Reviews of Books

"What then is the American, this new man?" Jon Butler takes up the oft-quoted question by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and answers it with a striking new portrayal of early American history. Writing in a deceptively simple style, Butler builds creatively on complex historiographical debates and masterfully synthesizes vast amounts of specialized research, both by himself and by others. For Butler, as for Crèvecoeur, ethnic diversity and widespread material prosperity defined America's European population already well before the Revolution, and Butler predictably expands on Crèvecoeur's Eurocentric vision to take stock of the changing conditions of Indians and Africans as well as of women and white men at different levels of society. His dominant historical theme is that modern America first took shape in the period 1680–1760. The decades of colonial history before 1680 he regards as too unique and unformed to provide much precedent for what happened later on. As for the late eighteenth century, the American Revolution pales in significance next to the enormous developments that preceded it. In this perspective, 1776 marks neither the culmination of colonial history nor the beginning of a new America, but rather an inconclusive transition between the transformational eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.	1
"Becoming America" is for Butler virtuously synonymous with "becoming modern." His perspective on modernity is thus critical to his view of colonial history, underlying the great strengths and occasional weaknesses of the analysis. Succinctly defining major characteristics of modern America, he itemizes five that derive from the colonial period: ethnic and national diversity; religious pluralism; an international market economy; large-scale participatory politics; and a penchant for power, authority, and control. With the exception of the last, these are conveyed as positive qualities, and Butler's account of the major developments that occurred in the American colonies between 1680 and 1760 is mostly a story of progress. His portrait of the American colonies highlights, in particular, the expansion and diversification of the economy, the rise of popular partisan politics, and, above all, the rich variety of peoples and cultures. Multiplicity emerges as the dominant and for the most part optimistic theme of the book.	2
There is, however, a dark side to the story, what Butler calls "modernity's capacity and inclination to control human lives" (p. 3). Here Butler departs from his benign view of colonial progress and underscores the great tragedies of early America. Unlike most historians who have viewed the colonial period as the beginnings of American democracy and economic expansion, he simultaneously stresses the institutionalization of African-American slavery and the deaths and displacements of Native Americans. Far from relegating these events to a distant past, he insists that the systematic authoritarianism and brutality of the eighteenth century were just as indicative of the future of the United States (and, by implication, of the modern world generally) as diversity and prosperity. Both the good and the bad traits that were manifest by 1760 became still more pronounced later on, supplemented by the rapid urbanization and technological innovation of the nineteenth century. Acknowledging that America's modernity was not "fully developed" (p. 2) in the colonial period and that the nation would become "more 'modern' " (p. 6) after the Revolution, Butler nonetheless sees this later process as the continuation of a well-established trend. It was the colonial period that gave the modern United States, as he puts it, "much of its essential identity" (p. 6).	. . .