Eighty years is a lot of history. In the latest addition to the Penguin History of the United States series, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910, Steven Hahn writes about the eight decades from 1830 to 1910 in a brisk and thought-provoking 500 pages. Many of the facts will be familiar to students of history, but the themes and analysis are new and engaging. Hahn’s analysis offers readers another way of looking at nineteenth-century America that may make them reconsider some of the ideas and themes with which they thought they were familiar.
From the first page, this history is different, beginning in 1830 in the West, along the Mexican border, rather than starting along the East Coast, where most Americans lived at the time. The shift, and its inclusion of Native Americans prominently in the story of Mexican-American-Texan relations, fits the now-decades-old trend of “history from the bottom up,” but it is not revisionism for revisionism’s sake. It also reinforces Hahn’s theme that the United States of the 1830s was a union, but not yet a nation. Looking at the West, especially, makes that clear as the reader is shown how many different peoples lived within what is now the contiguous forty-eight states. The shifting alliances among the Indian tribes, our federal government, the Mexican government, and the Texas settlers, along with the growing conflict between slave and free states in the United States, show a world where lines on the map marked precise borders, but reality was much fuzzier.
Many authors portray the antebellum United States as a place where the sectional divide between North and South was ever-present and ever-widening until 1861, when it culminated in an inevitable Civil War. Beyond suggesting that there are other sectional cleavages than North-South, Hahn also reorients the discussion. There were differences among all the states, and it was true that North and South were different in a broader sense. But what made them different, what made their societies and economies diverge so drastically, was not some imagined cultural variation, but slavery itself. Slavery, in Hahn’s telling, made the South and, reciprocally, made the North.
A union of states may exist with that level of variation between its constituent members, but a nation may not. The Civil War, the abolition of slavery, and the Reconstruction of the defeated South all moved America closer to a true, integrated nationhood. Hahn takes that theme of Reconstruction farther than the eleven states of the Confederacy; he applies the idea to all of the history between 1865 and 1910, seeing the trends of that period as all a part of one coherent drive to construct (or reconstruct) a nation. The Indian Wars and the building of the transcontinental railroads combined to tie the East and West together while crushing any completing sovereignties. The two regional reconstructions “thereby formed part of a sweeping national project.”
If federal action in the South and West contributed to the growth of the nation-state, the growth of industry, the triumph of the trusts, and the rise of the Progressive movement represent another sort of reconstruction, that of the relationship between Big Business and Big Government. By 1910, Theodore Roosevelt’s version of Progressivism, with the regulatory state growing to match the power and scale of increasingly lucrative businesses, was the dominant ideology in the American government. At the same time overseas expansion, whether by war (as in the Spanish-American War) or by trade (as with our businesses’ penetration of Latin America and Asia) had brought America beyond its borders and into foreign colonies and markets. Beyond nationhood, the United States became an empire.
This transformation is the source of the book’s title: while a nation, Hahn writes, has defined borders; an empire moves beyond its borders, conquering and expanding. Most of America’s post-Civil War conquest was of the metaphorical sort, annexing markets and expanding its sphere of influence, but the few true overseas possessions we took—and in some cases still hold—cemented the change to an empire in all but name (the final book in the Penguin series is, in fact, called American Empire.)
In any book covering so vast a stretch of time and space, a reader is bound to have some quibbles. Hahn’s expertise in populism adds to the book’s richness, but at times overwhelms the story. In the book’s closing chapters, we read more about the Socialist party than the Democratic party, despite the latter’s much greater footprint in the electorate. Following the different threads, too can be confusing—sections jump back to Lincoln enough times to be noticeable—but some dislocation is inevitable in a work of this scope. In general, A Nation Without Borders is readable and illuminating, and Hahn’s thesis will lead many writers, students, and history buffs to rethink what they have learned from a new perspective. That should be the goal of any historian.
