| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jon Butler. Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. x, 324. $27.95.

What then was this American Revolution, this new start in the New World? 1

Jon Butler traces the remarkable evolution between 1680 and 1770 of the British mainland colonies. He shows how the initially distinct societies, economies, polities, and cultures developed along convergent lines to produce an ensemble that its politically conscious inhabitants could recognize as their "America." They were by then part of "the first modern society" (p. 7). And they were on the brink of "the first modern revolution, the model for the French Revolution of 1789, and subsequently for so many nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions" (p. 227). 2

The plan of this book is simple, strong, and effective. Under five big chapter headings—"Peoples," "Economy," "Politics," "Things Material," and "Things Spiritual"—Butler reviews comprehensively the great changes that transformed the American colonies from rather primitive, still very English, offshoot societies into a burgeoning, ethnically plural modern society in 1770. . . .

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