From Colonials to Provincials

Ned C. Landsman. From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680-1760. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, 1997.

Landsman's book is a brief intellectual history of a period which he acknowledges has been described as a "Death Valley" in terms of interest. On the surface, this is an understandable bias--the era was not marked by the tumult, change, and conflict of the early decades in American colonial history; and of course it is followed by the much more dynamic and dramatic years leading up to the American Revolution. 

However, he argues that while the era might have been devoid of obvious drama and clear narrative interest, there was a great deal "going on" in the intellectual life of the colonies. When the era began, the colonists were isolated, both geographically and culturally, from the center of English culture. When it concludes, they are British subjects, intimately connected to--and involved in--the cultural and intellectual life of the Empire. This was a complex process that occurred on many different levels; Landsman is concerned with the intellectual changes which fed, directed, and helped create this conceptual shift.

Central to his argument is the meaning of the term "provincial", which here has a less negative or condescending meaning than it largely does in a contemporary context. Landsman is speaking of the "provinces" which developed in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union which, among other things, served to create a 'British' context in which subjects outside of the "metropolitan" (London, of course, but also the main centers of English culture and commerce) lived, and from which they conceptualized their place in this new political, social, and cultural sphere. It wasn't merely the North American (and Caribbean) colonists who were "provincials"--the title also applied to the Scots, Protestants in Ulster, and even some more remote parts of England proper.

The Scots are particularly important here, as the links between the Scottish and American colonial intelligentsia were frequent and robust--writers, theologians, officials, philosophers, etc. from both sides were in frequent contact with each other, through letter writing, literature, business, and personal relationships. Scotland was a poor country with a sizable educated professional class in need of opportunity; after the 1707 Union many of them increasingly sought those opportunities in the New World. 

Even as "provincials" were struggling--and often succeeding--to create enhanced roles for themselves in the newly-created "British" polity, other intellectual trends were in the works which would determine much of the climate in which they worked. Contrary to earlier beliefs that the Enlightenment was a narrowly elite intellectual event, confined to the Continent and largely to France, Landsman points out that historians today have a broader idea of what the Enlightenment was, where it happened, and who participated in it. In a chapter on the "republic of letters", he illustrates how a broad sector the literate public (and while literacy for this period is hard to measure, it was certainly relatively widespread) participated in the Enlightenment by engaging in "conversations" on a wide variety of questions moral, scientific, and so on. By focusing not just on what people were writing but also on what they were reading--and what their reactions to what they read were, when possible--Landsman is able to illustrate that there was indeed an American Enlightenment.

Aside from written culture--philosophy, science, history, even the relatively-new genre of the novel--the other arena in which provincial culture was worked out was in religion. Landsman goes over seemingly well-trod ground--the Great Awakening, the schisms in Puritan culture, the debate between Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncey, etc.--but puts this religious and theological history in a broader context. Parallel with the growth of Enlightenment thinking, the religious changes and controversies of this period helped develop a new culture in which a more self-consciously individualistic mode of thought developed. Provincials began to see themselves in new ways, and become more aware of their status as British subjects and their place within the larger imperial order.

This book has a lot to say about how colonial Americans learned to think about "liberty" in ways which would, ultimately, lead to revolution and independence.