The American Divergence, The Modern Western World, and the Paradigmatization of History

Abstract

This chapter is an invitation to rethink some narratives about the emergence of the modern Western world – restricted to Europe in the beginning and then expanded gradually to encompass the United States of America – and the ways in which this process has been explained through historical accounts at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an attempt to return to a societal process that was left aside when what was happening in a ‘borderline’, liminal time and space became the status quo. More to the point, the focus here is on some aspects of what was regarded as America, the ‘New World’, before and after the modern ruptures that occurred in the liminal ‘age of revolutions’ (Wagner, 1994; Armitage and Subrahmanyam, 2010). It is argued that America went through a process of bifurcation, or divergence, of North and South, at exactly the point when certain historical events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries started to be seen as inaugurating the modern times. In this process, many of the links which were used to make the New World as a whole a significant idea started to change in the early nineteenth century, became strongly separated out in the second half of this same century, to become irrec-oncilable after the first decades of the twentieth century.