 17. Turner, “The Significance of History,” 26. Turner, “Problem of the West,” 74. The essay was published in Atlantic Monthly 77 (September 1896). Turner, “Problem of the West,” 61–62, 69, 74. That Turner can imagine only the suspension, rather than the resolution, of social conflict contradicts Klein’s contention that the essay on the frontier emplots a comedic resolution to history (in which conflicting elements come together in a happy ending). See Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 78–88. Turner, “Problem of the West,” 75.

4. Decline and Renewal 1 Digeon, La crise allemande, 1–4. More recently Wolfgang Schivelbusch has given a psychological interpretation to this period. See The Culture of Defeat, 103–87. 2 Lidsky, Les écrivains, 7; Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 4. As noted in chapter 1, the idea of national regeneration appeared during the Revolution. Bell, Cult of the Nation, 75–76. 3 Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 227. 4 Ibid., 247–48.

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5 Ibid., 256–57. 6 On the position of France in Europe, see Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 238. 7 Michelet, Le peuple, 64, 73, 75 (ellipsis in original). Throughout this chapter I translate patrie as “fatherland” to preserve the gendered nuance of the French word but include the original in brackets to distinguish it from the German Vaterland, which the translation recalls to Anglophone readers. 8 Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle, x. 9 Ibid., 349–50, 400–409. 10 Quoted in Digeon, La crise allemande, 96. 11 Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution, 1:6–7. 12 Noiriel, Etat, nation et immigration, 160. 13 Renan, La réforme, 85. 14 Digeon, La crise allemande, 102–3. 15 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 10–11. 16 Noiriel, The French Melting Pot, 51–59; and Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 113–26. The phrase comes from a report to the Société d’Économie Politique de Lyon, L’invasion des étrangers et la taxe de séjour, by Alexandre Bérard (Lyon: Imprimerie Mongin-Rusand, 1886), quoted in Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 110. 17 Pomian, “Francs et Gaulois,” 2248. On the thesis of Franks versus Gauls in nineteenth-century French historiography, see E. Weber, “Gauls versus Franks.” 18 Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 241. 19 Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, 2:139; Nora, “Lavisse, instituteur national,” 248– 49. 20 Girardet, Le nationalisme français, 15, 50–51. 21 Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle, 413–19. 22 Girardet, Le nationalisme français, 17–18; Andrew, “French Colonialist Movement,” 165. 23 Quoted in Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France, 75. 24 Ozouf and Ozouf, “Le tour de la France,” 277–78; Bardos, “Postface,” 318. 25 On the bildungsroman and socialization, see Moretti, Way of the World, 15– 28. 26 Mehlman gives an entertaining Freudian reading of this search in “Remy de Gourmont with Freud.” 27 M. Weber, “Le lecteur virtuel,” 158. 28 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30. 29 G. Bruno (Augustine Fouillée), Le tour de la France, 45. This 1977 reprint reproduces the 1877 edition. Bruno produced a “laicized” edition in 1906 to conform to legislation separating church and state, removing religious references and adding an epilogue that takes place on New Year’s Eve 1905. Both editions remained available after 1906 and exist in modern reprints easily distinguished by the presence of the epilogue. Notes to Chapter 4

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30 On these projects, see E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 203–10. 31 Bruno, Le tour de la France, 25. 32 Ozouf and Ozouf, “Le tour de la France,” 288; Dupuy, “Histoire sociale,” 145–46. 33 A. Smith, Inquiry, 17. 34 Bruno, Le tour de la France, 194. 35 Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France, 3–5. 36 A common feature in treatments of nationality in schoolbooks of the Third Republic. Déloye, Ecole et citoyenneté, 112–13. 37 Mainguenau, Les livres d’école, 262. 38 Bruno, Le tour de la France, 304–5. 39 Ozouf and Ozouf observe that the vision of social order based on fraternal support resembles the quasi contract that Augustine Fouillée’s husband Alfred, an important republican ideologue, theorized as the basis of his philosophy of solidarity. Ozouf and Ozouf, “Le tour de la France,” 296. On Alfred’s theory, in which social unity is simultaneously organic and contractual, see Scott, Republican Ideas, 163–67; and Nicolet, L’idée républicaine, 371–74. 40 Lejeune, Les sociétés de géographie, 73–87; on Duval’s role, see p. 69. In English, consult Heffernan, “The Science of Empire.” 41 Duval, Les colonies, 451. 42 Gaffarel, Les colonies françaises, 8, 15. 43 On recrimination, see Gaffarel, Les colonies françaises, 4–5, 15. 44 Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation, 2nd ed., viii. For the background of LeroyBeaulieu’s book and its different editions, see Murphy, Ideology of French Imperialism, 103–8. 45 Schneider, Empire for the Masses, 156–57; Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 56– 57. 46 Gaffarel, Les colonies françaises, 128. 47 Duval, Les colonies, xx. 48 Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation, 1st ed., ii; 2nd ed., viii. 49 Roudaire, La mer intérieure africaine, 95. 50 Duval, Des rapports entre la géographie, 9–14. The piece first appeared in Bulletin de la Société de Geógraphie, September 1863. 51 Maclane, “Railways and ‘Development Imperialism,’” 505. Saint-Simonian thought, which had influenced transportation projects overseas since the 1830s, contributed to this faith; see Walch, “Les saint-simoniens,” 1760–93. 52 Pheffer, “Railroads,” 7. 53 Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation, 1st ed., vii. 54 Duval, Les colonies, 448–49. 55 Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation, 1st ed., 500. 56 Granet, Images de Paris, 76, 99–109. 57 Bruno, Le tour de la France, 279. 58 Bardos, “Postface,” 315.

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59 On occupations, see Ozouf and Ozouf, “Le tour de la France,” 289. 60 Dupuy, “Histoire sociale,” 142–45; Bardos, “Postface,” 324–26; Ozouf and Ozouf, “Le tour de la France,” 286–88. 61 Broc, “Les français face,” 336. 62 Ibid., 326. 63 Heffernan, “A French Colonial Controversy,” 150. 64 E. Cosson, quoted in Broc, “Les français face,” 328–29; Schneider, Empire for the Masses, 162. 65 Girardet, L’idée coloniale, 65. 66 Roudaire, “Une mer intérieure,” 323. 67 Roudaire, “Rapport à M. le Ministre,” 238. 68 Ibid., 261. 69 Ibid. 70 Roudaire, “A propos du projet,” 87. 71 Roudaire, “Une mer intérieure,” 349. 72 Roudaire, “Rapport à M. le Ministre,” 241. 73 Ibid., 232.

5. The Rupture of Meiji 1 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions” and “Mass-Producing Traditions.” 2 Balibar, “The Nation-Form,” 88. 3 Bloch, “Non-contemporaneity,” 108–12. 4 Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 25–26. 5 On the distinction between story and narrative discourse, see Genette, Narrative Discourse, 25–27. Most importantly, the distinction allows discrimination between the unilinear time ordering of story and the potentially more complex time ordering of narrative. 6 Duara, “Bifurcating Linear History,” 779. 7 An idea I take loosely from Jameson’s discussion of totality in The Political Unconscious, 52–54. 8 I thank Harry Harootunian for pointing out the importance of the future anterior in national history. 9 On domain nationalism, see Craig, “Fukuzawa Yukichi,” 99–101; on views of political geography, Howell, Geographies of Identity, 4–5. 10 Harootunian, Toward Restoration, 37. 11 G. Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers, 25–26. 12 New era names were declared frequently before 1868, sometimes according to omens; by a convention established by the new government, names would change only with the passing of an emperor. 13 On the annalistic histories, see Mehl, History and the State, 16–34; on the new historiography and the nation-state, Narita, “Jikan no kindai,” 11–12. Notes to Chapter 5

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Tanaka Akira, Meiji ishin-kan no kenkyū, 51–53, 58–59. Pierson, Tokutomi Sohō, 141, 125–26. Katō, “Jinken shinsetsu.” See also Howland, Translating the West, 136–38. “Kyōiku ni kansuru chokugo,” 868. Shively, “Japanization of the Middle Meiji,” 100–117; and Keirstead, “Inventing Medieval Japan,” 50–52. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 12, 99–100. Mertz summarizes the history of the genre and its place in the canon in chapter 7 of Novel Japan; see also Sakaki, “Kajin no kigū.” Maeda, “Meiji rekishi bungaku,” 3, 6–7. An example is Tōkai Sanshi’s Chance Encounters with Beautiful Women (Kajin no kigū, 1885–97), whose main characters come from Japan, Ireland, Spain, and China. Maeda, “Meiji rekishi bungaku,” 28–29. Tetchō’s influential Year 23 actually was the third future tale to appear and took its title from a little-known story of the same name by Ryūsō Gaishi from 1883. See Kurita, “Meiji Japan’s Y23 Crisis,” 5–16. Kurita’s analyses of stories by Ryūsō and Tetchō in the later part of the article, which include the unusual assertion that Tetchō was a nativist, leave much to be desired. Kōuchi and Hitaka, “Seijiteki ‘miraizu,’” 226–28, 230–31. Tetchō, Setchūbai, Nihon kindai bungaku taikei ed., 327. The comment is in a marginal note lost in many modern reprints. Kamei, Transformations of Sensibility, 215. Tetchō, Setchūbai, Meiji bungaku zenshū ed., 112–13. Further references are to this edition, which reproduces the first 1886 (rather than the revised 1890) edition. Tetchō, Setchūbai, 113–14. On the parallel to Endymion, see Yanagida, Seiji shōsetsu kenkyū, 2:455–56. Iwamoto, “Suehiro Tetchō,” 88–89. Tetchō, Setchūbai, 162. I discuss Songbirds among Flowers in chapter 4 of “National History and the World of Nations: Writing Japan, France, the United States, 1870–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999). Yanagida, Seiji shōsetsu kenkyū, 2:425; Iwamoto, “Suehiro Tetchō,” 90–91. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 69, 85–86. Tetchō, Setchūbai, 112. Ninomiya was Tetchō’s secretary and research assistant at the time. For Ahmad’s critique, see “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness,” esp. 98, 102, 104. Ibid., 110. Mertz examines a number of Japanese examples in chapters 4 and 5 of Novel Japan. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 55–56; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 246– 47.

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40 41 42 43 44

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Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 41, 48. Tetchō, Setchūbai, 134. Ibid., 120. Nolte and Hastings, “Meiji State’s Policy,” 155. I am indebted to Huyssen’s observation of a similar anxiety toward both the masses and women in late-nineteenth-century European thought. See “Mass Culture as Woman,” 52. A common feature of love in the Meiji political novel. Yanagida, “Seiji shōsetsu no ippan (I),” 430. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 162, 165–66. In Foundational Fictions, 41–55, Sommer provides a more extensive discussion of Benjamin in the analysis of national allegory than I am able to offer here. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 49. Duus, “Whig History, Japanese Style,” 420. Ibid., 433–44; Aizan, “Nihon no rekishi.” Duus, “Whig History, Japanese Style,” 424; Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 183. A complete translation is available as The Future Japan, trans. Vinh Sinh (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989). On Sohō and the state, see Tanaka Akira, Meiji ishin-kan no kenkyū, 101. Swale nonetheless revives the idea of a conversion by confusing Sohō’s early embrace of universalistic social theory with “internationalism.” See Swale, “Tokutomi Sohō,” 68–69. Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 67. Ibid., 68. Tokugawa Ienari reigned from 1786 to 1837. Compare to Macaulay, History of England, 1:210–11, as noted in chapter 1. Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 70–71. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid, esp. 15–36. On The Future Japan as a future tale, see Kōuchi and Hitaka, “Seijiteki ‘miraizu,’” 239–41; and Tanaka Akira, Meiji ishin-kan no kenkyū, 95. In The Future Japan, these leaders mainly are merchants; shortly afterward Sohō argued that country gentlemen (inaka shinshi) on the English model should lead society. My summary of the argument of The Future Japan comes mainly from chapters 2 and 8–10. While Vinh’s translation reproduces Spencer’s original terminology, I have translated with a view to the semantic relationships among the various Japanese words that Sohō employs. On Sohō’s sources, see Vinh’s introduction to his translation, xxi-xxvii. On Spencer and Meiji intellectuals, see also, most recently, Howland, Translating the West, 171–88. Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 72–73, 76, 78. Duus, “Whig History, Japanese Style,” 421–22. Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 93, 96–97, 114. Oguma, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa, 31–32. On this point, see Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, esp. 60–83. Pyle, New Generation, 48–49. Notes to Chapter 5

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64 Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 148–49, 157. 65 In keeping with what Gluck observes was a general tendency in the Meiji period to take the Tokugawa period as “the invented other in relation to which modernity posited itself.” Gluck, “The Invention of Edo,” 262. 66 On comparisons to Europe, see Hiraoka, Meiji bungakushi no shūhen, 63–64. 67 Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 165; on the unparalleled character of Japanese feudalism, see 148–49. 68 Ibid., 169. 69 Ibid., 170. Identification of names and places in this excerpt: Bakufu: the Tokugawa government; Ii Naosuke: high bakufu official; “lord of Mito”: Tokugawa Nariaki, reformist daimyō; Fujita Tōko: Mito scholar, writings taken to support imperial restoration; Sakuma Shōzan: promoter of Western science; Yoshida Shōin: anti-bakufu educator; Yanagawa Seigan: poet, advocated restoration; Yokoi Shōnan: scholar, reformist advisor to bakufu; Aizu: domain that resisted the Restoration; Kuwana: domain that welcomed it; “lord of Echizen”: Matsudaira Yoshinaga, advocated union of bakufu and imperial court; Satsuma and Chōshū: domains in the coalition that overthrew the bakufu; Saigō Takamori, Kido Takayoshi, Ōkubo Toshimichi: the “three heroes” of the Restoration. 70 Sumiya, “Meiji nashonarizumu no kiseki,” 22. 71 Kamei, Transformations of Sensibility, 69–73, 97–98. For a fuller discussion of the contemporary problems of style, see my essay “Mori Ōgai’s Resentful Narrator,” 368–70. 72 Tomiko Yoda’s “First-Person Narrative,” which deftly examines the split between the private and political aspects of the modern subject, continues this critical tendency, which emerged in the late 1940s. See Koizumi, “Recent Developments,” 80–81. 73 The comments on diplomacy and matters of state appear in a passage in the opening of the story that Ōgai cut when it was anthologized in 1892. The original passage appears in Kokumin no tomo 6, no. 69 ( January 3, 1890): 46; and in the Nihon kindai bungaku taikei edition, 417n4. I thank Andō Hiroshi for pointing out its importance. 74 On Ōgai’s medical research, see Lamarre, “Bacterial Cultures,” esp. 597–601. 75 Ōgai, “Maihime,” 40. My occasionally literal translations are intended to bring out aspects of the text that would be lost in fluid English. A complete translation is available as “Maihime,” trans. Richard Bowring, Youth and Other Stories, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 6–24. 76 Ōgai, “Maihime,” 41. The meaning of urami, which reveals Ōta’s attitude toward the events surrounding his abandonment of his lover, is important. Bowring’s translation as “remorse” is difficult to justify but provides the Anglophone reader with the comfort of a repentant protagonist. The word is better rendered as “resentment” or “bitterness” and suggests that Ōta has suffered an offense, not committed one. 77 Ōgai, “Maihime,” 43.

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78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 48. 80 The interracial aspect of the relationship emphasizes Ōta’s experience of freedom: in “The Dancing Girl,” the yellow boy gets the white girl. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 39. 81 Ōgai, “Maihime,” 54. 82 Hirata, “Retorosupekushon—purosupekushon,” 23. 83 Balibar, “The Nation-Form,” 96. 84 Osborne, The Politics of Time, 13–14. 85 Habermas, “Modernity’s Consciousness of Time,” 12. 86 Vlastos, “Opposition Movements in Early Meiji,” 403–4. 87 Sohō, Shōrai no Nihon, 170–71. 88 Ibid., 179. 89 Ibid., 182–83. 90 Ōgai, “Maihime,” 45. 91 I follow Komori’s distinction between the resentment (urami ) that Ōta expresses at the beginning of the récit and the hatred (nikumu kokoro) that he expresses at the end. See Komori, Buntai toshite no monogatari, 167–68. 92 Ōgai, “Maihime,” 60. 93 I owe this scarcely observed connection of “The Dancing Girl” to contemporary politics to Tanaka Minoru, “Tasōteki ishiki kōzō,” 191. 94 The reference to Montesquieu seems certain given Ōgai’s wide reading in European philosophy. A portion of The Spirit of Laws (De l’esprit des lois, 1748) was translated by Mitsukuri Rinshō in 1874; Nani Noriyuki published a complete translation in 1876. 95 Ōgai, “Maihime,” 45. On the meaning of the city in the story, see Maeda, Text and the City, 295–328. 96 Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 294–97.

6. Americanization and Historical Consciousness 1 On ideas of shared destiny, see Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, “Beyond Dichotomies,” 19; on particularistic expressions of it, see Fredrickson’s comments on Afrikaners in South Africa, White Supremacy, 53. 2 Jacobson, Whiteness, 72–73. 3 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 56–63, 102–5. 4 F. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” 828; R. Smith, Civic Ideals, 347–48, 357–59, 371–72. 5 On the impact of evolutionary theory on ideas of race in the United States, see Gossett, Race, 144–75. 6 F. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” 288. 7 R. Smith, Civic Ideals, 361, 356, the latter quoting from Daniel Brinton, “The Aims of Anthropology,” Science 2, no. 35 (1895). Notes to Chapter 6

301

8 Fredrickson, White Supremacy, xxiv, 140–49. 9 Jacobson, Whiteness, 74. 10 See McMaster, History, 1:1–2; Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, viii–ix; “drum and trumpet history” comes from Eggleston’s 1900 American Historical Association presidential address, quoted in Schlesinger, “Evolution of a Historian,” xix. 11 On the first generation of professional historians and Anglo-Saxonism, see Higham, History, 158–70. 12 Adams, “Germanic Origin,” 8, 23. 13 Higham, History, 165–66; Novick, That Noble Dream, 82. 14 Blight examines other examples of the “literature of reunion” in Race and Reunion, 211–54. 15 On Americanization and late-nineteenth-century educational programs, see Wald, Constituting Americans, 192–95; and Higham, Strangers in the Land, 59– 60. 16 Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 54–56. 17 Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address” (1861), 217, 224. I am indebted to Gary Wills’s insightful examination of the Gettysburg Address in Inventing America, xiii–xxvi. 18 W. Wilson, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” 459. 19 Burgess, “Ideal of the American Commonwealth,” 407. 20 James, The American, 515. This reproduces the 1877 first American book edition rather than the revised “New York” edition of 1907. On James’s interest in ethnography, see Blair, Henry James, 15–17. 21 Jolly, Henry James, 3–5, 22–29; see also Mizruchi, Power of Historical Knowledge, 56–70. 22 James, The American, 536, 520, 549. 23 Porter examines the dynamic in detail in “Gender and Value.” 24 I am broadly indebted to Brooks’s discussion of the novel’s changing generic form in “Turn of The American” and of James’s use of melodrama in chapter 6 of The Melodramatic Imagination. 25 James, The American, 849. 26 Banta, “Introduction,” 9–10. 27 James, The American, 663, 667. 28 Butterfield, “The American,” 19–20. 29 Lewis, The American Adam, 152–53. 30 James, The American, 533. 31 On the prejudicial “caste system of historical consciousness” in James’s work, see Mizruchi, Power of Historical Knowledge, 67. 32 James, Hawthorne, 327. 33 James, The American, 607. 34 On the development of James’s international theme, see chapter 4 of Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis.

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35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Brooks, “Turn of The American,” 46. Saveth, American Historians, 34. Ibid., 36–40; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 102–3. Fiske, American Political Ideas, 5–6, 151–52. Much of the argument comes from the British historians Edward Freeman, William Stubbs, and Henry Maine. Milton Berman, John Fiske, 137–39. Fiske, American Political Ideas, 104. As a lecture, “Manifest Destiny” received such acclaim that Josiah Strong defensively claimed he had come up with the ideas first. See Our Country, 159. Fiske, American Political Ideas, 105. Novick, That Noble Dream, 93. See also S. Anderson, Race and Rapprochement. Fiske, American Political Ideas, 125. Ibid., 129 (Fiske’s italics). Ibid., 121. The phrase uncannily anticipates the political rhetoric of George W. Bush and its own hyperbolic enunciation of American destiny. Gossett, Race, 118. For a succinct explanation, see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 41–42. Chapter 2 examines the use of typology in a variety of periods. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 35–44, 52, 60. Ibid., 89, 100. Drinnon, Facing West, 239. Winston, John Fiske, 13. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 90, 108. W. Wilson, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” 457. Thorsen, Political Thought, 144–45, 149. W. Wilson, Division and Reunion, 9. The book’s dual audience is evident in the inclusion of a list of “suggestions for readers and teachers” following Wilson’s preface. Ibid., 103, 212. Wilson and Turner became friends in 1889 when Wilson lectured at Johns Hopkins, where Turner was a graduate student. Thorsen, Political Thought, 146. W. Wilson, Division and Reunion, 127, 241. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 273, 299. From an 1884 letter from Wilson to Ellen Louise Axson, quoted in Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson,” 232; Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, 232. W. Wilson, “Proper Perspective,” 544. The original audience was the New Jersey Historical Society. W. Wilson, “Making of the Nation,” 1. W. Wilson, “Proper Perspective,” 546. My thanks to Pat O’Connor for clarifying the grammar in question. Wald finds a similar but inverse rhythm in Wilson’s rhetoric: warnings that Notes to Chapter 6

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67 68 69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

attention to the task of unity is failing followed by declarations of faith in the nation. For reasons that will be clear, I find the note of crisis the more important one. See Wald, Constituting Americans, 198. W. Wilson, “Making of the Nation,” 5–10. W. Wilson, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” 466. The school was previously called the College of New Jersey. W. Wilson, “Making of the Nation,” 3. Ibid., 1 (Populists), 10 (supporters and opponents of free silver); Division and Reunion, 121 (abolitionists), 297 (immigrants); “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” 463 (radicals), 464 (scientists). W. Wilson, Division and Reunion, 123. See also Wilson’s criticism of James Ford Rhodes’s History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1893) in “Anti-slavery History and Biography,” Atlantic Monthly 72 (August 1893). W. Wilson, “Proper Perspective,” 547. W. Wilson, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” 455. On the Populist backdrop, see Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, 215–16. W. Wilson, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” 459–60. James, The American, 844–45, 849–50. Ibid., 868–69. Jacobson points out remarks on Irish immigrants by Newman’s friends the Tristrams in Whiteness, 169–70. James’s only extensive comments on immigration appeared three decades later in The American Scene (1907). Fiske’s letters show that privately he was enthusiastic about the Native American genocide. Drinnon, Facing West, 233–36. W. Wilson, “Making of the Nation,” 4; for the comment on facts, 10. Ibid., 4. On the performative aspect of Wilson’s work, see Wald, Constituting Americans, 199. Butterfield, “The American,” 18. James, The American, 863.

7. French Revolution, Third Republic 1 Tilly, “Reflections,” 34. In these considerations I am also indebted to Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 368–76; and Noiriel, Etat, nation et immigration, 141–44. 2 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, x–xi; Noiriel, Etat, nation et immigration, 141–42. 3 El Gammal, “Les républicains,” 115. 4 Noiriel, The French Melting Pot, 7. 5 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 8–9. 6 See, for example, Taine, Les origines, 1:5. 7 Collected in Spuller, Hommes et choses.

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8 Fustel, “De la manière d’écrire,” 6. 9 Barral, Les fondateurs, 22–24; Gérard, La Révolution française, 58; Furet, La gauche et la Révolution, 83. On the Revolution in political discourse in the early nineteenth century, see Mellon, Political Uses of History; and Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism. 10 Thiers, from Chamber of Deputies session of November 13, 1872, in Garrigues, Les grands discours parlementaires, 31. 11 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 24–31. 12 Clemenceau, from Chamber of Deputies session of January 29, 1891, in Garrigues, Les grands discours parlementaires, 115; the occasion was Victorien Sardou’s play Thermidor, which exalts Danton over Robespierre and the crowds that attended executions during the Terror. 13 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 60–61. 14 See Gildea, Past in French History, 18–19; and Kale, “The Countercentenary of 1889.” 15 On changing views of the nation, see Noiriel, Etat, nation et immigration, 162. On Third Republic ideas of heritage and commemoration, see, among many works, Chastel’s “La notion du patrimoine” and Matsuda’s Memory of the Modern. 16 Ory, “Le centenaire,” 467; Keylor, Academy and Community, 32–33. 17 Ory, “Le centenaire,” 468. 18 Furet, “Histoire universitaire,” 980. 19 Keylor argues a marriage of convenience in Academy and Community, 49–50; on the Republic and positivism, see Nicolet, L’idée républicaine en France, 96. 20 On the early period of the revival, see Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution, chap. 6. 21 Hartog summarizes the controversy in Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire, 50–53. 22 Fustel, “L’Alsace,” 507, 511. 23 Ibid., 509. 24 Ibid. 25 Fustel, quoted in Hartog, Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire, 211, from a plenary lecture at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. 26 On the evolution of Hugo’s attitudes toward the Commune, see Albouy, Mythographies, 222–28; and Petrey, History in the Text, chap. 7. 27 Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize, 243. The spelling of the title is Hugo’s own. The novel has been translated as Ninety-Three, trans. Frank Lee Benedict (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988). 28 Critics such as Guy Rosa who seek a progressive argument in the novel by reading the revolutionary army, not the guerrillas, as the Communards’ counterpart confuse these parallels; see in particular Rosa’s introduction to the Club Français du Livre edition of the novel. 29 Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize, 151, 220, 295. Hugo’s capitalization of révolution is erratic; I have preserved his usage in each case. Notes to Chapter 7

305

30 Canivenc, “L’imagination du temps,” 41. 31 I am broadly indebted to Petrey’s identification and discussion of the two stories in History in the Text, 15–24, although my reading of their significance differs. 32 Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize, 482. 33 Ibid., 436. 34 Ibid., 157, 256. 35 Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel, 222. 36 Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize, 294, 296, 293. 37 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6, 158, 199–203; Renan, “What Is a Nation?” trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 8–22. 38 Renan, “La guerre,” 170, 186; La réforme, 102, 111, 134. 39 Renan, La réforme, 85. 40 Ibid., 84–85. 41 Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 223. 42 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 200. 43 Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 240. 44 The allusions to Alsace-Lorraine are especially clear in “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 241. 45 See chapter 4 for discussion of the fate of this argument in the Third Republic. 46 Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 229. 47 Ory, “Le centenaire,” 466. 48 El Gammal, “Les républicains,” 118–19. 49 On the project of popularizing republican views of the history of the Revolution, see Farmer, France Reviews, 38–45; and Ory, “Le centenaire.” 50 Gérard, La Révolution française, 68–70. 51 The characterization is from Gérard, La Révolution française, 49. 52 Avenel, Lundis révolutionnaires, i–ii. 53 On the role of the Ligue, which issued Guillon’s histories, see Ory, “Le centenaire,” 471; and Albert, “La presse française,” 205–6. 54 Larizza-Lolli, “Présentation,” 306. 55 Guillon, Petite histoire, 21. 56 Ibid., 11; Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 13, 16. 57 Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 29, 32. 58 Champion, Esprit de la Révolution, 359. 59 Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 46, 56. 60 Nicolet, L’idée républicaine en France, 252; Farmer, France Reviews, 40–41. 61 See, for example, Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 151, 200–201. On the thesis of circumstance as a response to Taine, see Farmer, France Reviews, 39. 62 See, for example, Janet, Centenaire de 1789, 179–88; and Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 201–2, 219.

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63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Petit outlines the popularization of Comte’s view in “La réinterprétation.” Hutton, History as an Art, 134. See, for example, Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 7. Janet, Philosophie de la Révolution, 170; Centenaire de 1789, 278. Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 152. Carnot, La Révolution française (new ed.), xv. Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 62; Farmer, France Reviews, 44; El Gammal, “Les républicains,” 114. Examples are Martin’s phrase “the third and definitive Republic” in his preface to Guillon’s Petite histoire, 10; and Carnot’s assertion that “France has chosen its definitive form of government” in the 1883 reissue of his Révolution française, xii. In Quatrevingt-treize, Cimourdain predicts that the future “republic of the absolute” will be “definitive” in contrast to the First Republic’s “provisional” nature. Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize, 466. Chapters 5, 6, and 7, respectively. Chapters 14, 48, and 61. Ollivier’s 1789 et 1889 (1889) has separate chapters on political history, the works of the Revolution, and their fate since 1815, crediting Napoleon I with most of the achievements republicans claimed for the Convention. D’Héricault’s La France révolutionnaire (1889) provides a political narrative up to the fall of the Jacobins in one section, with separate sections on matters such as religion, justice, and science during the Revolution, and says most true achievements began under the monarchy. Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, iv. Ibid. Martin, preface to Guillon, Petite histoire, 10. Rambaud, Histoire de la Révolution, 295. Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” 242. According to Nicolet, the phrase ( fils de la Révolution) appeared around 1825. L’idée républicaine en France, 83. Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, 163, 166–67. An unfortunately influential example is Rosa’s introduction to the Club Français du Livre edition, cited earlier. Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, 167. W. Wilson, “Proper Perspective,” 546.

Conclusion 1 On the production of locality, see Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 18. 2 On the treatment of material factors as determinants—rather than causes—I am indebted to Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 145–48. 3 Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, 7–9. 4 Representative examples are Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 12–13; and GaonNotes to Conclusion

307

kar, “On Alternative Modernities,” esp. 15–17. For astute considerations of the two positions, see Prendergast, “Codeword Modernity”; and Harootunian, “Quartering the Millennium.” 5 On this point see Fein, “Culture across Borders,” 3–4. 6 Turner, “The Significance of History,” 18.

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index

accession to nationality: in The American, 43, 203–4, 221–23, 273; in American Political Ideas, 221, 224; in “Dancing Girl,” 189, 191, 224, 273; historical consciousness and, 195, 221, 224, 226, 233; as motif in national history, 43, 158–59, 189, 191, 194–95, 242, 272–74; in NinetyThree, 242, 244; in Tour of France, 142, 158–59; in Wilson’s work, 226 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 90, 198, 208, 216 Algeria, 125–26, 135, 144–47 All the Countries of the World (Sekai kuni zukushi ) (Fukuzawa), 1–5, 42, 52 allegory: in The American, 199, 201– 3, 223, 225–26, 229–30, 273–74; in American Political Ideas, 213; Benjamin’s theory of, 170, 225; in “Dancing Girl,” 167, 180, 183–84, 192–93, 201, 203, 225–26, 273– 74; future-anterior perspective in, 159, 170–71, 183–85, 273–74; in Future Japan, 173, 177–78, 192–93, 226; in Gilded Age, 168; historical consciousness explored through, 199, 201, 223, 273; in historiography of the French Revolution, 258, 264–66, 277; inversion’s relation to, 269, 274–75; Jameson’s concept of national, 158–59, 167–68, 170; in Japanese political novel, 30, 163; as

means to place nation in world, 168, 183, 199, 203; narrative rupture’s role in, 192–93, 226, 272; national identity and, 158–59, 192–93, 272– 73; of nation as worldwide genre, 167–68; in Ninety-Three, 32, 239–41, 244–45, 251, 259, 261–62, 265–66, 277; origins of state and, 158–59, 265–66, 272; race in, 198–99; relationship of registers in, 169–71, 183–84, 192–93, 201, 204, 213, 223, 225–26; in Plum Blossoms in Snow, 167–71, 177, 183, 192–93, 201, 225, 245, 265–66; subject charged with responsibility for nation through, 226; territoriality of national history and, 274–75; in Tour of France, 158–59, 168; in Wilson’s work, 201, 225–26, 258; world market and, 168; in writing of national history, 30–32, 43–44, 158–59, 192–93, 198–99, 201, 226, 239–40, 264–66, 269, 272–74. See also narrative form; rhetoric Alsace-Lorraine, 21, 43, 119, 239; colonial emigration from, 125–26; in French meditations on decline, 123, 125, 134, 272; in Tour of France, 127, 140, 142–43, 151; in “What Is a Nation?” 246, 249, 263 American, The ( James): accession to nationality in, 43, 203–4, 221–23,

American, The ( James) (continued) 273; allegory in, 199, 201–3, 223, 225–26, 229–30, 273–74; Americanization in, 206–8, 211, 222–23, 227, 229, 243; conversion in, 201, 206–7, 221, 223, 227; dichotomies of identity in, 203, 206; gender and paternity in, 202, 206–7; historical consciousness as national characteristic in, 43, 199–201, 204–7, 215, 222–23, 227–29, 238; immigration disregarded in, 223; James’s interests in ethnography and historiography reflected in, 202, 223, 228; as melodrama, 202–3, 208, 227–29; moral education in, 203–4, 206, 221–23, 226, 229–30, 259; narrative form of, 202–3, 227; national identity in, 202, 206–7; as social comedy, 202– 3, 223, 227; United States compared to Europe in, 203–4, 206 Americanization: in The American, 206–8, 211, 222–23, 227, 229, 243; as ideology in United States, 25, 89–90, 126, 150, 159, 199, 201, 231, 235; in Strong’s work, 110, 270; as transformation of historical consciousness, 199, 221–24; in Turner’s work, 25–26, 43, 86, 89, 103, 105– 8, 109, 113–14, 116, 126, 143, 150, 152, 159, 209, 270 American Political Ideas (Fiske): accession to nationality in, 221, 224; allegory in, 213; American Revolution as racial mission in, 210–11, 215; Anglo-American rapprochement reflected in, 210, 214; AngloSaxonism in, 208–11; conversion in, 201, 221, 224; destinarianism in, 210, 213–14, 224, 278; England and United States as type and antitype in, 211–14, 263; future-anterior perspective in, 213; linear and irrup-

330

Index

tive emplotments of time in, 213, 229, 263; logic of equivalence in, 214, 227, 274; Puritan historiography’s influence on, 199, 201, 211– 13, 224, 229; racial history as means to define nation in, 223–24, 227–28, 251; racial theory of political evolution in, 208–10; rhetoric of second Englands in, 210–14, 227, 274; Strong’s reaction to, 303 n. 40; Teutonic germ theory in, 208–10, 231; United States as branch of English race in, 201, 209–15, 223–24, 227 American Revolution, 15; as problem in writing of national history, 16, 198, 210–11, 215, 219 Anderson, Benedict: on national traditions, 155–56; theory of nationalism of, 35–38, 128; on “What Is a Nation?” 246, 248 Anglo-Saxonism, 30–31, 90, 198, 208– 11, 215 Aulard, Alphonse, 237–38, 252. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Australia, 83–84 Avenel, Georges, 253. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Balibar, Etienne, 53, 65, 182 Bancroft, George, 89–90, 98, 208, 212 Barrès, Maurice, 124–25, 238 Benjamin, Walter, 170, 225 borders, national: as epistemological problem in writing of national history, xii, 42–43, 47–48, 50–51, 56–57, 68–73, 82, 95, 99, 108, 133, 142–43, 150, 270–72, 274–76; impact of global conditions on, 84–85; in Tour of France, 133, 142–43, 145, 151, 185, 191; in Turner’s work, 104–7

Britain: benefit of communications and transportation improvements to, 10; hegemonic position of, 7, 14; imperialism of, xi, 6–7, 51, 84–85, 134; liberalism in, 11, 13; national identity in, 37; in theories of social evolution, 120; trade policies of, 6–7 Bruno, G. (Augustine Fouillée), 127– 33; national regeneration promoted by, 43, 125–26, 152, 270. See also Tour of France Bryan, William Jennings, 114, 200, 220 Buckle, Henry, 56–58 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 12–13 Burgess, John, 25, 200 capitalism: impact on community of, xiii, 118, 172, 189; nation’s relationship to, 275; naturalized by writing of national history, 117–18, 269, 275; relationship to political territoriality of, 6, 8–9, 118, 275; state’s relationship to, 275–78, 281; temporality of, 95–96; temporality of national history and, 117–18; territoriality of national history and, 275. See also world market Carnot, Hippolyte, 253, 255. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Champion, Edme, 254. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Charter Oath (Gokajō no goseimon), 24, 175 Chatterjee, Partha, 35, 38–40 China: in All the Countries of the World, 1–2, 4; entry into international state system of, 49–50; Japanese views of, 51, 76; Japan’s relations with, 17; in Sinocentric diplomatic system, 47–50

Christianity: civilization associated with, 77–78, 100; consequences of progress acknowledged by, 109; destinarianism in, 91, 98, 109, 112, 121, 278; French universality and, 121; in Our Country, 98, 100, 109, 111–12, 278 circulation. See intercourse civilization: bunmei and kaika as translations of, 288 n. 14; Christianity associated with, 77–78, 100; Confucianism in ideas of, 58–59; Europe in theories of, 56, 64, 74, 75, 91, 120, 139; France in theories of, 120, 122; in French doctrines of colonization, 135–37; Fukuzawa’s promotion of, 1–2, 4, 24, 52–53, 58, 106, 155, 190, 259; in historiography, 54–63; as ideology in Japan, 23–24, 47, 52–54, 126–27, 150, 168, 190–91, 234–35, 267; imperialism as measure of, 76–77, 137–38; liberalism in conceptions of, 57–59, 99; males as agents of, 79–80, 260; as means to protect sovereignty, 61, 67; as means to reimagine social relations, 53; national identity and, 106; national particularity and, 73–81; in Our Country, 98, 100–101, 109; as source of social heterogeneity, 109; in Turner’s work, 103, 105–8; universalism in conceptions of, 56, 62, 64, 72–73, 79, 91, 120– 21 Civil War (U.S.), 18, 25, 196; as problem in writing of national history, x, 15, 28, 87, 194, 199, 215–17, 219; Wilson as critic of historiography of, 215–16, 219, 228 colonialism: in All The Countries of the World, 1–2; of Britain, 84; of France, 21, 43, 125, 145–46; France to be regenerated through, 43, 77, Index

331

colonialism (continued) 119, 123, 125–26, 133–39; of Japan, 17; second wave of European, 6, 269, 271, 279; of United States, 19. See also colonial propagandists, French; imperialism colonial propagandists, French: Africa in work of, 126, 135–36, 144, 147– 48; civilization in work of, 135–37; closed space as problem in work of, 115, 134–35, 147–48, 271; communications technology in work of, 136–37; formal characteristics of work of, 133–34; geography in work of, 133, 136–37, 144; ideal of managing history in work of, 126, 137– 39, 143–44, 147–51, 157, 186; intercourse in work of, 126, 136, 146–47, 270; liberalism in work of, 133; national regeneration promoted by, 43, 77, 125–26, 133–39, 143–144, 146–48, 151, 270, 278; race in work of, 137; rhetoric of new and second Frances in work of, 43, 126, 135– 36, 138–39, 147–48, 161, 186, 193, 272, 278; rhetoric of will in work of, 138–40; Saint-Simonian thought in work of, 133, 296 n. 51; theories of social evolution in work of, 133–36, 138, 146, 148, 175; transportation technology in work of, 136–37, 144; United States in work of, 135–37, 278 Combes, Louis, 253. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of communications technology: in French doctrines of colonization, 136–37; in Gilded Age, 92; as mechanism of social evolution, 89, 92–93, 98–100; nineteenth-century advances in, 9– 10; in Our Country, 98–100 comparison, ix-xi, xii, 14–16, 34, 40;

332

Index

as activity of national history, 3, 79, 90–91, 121, 163–64, 168, 280; international state system as ground for, ix, 269–70, 276–80; place of Europe in, x, 279; in study of settler societies, 83; world market as ground for, ix, 269–70, 276–80 Comte, Auguste: Fiske influenced by, 208; French Revolution interpreted by, 120, 236, 254–55; republican historiography influenced by, 236, 254–55; universalism in work of, 14, 39 Confucianism: in diplomatic relations, 49, 51; in historiography, 54, 161; in ideas of civilization, 58–59; in morals, 77–78 conversion: in The American, 201, 206– 7, 221, 223, 227; in American Political Ideas, 201, 221, 224; as motif for changes in historical consciousness, 196; national identity and, 200–201, 206–8; in Wilson’s work, 201, 231; in writing of national history, 196, 200–201, 221, 230–31. See also accession to nationality Cooper, James Fenimore, 12 “Dancing Girl, The” (“Maihime”) (Mori Ōgai): accession to nationality in, 189, 191, 224, 273; allegory in, 167, 180, 183–84, 192–93, 201, 203, 225–26, 273–74; emotion of resentment in, 179–80, 182, 184, 189– 91; Freedom and Popular Rights movement in, 179, 181, 190; futureanterior perspective in, 183–84, 274; gender and paternity in, 183, 260–61; narrative form of, 178–80, 183, 190–91, 221; narrative rupture in, 182, 184, 189, 191–93; national identity in, 163, 178–79, 182–84, 189–92, 221, 224, 226, 243; national

unity as problem in, 183–84; political conflict excluded from nation in, 185, 189, 191–93, 272, 274; position of knowing subject in, 163, 179–80, 182–85, 191; race in, 301 n. 80; rhetoric of seconds in, 193; state’s role in, 190–91; temporal planes in, 180; universalism rejected in, 179, 183, 190–91 Darwin, Charles, 208, 211 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 197, 208 De Forest, John, 31, 198–99 Déroulède, Paul, 123, 125 Disraeli, Benjamin, 163, 166, 280 Division and Reunion (Wilson), 215– 16, 219 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 13, 30, 163 Duval, Jules: colonization promoted by, 133–134, 148; intercourse in work of, 136; race in work of, 137; rhetoric of will in work of, 138–39; theories of social evolution in work of, 135–36. See also colonial propagandists, French Eggleston, Edward, 31, 198 Encouragement of Learning (Gakumon no susume) (Fukuzawa), 52–53, 73 evolution, social: colonization in French theories of, 133–36, 138, 146, 148, 175; England in theories of, 120; Europe in theories of, 120–21, 188; in Fiske’s work, 208– 10; France in theories of, 120–21, 122; French Revolution in theories of, 120, 122, 236, 254–55; in Future Japan, 173–75; imperialism legitimated by theories of, 72–73; in Japanese social thought, 52–67, 162, 171; nation in theories of, 44, 82; race in theories of, 197–98; territorial expansion in theories of, 85–86;

travel of theories of, in nineteenthcentury, 11–13, 29–30, 41–42; in U.S. social thought, 85–86, 88–92, 98, 102; universalism in theories of, 120–21, 188 Ferguson, Adam, 11–12 Ferry, Jules, 125, 236, 252 Fiske, John, 43, 212–14, 223–24, 227– 30; Anglo-Saxonism in work of, 90, 208–11; anti-immigrant activities of, 208; Puritan historiography’s influence on, 199, 201; race in work of, 197; reputation of, 208; sources for, 208; theories of social evolution in work of, 208–10; United States and racial history in work of, 201, 208. See also American Political Ideas Fouillée, Alfred, 296 n. 39 France: academic historiography in, 237–38, 251–52; alternative ideas of nation sought in, 43–44, 235, 238, 259, 264; colonialism of, 21, 43, 125, 145–46; colonization as means of regeneration in, 43, 119, 123, 125–26, 133–39; decline as keyword in, 119, 122–26, 235; destinarianism in, 120–21; economic conditions in, 21, 119–20; educational policies in, 125, 127, 199, 252; fiction in, 32–33; gender and paternity in ideas of nation in, 127–28, 131, 242–44, 259–61; heritage in ideas of nation in, 238, 240, 257–61, 264; historical consciousness as political problem in, 34, 43, 233–39, 258–59, 264, 267, 277; immigration in, 21–22, 28, 124, 235, 251; imperialism of, xi, 21, 77; language in ideas of nation in, 239, 247–48; liberalism in, 12–13; memory in ideas of nation in, 237–40, 258–61, 264; narrative history in, 32–33; national identity Index

333

France (continued) in, x, 15, 37, 235; nation as focus of social anxieties in, 26–29; past as touchstone for political conflict in, 15, 34, 43–44, 233–39, 249, 258–59, 264; political conditions in, 19–20, 22, 119, 233, 236–37, 249; position in international state system of, 119–20, 122, 125–26, 234, 277; position in world market of, 119–20; race in ideas of nation in, 26, 28–29, 124, 239, 247–49; regeneration as keyword in, 26–27, 43, 119, 122– 26, 187, 235, 277; regionalism seen as problem in, 123, 130; rhetoric of will in, 43, 124–26, 128–33, 138– 40, 150, 158, 185; spiritual filiation in ideas of nation in, 238–40, 242– 44, 258–59, 261, 264, 272; state in history of, x, 15, 19–20, 234; state in ideas of nation in, 234–35; state’s origins as ideological problem in, 233–35, 251; temporality of national history in, 33–34, 43–44, 233–68; territoriality of national history in, 43, 119–52; in theories of civilization, 120, 122; in theories of social evolution, 120–22; in transnational and comparative perspective, x-xi, 14–16; transportation projects in, 128; universalism in ideas of nation in, 26, 120–21, 123, 126, 139, 207, 278; views of history in, 122–27 —compared to other countries: Germany, xi, 15; Italy, xi, 15; Japan, x-xi, 14– 15, 21–23, 27–29, 33–34, 51, 74, 77, 119, 121, 123, 126–29, 131–33, 137–39, 149–52, 159, 161, 167–68, 175, 185–87, 191, 193, 203, 209, 211, 234–35, 243, 245, 252, 259–61, 264–80; United States, x-xi, 14–15, 21–23, 27–29, 33–34, 51, 74, 77, 115, 118–21, 123–24, 126, 128–29,

334

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131–33, 135–39, 143, 148–52, 159, 167–68, 185, 199, 203, 207, 209, 211, 233–35, 238, 243, 246–47, 251–52, 258–61, 263–80 See also Franco-Prussian War; French Revolution; Paris Commune; Third Republic Franco-Prussian War, 26, 119, 134, 234–35, 238–39; as problem in writing of national history, x, 15, 28, 32, 43, 122, 158, 238, 270 Freedom and Popular Rights movement, 53–54, 178, 186; in “Dancing Girl,” 179, 181, 190; new views of history inspired by, 161–62; political novel’s role in, 162, 164; second restoration as goal of, 161–62, 167 French Revolution, 26–27, 132; academic historiography of, 237–38, 251–52; alternative ideas of nation inspired by conflict over, 235, 238, 259, 264; Catholic historiography of, 237; centennial commemorations of, 237, 252; Comtean interpretation of, 120, 236, 254–55; historiography of as ground for political struggle, 233–38, 249, 259, 264; Left’s views of, 233–34, 237, 252–53, 255; literary treatments of, 238; nationalism inspired by, 122; in Ninety-Three, 240–46; political violence in historiography of, 235– 36; popular historiography of, 237, 251–52; popular insurrection in historiography of, 236–37, 252–53; as problem in writing of national history, 15–16, 28, 32–33, 34, 43–44, 123, 159, 233–68; Quinet’s view of, 236, 253; Right’s views of, 233–34, 237, 256; role in republican ideology of, 233–38, 252–55; Taine’s attacks on, 32, 123, 235, 237, 254; Terror in historiography of, 235–37, 240–41,

255–56, 262; in theories of social evolution, 120, 122, 236, 254–55; in Tour of France, 140–41; in “What Is a Nation?” 246, 249–51. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of French Revolution, republican historiography of, 43–44; allegory in, 258, 264–66, 277; Bourbon monarchy in, 253–54; class in, 254; Comte’s influence on, 236, 254–55; Danton praised over Robespierre in, 254–55; future-anterior perspective in, 265– 67; gender and paternity in, 259–61; heritage as foundation of nation in, 240, 252, 257–61, 264, 273; historical consciousness as problem in, 258, 267; intercourse as trope in, 254; memory opposed to history in, 257; national reconciliation urged by, 258, 273; origins of state as problem in, 261–63, 266; Paris Commune in, 255, 262; political conflict excluded from nation in, 43, 259, 261–65, 272; political goals of, 235–36, 251– 53; popular insurrection criticized in, 253, 255, 258–59; professional standing of authors of, 252; Quinet’s influence on, 236, 253; reader charged with responsibility for nation in, 257–58; repetition in, 266– 67; Revolution as unifying event in, 254; Revolution as unrepeatable event in, 255; rhetoric of seconds in, 263, 274; temporalities of heritage and political history in, 256–57, 263; thesis of circumstances in, 254, 262; Third Republic as successor to First in, 255, 262–65, 274, 277 Fujita Mokichi, 89–90, 99; as historian of civilization, 55–56; imperialism endorsed by, 76–77; intercourse in work of, 59–68; on masculinity and

civilization, 78, 80. See also History of the Eastward Advance of Civilization Fukuzawa Yukichi, 13, 159; on barbarism, 75–77, 80; on China, 1–2, 4; civilization promoted by, 1–2, 4, 25, 52–53, 58, 106, 155, 190, 259; genre of history of civilization founded by, 55; Guizot’s influence on, 12; imperialism endorsed by, 76–77, 139; intercourse in work of, 58–68, 99, 128, 270; liberalism in work of, 55; metaphor in work of, 5; on mixed residence of money, 68–69, 74, 80, 82, 113, 137–38, 271–72; nationality defined by, 64–65; on national quality of morals, 77–79; on women and civilization, 77–80. See also individual works Fustel de Coulanges, Numa-Denys, 236, 239, 246–47, 254 future anteriority: in allegory, 159, 170–71, 183–85, 273–74; in American Political Ideas, 213; in “Dancing Girl,” 183–84, 274; as expression of temporality, 159; in Future Japan, 177–78, 184; in historiography of the French Revolution, 265–67; in narrative form, 159, 170–71, 273; in Ninety-Three, 243–45, 265–67, 274; in Plum Blossoms in Snow, 170–71, 184; and territoriality of national history, 274–75; in Tour of France, 159; in “What Is a Nation,” 265– 67; in Wilson’s work, 218, 266, 274; in writing of national history, 159, 170–71, 183–84, 248, 264, 272–73. See also allegory; narrative form; temporality Future Japan (Shōrai no Nihon) (Tokutomi Sohō): allegory in, 173, 177– 78, 192–93, 226; capitalism naturalized in, 188–89; Charter Oath quoted in, 175; evolution of democIndex

335

Future Japan (continued) racy in, 29–30, 162, 173–74; futureanterior perspective in 177–78, 184; Japanese deviation from the universal as problem in, 173–78, 188–89, 209; Meiji Restoration as problem of representation in, 176–78, 187, 189, 191, 273–74; narrative rupture in, 172, 178, 188–89, 191–93; national unity as problem in, 174–75, 188; new views of history reflected in, 171–73; political conflict excluded from nation in, 185, 187–189, 191– 93; position of knowing subject in, 163, 172–73, 178–79, 182, 184–85, 189; race in, 171, 174, 188, 210; reader charged with responsibility for nation in, 187–88, 192, 226, 259; rhetoric of seconds in, 193; sources for, 14, 171–72; Spencer’s influence on, 29–30, 162, 173–74, 177, 188; temporal planes in, 172–73; theories of social evolution in, 173–75 Gaffarel, Paul: closed space as problem in work of, 134–35; colonization promoted by, 134, 148; rhetoric of will in work of, 138–39; theories of social evolution in work of, 135– 36. See also colonial propagandists, French Gambetta, Léon, 236–37, 252 Gellner, Ernest, 35–36, 38 gender: in The American, 202, 206–7, 260–61; concept of intercourse and, 77–80, 96, 131; in “Dancing Girl,” 183, 260–61; in Gilded Age, 96, 128, 260–61; in histories of civilization, 60, 77–80, 260–61; in historiography of French Revolution, 259–61; national identity and, 127–28, 183, 202, 206–7, 259–61; of national subject, 77–80, 96, 127–28, 131, 168–

336

Index

69, 183, 202, 206–7, 259–61, 273; in Ninety-Three, 242–44, 259–61; and paternity in French ideas of nation, 127–28, 131, 242–44, 259–61; and paternity in Japanese ideas of nation, 60, 77–80, 168–69, 183, 260–61, 273; and paternity in U.S. ideas of nation, 96, 128, 202, 206–7, 260– 61; in Plum Blossoms in Snow, 168– 69, 260–61, 273; in Tour of France, 127–28, 131, 259–61; in “What Is a Nation?” 259–61 geography (discipline), 42; in French doctrines of colonization, 133, 136– 37, 144; in U.S. ideas of territorial expansion, 94–95, 136–37 Germany, xi, 15; international position of, 15, 234; in Mori Ōgai’s work, 178; role in French meditations on decline of, 119, 122, 124– 25, 128, 130–31; in Spencer’s theory of social evolution, 174 Gilded Age (Twain and Warner), 118; communications technology in, 92; economic views in, 97, 100; gender and paternity in, 96, 128, 260–61; intercourse in, 91–92, 99; land as source of value in, 92–93; as national allegory, 168; race in, 94, 101, 137; satire of social anxiety in, 86–88; settlement as motif in, 230; transportation technology in, 92–93 Guillon, Edouard, 252–54, 256, 258, 264. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Guizot, François, 12, 30, 32, 56–58 Hawaii, 2, 5 historical consciousness: Abraham Lincoln on, 200; in The American, 43, 199–201, 204–7, 215, 222–23, 227–29, 238; Americanization as transformation of, 199, 221–24; in

American Political Ideas, 224, 227–28; as basis for unity of United States, 195–96, 199–201, 221, 227, 233, 246; conversion as motif for changes in, 196; dissent discredited through arguments on, 227–29; explored through allegory, 199, 201, 223, 273; in historiography of French Revolution, 258, 267; national identity and, 150, 195, 199–201, 227; in Ninety-Three, 267; as political issue in settler societies, 106; as political problem in France, 34, 43, 233–39, 258–59, 264, 267, 277; as problem in writing of national history, 43, 150, 157–58, 195, 264, 273; race in views of, 199, 201, 216; in Turner’s work, 106, 113–14, 185; in “What Is a Nation?” 248–51, 267; in Wilson’s work, 43, 65, 200–201, 215–16, 219–21, 224–28, 246, 251, 259, 273 historical novel (genre), 12–13, 30, 164 history of civilization (genre), 42–43; barbarism as sign of national particularity in, 60, 75–77, 115, 138; Europe in, 56, 74–75; Future Japan influenced by, 171; gender of national subject in, 77–80, 96, 260–61; idea of nation in, 59, 63–68, 72–75, 80–81; imperialism endorsed by, 76–77, 138–39, 149–50, 271; intercourse as trope in, 57–73, 89, 94, 99–100, 104–5, 110, 128, 149, 203, 270, 276–77; international state system in, 71–73; liberalism in, 55, 57– 59, 80; Min’yūsha historians influenced by, 171; national identity in, 64–67; national inversion in, 43, 68– 73, 82, 149, 276; national particularity in, 73–81; new views of history reflected in, 47, 54–56, 160–61;

reputation of, 54–55; rhetoric in, 57–68, 117; sources for, 56; universalism in, 55, 59–60, 64, 72–74, 77, 164; woman as signifier of national particularity in, 60, 77–80; world market in, 71–73 History of the Eastward Advance of Civilization (Bunmei tōzenshi) (Fujita), 55; imperialism endorsed in, 76–77; intercourse in, 57–68; on masculinity and civilization, 78. See also history of civilization Hobsbawm, Eric, 155–56 Hokkaidō, 48, 65, 85 Howells, William Dean, 31 Hugo, Victor, 43, 240–46; commemoration of, 237; spiritual filiation seen as foundation of nation by, 239–40; views on Paris Commune of, 32, 238, 240–41; views on Terror and counterrevolution of, 32, 238, 240– 41. See also Ninety-Three ideas, travel of, 11–14, 29–30, 35–42, 279–80 immigration: in France, 21–22, 28, 124, 235, 251; James’s disregard for, 223; in Japan, 85; nineteenthcentury patterns of, 10–11; in Our Country, 98, 109–10, 118, 272; as problem in writing of national history, 11, 25, 28, 31, 43, 84, 86, 98, 103, 105–6, 109, 118, 124, 159, 194, 197, 208, 223, 227, 231–32; in Turner’s work, 103, 105–6, 113, 118, 185; in United States, 25, 82– 83, 87, 89, 97, 197–98, 208 imperialism: in All The Countries of the World, 1–2; of Britain, xi, 6–7, 51, 84–85, 134; endorsed by histories of civilization, 76–77, 138–39, 149– 50, 271; of France, xi, 21, 77; in free-trade era, 6–7, 49, 269, 279; of Index

337

imperialism (continued) Japan, xi, 8, 17; Japanese response to European, 16–17, 47, 49, 85, 171– 72; legitimated by theories of social evolution, 72–73; as measure of civilization, 76–77, 110–12, 137–38; nationalist thought shaped by, 38– 40; of United States, xi, 19, 43, 47, 77. See also colonialism Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku ni kansuru chokugo), 24, 38, 162–63 intercourse: in Division and Reunion, 216; in French doctrines of colonization, 126, 136, 146–47, 270; in French ideas of regeneration, 125– 26; gender and, 77–80, 96, 131; in Gilded Age, 91–92, 99; in histories of civilization, 57–73, 89, 94, 99– 100, 104–5, 110, 128, 149, 203, 270, 276–77; in historiography of French Revolution, 254; imperialism and, 77; integrative and differentiating tropes of, 63–68; moral aspect of, 58–59, 67, 70, 78, 89, 95–96, 99, 133, 151, 203; in national inversion, 71–72, 270–71; nationality delimited by, 67–68, 80–81; national particularity threatened by, 74–75, 80; national unity created by, 58–61, 63–65, 86, 88, 90, 92–94, 97–100, 102–3, 108–9, 112, 114, 128–33, 142, 149, 151, 216; national unity threatened by, 86, 97–98, 109, 112; in Our Country, 97–100, 102, 108– 10, 112, 117–18, 131, 270; race and, 110; in Tour of France, 128–33, 142, 175, 270; in Turner’s work, 102–4, 117–18, 128, 270; universalism in conceptions of, 80; in views of history in United States, 85–86, 88–92 interiority, historical, 82, 91, 108, 149, 274: as condition for diachrony,

338

Index

71, 270–71; established by national inversion, 71–73. See also inversion, national; national-historical space international state system: East Asia’s integration into, 47–50; French position in, 119–20, 122, 125–26, 234, 277; functional similarity of states in, 8, 40; German position in, 15, 234; as ground for comparison, ix, 269–70, 276–80; in histories of civilization, 71–73; Japan’s entry into, 16–17, 47–50, 172, 234–35, 278; in national allegories, 168; nation-state as basic unit of, 40, 42, 47; nineteenth-century expansion of, 7–8, 44, 47, 234; Peace of Westphalia’s contribution to, 7, 234; world market’s relationship to, 8–9, 276–78, 281; writing of national history shaped by, 5, 35, 40–42, 44, 85–86, 90–91, 159, 234, 269–70, 275–80. See also nation-state; state inversion, national: allegory’s relation to, 269, 274–75; geopolitical division of world naturalized by, 72–73, 270; historical interiority an effect of, 71–73; in histories of civilization, 43, 68–73, 82, 149, 276; national-historical space established by, 71–73, 105, 108, 270–71, 274. See also national-historical space Italy, xi, 15, 234 Jacksonian view of history, 86–88, 94, 100 James, Henry, 202–8, 221–23, 227– 30; allegory in work of, 199, 201; ethnography and historiography as interests of, 202, 212; historical consciousness seen as national characteristic by, 43, 199–201; international theme in work of, 207; national identity and national types in

work of, 202–3; views of U.S. history of, 206. See also American, The James, William, 34 Jameson, Fredric, 158–59, 167–68, 170 Janet, Paul, 32–33, 252, 255–56, 264. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Japan: academic historiography in, 54, 76, 161, 163; annalistic histories in, 53, 161; civilization as ideology in, 23–24, 47, 52–54, 126–27, 150, 168, 190–91, 234–35, 267; conservative cultural turn in, 162–63; cultural nationalists in, 29, 38, 54, 72, 162– 63, 278; economic conditions in, 17; fiction in, 30; gender and paternity in ideas of nation in, 60, 77–80, 168–69, 183, 260–61, 273; immigration in, 85; imperialism of, xi, 8, 17; international state system’s integration of, 16–17, 47–50, 172, 234–35, 278; liberalism in, 12–13, 24, 161– 62; mixed residence debates in, 68; narrative history in, 29–30; national identity in, x, 15, 38, 53, 160, 163; national particularity as concern in, 29, 54, 73–80; nation as focus of social anxieties in, 23–24, 27–29; political conditions in, 16–18, 160; response to European imperialism of, 16–17, 47, 49, 85, 171–72; Sinocentric diplomatic system and, 48–49, 278; state in history of, x, 15; temporality of national history in, 33–34, 43, 155–93; territoriality of national history in, 42–43, 47–81; in transnational and comparative perspective, x-xi, 14–16; transportation projects in, 160; women’s political rights restricted in, 169; world market’s integration of, 49, 172, 234–35; views of history in, 52–57,

160–63; views of political geography in, 160 —compared to other countries: France, x-xi, 14–15, 21–23, 27–29, 33–34, 51, 74, 77, 119, 121, 123, 126–29, 131–33, 137–39, 149–52, 159, 161, 167–68, 175, 185–87, 191, 193, 203, 209, 211, 234–35, 243, 245, 252, 259–61, 264–80; Germany, xi, 15; Italy, xi, 15; United States, x-xi, 14–15, 21–24, 27–29, 33–34, 51, 74, 77, 81–82, 84–86, 88–91, 94, 96, 99–100, 104–6, 110, 113, 115, 117–18, 149–52, 159, 167–68, 185, 188, 193–96, 201, 203, 209–14, 221, 224–26, 229–32, 234–35, 243, 252, 259–61, 264–80 See also Freedom and Popular Rights movement; Meiji Restoration Jewett, Sarah Orne, 31 Kamei Hideo, 178–79, 183 Kanagaki Robun, 53 Karatani Kōjin, 69–72 Katō Hiroyuki, 162 kokugaku, 23, 29, 160, 278 Korea, 17, 48, 85 Kuga Katsunan, 38 Kunikida Doppo, 30 Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 159; capital considered means of colonization by, 137–38; colonization seen as solution to national problems by, 43, 77, 125; geography in work of, 133; ideal of managing history in work of, 137–39, 148–49; liberalism in work of, 133, 270, 279–80; problem of closed space in work of, 135; race in work of, 137; rhetoric of will in work of, 138–39; Saint-Simonianism in work of, 133; theories of social evolution in work of, 135–36, 138, Index

339

Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul (continued) 146, 175. See also colonial propagandists, French liberalism: in Britain, 11, 13; in conceptions of civilization, 57–59, 99; in France, 12–13; in French doctrines of colonization, 133, 270, 279–80; in Fukuzawa’s work, 55; in histories of civilization, 55, 57–59, 80; in Japan, 12–13, 24, 161–62; nineteenth-century travels of, 11– 13; in Our Country, 97; in political and economic thought, 11–13, 57–59; and race, 101; in Turner’s work, 102; in United States, 12–13; in writing of national history, 42– 43, 57–59, 88, 94, 112, 118, 125– 126, 270. See also evolution, social; Spencer, Herbert Lincoln, Abraham, 200, 209, 217 Loria, Achille, 103, 280 Lukács, Georg, 33, 164 Macaulay, Thomas, 14, 171–72 “Making of the Nation” (Wilson): American Revolution and Civil War as national consolidation in, 219; historical consciousness seen as basis of national unity in, 224–26; national development considered incomplete in, 217–19, 224–25; national past seen as model for future in, 217–19; Populism criticized in, 217; reader charged with responsibility for nation in, 218–19; settlement as motif in, 230; slavery viewed as obstacle to national unity in, 219 Manifest Destiny, 85–87, 196 Martin, Henri, 252–53, 257. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Marx, Karl, 12, 66, 69–72, 120 McMaster, John, 14, 31, 198, 208

340

Index

Meiji Restoration, 1, 16–17, 23; as problem in writing of national history, x, 15–16, 24, 28, 30, 33, 43, 63, 156, 159–60, 163–64, 166–67, 171–72, 176–78, 187, 189, 191, 193–95, 230, 273–74, 276 Melville, Herman, 26 Michelet, Jules, 130; French Revolution defended by, 32, 237, 252–53; pessimism about national future of, 122; on universality of France, 26, 120–21, 207. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Mill, John Stuart, 12, 39, 64 Min’yūsha, 162, 171, 252 Mito school, 29, 160 Miyake Setsurei, 38, 163 modernity, ix, 5, 35, 184, 279 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 58–59, 190 Mori Ōgai, 43, 163, 178–84, 189–93; Germany in work of, 178; national affairs as concern of, 179. See also “Dancing Girl” narrative form: of The American, 202– 3, 227; of American Political Ideas, 213; of “Dancing Girl,” 178–80, 183, 190–91, 221; future-anterior perspective in, 159, 170–71, 273; national history’s antipathy to time revealed by, 157, 231; national identity connected to state by, 157; of Ninety-Three, 242–45; of Plum Blossoms in Snow, 166–71, 187; political conflict excluded from nation by, 152, 157–59, 185; position of knowing subject in, 163; repetition in, 193, 266–67, 274, 280; role of allegory in, 158–59, 169–71; role of narrative rupture in, 157–58, 185; of Tour of France, 127–28; of “What Is a Nation?” 248–49; in

Wilson’s work, 217–21, 225–26; in writing of national history, xi, 4, 5, 157–60, 163, 192–93, 229–31, 248, 272–74, 279–80. See also allegory; rhetoric nation: as allegorical register, 169–71, 183–84, 192–93, 225–26; capitalism’s relationship to, 275; in fiction, 30–33; as focus of social anxieties, 23–29; gender and paternity in French ideas of, 127–28, 131, 242–44, 259–61; gender and paternity in Japanese ideas of, 60, 77–80, 168–69, 183, 260–61, 273; gender and paternity in U.S. ideas of, 96, 128, 202, 206–7, 260–61; heritage in French ideas of, 238, 240, 257– 61, 264; in histories of civilization, 59, 63–68, 72–75, 80–81; identified with state in settler societies, 84, 195, 224; language in French ideas of, 239, 247–48; memory in French ideas of, 237–40, 258–61, 264; in narrative history, 29–30; naturalized by writing of history, 44, 68, 71–73, 157–59, 185, 192; origins of as problem in writing of national history, 33, 155–58, 189, 191–92, 194, 231, 273–74; race in French ideas of, 26, 28–29, 124, 239, 247– 49; and race in settler societies, 84, 94, 195–96, 224; race in U.S. ideas of, 25, 28–29, 30–31, 84, 86, 89–90, 94, 195–201, 208–11, 215, 223–24, 235; as recent form of community, xi, 42; spiritual filiation in French ideas of, 238–40, 242–44, 258–59, 261, 264, 272; state in French ideas of, 234–35; state’s relationship to, 33–34, 157, 162, 275; in theories of social evolution, 44, 82; universalism in French ideas of, 26, 120–21, 123, 126, 139, 207, 278; universalism in

U.S. ideas of, 90–91, 197, 207; in U.S. social thought, 88–89, 99 national-historical space, 160; colonization and, 133, 136–39, 146–48; defined, 50–51; division of labor in representation of, 130–31, 137, 140–42; instability of, 118–19, 150– 51, 271, 280; moral aspect of, 95; national identity and, 142–43; national inversion in creation of, 71– 73, 105, 108, 270–71, 274; race in definition of, 94, 98, 101, 110–11, 117, 137; regeneration of, 123, 126, 130–31, 135–41, 146, 148; social heterogeneity as problem in, 86, 91– 92, 110, 112–17, 150–51, 271–72; temporality of national history and, 157, 274–75; territorial expansion and, 86, 91–95, 100, 103–5, 107–9, 113–18, 271. See also temporality; territoriality national history, writing of: accession to nationality in, 43, 158–59, 189, 191, 194–95, 242, 272–74; allegory in, 30–32, 43–44, 158–59, 192–93, 198–99, 201, 226, 239–40, 264–66, 272–74; American Revolution as problem in, 16, 198, 210–11, 215, 219; antipathy to time of, 157, 231; borders as epistemological problem in, xii, 42–43, 47–48, 50–51, 56–57, 68–73, 82, 95, 99, 108, 133, 142– 43, 150, 270–72, 274–76; capitalism naturalized by, 117–18, 269, 275; Civil War as problem in, x, 15, 28, 87, 194, 199, 215–17, 219; comparison as activity in, 3, 79, 90–91, 121, 163–64, 168, 280; contradiction between agedness and novelty in, 28, 155, 160–61, 194, 273–74; conversion as motif in, 196, 200– 201, 221, 230–31; economic conditions’ impact on, 5, 88, 276–80; Index

341

national history, writing of (continued) Franco-Prussian War as problem in, x, 15, 28, 32, 43, 122, 158, 238, 270; French Revolution as problem in, 15–16, 28, 32–33, 34, 43–44, 123, 159, 233–68; future-anterior perspective in, 159, 170–71, 183–84, 248, 264, 272–73; historical consciousness as problem in, 43, 150, 157–58, 195, 264, 273; immigration as problem in, 11, 25, 28, 31, 43, 84, 86, 98, 103, 105–6, 109, 118, 124, 159, 194, 197, 208, 223, 227, 231–32; intercourse as trope in, 57–73, 99–100, 104, 117–18, 125–26, 128–33, 136, 270; as international phenomenon, 34, 269–71, 276–80; international state system’s impact on, 5, 35, 40–42, 44, 85–86, 90–91, 159, 234, 269–70, 275–80; inversion in, 68–73, 269–71, 274; liberalism’s role in, 42–43, 57–59, 88, 94, 112, 118, 125–26, 270; local circumstances’ role in determining form of, 34, 40–42, 82, 86, 264, 276–80; as means to assert relationship of state to nation, 33–34, 162; as means to imagine relationship of nation to past, ix, 3, 160, 214, 233– 35, 248, 279; as means to place nation in world, ix, 3, 28, 41–42, 47, 51–52, 90–91, 102, 108, 118, 123, 125–26, 149–50, 160, 168, 183, 199, 271, 279–80; Meiji Restoration as problem in, x, 15–16, 24, 28, 30, 33, 43, 63, 156, 159–60, 163–64, 166–67, 171–72, 176–78, 187, 189, 191, 193–95, 230, 273–74, 276; morphology of, 276–80; narrative form in, xi, 4, 5, 157–60, 163, 192– 93, 229–31, 248, 272–74, 279–80; national and universal reconciled by, 40–42, 44; national identity in,

342

Index

xiii, 73, 142, 150–51, 158; national unity as problem in, 3, 31, 59–60, 73, 80–81, 90–91, 116–18, 124–25, 149–52, 229–32, 235; nation naturalized by, 44, 68, 71–73, 157–59, 184, 192; noncontemporaneity as challenge to, 156, 280; origins of state and nation as problem in, 33–34, 155–62, 189, 191–92, 194, 231, 233–35, 251, 265–66, 272–74; Paris Commune as problem in, x, 15, 28, 32–34, 43, 123, 158, 238, 240–41, 245, 270; political conditions’ impact on, 5, 230, 264, 276– 80; political conflict excluded from nation in, xiii, 3, 33, 126, 137–44, 147–52, 157–59, 185–89, 191–93, 227–32, 240, 245–46, 249–51, 259, 261–65, 272, 274–75; as problem in transnational historiography, ix, 34, 269, 276–80; race as problem in, 30–31, 86, 117, 137; rhetoric in, xi, 4, 5, 14, 57–68, 88, 116, 118–19, 122–26, 194, 229–31, 248, 270–71, 279–80; rupture as motif in, 33, 43, 152, 157–58, 185, 189, 191–94, 230, 264, 272–74; settlement as motif in, 194, 230–33; social heterogeneity as problem in, 3, 29, 31, 89–91, 110, 112–16, 150–51, 156–57, 271–72; state as problem in, x-xi, 28, 33–34, 43–44, 155–62, 189, 191–92, 194, 231, 233–35, 264–68, 273–74; state legitimated by, 155, 157–61, 163, 184, 240, 269, 275; temporality of, xiii, 27–28, 42, 43–44, 50, 112, 117– 18, 152, 155–60, 163, 184–85, 192– 93, 211, 213, 226, 229–32, 264–69, 272–75; temporality of (France), 233–68; temporality of ( Japan), 155–93; temporality of (U.S.), 194– 232; territoriality of, 42–43, 50, 71– 73, 117–18, 149–52, 155, 269–72,

274–75; territoriality of (France), 119–52; territoriality of ( Japan), 47–81; territoriality of (U.S.), 82– 118; world market’s impact on, 5, 35, 40–42, 44, 85–86, 90–91, 100, 269–70, 275–80 national identity: as allegorical register, 169–71, 183–84, 192–93, 225– 26; in The American, 202, 206–7; in Britain, 37; conversion and, 200– 201, 206–8; in “Dancing Girl,” 163, 178–79, 182–84, 189–92, 221, 224, 226, 243; defined by obligation to future, 219, 272–73; in East Asia, 48; in France, x, 15, 37, 235; gender and paternity in representation of, 127–28, 183, 202, 206–7, 259– 61; historical consciousness and, 150, 195, 199–201, 227; in histories of civilization, 64–67; in historiography of French Revolution, 259–61, 273; in James’s work, 202; in Japan, x, 15, 38, 53, 160, 163; national-historical space and, 142– 43; in Ninety-Three, 242–44, 259–61; as obligation for subject, 73, 142, 150–51, 158, 191, 224, 243, 251, 260–61, 271, 273; Renan’s work in theories of, 246; in settler societies, 196, 200, 224; as social practice, xi; state and, x, 157, 190–91; in Tour of France, 127–28, 130–32, 142–43, 185, 191, 259; in Turner’s work, 106–7, 113–14; in United States, x, 15, 37, 90, 199–201, 235; in “What Is a Nation?” 248–51, 259–61, 273; in Wilson’s work, 215–16 nationalism: Anderson’s theory of, 35– 38, 128; Chatterjee’s theory of, 35, 38–40; French Revolution as inspiration for, 122; Gellner’s theory of, 35–36, 38; imperialism’s impact on, 38–40; in Japan, 29, 38, 54, 72, 162–

63, 278; Renan’s work in theories of, 246; in United States, 86–87, 89, 196; universalism and, 39–42, 122; variations of, 40–41 national studies (kokugaku), 23, 29, 160, 278 Nation’s Friend (Kokumin no tomo), 162, 171, 252 nation-state: as basic unit of international state system, 40, 42, 47; establishment in East Asia of, 47– 48, 50; national history and, 33–34, 162, 184. See also international state system; nation; state New England: Anglo-Saxons associated with political institutions of, 198, 208–10; regarded as center of U.S. history, 90, 217; Wilson’s criticism of historiography centered on, 217, 219–20, 228 Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize) (Hugo): accession to nationality in, 242, 244; allegory in, 32, 239–41, 244–45, 251, 259, 261–62, 265–66, 277; future-anterior perspective in, 243–45, 265–67, 274; gender and paternity in, 242–44, 259–61; historical consciousness as problem in, 267; as meditation on Terror and counterrevolution, 32, 238, 240– 46, 258, 261–62; narrative form of, 242–45; national identity in, 242– 44, 259–61; origins of state as problem in, 261–62, 266; Paris Commune in, 32, 238, 240–46, 249, 258, 261–62; political conflict excluded from nation in, 43, 245–46, 259, 261–62, 264–65, 274; political violence as problem in, 243, 245, 258; popular insurrection criticized in, 241, 245, 258; repetition in, 266–67; Revolution as unrepeatable event in, 245; rhetoric of seconds in, 263; Index

343

Ninety-Three (continued) spiritual filiation as foundation of nation in, 239–40, 242–44, 258–59, 261, 264, 272; temporal planes in, 244–45, 265; Third Republic in, 241, 245–46, 251, 258, 277 Ōgai. See Mori Ōgai Okinawa, 49–50, 65, 85 Opium War, 51–52 Our Country (Strong): Americanization in, 110, 270; Christianity in, 98, 100, 109, 111–12, 278; civilization in, 98, 100–101, 109; communications technology in, 98–100; destinarianism in, 77, 97–98, 100– 101, 109–12, 155, 159, 199, 224, 278; immigration in, 98, 109–10, 118, 272; intercourse as trope in, 97–100, 102, 108–10, 112, 117–18, 131, 270; liberalism in, 97; nation defined by race in, 86, 89, 91, 98, 101–2, 110–12, 116, 188, 199, 224; social heterogeneity as problem in, 43, 109–12, 119, 132, 150–51; territorial expansion in, 43, 85, 126, 135, 138–39; transportation technology in, 98–100, 109; United States and racial destiny in, 77, 110–12, 120– 22, 188; United States and world history in, 97, 100–2; universalism in, 102 Outline of a Theory of Civilization (Bunmeiron no gairyaku) (Fukuzawa): barbarism in, 75–77; imperialism endorsed in, 76–77, 139; inter‑ course in, 57–68; masculinity and civilization in, 77–80; on mixed residence of money, 68–69, 82, 113, 137–38; place in Fukuzawa’s career of, 55; sources for, 12, 56; view of history in, 56. See also history of civilization

344

Index

Paris Commune, 21, 26, 119, 134, 233, 235–36, 238, 240–41: Hugo’s views on, 240–41; in Ninety-Three, 32, 238, 240–46, 249, 258, 261–62; as problem in writing of national history, x, 15, 28, 32–34, 43, 123, 158, 238, 240–41, 245, 270; republican historians critical of, 255, 262; in “What Is a Nation?” 246, 249–50 Peace of Westphalia, 7, 47, 234 Place de la Concorde (Paris), 140–42, 150 Plum Blossoms in Snow (Setchūbai) (Suehiro Tetchō), 190: allegory in, 167– 71, 177, 183, 185, 192–93, 201, 225, 245, 265–66; argument for democracy in, 162, 167–69; argument for second restoration in, 167, 185–87, 193, 213–14, 274; Disraeli as source for, 166, 280; future-anterior perspective in, 170–71, 184; gender and paternity in, 168–69, 260–61, 273; Meiji Restoration as problem in, 166–67, 187, 191; narrative rupture in, 186–87, 191–93, 265, 272; national unity as problem in, 166– 67, 169, 187; political argument in resolution of, 169–70; political conflict excluded from nation in, 185– 87, 192–93, 265, 272; position of knowing subject in, 163, 166, 172– 73, 178–79, 182, 184–87; reader charged with responsibility for nation in, 185, 192; state’s role in, 265–66; temporal planes in, 166 political novel (genre), 30, 162–65, 171. See also Plum Blossoms in Snow Populism (U.S.), 19, 105, 114, 118, 217, 219–20, 228 Prévost-Paradol, Lucien-Anatole, 122, 125, 135, 172 “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” (Wilson), 219–21, 225

“Problem of the West” (Turner), 114– 16 “Proper Perspective of American History” (Wilson), 217–20, 266 Puritan historiography, 199, 201, 211– 13, 224, 229 Quinet, Edgar, 236, 253 race: in allegories of the nation, 198– 99; in American Political Ideas, 197, 201, 208–15, 223–24, 227–28, 251; concept of intercourse and, 110; in “Dancing Girl,” 301 n. 80; in French doctrines of colonization, 137; in French ideas of nation, 26, 28–29, 124, 239, 247–49; in Future Japan, 171, 174, 188, 210; Gellner’s treatment of, 36; in Gilded Age, 94, 101, 137; in ideas of national destiny, 110–12; in ideas of nation in settler societies, 84, 94, 195–96, 224; in liberalism, 101; nationalhistorical space defined by, 94, 98, 101, 110–11, 117, 137; in Our Country, 77, 86, 89, 91, 98, 101–2, 110– 12, 116, 120–22, 188, 199; as problem in writing of national history, 30–31, 86, 117, 137; in theories of social evolution, 197–98; in U.S. ideas of nation, 25, 28–29, 30–31, 84, 86, 89–90, 94, 195–201, 208–11, 215, 223–24, 235; in views of historical consciousness, 199, 201, 216; in Wilson’s work, 215 railroads. See transportation technology Rai San’yō, 29 Rambaud, Alfred, 240, 252, 254–58, 263–64, 273. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of Rankean method in historiography, 54, 161, 237

Renan, Ernest, 43, 248–51; memory seen as foundation of nation by, 65, 239–40; on national degeneration, 26, 123; national past seen as guide for present by, 247; nation seen as act of will by, 124; political views of, 246–47, 250; precedents for “What Is a Nation?” in work of, 246–47. See also “What Is a Nation?” rhetoric: of decline in France, 119, 122–26, 235; in Gilded Age, 91–92, 99; in histories of civilization, 57– 68, 117; in Our Country, 99–100; of regeneration in France, 26–27, 43, 119, 122–26, 187, 235, 277; of second and new nations, 43, 126, 135– 36, 138–39, 147–48, 161–2, 167, 185–87, 193, 210–14, 227, 263, 272, 274, 278; in Tour of France, 128–33, 140, 243, 272; in “What Is a Nation?” 248–49; of will in France, 43, 124–26, 128–33, 138–40, 150, 158, 185; in Wilson’s work, 217–21, 225– 26; in writing of national history, xi, 4, 5, 14, 57–68, 88, 91, 116, 118–19, 122–26, 194, 229–31, 248, 270–71, 279–80. See also allegory; narrative form; rupture, narrative Roudaire, François: ideal of managing history in work of, 135, 145–48; intercourse in work of, 146–47; national regeneration promoted by, 143–44, 146–48; Saharan sea project of, 143–49. See also colonial propagandists, French rupture, narrative: in “Dancing Girl,” 182, 184, 189, 191–93; epistemological function of, 157–58, 172, 178, 182, 184, 185–87, 189, 191–94, 230, 273–74; in Future Japan, 172, 178, 188–89, 191–93; as motif in national history, 33, 43, 152, 157–58, 185, 189, 191–94, 230, 264, 272–74; Index

345

rupture, narrative (continued) in Plum Blossoms in Snow, 186–87, 191–93, 265, 272; political function of, 33, 152, 157–58, 185–89, 191– 94, 230, 264–65, 272–74; role in allegory of, 192–93, 226, 272 Ryūkyū islands, 49–50, 65, 85 Saharan sea. See Roudaire, François Say, Jean Baptiste, 13 Scott, Walter, 12–13, 30 settlement: in Gilded Age, 230; as motif in ideology of settler societies, 83, 195; as motif in national history, 194, 230–33; in Wilson’s work, 230–31 settler societies: in Australia, 83–84; comparison in study of, 83; destinarianism in, 196; hegemonic group associated with metropolitan power in, 83, 195; historical consciousness as political issue in, 106, 195–96; national identity in, 196, 200, 224; nation identified with state in, 84, 195, 224; race in ideas of nation in, 84, 94, 195–96, 224; settlement as motif in ideologies of, 83, 195; in South Africa, 84, 197–98; state associated with hegemonic group in, 83–84, 195, 224; in United States, 82–84, 150, 159, 195–96, 199–201, 224, 235 Shiga Shigetaka, 72, 163 Short History of Japanese Civilization (Nihon kaika shōshi ) (Taguchi), 55; intercourse in, 57–68; on masculinity and civilization, 78. See also history of civilization “Significance of History” (Turner), 90, 106, 113, 282 “Significance of the Frontier” (Turner): Americanization in, 103, 105–8, 113–14; borders and so-

346

Index

cial evolution in, 104–7, 112–16; civilization in, 103, 105–8; function of stages of history in, 103–6, 148; immigration in, 103, 105–6, 113; intercourse in, 103–4; national identity in, 106–7, 113–14; national unity in, 103; regional differences in, 105, 114–16; social heterogeneity as problem in, 112–16; sources for, 103; transportation technology in, 103, 113 Sinocentric diplomatic system, 16, 47–50, 278 slavery, 10–11, 84, 216, 219, 277 Smith, Adam, 13, 129 social Darwinism, 293 n. 44. See civilization; evolution, social; liberalism; Spencer, Herbert Sohō. See Tokutomi Sohō solidarity, French doctrine of, 22, 296 n. 39 Sommer, Doris, 168, 170–71 South Africa, 84, 197–98 Spain, 84–85 Spencer, Herbert: England in work of, 120; Europe in work of, 188; Fiske influenced by, 208; influence in United States of, 87–88; Tokutomi Sohō influenced by, 29–30, 162, 173–74, 177, 188; universalism in work of, 39, 188 Spuller, Eugène, 236, 252–53. See also French Revolution, republican historiography of state: allegory and, 158–59, 265–66, 272; capitalism’s relationship to, 275–78, 281; in “Dancing Girl,” 190–91; emergence of sovereign, 7; in France, x, 15, 19–20, 233– 35, 251; in French ideas of nation, 234–35; in historiography of French Revolution, 261–63, 266; legitimated by writing of national history,

155, 157–61, 163, 184, 240, 269, 275; national identity and, x, 15, 157, 190–91; nation’s relationship to, 33–34, 157, 162, 275; in NinetyThree, 261–62, 266; in Plum Blossoms in Snow, 265–66; as problem in writing of national history, x-xi, 28, 33–34, 43–44, 155–62, 189, 191–92, 194, 233–35, 251, 264–68, 272–74; settler societies’ hegemonic groups associated with, 83–84, 195, 224; temporality of national history and, 264–68, 275; territoriality of sovereign, 7, 50; in “What Is a Nation?” 261, 263. See also international state system; nation-state Strong, Josiah, 97–102, 108–112; Anglo-Saxonism in work of, 90; destinarianism in work of, 77, 120–22, 155, 159; Europe in work of, 91; intercourse in work of, 117–18, 131; race in work of, 86, 89, 91, 98, 101– 2, 110–12, 116, 188, 199, 224; reaction to American Political Ideas of, 303 n. 40; response to social heterogeneity of, 43, 109, 119, 132, 150– 51; territorial expansion in work of, 43, 85–86, 108–9, 117–18, 126, 135, 138–39. See also Our Country Sue, Eugène, 32 Suehiro Tetchō, 43, 162–71, 185–87, 192–93; literary activities of, 164– 65; political views of, 164–67. See also Plum Blossoms in Snow Suez Canal, 1, 9–10, 144 Taguchi Ukichi, 42: as historian of civilization, 55–56; intercourse in work of, 57–68; on masculinity and civilization, 78, 80. See also Short History of Japanese Civilization Taine, Hippolyte, 32, 123, 235, 237, 254

Takekoshi Yosaburō, 30, 171 telegraph. See communications technology temporality: of capitalism, 95–96; future-anterior perspective as expression of, 159; linear and irruptive combined in national history, 213, 229, 256–57, 263; of modernity, 184; of national history, xiii, 27–28, 42, 43–44, 50, 112, 117–18, 152, 155–60, 163, 184–85, 192–93, 211, 213, 226, 229–32, 264–69, 272–75; of national history in France, 33–34, 43–44, 233–68; of national history in Japan, 33–34, 43, 155–93; of national history in United States, 33–34, 43, 194–232; noncontemporaneity and, 156, 280; relationship to state of, 264–68, 275; relationship to territoriality of, 50, 274–75; of restoration in Japan, 192–93, 230; of settlement in United States, 230–32; of succession in France, 264–68. See also allegory; future anteriority territoriality: of national history, 42– 43, 50, 71–73, 117–18, 149–52, 155, 269–72, 274–75; of national history in France, 43, 119–52; of national history in Japan, 42–43, 47–81; of national history in United States, 43, 82–118; relationship to capitalism of, 6, 8–9, 118, 275; relationship to temporality of, 50, 274–75; of sovereign state, 7, 50. See also international state system; nationalhistorical space Terror (French Revolution): in historiography of French Revolution, 32– 34, 235–37, 240–41, 254–56, 262; in Ninety-Three, 32, 238, 240–46, 258, 261–62; Quinet’s criticism of, 236 Tetchō. See Suehiro Tetchō Teutonic germ theory, 30–31, 33, 34, Index

347

Teutonic germ theory (continued) 90, 101, 104, 106, 198; in American Political Ideas, 208–10, 231; Wilson’s criticism of, 215 Thiers, Alphonse, 236–37 Third Republic (France): commemorations organized by, 237, 252; early instability of, 20–21, 119, 141, 233, 249; in French debates over regeneration, 26, 235; in Ninety-Three, 241, 245–46, 251, 258, 277; past as touchstone for political conflict in, 15, 34, 43–44, 233–39, 249; in republican historiography, 255, 262– 65, 274, 277; Thiers’s view of, 236; in “What Is a Nation?” 247, 249–51 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12 Tokutomi Sohō, 43, 175–78, 187–89, 192–93; on evolution of democracy, 29–30, 162; Meiji Restoration as problem in work of, 171–72; national issues as consistent concern of, 171–72; Nation’s Friend founded by, 162, 171; race in work of, 171; sources for, 14, 171–72; Spencer’s influence on, 29–30, 162, 173–74, 177, 188. See also Future Japan Tour of France (Tour de la France) (Bruno), 281; accession to nationality in, 142, 158–59; allegory in, 158–59, 168; Alsace-Lorraine in, 127, 140, 142–43, 151; borders in, 133, 142–43, 145, 151, 185, 191; class identity in resolution of, 142; division of labor as model for nation in, 129–32, 140–42, 203; economic geography in, 127–30, 132, 142; editions of, 295 n. 29; education as means of national renewal in, 128, 131–32, 254; French Revolution in, 140–41; future anteriority in, 159; gender and paternity in, 127–28, 131, 259–61; intercourse in, 128–

348

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33, 142, 175, 270; narrative form of, 127–28; national identity in, 127– 28, 130–32, 142–43, 185, 191, 259; national regeneration promoted in, 43, 125–26, 128, 132–33, 137–39, 141–43, 152, 209, 270; pedagogical devices in, 127–28; Place de la Concorde as figure for reconciliation in, 140–42, 150; political conflict excluded from nation in, 140– 43, 149–51, 157; reputation of, 127; rhetoric of will in, 128–33, 140, 243, 272; transportation technology in, 128–29, 131 trade: as concept in writing of national history, 57–63, 66, 85, 174; nineteenth-century expansion of, 6– 7. See also intercourse; world market transcontinental railroad, 1, 10, 136 translation, 12, 13, 57 transnational historiography, ix-xi, xii, 14–16, 34, 39, 281–82; national history as problem in, ix, 34, 269, 276– 80; place of Europe in, x, 279 transportation technology: in Division and Reunion, 216; in French doctrines of colonization, 136–37, 144; French government projects of, 128; in Gilded Age, 92–93; in History of the Eastward Advance of Civilization, 62; Japanese government projects of, 160; as mechanism of social evolution, 88–89, 92–93, 98–100, 103, 109; nineteenth-century advances in, 9–10; in Our Country, 98–100, 109; Suez Canal, 1, 9–10, 144; in Tour of France, 128–29, 131; transcontinental railroad, 1, 10, 136; in Turner’s work, 103, 113 Tsuda Mamichi, 52–53 Turner, Frederick Jackson: Americanization in work of, 25–26, 43, 86, 89, 103, 105–9, 113–14, 116,

126, 143, 150, 152, 159, 209, 270; Europe in work of, 91, 105–6; historical consciousness in work of, 106, 113–14, 185; immigration in work of, 103, 105–6, 113, 118, 185; intercourse in work of, 102–4, 117– 18, 128, 270; on local and world history, 90; national unity as problem for, 102–3; Populism criticized by, 105, 114; on rewriting of history, 113, 282; social heterogeneity in work of, 109, 112–16, 119, 132; sources for work of, 103, 280; territorial expansion in work of, 85–86, 91–92, 108–9, 117–18, 135, 138–39, 195; on travel of ideas, 11; United States and world history in work of, 102, 108; universalism in work of, 102, 108; Wilson influenced by, 216. See also individual works Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 92– 97; rhetoric of intercourse in work of, 91; satire of social anxiety in work of, 86–87. See also Gilded Age United States: academic historiography in, 198, 202; Americanization as ideology in, 25, 89–90, 126, 150, 159, 199, 201, 231, 235; destinarianism in, 85–87, 89–91, 98, 101–2, 121, 196, 199; economic conditions in, 19–20, 87–88; educational projects in, 199; exceptionalist views of, 83, 90–91; fiction in, 31; French colonial propagandists’ views of, 135– 37; gender and paternity in ideas of nation in, 96, 128, 202, 206–7, 260–61; global conditions’ impact on borders of, 84–85; historical consciousness as basis for national unity in, 195–96, 199–201, 221, 227, 233, 246; immigration in, 25, 82–83, 87, 89, 97–98, 197, 208; imperialism

of, xi, 19, 43, 47, 77; liberalism in, 12–13; narrative history in, 30–31; national identity in, x, 15, 37, 90, 196, 199–201, 235; nationalism in, 86–87, 89, 196; nation as focus of social anxieties in, 24–29; new social conditions as concern in, 85–89, 116, 196; political conditions in, 18–20; Populism in, 105, 114, 118, 217, 219–20, 228; race in ideas of nation in, 25, 28–29, 30–31, 84, 86, 94, 195–201, 209–11, 215, 223–24, 235; republican political economy in, 85–88, 90, 95, 101, 107–8, 115; settlement as motif in history of, 194, 230–33; as settler society, 82– 84, 150, 159, 195–96, 199–201, 224, 235; state in history of, x, 15, 18– 19; temporality of national history in, 33–34, 43, 194–232; territorial expansion in social thought of, 82, 85–87, 91–92, 94, 194, 276; territoriality of national history in, 43, 82–118; in transnational and comparative perspective, x-xi, 14–16, 83; universalism in ideas of nation in, 90–91, 197, 207; views of history in, 85–92, 94, 100, 198 —compared to other countries: France, x-xi, 14–15, 21–23, 27–29, 33–34, 51, 74, 77, 115, 118–21, 123–24, 126, 128–29, 131–33, 135–39, 143, 148–52, 159, 167–68, 185, 199, 203, 207, 209, 211, 233–35, 238, 243, 246–47, 251–52, 258–61, 263–80; Germany, xi, 15; Italy, xi, 15; Japan, x-xi, 14–15, 21–24, 27–29, 33–34, 51, 74, 77, 81–82, 84–86, 88–91, 94, 96, 99–100, 104–6, 110, 113, 115, 117–18, 149–52, 159, 167–68, 185, 188, 193–96, 201, 203, 209–14, 221, 224–26, 229–32, 234–35, 243, 252, 259–61, 264–80 Index

349

See also American Revolution; Civil War universalism: in Comte’s work, 14, 39; in conceptions of civilization, 56, 62, 64, 72–73, 79, 91, 120–21; in conceptions of intercourse, 80; in conceptions of nation, 40; in conceptions of time and space, 50; in “Dancing Girl,” 179, 183, 190– 91; in French ideas of nation, 26, 120–21, 123, 126, 139, 207, 278; in Future Japan, 173–78, 188–89; in histories of civilization, 55, 59– 60, 64, 72–74, 77, 164; in Japanese political novel, 164; in J. S. Mill’s work, 39; in nationalist thought, 39–42, 122; in Our Country, 102; in Spencer’s work, 39, 188; in theories of social evolution, 13–14, 39–40, 50, 120–21, 188, 279–80; in Turner’s work, 102, 108; in U.S. ideas of nation, 90–91, 197, 207 Vallès, Jules, 33 Walker, Francis, 197, 223 Warner, Charles Dudley, 92–97; rhetoric of intercourse in work of, 91; satire of social anxiety in work of, 86–87. See also Gilded Age Wayland, Francis, 13–14 Westphalia, Peace of, 7, 47, 234 “What Is a Nation?” (“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”) (Renan): Anderson on, 246, 248; contemporary references in, 246, 249; French Revolution in, 246, 249–51; future-anterior perspective in, 265–67; gender and paternity in, 259–61; historical consciousness as problem in, 248–51, 267; immigration absent in, 251; language and race rejected as foundation of nation in, 26, 247–48, 254;

350

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memory as foundation of nation in, 26, 65, 240, 246–51, 258–61, 264, 273; memory linked to consent in, 248–51; memory opposed to history in, 246, 248–51, 257; national identity in, 248–51, 259–61, 273; Paris Commune in, 246, 249–50; political conflict excluded from nation in, 43, 246, 249–51, 259, 261, 263– 65; political violence as problem in, 246, 248–51, 258–59; Renan’s earlier work as precedent for, 246– 47; repetition in, 266–67; reputation of, 246; rhetoric and narrative form in, 248–49; state in, 251, 261, 263; Third Republic in, 247, 249–51 Whitman, Walt, 25 Wilson, Woodrow: accession to nationality in work of, 226; allegory in work of, 201, 225–26, 258; American Revolution and Civil War seen as national consolidation by, 219; American Revolution seen as extension of English liberty by, 215; Anglo-Saxonism and Teutonic germ theory criticized by, 215; Civil War historiography criticized by, 215– 16, 219, 228; conversion in work of, 201, 231; educational goals of, 216–17, 252; future-anterior perspective in work of, 218, 266, 274; historical consciousness in work of, 43, 65, 200–201, 215–16, 219–21, 224–28, 246, 251, 259, 273; narrative form in work of, 217–21, 225– 26; national development considered incomplete by, 31, 217–19, 224–25; national identity in work of, 215–16, 221; national past seen as model for future by, 217–19, 224–26, 228–29, 247, 251, 266; national subject defined by obligation to future in work of, 219, 272–73; New England-

centered history criticized by, 217, 219–20, 228; Populism criticized by, 217, 219–20, 228; race in views of nation of, 215; reader charged with responsibility for nation in work of, 217–20, 225–26; rhetoric in work of, 217–21, 225–26; settlement as motif in work of, 230–31; on slavery, 216, 219; Turner’s influence on, 216. See also individual works world market: French position in, 119–20; as ground for comparison, ix, 269–70, 276–80; in histories of

civilization, 71–73; international state system’s relationship to, 8–9, 276–78, 281; Japan’s integration into, 49, 172, 234–35; in national allegories, 168; nineteenth-century expansion of, 6–7, 44, 47; U.S. economy tied to, 87; writing of national history shaped by, 5, 35, 40– 42, 44, 85–86, 90–91, 100, 269–70, 275–80. See also capitalism Zola, Emile, 33, 238

Index

351

Christopher L. Hill is an associate professor of Japanese literature at Yale University.

Material from chapters 2, 3, and 4 appeared previously in “National Histories and World Systems: Writing Japan, France, the United States,” in Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002). Material from chapter 5 appeared in “Mori Ōgai’s Resentful Narrator: Trauma and the National Subject in ‘The Dancing Girl,’” Positions 10, no. 2 (fall 2002), and “How to Writ a Second Restoration: The Political Novel and Meiji Historiography,” Journal of Japanese Studies 33, no. 2 (summer 2007).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hill, Christopher L. National history and the world of nations: capital, state, and the rhetoric of history in Japan, France, and the United States / Christopher L. Hill. p. cm. — (Asia-Pacific) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4298-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4316-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Nationalism and historiography—Japan. 2. Nationalism and historiography—France. 3. Nationalism and historiography—United States. I. Title. d13.h444 2008 320.54—dc22 2008028434