Reviewed by John Wood Sweet | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by John Wood Sweet | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

John Wood Sweet, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 356 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
The military, religious, and political upheavals that rocked the British Isles from 1640 to 1661 also "transformed" (210) England's American colonies, Carla Gardina Pestana argues in this ambitious analysis of transatlantic politics. As the settler population almost quadrupled, the colonies became less beholden to great proprietors, more conflicted about their allegiance and subjugation to the mother country, more diverse and tolerant in matters of religion, more devoted to English liberties, and more reliant on unfree labor. Thus, the revolution "gave shape to the English Atlantic" (1).	1
Encompassing all the colonies from Newfoundland to Barbados, Pestana focuses on colonial political elites and their relations with English authorities. Grounding her analysis in a wide reading of contemporary political tracts and Anglo-American political history, she demonstrates with considerable nuance that these elites were themselves often divided by political factions, economic interests, and religious differences. Some of the most sweeping assertions seem ill-considered: for instance, the claim that the restored King Charles II continued Parliament's hostility to proprietary colonial governments does not comport with his granting, within a few years, much of the North American seaboard to the Duke of York, William Penn, and the Carolina proprietors. But this claim is not a major focus. Pestana explores three major themes that transcended regional differences: battles over loyalty and allegiance, conflicts over religion and toleration, and political debates about English liberty in a colonial world increasingly dominated by servitude and slavery.	2
As the conflict in England escalated, and as many settlers developed strong loyalties, most local colonial governments bent over backward to avoid having to take sides. Elites were afraid of choosing the losing side, unwilling to stop trading with ships in the opposing camp, and worried that civil unrest might threaten their economic interests and political power. The beheading of Charles I caused even puritan New England to blanch and prompted six plantation colonies to proclaim their loyalty to Charles II and even briefly to take up arms in his defense. Only after Parliament sent warships, which forced Barbados into submitting to its authority, did the other rebellious colonies fall into line. In Pestana's judgment a cause and a consequence of these rebellions was Parliament's bold new colonial policy adopted in 1650 and designed to remake the American colonies "into a centrally governed and commercially integrated empire" (157). The novelty of this policy, though, has long been debated: Pestana's view was anticipated by Charles H. McIlwain in the 1920s and rebutted by Charles Andrews a decade later. Andrews dismissed the Commonwealth's claims to authority over the colonies as empty "bombast" and argued that colonial trade policies dated back to the 1620s and reflected common European assumptions about the subordinate status of colonies.¹	. . .

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