Book Review

Telling a single, coherent story about "colonial America" is a notoriously difficult task. Shall we do it in terms of the thirteen separate provincial polities that declared independence? Why not add Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Barbados, and Jamaica? Shall we talk in terms of a pre-quel to the American Revolution? That would be teleological in any case, and the objection is all the more powerful given that even well into the period of strife with Britain hardly any colonials wanted independence. Do we discuss the rise of American freedom? Only at the price of ignoring the intertwined rise of a very powerful system of slavery.	1
If we fall back on images of would-be civilizers pushing westward into the wilderness, we ignore the fact that "Indian Country" was not wilderness at all to the people who possessed it. We also ignore the fact that by mid-eighteenth century those people east of the Mississippi River were effectively surrounded, under pressure from the French in Quebec and Louisiana and from Spaniards in Florida and the southwest as well as from the East Coast "British" settlements.	2
We might look at "the colonies" as a neo-Europe, replicating the institutions and patterns of the Old World. That surely was the goal of many colonists, and to a large measure they succeeded. But where in the British Isles was there enslavement of any sort, let alone an economy founded on plantation production of staple crops for a distant market? The possessions and life patterns of a major Chesapeake tobacco grower might resemble those of an English country gentleman, but the similitude was superficial. Beveled as they are to resemble the stone blocks of an English manor house, the wooden clapboards that clad Mount Vernon provide a perfect metaphor both for colonial mimesis and for colonial difference.	3
Small wonder that Woodrow Wilson dismissed the colonial era in terms of ten thousand facts to be memorized for his doctoral examination and then forgotten. Small wonder that most textbooks on the period do no better. Perhaps Fernand Braudel got it best when he characterized the British colonies as "a mosaic of a hundred different colours: modern, archaic, primitive, or curious mixtures of all these" (Civilization and Capitalism, 1985, vol. III, p. 426). However brilliant his insight, Braudel was working from the barest of sources.	4
Jon Butler's Becoming America rests not on a handful of secondary readings, but rather on mastery of an enormous scholarly literature. By itself, such a reading might lead only to a textbook-style series of glosses, one monograph after another, and there are some passages where Butler's debt is patent. But like Braudel (and unlike so many other writers who have attempted the large problem of making sense of the British colonial epoch), Butler has an integrating vision. He eschews Braudel's invocation of archaic and primitive as serious explanatory categories. For him the most striking quality of East Coast colonial life is how "modern" it was.	5
That might seem like an excuse to return to a story of successful white colonists, leaving Europe behind not only in spatial but also in cultural and political terms and realizing their own destiny. Butler is far too well read and intelligent to brook any such nonsense. Nor does he fall into the trap of tokenism, with a nod to dispossessed Native people, a bow to enslaved Africans, and on to the Great American Story, Volume I. On the contrary, his pages are peopled with the women and men who might have received a bare nod as "outsiders" in previous synthetic accounts, if they were mentioned at all. The result is a very rich account. Butler attempts to describe a uniquely American social formation that included all sorts of people whose lives interpenetrated but who all experienced one central phenomenon: modernity.	. . .