Learning Empire from the Americans: Michel Chevalier's 1833 US Tour

Time: 3:30 to 5:00pm

Location: Hagerty Library L33, Drexel University

Accounts of the USA in the 19th century often draw on Tocqueville's Democracy in America. But a neglected French voyager's report from the same moment gives a different view of the early republic. Michel Chevalier was an engineer trained at the Ecole Polytechnique and a former leader of the utopian Saint-Simonian movement; he would go on to become a leading political economist, champion of free trade and of French colonial expansion. In 1833 he toured the USA. In contrast to Tocqueville, Chevalier's Letters on North America defined the USA not by virtuous farmers and small-town democracy, but by the coordinated creation of a vast commercial and technical infrastructure. This "Tocqueville of Technology" introduced his readers to a new mode of imperial power, grounded in relentless industry and exclusionary liberalism, preparing to redefine the continent and the globe. Chevalier's prophetic observations underline the need to revise isolationist histories of US science and technology and include them within comparative studies of empire.