d onald e. P ease Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 1 American Exceptionalism. General Editors Timothy Roberts and Lindsay Dicuirci� London: Pickering & Chatto Limited, 2013� 1552 pages� $625�00 (cloth) Volume I: American Exceptionalism: Land and Prosperity� Edited by Timothy Roberts� 388 pages� Volume 2: American Exceptionalism: The American Revolution. Edited by Timothy Roberts� 353 pages� Volume 3: American Exceptionalism: Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism. Edited by Lindsay Dicuirci� 404 pages� Volume 4: American Exceptionalism: Anti-Exceptionalism. Edited by Lindsay Dicuirci� 280 pages� In 2013, Timothy Roberts and Lindsay DiCuirci served as general editors of a four volume collection of thematically organized primary source materials on American Exceptionalism that the London-based company, Pickering & Chatto published, complete with an editorial apparatus that including a general introduction, introductions to each volume, biographical sketches, headnotes and endnotes as well as a consolidated index� Readers of this remarkable four-volume treasury of American Exceptionalist tracts might wonder why the editors undertook this project when the prevailing historiographical mood has decisively shifted to transnational inquiries into United States culture and experience� Over the past two decades American Studies scholars have impugned American exceptionalism as an ethnocentric relic of the Cold War chiefly responsible for the denial of the long history of U.S. Imperialism. The British American Studies scholar, Paul Giles, recently gave representative expression to this mood when, after listing foundational tropes of the exceptionalist paradigm - Puritanism, the frontier, Manifest Destiny - as examples of what American studies scholars should no longer take as objects of study, he admonished that only by replacing these remnants of an ahistorical fantasy will “transnational” and “transhemispheric American studies” plant a “stake through the heart of the unquiet corpse of American exceptionalism” (Giles, 2006, 648 )� But American Studies scholars’ demand for its expulsion from respectable scholarly discourse has coincided with a spectacular upturn in the usage of the term within the public domain� Print media references to American exceptionalism increased from two in 1980 to a stunning 2,580 in 2012� 1 A slightly revised version of this essay appeared in American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 1, March 2014, pp� 197-209� 2 d onald e. P ease Republican candidates for the presidency supplied one rationale for this disconnect when they characterized anti-exceptionalist, left-leaning academics and the democratic political candidates they supported as anti-American� The term that had formerly been restricted in its usage to political scientists and American Studies scholars took over conceptual center stage when the Homeland Security Apparatus presented difficulties for distinguishing the United States as a nation from the activities of a global empire� American exceptionalism became the default category politicians and policy-makers took up to manage citizens’ understanding of the contradictory relationship between U�S� nationalism and U�S� imperialism in a transnational epoch� Rather than disagreeing with scholars who set the transnational and the exceptional in a relationship of irremediable antagonism, the editors of this project concede “that scholarship with a national focus misses America’s historical connections with the world�” (ix, volume 1) But they turn this concession into rationale for the pertinence of the question that has animated their project: “Why has the myth of American exceptionalism, characterized by a belief in America’s highly distinctive features or unusual trajectory based in the abundance of its natural resources, its revolutionary origins, and its protestant religious culture that anticipated God’s blessing of the nation - held such tremendous staying power, from its influence in popular culture to its critical role in foreign policy? ” (ix, volume 1) In response, the editors turn “America’s highly distinctive features” into thematic rubrics - Land and Prosperity, the American Revolution, Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism - organizing the first three volumes of the set of four� The editors then proceed to sort various “source documents” under each of these rubrics� Traversing three centuries, these works range from academic essays, congressional addresses, and sermons, to juridical briefs, orations, and funeral sermons� Individually and collectively these entries cross cultural, economic and political terrains and promise to transform the received understanding of American exceptionalism� Although this compilation “focuses on the discourse’s changing contours, rather than elements shared with other nation’s exceptionalist claims,” the editors insist that it “nonetheless…offers a rich opportunity to study exceptionalism from a comparative perspective, a topic that has received little attention, that the time is ripe to undertake a comparative history of various national ‘exceptionalisms�’” (xviii, Volume 1) Following this account of its significance to the field of transnational scholarship, the editors go on to claim that this collection “illustrates the ways in which American exceptionalism became an unquestionable and entrenched ethos that dominated economics, politics, religion, and culture from the colonial period through the early twentieth century�” (xviii, Volume 1) Since scholars in the field of transnational American Studies have demonstrated how each of the traits - America’s prosperous lands, the American Revolution, America’s religious millennialism - that the editors describe as foundational to the United States’ exceptional standing are in fact connected to encompassing patterns of economic, political, geographical and cultural Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 3 behavior in the Atlantic world system, it is difficult to understand how the editors’ intention to study them “in isolation from other nation’s exceptionalist claims” would contribute to comparative perspectives� How can a discourse which claims to be an exception to the norms of intelligibility organizing other national histories “nonetheless”, offer a “rich opportunity to study exceptionalism from a transnational comparative perspective”? Doesn’t its “uniqueness” presuppose the non-comparability of American exceptionalism and quite literally disconnect it from other national formations? Moreover, how can the editors achieve the intention to trace the contours of American exceptionalism “evolving discourse” when the collection purports to illustrate the ways in which “American exceptionalism” became an “unquestionable and entrenched ethos”? Rather than addressing these questions the editors’ introductions to each volume and to the individual contributions provoke additional ones� Three generations of American Studies scholars have scoured the historical archive to locate writers to authorize belief in American exceptionalism� Their intensive scholarly labors resulted in the ordination a pantheon of hyper-canonized figures - John Winthrop, Alexis deTocqueville, John L. O’Sullivan, Hugo St. John de Crèvecoeur, Frederick Jackson Turner, Werner Sombart - all of whom make cameo appearances in the introductions to the individual volumes� With the exception of John L� O’Sullivan, however, the editors have included none of their writings in the more than 1552 pages of their scrupulously annotated digest. The fact that none of the fifty-seven figures the editors selected as representative American exceptionalists previously received this attribution, raises vexing questions concerning what criteria might possibly have guided the editors’ decisions as to which authors and texts to include (or exclude)? I confess that I did not find my skepticism concerning the rationale of the editors’ enterprise or my dubiety as to the applicability of this plethora of documents to American exceptionalism assuaged by what I considered the bizarre interpretive frame through which they tracked its history� Indeed, on first reading the introductions to the individual volumes and individual entries, I found myself in near total disagreement with what I deemed arbitrary, inconsistently assigned criteria, and wrong-headed explanations� But my critical attitude toward the project altered considerably after it belatedly dawned on me that the editors did not select these texts to corroborate a United States readership’s pre-existing consensus about American exceptionalism� Neither the texts the editors selected as representative specimens nor the rubrics under which they organized them can be comprehended without recognizing that the editors viewed American history from a perspective that re-imagined the “exceptionalist” aspects of United States history as a continuation of Anglo-American imperialism� As a consequence of this realization, I have decided to begin this review with a series of observations about what renders this perspective different from United States American Studies scholars accounts of American exceptionalism� After thus demonstrating the literal truth of the editors’ claim that 4 d onald e. P ease their project would foster future comparativist study of “national exceptionalisms”, I shall turn to what I continue to find troubling about the editors’ method of representing, interpreting, and opposing American exceptionalism� British-American Exceptionalism American Studies scholars in the United States usually position American exceptionalism in a relation of insuperable opposition to British imperialism� In establishing what renders the United States different from Great Britain, citizens and scholars steeped in exceptionalist norms routinely list a series of absences - of feudal lords, of a landed aristocracy, of a monarchical tradition, of a colonial empire - as the outstanding traits that set American liberal democratic and egalitarian values apart from British institutions� (Pease, 2007, 109) Depending on the context, what’s thought exceptional about the features that distinguish American political and social institutions from Britain’s can mean “distinctive” (meaning merely different), or “unique” (meaning anomalous), or “exemplary” (meaning a model for other nations to follow), or that the United States is “exempt” from the rules and treaties regulating the international community (meaning that unlike Great Britain, it embodies the power to enforce them internationally), or that it is an “exception” to historical laws (meaning that it is able unilaterally to establish the terms and provenance of international law)� (Pease, 2009, 21) Rather than taking on such representations, the editors describe the United States origins as a British settler colony as the prerequisite to understanding what renders it exceptional� According to the editors, American exceptionalism originated within a culture of British colonial imperialism as the response of white British settlers to the lands and populations they colonized� Observing that British settler-colonists participated in a colonialimperialist project that set the British presence in the New World against the Catholic powers of Spain and France, the editors explain how British exceptionalism endowed white colonial settlers in the Americas with the sense of moral superiority belonging to a people specially chosen to carry out a mission� In the following passage, the editors attribute to British colonial imperial formations each of the qualities - moral superiority, uniqueness of purpose, exemplary polity, exemption from the historical laws regulating the trajectory of other empires - conventionally ascribed to Americans exceptionalism: “Similar exceptionalist discourse would serve many functions in populating the British North American colonies…America was an exemplary place for all free people to occupy the same social status under the law and to enjoy equal opportunity…Despite the geographic dispersion of disparate communities with unique national roots, ethnicities and religious creeds settling in the New World, they shared in common a sense of the lands exceptionality and the unique purposes to which it might be put� In the British colonies of North Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 5 America, this unique purpose assumed the form of radically new political arrangement…colonists in New France, New Spain and New Amsterdam… often understood themselves to be emissaries of European Empire…Once in America, Spain, Portugal and France have planted despotisms, only Britain liberty�” (x, xiii, volume one) In this passage, British imperial exceptionalism tacitly supplies the editors the norms and rules guiding the editors’ account of American exceptionalism� They give explicit expression to this re-orientation, however, only after they cite the following passage from Godfrey Hodgson’s, The Myth of American Exceptionalism to explain how exponents of the Americanness of exceptionalism performed a categorical mistake when they located its origin in Winthrop’s 1635 sermon “Model of Christian Charity”: “(Winthrop) could not possibly have imagined a United States� He was preaching to Englishmen, and expressing his determination that the colony … [which] he and his friends were setting out to found would be ‘an example to other English colonies, in North America and elsewhere,’” but not that “the colony was ‘unique or exceptional’ in any way�” (vii, volume 3) Hodgson proposed that the exceptionalist belief undergirding Winthrop’s covenant with God was invested in the British imperial venture in which Winthrop participated. Rather then advancing Hodgson’s demystification of the Americanness of exceptionalism, however, the editors point out the ecology of belief sustaining the disposition that persuaded United States citizens to perpetuate this mistake: “Despite a contemporary impulse to expose American exceptionalism as a myth, religious writers from the colonial period through the turn of the nineteenth century still frequently drew upon religious rhetoric to insist upon America’s absolute uniqueness�” (viii, volume 3) As they trace the history of this disposition from the Puritan times to the present, the editors organize their narration of this chronology from a perspective that designates the United States the special legatee of the exceptionalism at work in British imperial formations� This viewpoint is evidenced in the editors’ selection of texts, and the conceptual schema with which they offer accounts of their historical significance. In the course of four centuries, the geographical territory of the United States underwent a change in status from the product of processes of conquest, colonization, and cultural transformation, to its initiator and from a subaltern colony in the British empire to the most powerful hegemon in the imperial world system� The editors restrict their discussion of American exceptionalism to a chronological period ranging from colonial era to the prelude to World War I - just before the United States replaced Great Britain as the global hegemon� The four rubrics they have selected to organize their vast array of exempla - Land and Prosperity, The American Revolution, “Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism” and Anti-Exceptionalism - supply the editors with the warrant to strip territorial mappings, political institutions, and religious predilections of what once were considered their incomparably unique American traits and render them expressive of quintessentially British institutions� In 6 d onald e. P ease volume one, they describe the descendants of the British colonial settlers in New England and Virginia as the legitimate heirs of America’s prosperity� The sources the editors cite in volume two characterize American Revolutionaries as struggling to preserve “traditional British rights to life, liberty, and property - not to seize new ones�” (xi, volume one) In volume three they describe Anglo-Saxon Protestantism as the chief agency responsible for national transformation� In volume four they assign an arbiter of British imperialism the proto-typical anti-exceptionalist posture� Spectres of British Exceptionalism British spectres of comparison guide the editors’ representations of U�S� history� In passages scattered throughout their Introductions, the editors repurpose tropes from the discourse of British imperialism to forge a vantage point from which to re-envision and explain formative historical events within U�S� history� I felt the spectral presence of this alternative perspective most strongly in the editors’ account of the American revolution� In the editors’ view, the revolutionary era Americans who clamored to throw off the yoke of British imperial rule, could only achieve this aim by enacting ideals already laid down by their British imperial master� It was the British roots of the American revolutionary cause that disclosed the “unique nature of American revolutionaries�” It followed that preserving the uniqueness of British traditions of liberty - “became equal to or more important” than the emancipatory “rhetoric of the revolutionary era�” (xi, volume One) It also followed that America’s revolution against British Imperial rule could only be realized through the continuation of the British Empire by American means� Their effort to sustain this perspective leads the editors to distinguish the British imperial exceptionalism of the American Revolution from the alien exceptionalism they assign the French Revolution� The editors secure the line separating the “conservative” American from the “radical” French Revolution by consigning advocacy of French revolutionary ideas to Morgan John Rhees, a “Welsh radical” the editors fault for believing America “was less exceptional than it was a New World location for dangerous ideas of equality, he had first encountered in France” (95, volume Two) The editors’ belief in the distinction between the two revolutions also in part explains their selection of Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau’s 1784 Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution” over Alexis deTocqueville’s Democracy in America as the lead text in their second volume� Unlike Tocqueville, Mirabeau considered the aspirations of the emergent American republic so similar to British governmental principles that he felt impelled to advise United States leaders not to “adhere too closely to British precepts”� (1, volume Two) From the opening volume, the editors describe American exceptionalism as an inherently divided disposition that regulates the disparity between construals of United States as an empire and a democratic republic� According to the editors, the Civil War realized the imperial aspirations of the American Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 7 Revolution by “consolidating a state formation powerful enough to extend its liberal ideology across time and space� “ (vii, volume Two)� The editors elaborate this claim in their remarkable account of United States continental expansion� United States historians have conventionally drawn a contrast between U�S� territorial expansion and British settler colonialism by explaining how the territories were destined to became equal polities in a nation rather than colonial protectorates within an imperial formation� Frederick Jackson Turner established the precedent for this understanding when he famously described self-reliant settlers, rather than an imperial state, as the agents chiefly responsible for westward expansion. The editors differ from Turner and most U�S� historians in that they are keen to explain how the nation’s expansionist policies “collectively exposed…practices of 19th century statebuilding’’ focused primarily on “expanding the rights of white men�” (xii, Volume Two) The editors concede that the western territories were indeed incorporated into the union as equal states, but they call attention to the fact that the populations of Native Americans, free blacks, women, creoles, Hispanics and Mexicans who resided within the territories were treated as if imperial subjects� Although they never quite call the territories settler colonies, the editors do assert that the federal government’s “continuance and expansion of black slavery, removal of Indian populations and subordination of women and workers” installed the rule of colonial difference throughout the territories� (xii, Volume Two)� The United States is a democratic republic; it is also an imperial state with multi-jurisdictions comprised of gender and racial hierarchies, excepted spaces (slave plantations), excepted peoples (slaves, women, people of color); and excepted polities (colonies, foreign domestic nations, western territories) that the editors describe as comparable to Great Britain’s� (Pease, 2010, 65) Most of the documents the editors have selected for inclusion are situated at the dynamic interface of disputes over understandings of the United States as a democratic republic and as an imperial state� But the criteria that the editors deploy for the selection of American exceptionalist texts reflect the rules of colonial difference instituted under British settler colonialism to justify the unequal treatment of women, slaves, Native Americans, slaves, and racialized minorities� Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Phyllis Wheatley are mentioned in the introductions, but no women are included among the 57 entries� Three of the four African-Americans the editors cite hail from British colonies and exemplify the impossibility of becoming fully assimilated to U�S� citizenship� The sole Native-American, the Choctaw Chief Moshulatubbee, makes his appearance in the third volume to attest to the sweeping impact of American exceptionalism on “U�S� Policy-making�” (248, Volume Two) Few United States American Studies scholars would select figures from the American Colonization society and the Free Soil Party as the chief representatives of the anti-slavery movement� None would characterize the 8 d onald e. P ease American Colonization society, the anti-slavery movement, and the Free Soil Party as comparable efforts to sustain the United Status identity as “a benevolent empire�” (116, volume One) But the editors of American Exceptionalism assert that the United States decided to resolve the racial tensions internal to United States national society by devising a policy of “racial exceptionalism” that was implemented by white leaders of the American Colonization Society and the Free Soil Party� To explain the role slavery played in forging this doctrine of “racial exceptionalism,” they cite William Murdock’s 1848 “Address on the Free Soil Question” that describes slavery as a constitutionally protected conservative force inherited from the “revolutionary ancestors” to protect Americans from the social revolutions besetting Europe during the period� (263-264 Volume One) Although most black abolitionists shared Frederick Douglass’s repugnance for the American Colonization Society, the three authors - Robert Finley, Ralph Randolph Gurley and Leonard Bacon - that the editors have selected to represent the anti-slavery movement were authored by white members of this fellowship� And although they take care to acknowledge that “the relationship between African colonization schemes and American exceptionalism is complicated” the authors nonetheless maintain that colonization fulfilled the “Christian mission…representative of exceptionalism” by instituting “outposts of a benevolent empire that were utterly different from the trading colonies of European powers�” (116, volume One) To corroborate this claim, the editors include “The Negro at Home and Abroad,” a text written by the Sierra Leonean “African exceptionalist”, J� Augustus Cole, who traveled to the United States to Christianize Americans�” (344, Volume Three) Perhaps the most anomalous of the editors’ entries is George Washington Williams’ 1876 Independence Day oration, “The American Negro”� A “free black”, Williams fought with Union forces during the Civil War and with U�S� troops in the military campaign in Indian territory before traveling to King Leopold’s Congo in 1886 where he championed the official recognition of Congo Free States� The editors distill the miscellany of critical statements Williams directs against the Unites States as well as King Leopold into what they describe as an exemplification of “the evolution of exceptionalist discourse after the era of American slavery” that calls attention to “the brutality of European not American colonialism�” (266, Volume Two)� Lest the unwary reader sort British colonial structures with other exemplars of the “the brutality of European not American colonialism”, the editors include an essay entitled “The Oregon Question” that Charles Hazewell published in 1876 that described the United States and Great Britain as separate but equal partners in a global enterprise of benevolent “Anglo-American” imperialism that authorized the United States to exercise power in the western hemisphere after the example of British dominion in the East� (202, Volume One) Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 9 The editors’ account of Anglo-America’s “benevolent empire” reflects an encompassing outlook emphasizing, on the one hand, the United States establishment of national institutions unique to the American experience, and, on the other hand, its validation of popular rebellions against traditions of authority elsewhere in the world�” (xvi, Volume Two) Alpheus H� Snow, a lecturer in colonial government at George Washington University and a member of the executive council of the American Society of International Law, Snow supplied the editors’ perspective with quasi-juridical warrant in a 1907 legal brief bearing the unwieldy title: “’Colony’, -or ‘Free State’? ‘Dependence’, or ‘Just Connection’? ‘Empire’,or ‘Union’? An Essay Based of the Political philosophy of the American Revolution, as Summarized in the Declaration of Independence, towards the Ascertainment of the Political Relationship Between the American Union and Annexed Insular Regions”� Unlike many of his contemporaries, Snow forthrightly described imperialism as a primary determinant of U�S� history and based this proposition on the contention that the founders of the American republic intended the United States to be “an imperial state in its possession of territories and in its influence over farflung areas.“ (289, Volume Two) In Snow’s opinion, this meant that the United States’ newly acquired territorial possessions had a right to just government under the law of nations established by the Declaration of Independence and adjudicated by the United States in its role as “Justiciar�” (290, Volume Two) Providential Exceptionalism as Myth and Method As should be evident from these observations, the editors’ notion of American exceptionalism manages to serve as a governing disposition across disparate iterations of American political, economic and religious culture because the incompatible elements out of which it is composed lack any fixed relationship to a binding state of affairs� Each of the overarching schema - Land And Prosperity, The American Revolution, Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism, and Anti-Exceptionalism - the editors have selected, elevates a particular trait into a grand conceptual narrative capable of subsuming and subordinating other concerns� None of these conceptual metaphors supplies the editors an all-embracing definition of American exceptionalism. In changing the foundational trope to which American exceptionalism is rendered applicable as well as the significance of the context in which it accomplishes its effects, the editors dismantle the various ideological and cultural elements organizing its previous disposition and recombine them in shifting permutations that give expression to quite different, even contradictory cultural values� Each volume unfolds in seeming disregard of the ways in which these changes in the term’s meaning affect the texts selected for the previous volume� The editors’ inventive lexicon of ever-multiplying qualifying terms - national, racial, conservative, sectional, theological, radical, economic, imperial - reveals the varied and changing criteria organizing the multi-layered 10 d onald e. P ease terrain of American exceptionalism as well as the quixotic beliefs it fostered� I tend to lose track of the provenance of each of these qualifying terms as the editors change the domain to which the term applies� But there is quite literally a world of difference between national and imperial exceptionalism� The editors describe the conceptual metaphors organizing each volume as more or less equivalent manifestations of the phenomenon� Nevertheless, within this four volume set, the topic of the third volume, Millennial Aspirations and Providentialism, performs a privileged function in the valorization, circulation, and expansion of the ethos of American exceptionalism� Rather than characterizing it as historical mystification, the editors explain how Providentialism elevated American Exceptionalism into an ontological disposition that aligns contradictory versions of American exceptionalism to a network of interdependent symbolic structures, institutional formations and material practices� Truth be told, however, it is the editors’ discourse that produces the historic outcomes that they describe as an effect of Divine Providence� The editors repeatedly assert that the growing evangelical impulse encouraged participation in both church and civic life� However the link of these two ideologies is tenuous and made by the editors rather than drawn from the text� The editors simply assert that during the revolutionary crisis, a pre-existing millennial tradition initiated a reciprocal dynamic that brought about the merger of otherwise incompatible forms of knowledge-production - enlightenment rationalism and faith-based belief - in what the editors call providential design� But it is the editors’ assertion of the dominance of the system of belief over the order of knowledge that is the true agent of the historical causation that they assign providential exceptionalism� Each discourse the editors have designated as a representative instance of American exceptionalism is the historically specific result of an analytically separable historical interaction and negotiation� But their usage of American exceptionalism as an encompassing ontological disposition flattens out specific issues and elides materially specific political and economic antagonisms - between pre-millennialists and post-millennialists, between Whigs and Federalists, between advocates of the Confederacy and supporters of the Union, between Marxian socialists and laissez-faire republicans - as if exceptionalism rather than slavery or state’s rights or self-determination or salvation was the issue under contestation� Instead of propounding a series of potentially falsifiable historical claims, the editors turn historically specific facts into evidence of American exceptionalism’s transhistorical reach as the ruling norm� But when it becomes sufficiently elastic to accommodate seemingly every moment in United States history, the term American exceptionalism loses any semblance of analytic rigor. The self-confirming circularity of the editors’ discourse overdetermines their every representation and allows them imperially to define, reflect upon and decide the meaning of nearly every event under their provenance� In passages like the following, the editors conflate the historical controversies over specific issues as if they are indistinguishable from the doctrinal Spectres of Anglo-American Exceptionalism 11 exceptionalist rhetoric through which the editors assign them significance: “These shifts in emphasis on what aspects of the creed of national exceptionalism were actually still within reach, and what aspects of the creed were merely instrumental or expedient, mark an important evolution in exceptionalist discourse� (xxxv-xxxvi, Volume One) By the time its readers arrive at the conclusion of the four volumes, they discover that the editors have installed Anglo-American imperial exceptionalism in a providential relationship to the entirety of the United States historical past and future� According to the editors, American exceptionalism is, was, and what Americans will have made British imperial processes� Anglo-American Imperial Exceptionalism In my remarks thus far, I have shown how Anglo-American imperialism has supplied the editors with the perspective from which they interpreted the providential role American Exceptionalism played throughout the history of the United States� In the 4th volume, entitled Anti-Exceptionalism, the editors proceed to demonstrate how Anglo-American imperialism also provides the standpoint from which to criticize the Americanness of American exceptionalism� All the contributors to Anti-exceptionalism require some version of Anglo- American imperialism to articulate their opposition to American exceptionalism� The British journalist Henry Bragg expresses this critique most cogently in his 1869 “Challenge…to American Progress and American Democracy” when he casts American exceptionalism as a mystification of the United States continuation of British imperialism by other means: “it fights, it gets into debt much like a monarchy, labor there as here gets into contests with capital… bribery in elections there as here there the original owners of the soil - the Mohawks, Seminole or Cheyenne is dealt with just as we have treated the Hindoos�” (xvi, Volume 4) In my 2009 book, I described American exceptionalism as a fantasy through which United States citizens misrecognized the nation’s transposition from a democratic republic to a global imperial power� The editors of American Exceptionalism have proposed an alternative understanding� In their view, American exceptionalism facilitates a misrecognition of the Britishness of (Anglo)American imperialism� But if the editors’ descriptions as well as their criticisms of American exceptionalism presuppose the hegemony of Anglo-American imperialism, their project makes all the more urgent the need for a truly transnational, and critically comparativist analysis of national imperial exceptionalisms so as to expose the limitations of that hegemony� 12 d onald e. P ease Works Cited Giles, Paul, “Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality�” American Literary History 18, no� 3 (2006): 648� Pease, Donald E�, “Exceptionalism�” In Key Words for American Cultural Studies, ed� Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 108-12� New York: New York University Press, 2007� -----, The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 -----, “American Studies after American Exceptionalism? Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalisms�” In Globalizing American Studies, ed� Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 47-83� Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010�