American Colonies

Alan Taylor. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Alan Taylor's book was to be the projected first volume of a series, "The Penguin History of the United States." Given this start, and the fact that it was to be edited by Eric Foner, it's a shame that the series seems to have been shelved. We can be grateful that we got this volume, though--Taylor has written an excellent synthesis history of "colonial America" re-imagined in ways which that venerable descriptor fails to signify in the popular imagination.

The first hint to where Taylor takes the reader is in the title--this is a history of multiple colonies, rather than the singular tale of the British North Ameican colonies spreading westward across an empty, formless continent. Taylor tells a more nuanced story--one which is aimed at the general reader, the college undergraduate, and ultimately anyone interested in rethinking old assumptions about the colonial period.

The story begins with the American Indians of North America, and then moves across the Atlantic to consider Western Europe on the verge of the colonial era. In this second chapter, we meet many "colonizers" including of course Christopher Columbus--but from there rather than move quickly to the British story, first the reader gets a chapter each on New Spain and New France.

The point here is to look at the colonies as they were, not as precursors to what the reader knows is coming. The second section of the book is a detailed look at the British colonies in North America, including the West Indies. A consistent theme of this section is the dynamic nature of Indian societies during this period--American Indian societies were constantly adjusting to, and affecting, the rise of Euro-American settlement. This section also gives consideration to the colonies of New Netherlands and even New Sweden.

The final section, "Empires", traces the story of how these different colonial empires collided and contested the North American continent between them--while never losing sight of the Indians who were caught in the crossfire, or the African-American slaves who were compelled to play a role in this story. The book ends far away from the Atlantic seaboard, on the islands of Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest. Taylor spreads a wide net, and the result is a very readable reconsideration of the story of "colonial America."