Reviews of Books

When English colonists arrived in New England in the seventeenth century, they entered into a complex, multifaceted process of intercultural negotiations with the native inhabitants. Initially dependent on the Indians for their survival, English colonists found themselves in a strange environment, forced to alter their plans to fit the realities of life in the New World. Very quickly, however, the English moved to establish a colonial system that could promote trade, secure control of land, and impose political sovereignty. To achieve each of these goals, the English believed, the Indians must be brought to "civility." A primary target of this campaign was Indian domestic life. Native practices such as premarital sex, polygyny, and easy divorce challenged the English ideal of monogamous, patriarchal marriage and threatened to destabilize the orderly communities central to the Puritan agenda. In Colonial Intimacies, Ann Marie Plane examines the inextricably intertwined relationship between marital alliances and the establishment of a colonial system in southeastern New England, an area that fell under several jurisdictions--Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard--in the seventeenth century. As an institution with religious, legal, political, sexual, and social significance, marriage proved to be an ideal site for negotiating the cultural battles of early America.	1
Marriage, Plane argues, "not only reflected the influence of European colonialism in southeastern New England but actually shaped the progress of colonial dominance, helping to make and remake the region's cultures" (pp. 11–12). Shedding light on such a private institution is no easy task, and it is made even more difficult by biased European accounts of Indian relationships. Through imaginative use of her sources and a willingness to speculate from careful conjecture, Plane succeeds in this endeavor: marriage, she reveals, was a highly flexible vehicle for English efforts to alter Indian culture in the interests of colonialism. At the same time, Indians appropriated English institutions to their own ends. Through the language and legal ceremonies of European marriage, they sought to preserve native identity.	2
Plane begins with the various roles marriage served in pre-Contact Indian society. At the most basic level, it functioned as a means of facilitating social and biological reproduction. In the strongly hierarchical, patrilineal societies typical of southeastern New England, marriage was also an important instrument of political and economic power. Elite men might marry several women at the same time for the sake of forging alliances and displaying high status. Such practices contradicted English norms. Although European marriages did vary considerably in practice, Plane points out, only one ideal type was sanctioned by church and state. Algonquians had a much more flexible set of standards, recognizing several distinct types of marriage, each with its own set of rules and expectations. Trapped in their cultural categories, European observers missed the complexities of the Indian way of life.	. . .