AHR Forum

Comment: Generational Turns

NATHAN PERL-ROSENTHAL

One generation goes, another comes,

But the earth remains the same forever
Ecclesiastes 1:4

THE TURN IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE TURN. Just as early modern Europeans hailed a new
king and in the same breath mourned his predecessor, the essays in this forum an-
nounce the turns rebirth as they pronounce its epitaph. The authors offer compelling
arguments for rejecting turn talk and the idea of scholarly generations on which it
is based. As they observe, turns are often described in an almost religious language
of conversion experiences and about-faces. This language reifies what came before
and suggests that it has been decisively supplanted by another way of writing and
thinking. The authors rightly reject this practice as more apt to foreclose thinking
than to stimulate it.1 At the same time, in somewhat contradictory fashion, they
suggest that there are troubling developments occurring now in their respective areas
of specialization. Wilder observes the formation of a disciplinary consensus that
aims to blunt the force of innovative work on French imperialism. Cook and Surkis
record the declarations by senior scholars that the cultural and linguistic turns are
over. Ghosh notes a strand within the new imperial history that seems to ignore
postcolonial historiography.
The authors rejection of turn talk and their concerns about current scholarship
are both rooted in the particular notion of historical generations that they embrace.
In their articles, the contributors imagine generations as existing primarily in se-
quence, with each rising generation supplanting or superseding the earlier one.2 This
concept of generations has a long history: it was a common trope in Weimar Ger-
many, and it is essentially the one that is peddled to us on a daily basis by Madison
Avenue, with its continual refocusing on the pleasures and preferences of young

I am grateful to the following individuals for discussions of this essay and/or comments on draft versions
of it: David Armitage, David A. Bell, Konstantin Dierks, Philip J. Ethington, Eric Foner, Peter Mancall,
Jessica Marglin, Samuel Moyn, David N. Myers, Robert A. Schneider, and especially Vanessa R.
Schwartz.
1 For the foreclosure effect, see Gary Wilders and Judith Surkiss contributions to this forum.
2 Wilder does not state this point explicitly, but his account of Laurent Duboiss work expresses most
strongly of all the idea that new approaches (in his case, an Atlantic-centered approach to the history
of the French Revolution) must displace earlier approaches.

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 Generational Turns 805

consumers.3 It is also embedded in the way that the senior scholars whom the authors
cite as historiographic masters have described their own scholarly trajectories, link-
ing their embrace of various turns to landmarks in their own autobiographies.4 If turn
talk is indeed nothing more than a way to declare that something new has arrived
to displace the old, then the contributors to this forum are right to dismiss it as barren
and unhelpful.
However, the account of historiographic generation that underpins both the au-
thors rejection of turn talk and their anxieties about the future strikes me as some-
what counterintuitive and unsatisfying. There is another dimension to the familial
metaphor of the generation that can be elided by focusing too narrowly on the drama
of supersession. I am referring, of course, to the deep continuities between the old
and the young that talk of generations implies. In its strongest formulation, this way
of seeing generations denies the very possibility of supersession. One group of schol-
ars must eventually give way to another in the natural course of events. But the rising
group is formed by the passing one and is inculcated with their values and preoc-
cupations. The passage from one to the other is at least as much a moment of con-
tinuity as of rupture.5 Indeed, the forum essays themselves embody this kind of non-
supersessionist generational shift. The authors willingly employ the distinctive
technical vocabulary of the cultural and linguistic turns, so that there is a genetic
similarity in language and style of argumentation between their essays here and the
writings of the earlier generation whom they critique.6
The contributors to this forum, tenured and training students in their own right,
are now the older generation to a younger cohort, of which I am a member. That
relationship offers the opportunity to reexamine the balance between continuity and
disjuncture in scholarly generations. Reflecting on this new cohort, composed as it
is of individuals who have not yet published their first books, means looking at un-
published dissertations. I will focus here on around twenty drawn from my areas of
specialization, early modern Western Europe and North America. These selections,
while necessarily personal and idiosyncratic, cover a wide range of regions and topics.
Together they show a strong shift among younger scholars toward novel objects of
study, the adoption of a shared mode of analysis based on practice and process, and
a return to intensive archival research. These shifts are rooted in the particular in-
tellectual and political context of the cohorts training, but they do not mark a cae-
sura with the previous generation. Indeed, they suggest that a revised language of
turns still has value as a way to articulate and analyze historiographic change.

3 See Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass., 2010),

4851; and Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York,
1994), 168169.
4 For examples of this, see especially William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and

Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 40 45; Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the
History of Society (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), 9093. The process is well discussed in Cooks essay.
5 Two remarkable works that reflect on this process of intergenerational linkage in very different

ways are Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, Wash., 1982);
and David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989).
6 The phrase historiographic turn is itself one of these markers: in ordinary speech, the noun

turn is rarely used with adjectives that do not denote speed or direction (e.g., fast, right).

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 806 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

THREE TOPICS OR TYPES OF OBJECTS have attracted the interest of many younger early
modernists: histories of communication, transportation, and material culture.7
Scholarship on communications draws on the increasingly rich history of the book,
but applies its methods far beyond the codex and the classic questions of cultural
history.8 The history of transportation has evolved from a topic of almost purely
antiquarian interest into a vibrant theme of new research in a wide variety of geo-
graphic and temporal areas. In the early modern period, its most prominent man-
ifestation has been a renewal of maritime history.9 Though these historians are ask-
ing questions drawn from outside the traditional history of transportation (especially
labor, economic, and environmental history), they have rethought those problems
in light of the centrality of transportation and its practicalities to the sea-centered

7 A fifth major area that has developed in recent years is the history of political economy. This

includes such important work as Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of
Political Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Jose R. Torre, The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper
Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 17801820 (London, 2007); Seth Rock-
man, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009); Paul Cheney,
Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); John Shov-
lin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca,
N.Y., 2006); and Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 16201720
(Cambridge, Mass., 2011). Because its growth has been particularly precocious in the early modern
period and its practitioners have mostly published monographs already, it is visible to the wider pro-
fession, so I do not focus on it here.
8 On the early modern history of the book, see especially Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground

of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary
France (New York, 1995); Roger Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France dancien regime (Paris,
1987); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450
1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before
the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn., 2010). In the Anglo-American context, see, among others, Richard
D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 17001865 (New York,
1989); Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the
New Nation, 17901840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010); Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book:
Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, 2006).
The theme of communications is important in a number of recent dissertations: Kenneth Bernard Loi-
selle, New but true friends: Freemasonry and the Culture of Male Friendship in Eighteenth-Century
France (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2007); Jeremy Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Question:
Academic Prize Competitions (concours academiques) and the Francophone Republic of Letters, 1670
1794 (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008); Noah Chaim Millstone, Plots Commonwealth:
The Circulation of Manuscripts and the Practice of Politics in Early Stuart England, c. 1614 1640
(Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2011); Alejandra Dubcovsky, Connected Worlds: Communication
Networks in the Colonial Southeast, 15131740 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011);
Jessica M. Lepler, 1837: Anatomy of a Panic (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2007); and Joseph M.
Adelman, The Business of Politics: Printers and the Emergence of Political Communications Networks,
17651776 (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2010). My own dissertation, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal,
Corresponding Republics: Letter Writing and Patriot Organizing in the Atlantic Revolutions, circa
17601792 (Columbia University, 2011), fits into this category as well. See also Jeremy Caradonna, The
Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France, 16701794 (Ithaca,
N.Y., 2012).
9 See Niklas Erik Frykman, The Wooden World Turned Upside Down: Naval Mutinies in the Age

of Atlantic Revolution (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2010); Brian J. Rouleau, With Sails
Whitening Every Sea: Commercial Expansion, Maritime Empire, and the American Seafaring Com-
munity Abroad, 17801870 (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010); Denver Alexander
Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2004); Charles R. Foy, Ports of Slavery, Ports of Freedom: How
Slaves Used Northern Seaports Maritime Industry to Escape and Create Trans-Atlantic Identities,
17131783 (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2008); and Rachel Tamar Van, Free Trade and Family
Values: Kinship Networks and the Culture of Early American Capitalism (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Uni-
versity, 2011)

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early modern world.10 Younger scholars interest in material culture has been
spurred by work in two areas, the history of science and visual studies, that have
moved rapidly from the margins to the center over the past generation. Much of the
newest scholarship focuses on extra-European science, the environment, and knowl-
edge-making through visual and material sources.11
In working on these topics, the younger scholars all devote considerable effort
to answering what one of them, Noah Millstone, calls the pragmatic questions:
How does it work? How does it happen?12 This can mean reconstructing the complex
Atlantic and global processes that turned commodities into finished decorative ob-
jects, as in work by Zara Anishanslin and Molly Warsh. Or it may entail painstaking
description of print, oral, and manuscript communication networks, as in work by
Joseph Adelman, Alejandra Dubcovsky, and Millstone. It can even involve tracing
the evanescent movements of maritime people, as Charles Foy and Niklas Frykman
do. Each of these studies and others like them rest on a substantial base of archival
research: there is no other way to gain an understanding of how, exactly, such sprawl-
ing, intricate systems of transportation, communication, and consumption func-
tioned.
The forum authors offer sidelong acknowledgments of this new scholarship and
express concerns about where the turn-in-progress is headed. Some believe that it
represents a new empiricism or new nominalism spreading through the historical
profession. Younger scholars seem to be taking positivist stances toward their
sources and in some cases even believe themselves to be reconstructing the objective
reality of the past. Wilder, Surkis, and Ghosh cast this development in superses-
sionist terms, as a rejection of the theoretical sophistication and focus on meaning
that was characteristic of scholarship inflected by the linguistic and cultural turns.13

10 The important scholarship that influenced this new work includes Peter Linebaugh and Marcus

Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolu-
tionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000); Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex
County, Massachusetts, 16301850 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); Daniel Vickers and Vince Walsh, Young
Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, Conn., 2005); Margaret S. Creighton
and Lisa Norling, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 17001920
(Baltimore, 1996); Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery,
17201870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Alain Cabantous, La mer et les hommes: Pecheurs et matelots
dunkerquois de Louis XIV a la Revolution (Dunkerque, 1980); Cabantous, Dix mille marins face a locean:
Les populations maritimes de Dunkerque au Havre aux XVII e et XVIII e siecles (vers 16601794): Etude
sociale (Paris, 1991); Greg Dening, Mr. Blighs Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty
(Cambridge, 1992).
11 See especially Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in a Silk Dress: The Hidden Histories of

Aesthetic Commodities in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Ph.D. diss., University of
Delaware, 2009); Molly A. Warsh, Adorning Empire: A History of the Early Modern Pearl Trade,
14921688 (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009); Sarah Easterby-Smith, Cultivating Com-
merce: Connoisseurship, Botany and the Plant Trade in London and Paris, c. 1760c. 1815 (D.Phil. diss.,
University of Warwick, 2009); Kathleen S. Murphy, Portals of Nature: Networks of Natural History in
Eighteenth-Century British Plantation Societies (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008); and
Ryan Jones, Empire of Extinction: Nature and Natural History in the Russian North Pacific, 1739
1799 (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008).
12 Millstone, Plots Commonwealth, 36. See also Van, Free Trade and Family Values, 14, for

another key how question.

13 Wilder and Surkis emphasize the role played in this process by older scholars. These older cohorts

have flattened and schematized the cultural and linguistic turns in order to reject a putative extreme
constructivist position. The end result of this process, both suggest, is a movement toward a positivist
social scientific framework.

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 808 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Ghosh is the most inclined to celebrate what she takes to be a potentially salutary
archival turn, yet even she is careful to warn her readers against uncritical pos-
itivism.
However, a supersessionist view of the new scholarship, at least in the early mod-
ern period, seems mistaken to me. The emergent work does not reject the preoc-
cupations and insights of the previous generations. It executes instead two subtle but
crucial shifts of emphasis in subject matter and approach. First, while the emergent
scholars emphasize the study of acts or behaviors rather than discursive texts and
statements, they do so not to reject the study of meaning but in order to give a
different account of the relationship between acts and culture. The languages of
practice, process, and networks that they each employ focus our attention on the
power of habitual action and symbol-poor practices to create meaning. Second, in
part because of the central role it gives to process and practice, this scholarship
emphasizes the physical and social factors that constrained how early modern people
made meaning in their everyday lives.
These younger scholars write about material practices, the practice of poli-
tics, and cultural practice.14 In one sense, practice for them is simply the an-
tonym of principle or pure intellection: it signals their emphasis on analyzing culture
through behavior. In a second sense, it indicates that they are talking in particular
about repeated or habitual action. On a deeper level, they and many others use the
term to denote what lies between pure constructivism on one side and hard-core
methodological realism or materialism on the other. It seems to imply a belief that
there is a mutually constitutive relationship between the social and the cultural.15
Equally important is what the younger scholars do not mean to signal by using the
term: a desire to enter into the intricate debates over practice that have grown up
around the work of French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu.16
Practice offers a language well suited to discussing how meaning-making oc-
curred through ordinary, habitual behavior. There is nothing novel in the thought
that people make meaning through everyday life. This was a key insight of the An-
nales school nearly a century ago, and in various ways it has been a mainstay of social
and cultural history ever since. In this respect, the emergent early modern scholars
show deep continuities with the generations of cultural and social historians who
came before them. Yet for cultural historians since the 1970s, who rejected the gen-
eralizing tendency of the classic history of mentalites, exceptional and extraordinary
cases or moments were often taken to be the best route into the recesses of historical
actors minds. The forum authors mention several exemplary interpretations in this
mode, including Robert Darntons cat massacre, Natalie Zemon Daviss Martin
Guerre, and Carlo Ginsburgs Menocchio. This model has been widely influential,
though not unquestioned: the explanatory power of exceptional cases spurred im-
14 Quotations from Murphy, Portals of Nature, 19; Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in a Silk

Dress, 32; Millstone, Plots Commonwealth, i.

15 For this formulation, see Carla Hesse, The New Empiricism, Cultural and Social History 1, no.

2 (2004): 201207, here 206.

16 For examples of this sidestepping of the Bourdieu-centered debates, see Millstone, Plots Com-

monwealth, 3536; and Easterby-Smith, Cultivating Commerce, 75. For capsule statements of some
of these debates, see the essays in Craig J. Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, eds.,
Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, 1993); and David L. Swartz and Vera L. Zolberg, eds., After
Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration (Dordrecht, 2004).

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mediate debate, and a number of scholars partly moved away from it toward histories
of ordinary occurrences.17
The early modernists of this younger generation are distinguished from earlier
cohorts by their fulleven exclusiveembrace of the everyday as a source of mean-
ing. Networks of print and manuscript circulation, which are central to the projects
of several of the emerging scholars working on political culture, are notable because
they performed their political work over time rather than in a single, dramatic mo-
ment.18 Recent work in maritime history has similarly turned sharply away from
exceptional cases, such as the Bligh mutiny, and focused increasingly on common,
often repeated, practices: impressment, foreign travel, naval service.19 In histories
of material culture, much of the new work has focused on chains of commodity
production and exchange rather than the instant of purchase or consumption. This
approach draws the eye away from the moment of exception, the instance of mean-
ing-making at purchase, and toward the slow accretion of meanings as an object is
made and traded from hand to hand.20
The everyday practices at the center of these recent dissertations also seem, in
many cases, to be surprisingly poor in symbolic meaning. This marks another im-
portant shift in emphasis from the previous generation of scholars. The classic cul-
tural histories and the theorists on whom they drew, from Geertz to Foucault and
Derrida, privileged the symbolic or semiotic dimension of culture. In practice, this
meant that their analyses of actions and events gave pride of place to discovering
the symbolic meanings encoded into actions. Such meanings were of course hidden,
requiring deep excavation to make them yield their secrets. This method gave cul-
tural history the form that we usually associate with it: close, deep readings of texts,
richly contextualized. It also worked best with certain kinds of sources, notably ones
that employed complex categories or rich description, which lent themselves to such
analyses.
The younger scholars by no means reject close reading, but it is counterbalanced
in their work by attention to how even seemingly symbol-poor practices can create
meaning by instantiating social and intellectual relationships. Jeremy Caradonnas
study of academic prize competitions in eighteenth-century France argues that the
very act of participating in the competitions helped large numbers of individuals
17 On the idea of mentalites and its relationship to cultural history, see especially Dominick LaCapra,

Is Everyone a Mentalite Case? Transference and the Culture Concept, History and Theory 23, no. 3
(October 1984): 296311; and Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French
Cultural History (New York, 1985), 282283 nn. 12. One could adduce many examples of the move back
to cultural histories of ordinary behavior: one example that stands out is the wave of studies of con-
sumption, for which in the late eighteenth century see especially T. H. Breen, Ideology and Nationalism
on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising, Journal of American
History 84, no. 1 (1997): 1339; Breen, Baubles of Britain: The American and Consumer Revolutions
of the Eighteenth Century, Past and Present, no. 119 (May 1988): 73104; John Brewer and Roy Porter,
eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993); and Colin Jones, The Great Chain of
Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolu-
tion, American Historical Review 101, no. 1 (February 1996): 13 40.
18 See especially Millstone, Plots Commonwealth; and Adelman, The Business of Politics.
19 Brunsman, The Evil Necessity; Rouleau, With Sails Whitening Every Sea; Frykman, The

Wooden World Turned Upside Down. Frykman focuses on naval mutinies, which might appear to be
exceptional rather than ordinary, but a central part of his argument is that these events were in fact quite
habitual in the period he is considering and rooted in the ordinary life of sailors (the labor process) itself.
20 See Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in a Silk Dress; and Warsh, Adorning Empire.

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become stakeholders in the Enlightenment. While not uninterested in the content

of the prize submissions, Caradonna sees meaning (in this case, enlightened-ness)
as being created more by the act of taking part than by any particular ideological
position that a writer assumed.21 Sarah Easterby-Smith makes a somewhat similar
point when she traces how the circulation of plants in wartime created cosmopol-
itanism among botanists. Maintaining international connections and continuing to
circulate live plants and other botanica helped commercial nurserymen demonstrate
their identities as scientific (and thus cosmopolitan) actors.22
The use of networks as a concept and a category of analysis is the clearest man-
ifestation of the younger scholars interest in the cultural content of relatively sym-
bol-poor, everyday actions. Networks are the products of routine or even rote action,
a type of behavior that by design lacks conceptual complexity and ambiguity.23 Study-
ing networks, moreover, often means having to depend on sources such as population
records, manuscript catalogues, or business letters that are designed to avoid just the
kind of richness and complexity that cultural historians have sought. Adelman, Dub-
covsky, Foy, Millstone, Rachel Van, and Kathleen Murphy, working on topics rang-
ing from American printers to enslaved sailors to East Asian merchants, all feature
the term network in either their title or their chapter headings. This is just part
of a broader, vertiginous rise of network talk throughout the entire profession: a
keyword search for network within abstracts in history and allied disciplines, via
Dissertation Abstracts Online, yields 3,705 individual dissertations. Of those dis-
sertations, 48 are from before 1981; 497 are from 19811990; and 1,304 date from
19912000. A majority, 1,856 of the total, are from 20012012 alone.24
Alongside their emphasis on habitual acts, the second innovative element of the
younger scholars work is their heightened awareness of the physical and material
constraints that shaped how early modern people fashioned themselves and their
cultural worlds. This awareness is in part a result of the kinds of topics that have
drawn their attention. Transportation in this period was highly sensitive to time,
weather, and geography, among other factors. Communications were only as good
as the medium of transmissionwhich in the early modern period, without tele-
communications, often came down to transportation as well. These factors did not
make meaning all by themselves, but the younger scholars emphasize how profoundly
they affected the ways in which early modern people assigned meanings to acts.
Jessica Leplers work shows how the inefficiencies of early modern information net-
works helped to spawn financial panics in early-nineteenth-century America. (In her
work, indeed, the networks created to facilitate communications turn out to be a
straitjacket in times of crisis.)25 Kenneth Loiselle notes how important the speed and
frequency of correspondence were in creating the social meaning of letters in early

21 Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Question, esp. 1213.

22 Easterby-Smith, Cultivating Commerce, 173235, esp. 213222.
23 For a useful discussion of new research on the science of habitual action, see Charles Duhigg, The

Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York, 2012), chap. 1.
24 Accessed March 9, 2012. The ratios by decade are similar in the more tightly focused America:

History and Life database. This database, which covers only American history, goes back to 1974 and
has coverage through 2009. The results are 35 from before 1981; 86 from 19811990; 104 from 1991
2000; and 119 from 20012009.
25 Lepler, 1837, chaps. 23, esp. 60, 113114.

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modern Europe.26 Ryan Jones notes that ecological factors (in his case, in the
North Pacific) can help to explain processes as diverse as human patterns of set-
tlement and European ideas about empire.27
Restraints imposed by the physical world, however, are less significant to many
of these scholars than the ways in which historical actors became stuck in webs of
their own making. In a general sense, this is a very old idea, but its prominence in
the interpretations of the younger scholars is striking. The scholarly and financial
networks that Lepler, Easterby-Smith, and Murphy discuss all created closed com-
munities that had the effect of limiting the intellectual and conceptual flexibility of
those who participated in them.28 Brian Rouleaus work on American seamen abroad
suggests that racialized thinking proved hard to escape even for those who traveled
the farthest.29 The new generation of scholars reminds us that habits are hard to
shake, and that their power often stretches well beyond their usefulness. The spe-
cifics differ from field to field, but in each one there is a similar newfound respect
for the limitations that historical actors and communities inadvertently create for
themselves.
There are echoes of materialism and structuralism in the power that younger
scholars attribute to social and physical constraints. The search for underlying pat-
terns of action recalls the structuralist drive to discover frameworks of human
thought and behavior. Foregrounding material constraints effects a diminution of
individual agency similar to that of structuralist and materialist accounts: boats sink
or float, and the drowned do not engage in discourse. Yet the new scholarship es-
chews the ahistorical, mechanistic formulations with which structuralism has come
to be associated. The vocabulary of practice implies that social habits were a struc-
ture that constrained historical actors volition, but those structures are seen as the
product of the actors own efforts. Similarly, the new scholarship does not resurrect
the discredited conceptual framework by which material realities are bedrock and
cultural construction is a light spume playing on the rocks.30

WHY IS IT THAT SO MANY YOUNGER early modernists are turning in a similar direction?
The question may turn out to be mal posee. If we follow the lead of the new early
modern scholarship, it makes more sense to offer a descriptive account of the turn,
emphasizing the how rather than the why. Since we are dealing with a turn still
under way, moreover, it is far easier to observe that something is happening than to
explain why it is occurring. We lack the distance we would need to offer a complete
genealogy of the turn-in-progress. Let me nonetheless venture two guesses, one in-
ternalist and one externalist, about why so many younger scholars are making a

26 Loiselle, New but true friends, chap. 3.

27 Jones, Empire of Extinction, 18.
28 See citations above and Murphy, Portals of Nature, chap. 4, esp. 192195.
29 Rouleau, With Sails Whitening Every Sea, chap. 3.
30 Claude Levi-Strauss is usually cited as the key structuralist interested in universal frameworks; see,

e.g., John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida (Oxford, 1979), 4 5, 47 48.
For a good discussion of the problem of generality in structural analyses, see Lucien Goldmann, Struc-
ture: Human Reality and Methodological Concept, in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donatio, eds.,
The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, 1970), 98124, here 108110.

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 812 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

particular turn. Internally, within early modern historiography, many of the most
discussed themes during the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century
were described primarily in geographic terms: the rise of Atlantic history, a resur-
gence of Mediterranean studies, the beginnings of global and oceanic history, even
the history of borderlands.31 This way of thinking about a field, which grouped people
and things by place, naturally led younger scholars to be curious about what kinds
of ligatures bound together the individuals and objects so collected. Hence the shift
toward themes that emphasized practices and processes of connectionand the
study of networks in particular.
This cohort also had longer-term forces acting on it that may help to explain why
it has proven receptive to the how and to histories of process and practice. These
are scholars who entered graduate school between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s;
most were born in the mid- to late 1970s or early 1980s. That means, in turn, that
they were among the first to come of age in a post-Reagan, post-Thatcher, post-
Soviet world, in which the dreams of revolution from both right and left (both so-
cialist and Reaganite) had been somewhat deflated. As these future scholars were
entering high school or college, they found themselves in an era of small-bore prag-
matism about social and political problems. That atmosphere seems to be reflected
in their relatively greater interest in concrete questions about how things hap-
pened.32
Recognizing the intellectual and social milieu in which the new generation of
scholars was formed, however, raises a question about whether the current turn is
a historiographic moment as much as it is a generational shift. (Though they share
a temporal frame, the metaphor of a moment is more inclusive than the idea of
a generation, suggesting as it does that scholars at many stages and of many ages are
adopting a new approach at the same time.) For instance, some of the most important
new work that employs networks as a category has been done by senior scholars.33
By the same token, histories of visual and material culture were well established
before the rising generation of early modernists had entered graduate school.34 Yet

31 See, among many others, Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge,

Mass., 2005); David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 15001800 (New
York, 2002); Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c.
18001900 (Berkeley, Calif., 2010); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study
of Mediterranean History (Malden, Mass., 2000); AHR Conversation: On Transnational History, Amer-
ican Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 14411464. This geographic turn has also expressed
itself in the form of numerous recent studies of cartography, including Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West
and the Contest for Empire, 17131763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011); Neil Safier, Measuring the New World:
Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008); D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They
Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago, 2000); and Jordana Dym and Karl
Offen, eds., Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago, 2011).
32 I do not mean to suggest that this pragmatism was admirable or virtuous. It proved disastrous for

crucial social programs and political institutions, from poverty relief to unions. Nor does nineties prag-
matism characterize the personal politics of the scholars I discuss here. Another possible interpretation
is that the interest in networks and processes reflects the declining power of social class as an organizing
principle in both society and scholarship during those same years. For further discussion of the envi-
ronment in which the younger cohort of scholars was reared, see the discussion in Daniel T. Rodgers,
Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), chap. 6.
33 This includes David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and

Taste (New Haven, Conn., 2009); and Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Lautre et le frere: Letranger et la franc-
maconnerie en France au XVIII e siecle (Paris, 1998).
34 See, among many others, Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley,

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 Generational Turns 813

it is very possible for a turn to be simultaneously a moment and a generational shift

ifas seems to be the case herethe impact of the new approach is most strongly
felt among one cohort of scholars. For those scholars, the moment becomes one
of their defining generational experiences.35
What, then, of historiographic generation and the turn? At least in scholarship
on early modern Europe and North America, neither one is as much a caesura as
it might seem at first glance. Generational change is real, but it is often a gentle and
even enriching process marked by substantial continuities rather than an abrupt dis-
missal of what came before. The new generation of scholars who are now entering
the profession are turning in new directions, to be sure, but they are not rejecting
the questions and preoccupations of those who trained them. The language of turns,
recast within this generational model, has much to offer. It helps to name and to
demarcate historiographical changeand so helps drive it forwardwhile also giv-
ing us a language for managing the passage of generations.
For the turn to be a useful concept, however, it ought to be redefined to embody
two specific qualities. First, as Cook suggests at the end of his essay, we need to
employ the language of turns prospectively, to describe and debate change that is
ongoing or just beginning. Used retrospectively, as the contributors to this forum
show, it risks becoming nothing more than a way of warehousing supposedly out-
dated concepts. Used prospectively, as a tool to bring into sharper focus trends that
are under way or in the process of emerging, it can organize fields and help them
advance. Second, turning has to be framed within a non-supersessionist account of
generational change: as a process of reinvention and reformulation of what came
before, not a wholesale replacement of it. The turn imagined as a sharp about-face
can lead only to dead ends, to intellectually barren reversals and re-reversals. Turn-
ing conceived of as a more gradual process, however, offers us a much-needed lan-
guage for intergenerational conversation within the profession. Used in this fashion,
that is to say prospectively and dialogically, the vocabulary of turning is worth saving.
We should appropriate the idea rather than reject it. That, after all, is what new
generations have always done.

Calif., 1984), chap. 3; Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman
Empire (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific
Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Robert Blair St. George, Material Life in America,
16001860 (Boston, 1988).
35 Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 14 16. I am grateful to

Samuel Moyn for drawing my attention to this book.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Assistant Professor of History at the University of

Southern California. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2011
with a dissertation on epistolarity and elite political organizing in the American,
Dutch, and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century. He is currently
writing a book about Atlantic maritime cosmopolitanism in the revolutionary
era.

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