Making America Not Great

Making America Not Great Chris Magra (bio) Dane A. Morrison, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. xv + 314 pp. Notes, sources, and index. $57.00. There has been much recent interest in interactions between the United States and the rest of the world. America's dependence on Chinese manufacturers and shipping companies, red balloons with spy cameras, and TikTok tech have grabbed the attention of politicians, historians, and the wider public. A United States president and multiple state governors have played on popular xenophobic fears and toxic nationalism in a wild effort to make America great again. Historians have engaged with this public interest in America and the world.1 Dael Norwood in Trading Freedom (2022) and Brian Rouleau in With Sails Whitening Every Sea (2014), for example, have demonstrated that overseas trade and foreign entanglements shaped the course of early American political culture. For Norwood, United States commercial ties with China "put American merchants and sailors into direct contact with a vast array of new peoples and places, and at critical moments it inspired policymakers and politicians to consider national projects and domestic disputes in global perspective" (p. 10). In this top-down history, overseas commerce turned early American political leaders into cosmopolitans, and they began to associate world trade with freedom, or post-American-Revolution "liberation from the mercantilist confines of the British Empire" (p. 20).2 Rouleau tacks a different course. For him, "every barroom brawl, stabbing, or other violent incident" involving American mariners in overseas ports in China and throughout the Pacific Ocean, "jeopardized connections the United States (and its commercial class) had built with foreign governments (and their own merchants)." (p. 106) Controlling misbehaving maritime laborers became a means of sustaining global capitalism and America's burgeoning overseas empire. In this bottom-up account, early American maritime laborers were not cosmopolitans. Overseas trade did not foster worldly accommodationist attitudes among motley crews. Instead, they used contemporary notions of savage and civilized to describe themselves and the foreign peoples they encountered. Mariners frequently likened Pacific Islanders to negative stereotypes of American Indians. These [End Page 121] attitudes led at times to physical violence. Such "racialized vigilantism" even caused colonization in the case of Hawaii (p. 85). Dane Morrison's prize-winning new book, Eastward of Good Hope, further positions the early history of the United States in a global context. Morrison's book leans more toward Rouleau's bottom-up approach. For Morrison, increased interest in world trade meant greater antipathy among American merchants and mariners toward foreign peoples and places during the Early Republic, when U.S. attitudes were in their most formative state. The winner of the John Lyman Book Award stridently argues that "Americans had imagined the world as disordered and dangerous, deranged by tyranny or steeped in chaos, often deadly, always uncertain, unpredictable, and unstable . . . This vision of the world, more than anything else, shaped Americans' ideas of their place in the world" (p. viii). Big, bold arguments make for good discussions in graduate seminars. And Morrison sticks to his guns throughout the book. Greater volumes of direct, long-distance trade between the United States and the world did not shape the contours of American culture in positive ways. Maritime commerce did not produce American cosmopolitans, or citizens of the world. Instead, overseas trade stimulated xenophobia in the early United States. The author has marshalled a great deal of evidence to make his case. Morrison focuses on American attitudes toward four regions: the Ottoman Empire; China; India; and the Great South Sea, which includes the East Indies, Oceania, and the Pacific Northwest portion of North America. Scholars young and old will no doubt enjoy debating the extent to which these four regions constitute "the world"3 (p. viii). Morrison principally relies on mariners' news reports, ships' logs, journals, captivity and travel narratives, and correspondence between merchants to document the formation of American fears of peoples and places in these four regions. Morrison is as theoretically oriented as he is meticulous in his research methods. He uses Lorgia Garcia-Pena's postcolonial theories on archival silences to unpack the ways in which eighteenth...