¹ Gordon S. Wood, “History in Context,” Weekly Standard, Feb. 2015, at www.weeklystandard.com/history-in-context/article/850083.

² Christopher Minty, “Finding Its Way: Gordon Wood and the William and Mary Quarterly,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, 9 Sept. 2015, at https://earlyamericanists.com/2015/09/09/gordon-s-wood-and-the-william-and-mary-quarterly; Kristin Kobes Du Mez, “Gordon Wood on Bernard Bailyn: American Religious History and ‘An Honest Picture of the Past’,” Religion in American History blog, 6 March 2015, at http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2015/03/gordon-wood-bernard-bailyn-and-american.html; Kevin Levin, “Gordon Wood, the Politics of History and the History Classroom,” Civil War Memory blog, 23 Feb. 2015, at http://cwmemory.com/2015/02/23/gordon-wood-the-politics-of-history-and-the-history-classroom; Eran Zelnik, “I Am a Presentist—and So Is Gordon Wood,” U.S. Intellectual History Blog, 18 Feb. 2015, at https://s-usih.org/2015/02/i-am-a-presentist-and-so-is-gordon-wood; John Fea, “Gordon Wood Is Still Relevant,” The Way of Improvement Leads Home blog, 18 Feb. 2015, at https://thewayofimprovement.com/2015/02/18/gordon-wood-is-still-relevant.

³ Josh Piker, “Getting Lost,” Uncommon Sense, The Blog, 21 Jan. 2016, at https://blog.oieahc.wm.edu/getting-lost, original emphasis.

⁴ For some context see Andrew Hartman, “The Culture Wars Are Dead: Long Live the Culture Wars!”, The Baffler 39 (May 2018), at https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/culture-wars-are-dead-hartman.

⁵ Fraser, Nancy, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” in Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London and New York, 2013)Google Scholar, 223, makes a similar point concerning feminist politics: “Unambiguously emancipatory in the era of state-organized capitalism, critiques of economism, androcentrism, étatism, and Westphalianism now appear fraught with ambiguity, susceptible to serving the legitimation needs of a new form of capitalism. After all, this capitalism would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution.” See also Jeremy Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” Aeon, 2 March 2017, at https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment. On questions of these kinds see also Dinner, Deborah, “Beyond ‘Best Practices’: Employment Discrimination Law in the Neoliberal Era,” Indiana Law Journal 92/3 (2017), 1059–1118Google Scholar.

⁶ Drayton, Richard and Motadel, David, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13/1 (2018), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Drayton and Motadel are responding most directly to Adeleman, “What Is Global History Now?”. For discussions of the emergence of global history see, among many good sources, Lang, Michael, “Globalization and Its History,” Journal of Modern History 78/4 (2006), 899–931CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, Lynn, Writing History in the Global Era (New York, 2015)Google Scholar; Cheng, Eileen Ka-May, Historiography: An Introductory Guide (London, 2012)Google Scholar, chap. 6. In the case of US historiography see Guarneri, Carl J., “Globalizating the U.S. Survey-Course Textbook: Challenges, Choices, and Opportunities,” Journal of American History 103/4 (2017), 983–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸ On debates over national historiography and further citations see Neem, Johann N., “American History in a Global Age,” History and Theory 50/1 (2011), 41–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Thus Pompeian, Edward P., “Mind the Global U-Turn: Reorienting Early American History in a Global Context,” Journal of the Early Republic 36/4 (2016), 715–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that historians of global supply chains are uniquely suited to understand the workings of the early modern Atlantic world. If what matters is exchange, what topic is better suited to understand it than economic history? Although Pompeian is aware of the risk that such work might become “the handmaiden of today's globalization or global capitalism” (ibid., 748), he nonetheless concludes that the benefits of transcending national historiographies are worth the risk. His essay demonstrates, despite his protestations, how deep the ideas of neoliberal economic globalization today are to the emergence of histories of vast early America.

¹⁰ Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Johnson, Randal (New York, 1993), 30–31Google Scholar, 64. For overviews of Bourdieu's field theory see, among many sources, Patricia Thompson, “Field,” in Grenfell, Michael, ed., Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts (Stocksfield, 2008), 67–81Google Scholar; Calhoun, Craig, “Habitus, Field, and Capital,” in Calhoun, Craig, LiPuma, Edward, and Postone, Moishe, eds., Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, 1993), 61–88Google Scholar.

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¹³ Anderson, “The Shifting Stage of Politics,” 134, 140, 152. On the contingent, and changing, forms of globalization see Jürgen Osterhammel, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, 2005).

¹⁴ Sassen, Losing Control, 31.

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¹⁹ Rodgers, Daniel, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 10. For a discussion of how the category of “society” emerged and was, ultimately, overcome, see also Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, chap. 3.

²⁰ See also Lang, “Globalization.” It is worth noting that Rodgers would not use the term “neoliberalism” because he worries that it (a) encompasses too much, and (b) lacks political value beyond elite academic contexts. See Rodgers, “The Uses and Abuses of ‘Neoliberalism,” Dissent, Winter 2018, at www.dissentmagazine.org/article/uses-and-abuses-neoliberalism-debate.

²¹ Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 188, 196–98.

²² Ibid., 2, 5.

²³ Ford, Lisa, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar, 2; Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar. See also Adelman, Jeremy and Aron, Stephen, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104/3 (1999), 814–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁵ For overviews of historians’ changing approaches to studying the British Empire see Johnson, Richard R., “Empire,” in Vickers, Daniel, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, MA, 2003), 99–117Google Scholar; Benton, Lauren, “Constitutions and Empires,” Law and Social Inquiry 31/1 (2006), 177–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burnard, Trevor, “Empire Matters? The Historiography of Imperialism in Early America, 1492–1830,” History of European Ideas 33/1 (2007), 87–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁷ Kumar, Krishan, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton, 2017), 3Google Scholar.

²⁸ White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar, esp. 7–11. On Revolutionary narratives see also Knott, Sarah, “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 73/1 (2016), 3–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Saler, Bethel, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest (Philadelphia, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, offers a polity-centered examination of state building in the West, while highlighting the central importance of how such historical narratives are constructed.

²⁹ The phrase is from Sylvia Frey, “Causes of the American Revolution,” in Vickers, A Companion to Colonial America, 508–29, at 511. Interestingly, these new narratives are no less focused on the Revolution than was previous scholarship, but the meaning of the Revolution is best understood as a cathartic moment implied from the beginning.

³⁰ DuVal, Kathleen, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York, 2016)Google Scholar.

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³³ Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 19, 30, 82–83, 130, 183.

³⁴ Joshua Piker, review of Pekka Hämäläinen, The Commanche Empire, William and Mary Quarterly 67/2 (2010), 379–82, at 382.

³⁵ Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard J., “Empires and Legal Pluralism: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern World,” in Benton and Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York, 2013)Google Scholar, 1–18, at 2. See also Benton, Lauren, “AHR Forum: Law and Empire in Global Perspective,” American Historical Review 117/4 (2012), 1092–1100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benton, “Historical Perspectives on Legal Pluralism,” Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 3/1 (2011), 57–69; Grasso, Christopher and Wulf, Karin, “Nothing Says ‘Democracy’ Like a Visit from the Queen: Reflections on Empire and Nation in Early American Histories,” Journal of American History 95/3 (2008), 764–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recent examples include Beverley, Eric Lewis, “Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55/2 (2013), 241–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁸ DuVal, Independence Lost, xvii. In contrast, Adelman and Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders,” 839, remind us that even in the borderlands, political institutions exerted an autonomous force: “Cross-cultural brokering and conflict shaped but did not determine the patterns of coexistence. In the end, Old World conflicts and eighteenth-century warfare provided the decisive markers for hinterland processes.”

³⁹ Paul Halliday, “Laws’ Histories: Pluralism, Pluralities, Diversity,” in Benton and Ross, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 261–77.

⁴⁰ Megill, Allan, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar, 72. See also Knott, “Narrating the Age of Revolution.” More generally see Megill, Historical Knowledge, chaps. 3–4; Smith, Rogers, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Knott, “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” 21, one of the things that make some contemporary accounts appropriate “for neoliberal times” is their “politically quietist narrative form.” But, I would note, this political quietism may reflect an uncertainty or even a hesitancy to recognize the political implications of some new work.

⁴¹ Burnard, Trevor, “The British Atlantic,” in Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D., eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York, 2009), 111–36Google Scholar, at 128. See also Burnard, Trevor and Vidal, Cécile, “Location and the Conceptualization of Historical Frameworks: Early American History and Its Multiple Reconfigurations in the United States and Europe,” in Barrreyre, Nicolas, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck, and Cécile Vidal, eds., Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2014), 141–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁴ Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York, 2010), 2Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 6–7, 28, 30, 265, original emphasis. For a contrasting perspective, which emphasizes the benefits of order and shared norms, see Hanna, Mark G., Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (Chapel Hill, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁷ Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 2, 12, 16, 22, 458.

⁴⁸ Kumar, Visions of Empire, 475. To Brown, Undoing the Demos, 20, under neoliberalism, the collective political rule of citizens in a democracy “transmutes into governance and management,” something that recent scholarship concludes empires are particularly well suited to achieve compared to democracies.

⁴⁹ Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 459. Although, “from a different perspective,” Jean L. Cohen writes in “Sovereign Equality vs. Imperial Right: The Battle over the ‘New World Order’,” Constellations 13/4 (2006), 485–505, at 491, “the sovereignty-based model of international law appears to be ceding not to cosmopolitan justice, but to an imperial project of dominance and indirect control of key ‘peripheries.’”

⁵⁰ Lennox, “Geography of Interactions,” 437.

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⁵² Taylor, Alan, American Colonies (New York, 2001), xi–xiiGoogle Scholar.

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