The Progressive Historians, Settler Colonialism and the Jeffersonian Critique of American Capitalism’ [in Chinese]

GAIDO, DANIEL

Historiography Quarterly [in Chinese]

Nankai University

Lugar: Tianjin; Año: 2008 p. 88 - 99

1004-0013

<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:70.85pt 3.0cm 70.85pt 3.0cm; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> Progressive historiography grew out of the “discovery” of the settler colonialist origins of the United States by Frederick Jackson Turner, who analyzed this process, not from the point of view of the victims of colonialism (the Native and African Americans), but from that of the rural middle class—the colonialist yeomanry. Turner’s apology for the “democratic” settler was written against the background of the Populist movement, and could therefore also be read as a middle-class criticism of the takeover of the American economy by corporate capitalism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. His writings provided the starting point for Charles Beard´s work, whose aim was to describe what Marxists call the primitive accumulation process within the settler community. Only two of Beard’s books were based on actual research in primary sources (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy), and they described what Beard saw as the two antithetical forces that shaped American history: the “Hamiltonian” capitalists and the “Jeffersonian” (or “Populist”) farmers. Beard then generalized his analysis of the origin of the first party system into an overall interpretation of American political history. The author concludes that, even though Progressivism was a basically retrograde movement, Turner and Beard’s war was groundbreaking in its attempt to analyze the peculiarities of early American capitalism, even if they did it from an anachronistic perspective.