Reviewed by Timothy J. Shannon | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Timothy J. Shannon | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Timothy J. Shannon, Gettysburg College

The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830. By Elizabeth Mancke. New World in the Atlantic World. New York: Routledge, 2005. 214 pages. $85.00 (cloth), $27.95 (paper). At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America. By Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall. Regional Perspectives on Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 210 pages. $17.95 (paper).
The discriminating reader may wonder if these two books have enough in common to merit a shared review. Elizabeth Mancke does not address the backcountry as a place or category of analysis in her comparative town study, and Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall scarcely mention northern New England or Nova Scotia in their overview of British North America's hinterlands. Both works, however, are concerned with the formation of colonial societies on the periphery of the British Atlantic Empire. Each work takes a fresh approach to its subject matter, and each struggles with problems of scale and the applicability of their conclusions. Mancke puts two towns—Machias, Massachusetts, and Liverpool, Nova Scotia—under a microscope and ends up with a finely detailed argument of limited relevance elsewhere. Hinderaker and Mancall step back to examine their subject as broadly as possible, stretching the definition of the backcountry so far that it loses usefulness as a regional designation. Together the books raise questions about the nature and location of an empire's periphery.	1
Mancke's purpose in comparing Machias and Liverpool is to uncover the point of divergence between political cultures in the United States and Canada. She has selected fitting subjects for her analysis. Both towns were established by New Englanders in the early 1760s and had similar economies. By immersing herself in the local sources for each community, Mancke traces the factors that led them to develop along different paths despite their common origins. Machias organized and governed itself like earlier generations of New England towns and identified wholeheartedly with the American side in the American War of Independence. Liverpool, on the other hand, departed significantly from New England precedents in its organization and government and, like the rest of Nova Scotia, remained loyal to the Crown during the Revolution.	2
According to Mancke the roots of this split are not to be found in the revolutionary experiences of these two communities but rather in changing imperial policies that the Crown and Parliament had imposed on American colonies decades earlier. The most significant was the Crown's effort to roll back local self-government in its colonial possessions by refusing to grant corporate town charters that conveyed political rights and responsibilities along with grants of land. The payoff of Mancke's research comes in her careful reconstruction of how this reorientation in colonial administration affected land ownership, militia service, and religious institutions in these two communities, one of which clung tenaciously to its seventeenth-century New England heritage whereas the other adapted to the realities of centralized power in a more recently established colony.	3
Mancke tackles her subject with the rigor of a social scientist but the vocabulary of one, too. The phrasing of the research question, for example, is unneccessarily opaque: "Was developmental convergence normative throughout British America, or was there also developmental divergence" (2)? Likewise, the discussion of political relationships within and outside these towns would be clearer without reliance on references to "horizontal linkages" and "vertical ones" (26). The local institutions of Machias and Liverpool are rendered clearly, yet their human inhabitants are for the most part ghostly presences, slipping in and out of the narrative without emerging as distinct or engaging personalities.	. . .

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