A Tribute to John Murrin — Master of Essays

John Murrin, who passed away a few days ago, was surely one of the most influential historians of early America over a long career that spanned half a century. I have never met John Murrin, but after reading much of his scholarship this last year, it feels as though I’ve met him, and dare I say even know him a little. To be frank, I have been at work writing an essay that argues against one of Murrin’s most famous and polemical pieces. As I sought to take down Murrin’s argument—initially a bit too eagerly as I am at times wont to do—I discovered one of the most inspiring intellectuals in the field.

Murrin felt most at home with the essay format. Indeed, alongside Joyce Appleby, he was probably the most effective essayist in the field. Though I read a few of Murrin’s essays over the years, as I read them in sequence for the first time, I was reminded why the essay is my favorite format. Ideally read in one session, the essay allows the author to lay out before the reader a unified, digestible argument. To me this has always been the most compelling form of intellectual exercise, to wrestle in one sitting with an argument (preferably polemical and counter-intuitive)—the author on the one side, and the reader on the other.

For this to occur, however, the author must go out on a limb, and perhaps more importantly, convince the reader to join them. Here again Murrin was at his best, especially as he navigated the rather conservative and balkanized field of early American history. Even as he offered daring intellectual exercises, such as comparing the American Revolution to the Civil War, or borrowing heavily from historical events and scholarship outside the nominal topic of the essay, he reassured his fellow scholars by demonstrating outstanding command both of far-flung historiographies and the ins-and-outs of the historical events he was considering.

Take for example Murrin’s most influential provocation, his so-called “Anglicization thesis” that recast our understanding of the decades leading up to the revolutionary ferment of the 1760s. Writing against the intuition that over decades of “salutary neglect” American colonists developed an identity apart from their fellow Britons, he argued that in fact during the half century preceding the Revolution, colonists grew ever more oriented towards their Britishness. Furthermore, Murrin stressed that in many ways the individual colonies in British North America shared more affinity with the metropolitan center than with most other colonies. Thus the Revolution was what he called a “countercyclical event” that “ran against the prevailing integrative tendencies of the century.”(1)

To pull this off, Murrin needed in one essay to contend with numerous potential counterarguments that could be leveled at him from very different fields, each with robust and lively historiographies. And indeed to make his case, he marshaled in very concise and compelling language evidence from a wide array of fields, demonstrating command of the republican synthesis, demographic and economic history, legal history, religious history, British imperial history, Atlantic history, as well as the idiosyncratic histories of each colony. Weaving intricate knowledge of the historiographies and of the minute details of events on the ground, Murrin laid out an almost hermetic argument that proved very hard to challenge.(2)

Perhaps even more audaciously, Murrin engaged in intellectual exercises that few historians, especially early Americanists, have been comfortable with. In two different essays Murrin experimented with counterfactual scenarios to examine the significance of the First Great Awakening and the French cession of Canada to the British at the end of the Seven Years’ War, respectively. In effect, he asked if there would have been a Revolution and if it would have succeeded had these two events not occurred.(3) Showing an astounding level of knowledge about, and comfort with, early American history, Murrin pulled it off—reaching nuanced and insightful conclusions, that appeared neither heavy handed, nor too subtle to be substantive.

Similarly Murrin felt at ease with the comparative method, which often runs against the instincts of historians bent on highlighting the contingent nature of the past and averse to anything that smacks of anachronism. In his essays he often employed various comparative frameworks, including two essays devoted wholly to comparative analyses: one essay compared the settlements in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, while another compared the Civill War with the American Revolution, as well as early American nationalism with sectional identities.(4)

Above all else, Murrin showed a passion for historical thinking that refused confinement to field, methodology, or school. For while most of his famous contemporaries became associated with one historiographical tradition, usually remaining safely ensconced within the school of history that they had hitched their carts to, Murrin navigated between schools and often worked to reconcile them in ways that drew from all traditions. Thus, even as neo-whig intellectual historians sparred with neo-progressive social historians and liberal historians argued with republican historians, Murrin sought to benefit from all their insights. Though more of an intellectual historian, who often wrote in the vein of his republican-synthesis contemporaries, he at times took to social neo-progressive methods and topics explicitly and effectively.(5) In this he anticipated much of the recent historiography of the era that in recent years has increasingly reconciled these, once at odds, camps.

Thus, even as I argued with Murrin and though I have never met him, over this last year I have found an increasing affinity to his style and intellectual persona. Where once I had felt uneasy and a bit anxious about arguing against Murrin, as I came to know him, I grew more comfortable with my attempts to refute one of his more famous arguments. For if there was one historian I have come across over the years that seemed ever eager to entertain new ideas and that seemed genuinely elated by fresh and counter-intuitive approaches, it was Murrin.

For those interested in Murrin’s scholarship I highly recommend the recent collection of some of his most famous essays – Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic, eds. John Murrin and Andrew Shankman (New York, 2018)

1. Murrin, “1776: The Countercyclical Revolution,” in Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, eds. Michael Morrison, Melinda Zook, and John Murrin (New York, 2004), 76.

2. Ibid.

3. Murrin, “The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy,” Reviews in American History 1:3 (Sep., 1973), 307-318 and “No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculation, Reviews in American History 11:2 (Jun., 1983), 161-171

4. John Murrin, “The Great Inversion or Court versus Country: A Comparison of Revolutionary Settlement in England (1688-1722) and America (1776-1816), in Three British Revolutions, 1640, 1688, 1776, ed. J.G.A Pocock (Princeton, 1980), 378-453; Murrin, “War, Revolution, and Nation-Making: The American Revolution versus the Civil War,” in Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic, eds. John Murrin and Andrew Shankman (New York, 2018), 343-381.

5. For example, in Murrin and Gary Kornblith, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class” in Beyond the Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred Young (DeKalb, Ill., 1993), 27-79.