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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative
93.4  
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March, 2007
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Book Review



Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America. Ed. by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. viii, 386 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8018- 8251-6.)

In this collection, Robert Olwell and Alan Tully offer a sampling of new work on the interplay between "centrifugal" forces that caused colonial societies to adapt to their particular environments and contexts and "centripetal" forces that pulled them back toward the metropolis (p. 11). Of course, that formulation evokes the model of colonial development articulated by Jack P. Greene in Pursuits of Happiness (1988), a model this volume seeks to refine and complicate. Indeed, the collection bristles with challenges to prevailing assumptions about the extent of regional differentiation in early America and includes several efforts to rethink the nature of the imperial system. 1
      The volume opens with essays on the adaptation of English settlers to the ecological, economic, and emotional realities of the New World. S. Max Edelston writes suggestively about the ways South Carolina planters understood both the people they enslaved and the natural world they sought to master (both seemed at once fruitful and dangerous). David C. Littlefield examines the split identities and cultural affiliations of eighteenth- century Anglo-African writers. Bradford J. Wood evokes the isolation felt by cultivated elites in the scattered settlements of the lower Cape Fear region. Robert M. Weir examines colonial efforts to manage the finite resources of timber, fish, and game. . . .

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