The Age of Reconstitution: Negotiating Statehood and Citizenship in the 1780s

This historiographical essay explores the last thirty years of scholarship on the United States during the 1780s, focusing especially on international commerce, westward expansion, and debates over citizenship. It argues that, rather than taking the federal constitution as a hard break and a starting-point for the political history of the early republic, we should instead situate the 1780s as an "age of reconstitution," during which crucial dynamics and contradictions were established at both state and continental level that continued to shape the development of the early republic. Historians in the last thirty years have broadly moved away from the study of republican and liberal ideas towards the practicalities of state-formation and transnational relationship-building. The lens of citizenship, however, might help us reconsider the relationship between constructing social order in the new republic and ensuring its survival in a hostile world.