Reviews of Books

When Sydney V. James passed away in 1993, he left significant portions of his scholarly projects unfinished. Dedicated colleagues have since brought that work to completion. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, a colleague at the University of Iowa, where James was long-time chair of the History Department, edited John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island, 1638–1750 (1999). Sheila Skemp, a former student of James's, and Bruce Daniels, a former colleague, have now published another of his manuscripts under the title Colonial Metamorphoses. Something of a companion volume to his earlier work, Colonial Rhode Island (1975), Colonial Metamorphoses examines a specific aspect of early Rhode Island's political and religious history: the development of "institutions."	1
James defines institutions comprehensively as "the ways in which human beings act together on a routine or recurring basis and also the organizations they form to conduct this action" (p. 2). Colonial Metamorphoses focuses more tightly on colonial and town governments, ecclesiastical bodies, and a few smaller private organizations. The twelve chapters trace the origins and development of these institutions, moving from the settlement of the original four English towns in the 1630s and 1640s to the chartering of lotteries and corporations (the College of Rhode Island, Newport's Redwood Library, and Providence's Charitable Baptist Society, for example) by the colonial assembly in the last thirty years of the colonial era.	2
The book is dense with information culled from more than 100 years of town and colony records. James and his editors have given readers access to this wide-ranging and often chaotic documentary record through clear chapter titles and headings and in an admirable index. Thus the volume provides not only a provocative overview of one colony's development but also potent mini-essays on the origins of particular institutions, such as local militias, lotteries, and church-sponsored schools, that had counterparts in every other colony.	3
James identifies four eras in the rocky development of Rhode Island's early institutions. (1) 1636–1658: Unplanned settlement of diverse and scattered communities by religious outcasts from neighboring colonies intent on "soul liberty" and their particular idea of a good community. (2) 1658–1696: A period of near-anarchy, when neither colonial government nor ecclesiastical authority could provide stability, owing to the upheaval of land disputes, invasion during King Philip's War, and political restructuring during the Dominion of New England. (3) 1696–1738: A period of restoration, when colonial government at last emerged as an effective central control, thanks to new backing by royal authority in England as well as by rising mercantile interests in Newport. (4) 1738 to the Revolution: A period of elaboration and intensification of authority in civil and ecclesiastical institutions, observed most notably in the establishment of organizations and associations. These four eras, sketched in the introduction but not amplified elsewhere, make sense of the disorderly arc of Rhode Island's early history and would have provided an excellent organizational scheme for the book.	4
In James's analysis, Rhode Island's institutions "metamorphosed" slowly during the colonial era from fragile associations of people bound together by "pursuit of a good community" (p. 246) to organizations bound together by shared control of land and resources and limited by "explicit rules" (p. 243) that were crafted by "consent of the active participants" (p. 242). This particular pattern of institutional development, James argues, was not unique. Although New Hampshire was most similar, with its four original towns founded by independent religious dissidents, all New England towns shifted focus rapidly from the communitarian ideals of the founders to the proprietary concerns of land control, as John Frederick Martin and others have shown.	. . .