| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Imperial Executive in America: Sir Edmund Andros, 1637–1714. By Mary Lou Lustig. (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. 339 pp. $59.50, ISBN 0-8386-3936-4.)

Finally, Edmund Andros has his own book. Vilified for centuries by many Americans, New Englanders in particular, Andros here has his sympathetic biographer. From Denmark to Barbados, Maine, and Albany, Andros worked the edges of the emerging English empire and stayed in close touch with the center. Notorious in colonial historiography as an arbitrary authoritarian, Andros appears in the pages of Mary Lou Lustig's book as a loyal and skilled imperial administrator. His significance to colonial American history is unquestionable. We all owe Lustig a great debt for bringing together the disparate elements of Andros's story under one cover.

A book-length study of Andros's career (there are no personal papers to permit the more intimate understanding of his personality that Lustig desires) is a marvelous opportunity to explore the character of the English empire under the later Stuarts. Drawing on the latest work on everything from Iroquois diplomacy to the Popish Plot crisis, the able historian could use Andros's remarkable career to show what worked and what did not in these formative years of colonial American history. After all, Andros, as the loyal servant of several different English monarchs, was willing to try to implement anything they told him to.

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