| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America. By Richard R. Beeman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 366p. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index. $39.95.)

The theme that most concerns this ambitious book (its title notwithstanding) is the colonial roots of American democracy. Beeman presents his work as a social history companion to Edmund S. Morgan's Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988); whereas Morgan explored the growth of democracy from the vantage point of ideas, Beeman concentrates on behaviors. Although he sees the gradual movement from "traditional" to more "modern" democratic modes of political behavior as taking place in all of Britain's mainland North American colonies, Beeman is especially eager to highlight regional variations, distinguishing among the political cultures of not only different colonies but also the "settled, urban, and frontier areas" of particular colonies (p. 7). As a result of this focus, the argument proceeds less as a chronological analysis of developments relating to democratic growth and more as a taxonomy of different colonial political cultures.

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