Book Review

Volume 1 of this series is organized around a conventional view of the British Empire in the founding period. Most of the articles deal with single regions, and, in the case of North America, these regions are narrowly defined administrative units. This editorial strategy results in both gains and losses.	1
The gains are impressive. Simply put, this is an extremely useful volume, and it will be the principal reference work for many years to come. The crisp and apparently effortless summaries of existing scholarship reveal an extraordinarily high level of meticulousness. Facts and figures, names and positions are presented in their contexts, and, especially at this high level of accuracy, that is no mean feat. If one needs to know just what was at stake in the Keithian Schism, to chart the growth of the tobacco or sugar economy, or to find out the size and composition of populations at key moments, this is the place to look. The charts and maps that accompany many chapters convey hard-to-find information in very accessible forms. Graduate students preparing for exams will surely consider the volumes indispensable.	2
This first volume faces a conceptual problem unique in the series: it must define what (and when) empire is and how we should talk about it. It assumes that empire is a given, an assumption that is jarringly accentuated by the consistent capitalization of the word empire. The only question is where and when empire (or Empire) will be instituted and what it will look like. But clearly this was a period in which British people were groping toward empire as one possibility among many. As David Armitage's chapter makes clear, Britons would not have applied the term to overseas territories until late in the seventeenth century. There is no set of relationships that can clearly be labeled imperial; some chapters present a system of trade, others a growing system of settlement.	. . .