The Promise of Empire

three disjunctions" Pauline Maier describes in her provocative essay: that between colonial and Revolutionary historiographies. She is entirely correct, it seems to me, in noting that disjunction. She is also right in suggesting that the disjunction is much more than a chronological or narrowly thematic one: it rests on a longstanding methodological divide between social historians and historians of the institutions of government. The former are engaged by the longue durée of the colonial era; the latter, by the histoire événementielle of the comparatively brief Revolutionary era. My own sense, though, is that far from growing more pronounced, this disjunction seems to be weakening. That's the good news. The bad news, from Maier 's perspective, is that this weakening does not involve a return to the history of government. That is, to my knowledge, most young historians continue to avoid questions about the origins of the Constitution or the political thought of the founders or the power of the Continental Congress. Similarly, there has been very little recent work on the apparatus of colonial government—whether the New England towns or the colonial assemblies. Exactly why historians have lost interest in the history of governing institutions is obviously connected to contemporary debates about exactly what it is we mean by politics. And among academic historians, the answer has hedged toward a capacious definition in which politics happens in the bedroom, in the coffee house, on the street, on ships at sea, and at the geographical fringes ofEuropean dominion. This trend has seemed to me driven less by any coherent agenda than by momentum (scholars have never gotten jobs by ignoring academic fashions) and an appetite for novelty. Of course, one historian's appetite for the new is another's exhaustion with the old. My sense is that the current fascination with narrative—much of which falls under the rubric