Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University

Readers familiar with Gloria Main's many essays will relish this sparkling book. A synthetic account of New England development from 1600 to 1775, it gives serious attention not only to English colonists but to the people whom Main, following the anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon, calls "the Ninnimissinouk" (p. 8). The book is organized as a sandwich. Three chapters at the beginning and two at the end narrate the demographic and economic story, assigning separate chapters to the English and Indian versions. The chapters in between abandon chronology to describe cycles of reproduction and family. Although the relationship between the narrative ends and the ethnographic middle is not always clear, there is no question about the overall thesis of the book.	1
As Main writes in the introduction to chapter 8, "Transitions: The Narragansetts," "Families and their farms are the means by which the English took New England and how their descendants would take upstate New York, the Old Northwest, and the Oregon Territory." This emphasis on the biological rather than the intentional nature of the English conquest is apparent in the prose itself. By the end of the eighteenth century, English colonists "had spread over the land like the incoming tide, gradual but inexorable as their numbers multiplied. For more than a decade, the English had poured forth off the ships, onto the beaches, moving up every waterway and along every coast. When the ships ceased coming in the early 1640s, the force of their increase scarcely faltered, as their children matured and themselves had children. The intruder population burgeoned and swelled in great generational pulses, surging relentlessly, lapping further into the interior in ever-widening half-circles, rising like the flooding sea to sweep over the land, engulfing native cornfields and beaver meadows, clearing the lowlands and toppling the trees" (p. 188).	2
Culture played a part. But it was not Puritan discipline alone or a penchant for hard work that led to success. Other Puritan settlements had fallen before Spanish resistance or succumbed to environmental adversity. New England colonists succeeded because they were able to adapt to the harsh conditions of a landscape that even before contact had inhibited indigenous development. "Armed with a reproductively superior family system and an arsenal of infectious diseases, they and their descendants swarmed and hived, colonizing the region, and the Ninnimissinouk, by biological force" (p. 189).	3
The English advantages included the possession of domesticated livestock. Animal husbandry and the gradual development of specialized agriculture both provided a means of support and allowed English women "a more sedentary lifestyle than was possible for the women of the Ninnimissinouk" (p. 189). English wives bore a child every other year until menopause, whereas Indian women spaced their children far apart, a necessity in a society that required mobility and that relied on women's agricultural labor for subsistence. In contrast, male investment in farming relieved English women of the heavy burdens of field labor and portage and provided animal protein for the sustenance of newly weaned children.	. . .