British Colonial America

This insightful set of essays reveals the day-to-day lives of the British colonists who laid the foundation for what became the United States. British Colonial America: People and Perspectives shifts the spotlight away from the famous political and religious leaders of the time to focus on colonial residents across the full spectrum of American society from the early-17th to the late-18th century. In narrative chapters filled with biographical sketches, British Colonial America explores the day-to-day world of the religious groups, entrepreneurs, women and children, laborers, farmers, and others who made up the vast majority of the colonial population. Coverage also includes those not afforded citizenship, such as African slaves and Native Americans. It is a revealing examination of life at ground level in colonial America, one that finds the people of that time confronting issues that appear throughout the American experience.

Never truly a "new world" entirely detached from the home countries of its immigrants, colonial America, over the generations, became a model of transatlantic culture. Colonial society was shaped by the conflict between colonists' need to adapt to the American environment and their desire to perpetuate old world traditions or to imitate the charismatic model of the British establishment. In the course of colonial history, these contrasting impulses produced a host of distinctive cultures and identities. In this impressive new collection, prominent scholars of early American history explore this complex dynamic of accommodation and replication to demonstrate how early American societies developed from the intersection of American and Atlantic influences. The volume, edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, offers fresh perspectives on colonial history and on early American attitudes toward slavery and ethnicity, native Americans, and the environment, as well as colonial social, economic, and political development. It reveals the myriad ways in which American colonists were the inhabitants and subjects of a wider Atlantic world. Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, one of a three-volume series under the editorship of Jack P. Greene, aims to give students of Atlantic history a "state of the field" survey by pursuing interesting lines of research and raising new questions. The entire series, "Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World," engages the major organizing themes of the subject through a collection of high-level, debate-inspiring essays, inviting readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Atlantic experience shaped both American societies and the Atlantic world itself.

With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society. Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.

Colonial America deals with the development of the American colonies from the first permanent settlement at Jamestown to the independence of the thirteen which became the USA. Instead of anticipating the birth of a nation, as is too often the case, Mary K. Geiter and W.A. Speck treat the history of the colonies as part of the wider history of the British Empire. They also include in their discussion those colonies which did not rebel against British rule, such as the islands in the West Indies. Using this valuable and informative approach to the study of the American colonies, Geiter and Speck demonstrate how Britain and America shared a common history for nearly two hundred years.

An Empire of Regions is a refreshing interpretation of British American history that demonstrates how the thirteen British mainland colonies grew to function as self-governing entities in distinct regional clusters. In lucid prose, Eric Nellis invites readers to explore the circumstances leading to the colonies' collective defense of their individual interests, and to reevaluate the founding principles of the United States. There is considerable discussion of social conditions and of the British background to the colonies' development. Extensive treatment of slavery, the slave trade, and native populations is provided, while detailed maps illustrate colony boundaries, settlement growth, and the impact of the Proclamation Line. This absorbing and compelling narrative will captivate both newcomers to and enthusiasts of American history.

First Published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"A tour de force... It both summarizes and advances our understanding of early modern British America." -- Journal of Southern History

The thirteen mainland colonies of early America were arguably never more British than on the eve of their War of Independence from Britain. Though home to settlers of diverse national and cultural backgrounds, colonial America gradually became more like Britain in its political and judicial systems, material culture, economies, religious systems, and engagements with the empire. At the same time and by the same process, these politically distinct and geographically distant colonies forged a shared cultural identity—one that would bind them together as a nation during the Revolution. Anglicizing America revisits the theory of Anglicization, considering its application to the history of the Atlantic world, from Britain to the Caribbean to the western wildernesses, at key moments before, during, and after the American Revolution. Ten essays by senior historians trace the complex processes by which global forces, local economies, and individual motives interacted to reinforce a more centralized and unified social movement. They examine the ways English ideas about labor influenced plantation slavery, how Great Britain's imperial aspirations shaped American militarization, the influence of religious tolerance on political unity, and how Americans' relationship to Great Britain after the war impacted the early republic's naval and taxation policies. As a whole, Anglicizing America offers a compelling framework for explaining the complex processes at work in the western hemisphere during the age of revolutions. Contributors: Denver Brunsman, William Howard Carter, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Anthony M. Joseph, Simon P. Newman, Geoffrey Plank, Nancy L. Rhoden, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman, Jeremy A. Stern.