Book Review

Thomas Scanlan's argument for "a reading of the colonial period that attempts to render an account of both the European origins of colonial expansion and its specifically American consequences" is not as new as he announces. His assertion that until recently scholars of the early colonial period in the Euro-American past have failed to integrate the European/English perspective with the American exceptionalist position is bound to astonish the historians of British America, many of whom have produced a whole body of historiography embracing the transplantation-transformation stance on early American society and culture. Edmund S. Morgan, T. H. Breen, James Horn, J. P. Greene, David H. Fischer, Bernard Sheehan, Micha Rozbicki, to mention only a few, have all worked with the premise that the early colonial process involved both the European inheritance and the American experience.

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What really is new in Scanlan's attempt at the historical understanding of the early modern phenomenon of English colonialism is the method. He set out to analyze the discursive operations in the allegorical texts addressing the problem of the Native Americans by several Protestant authors variously involved in colonizing America. That interpretive exercise was to prove the existence of an inextricable connection between colonialism and nationalism in contemporary English culture.

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