The Genesis of America : US Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815

Interprets American nationalism as an external demarcation process and early US foreign policy as a vital instrument of nation-building. It introduces a new perspective on the ideological foundations of American foreign relations and the origins and nature of American nationalism, making it relevant to all historians of the early republic.

The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.