Reviewed by Steven Sarson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1

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Reviewed by Steven Sarson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Steven Sarson, University of Wales, Swansea

A Companion to Colonial America. Edited by Daniel Vickers. Blackwell Companions to American History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 576 pages. $99.95 (cloth), $39.95 (paper).
Collectors of Blackwell's Companions will instantly notice how different Daniel Vickers's volume is from its sibling, Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, A Companion to the American Revolution. Partly because the latter began life as The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, but also because it addresses clearly defined events, it bulges with factual information. With introductions to scores of topics organized under the categories of Context, Themes and Events, External Effects, Internal Developments, with ten maps, a chronology, and numbering almost eight hundred pages (the earlier version of the encyclopedia had biographies too), it seemingly supplies everything readers need to know about the Revolution. By contrast, A Companion to Colonial America is organized around twenty-three thematic essays, all in turn organized historiographically, and more closely resembles another Greene and Pole editorial collaboration, Colonial British America.¹ The colonial companion, therefore, has more interpretative depth but less historical breadth than its revolutionary counterpart, raising questions about what one wants from a reference book.	1
The volume's themes are well chosen and include age-old and obvious topics: origins of colonization, migration and settlement, economy, class, religion, secular culture, empire, colonial politics, and the American Revolution. Other subjects were new a generation ago but are staples now, testifying how far colonial scholarship has come: precontact America, ecology, Indians, African Americans, women, gender, consumption, and regionalism. Others still are fledgling topics, heralding the continuing vigor of the field: children and parents, borderlands, and comparative studies of other North American empires and colonies. All the authors are experts in their fields, and each essay covers writings on every subject from the first, often contemporary commentaries up to the latest word. Each also suggests new avenues of exploration. As a history of colonial history it is unsurpassed and, with extensive bibliographies of every topic, it is a marvelous resource.	2
Historiographies, like narrative histories, are selective, organized according to writers' priorities, and are invariably interpretive, even if implicitly. Some of these essays resemble annotated bibliographies, whereas the most engaging are those that are more explicitly and extensively analytic. Carole Shammas, for example, moves beyond simple emphasis on European technological superiority with a global explanation of American colonization involving military, political, economic, and religious imperatives dating from the Crusades. Cary Carson also connects consumption with the process of colonization, as T. H. Breen has done with the American Revolution. Ned Landsman skillfully evokes the diversity and complexity of migration and settlement while testing historical conceptions, particularly those of Bernard Bailyn, and James H. Merrell and Philip D. Morgan explore encounters with and the interior lives of Indians and African Americans. Sylvia Frey summarizes the various meanings and implications of America's "revolutions" (508) for their multiplicity of participants. Entertainingly, some essays can be read against others. Greg Nobles challenges readers to think about class even in an era when the term was unused, at least in its modern sense, concluding, though he remains sensitive to time and place, that colonial America offers a "prehistory" of nineteenth-century class development. Alan Tully, however—and in the very next essay—warns against such forward-looking approaches, arguing for discontinuity in American politics before and after independence. A more minor contradiction is that Nobles has Jackson Turner Main's The Social Structure of Revolutionary America revealing eastern inequality (261–62), whereas Tully writes of "Main's relatively egalitarian society" (295).²	. . .

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