Bernard Bailyn. The Barbarous Years. The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
This is a very readable synthetic history of the early colonial period in what became the United States of America. Bailyn is building on his work for the earlier "Voyagers to the West" which also examined the process of "peopling" British North America, but he also has another goal, which is implicit in the title. He wants to strip away some of the bucolic romance that later generations imposed on their memories of the first few decades of settlement along the Atlantic coast. This was, Bailyn wants the reader to understand, a bloody and violent period of conflict not only between settlers and American Indians--he refers to a "race war"--but also between different groups of settlers, between and within colonies, and between classes and races within colonies.
In order to make his case, Bailyn first begins with a chapter on "The Americans", which is not a general consideration of American Indians but rather the specific tribes living in the area under consideration--the Cheseapeake to New England. (The histories of Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and Georgia are outside the parameters of this study). Respectful without succumbing to idealization, this chapter considers both the general characteristics of American Indian culture in the region as well as the specific circumstances of the time and place. It is a tricky thing to simultaneously consider Indian cultural values of balance and reciprocity while at the same time acknowledging the particular circumstances of history and contingency, and Bailyn manages to do both nicely.
The bulk of the book is taken up by the middle section, which considers the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, New Amsterdam/New Sweden/New York, and New England (the different colonies within New England do receive particular treatment) in light of the circumstances of their development and the origins of the European settlers (it is worth noting that African-American slavery, while not unknown in this period, was a much smaller institution than it would be later in the colonial period). Bailyn has clearly done his research and his command of sources covering both sides of the Atlantic, and a willingness to dig into the details of Dutch politics, Puritan theological disputes, and numerous other conflicts on both sides of the Atlantic is impressive.
I'm not so sure the book adds up to much more than a survey, however. The theme of constant strife and "barbarism" gets stretched pretty far, as it's hard to consider tension in New York between the Dutch majority and the English ruling minority on the same level as armed conflict between Maryland and Virginia militias, or for that matter as being anywhere equivalent to the racial warfare between European settlers and Indian natives. And while the final section/chapter, "The British Americans" is an excellent summary of the changes wrought by and in the first handful of generations of colonists in British, at the end Bailyn somewhat abruptly shifts to an Atlantic point of view. This is not entirely unwarranted--as noted, Bailyn recognizes that in order to understand the earlier colonists we must consider where they came from--but other than providing a neat symmetry with the first section (even as the Eastern Indians were tied to a larger Native world to the south and west, the colonists were tied to a larger world across the Atlantic and in the Caribbean), the shift to this theme in a book which explicitly seeks to deal with the "barbarism" within that colonial world seems either tacked-on or underdeveloped.
However, this book is an excellent introduction to a wealth of research and literature on a era which is too often overlooked or considered piecemeal and out of context.
