Early America

Once in a while, I hit the jackpot with my random browsing in public libraries. Recently, I chanced upon a book called The American Colonies by Alan Taylor, published in 2001.

This is a remarkable book, shorn of the usual triumphalism of books on American history.  As the author says in the Introduction:

Until the 1960s most American historians assumed  that "the colonists" meant English-speaking men confined to the Atlantic seaboard. Women were there as inconsequential helpmates. Indians were primitive peoples beyond the pale: unchanging objects of colonists' fears and aggressions. African slaves appeared as unfortunate aberrations in a fundamentally upbeat story of Englishmen becoming freer and more prosperous in an open land. The other colonies of rival empires -- Dutch, French, and Spanish -- were a hazy backdrop of hostility: backward threats to English America that alone spawned the American Revolution and the United States. ...

That narrow colonial cast and stage made for the fundamentally happy  story of "American exceptionalism": the making of a new people, in a new land ... The story persists in our national culture and popular history because it offers an appealing simplification .... Moreover, not all of colonial America was English. Many native peoples encountered colonizers not as westward-bound  Englishmen, but as Spanish heading north from Mexico, as Russians coming eastward from Siberia, or as French probing the Great Lakes and Mississippi river ...

To divide the  peoples into three, into the racial and cultural categories of European, African, and Indian, only begins to reveal the human diversity of the colonial encounter. For each embraced an enormous variety of cultures and languages, For example, the eighteenth-century "British" colonists included substantial numbers of Welsh, Scots, Irish, Scots-Irish, Germans, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and French Huguenots -- as well as the usual English suspects. .. Until lumped together in colonial slavery, the African conscripts varied even more widely in their ethnic identities, languages, and cultures. A very partial list of West African peoples includes Ashanti, Fulani, Ibo, Malagasy, Mandingo, and Yoruba. In general, their languages differed from one another more than English did from French or Spanish. Most diverse of all were the so-called Indians. Divided into hundreds of linguistically distinct peoples, the natives did not know that they were a common category until named and treated so by the colonial invaders.

 This is already promising, given the willingness to present the complexity of the colonial encounter, which spanned the centuries starting with the voyages of Columbus in 1492, to at least the American revolution in 1776, if not the Latin American wars of independence in the early nineteenth century. Every chapter in the book  bristles with insights, and is aided by superb maps. The story of European expansionism in the 15th century is laid out with penetrating detail.

Popular literature reinforced the European longing for a new trade route to the fabled riches of the Far East. During the second half of the fifteenth century, the development of the printing press immensely lowered the cost and increased the volume of book publishing. ... By the end of the century, Europeans possessed twenty million copies of printed books. Readers especially delighted in vivid accounts of the wealth and power of India and China. These included the real travels of Marco Polo, an Italian merchant,as well as the pure fictions attributed to John de Mandeville. 

The whole book is a great example of excellent history writing, including the wonderfully chosen maps. I recommend it highly. Read it, enjoy it, and spread the word.