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More Means Different: Quantifying American Exceptionalism

Historians of the United States have been accusing each other of parochialism for at least forty-five years.' Lately we have turned our wish to be free of local blinders into a positive desire to acquire global vision: in the last decade, the Journal of American History has devoted four issues entirely to transnational concerns.2 This effort comprises what, a decade ago, JAH editor David Thelen called the "internationalization of American history," and it signifies, as one of his contributors put it, an effort to move "beyond [American] exceptionalism."3 By contrast, as world historian Michael Adas recently noted, "other than to lament the myopia and provincialism of their American audiences," world and comparative historians have had little to say about the United States.4 At some level of consciousness, historians all know the reasons for both trends. The United States would not be what it now is without the migration of capital, labor, ideas, and cultures from overseas: therefore we need to know world history to understand American history. At the same time, because the U.S. has received disproportionately more money and more migrants than any other country it occupies a unique place in the world's recent historywhich makes it troublesome fodder for global comparisons. The great question for everyone who wants to move beyond exceptionalism is whether it made any difference to American political or cultural development that the U.S. should have had more exposure to international capital and labor: does more mean different? Jeffrey G. Williamson and his co-authors Timothy J. Hatton and Kevin H. O'Rourke have in two volumes of cliometric synthesis