Fatal encounters, brutal wars, crass exploitation, missionaries, and new masters

Review of American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Vol. 1 by Alan Taylor

As comprehensive survey histories go, you can't do much better than this one. It combines detail, analysis, and succinct narratives into an absolutely wonderful reading experience. Best of all, even though I knew the outlines of the history quite well, I learned something on every page and felt enthralled for all 500 pages.

America was discovered at the very beginning of the modern age, during what we would call the Renaissance, though many of the explorers resembled medieval pillagers at best; Europe was also moving into the Reformation, of course, which played out in the Americas in its own brutal ways. The Europeans had limited experience dealing with culture clash and shock, so they presumed their superiority over the “savage pagans” and hence treated the natives as slaves and animals, though there were a few humanitarian exceptions.

The Spanish arrived looking for slaves and gold, bringing the first wave of microbes that would kill up to 98% of the native populations. Their idea was to extract as much wealth as possible, though a few of them began to establish ranches and farms. Interestingly, the template for the conquistadors were the Canary Islands, which they essentially devastated – killing virtually all the natives, destroying the entire natural ecology, and installing themselves as slave plantation owners.

About 100 years later, the British began to attempt to colonize what became Virginia. After several catastrophic failures and wars with the Spanish, they succeeded in establishing a crude colony, based on indentured labor for the price of passage and tobacco plantations; it was loosely Anglican. England at that time was in social upheaval, so many wished to depart with hopes of a better life. This soon changed when New England was established, which was largely Puritan though with many other strict protestant sects. While relatively autarkic economically, once the highly profitable sugar plantations were established in Barbados and its nearby islands, there was finally a market for New England goods, stimulating the economy for fish and other staples that the West Indies could not produce for itself. The sugar plantations also served as template for slave plantations in the deep south (for tobacco and then cotton).

The French established trading posts in Canada, working more cooperatively with the Indians because of the sparseness of French immigration. Most of their trade was in furs, which the Indians supplied in exchange for guns and metal tools. There were also Dutch (New York) and Swedish (Delaware) colonies in the mid-Atlantic, soon to be absorbed into the British Empire, which continued its incipient war with the French until the 18^thcentury.

Each colony had its own character, such as Quaker Pennsylvania under the Penn family, a kind of family franchise that boomed for a number of decades and was surprisingly tolerant. Most fascinating to me was the establishment of Rhode Island, a tolerant oasis for religious experimentation, by Roger Williams when he was exiled from Massachusetts for Puritan religious ideas that bordered on fanaticism.

Throughout the volume, Taylor is very critical of the behavior of the colonists, who in spite of many sincere efforts to treat the natives with dignity and respect essentially wound up taking whatever they wanted. As a result, surviving east coast Indians were either pushed west or simply massacred. Many of the tribes that emerged were actually amalgams of disease survivors, hence relatively new, though larger groupings, such as the Iroquois nations, remained players for longer periods. Of course, there were exceptional adaptations as well: when the Plains Indians acquired guns and horses, they expanded their populations and became formidable adversaries in newly established warrior cultures, though they could never effectively unite; they also remained dependent on white men for gun powder and metal working.

Taylor goes into many of the cultural details of all parties involved, particularly the various Indian tribes. This is very fun, but due to the format of a comprehensive survey is superficial at best. The bibliography is also outdated, given that the book was written about 25 years ago. If I have a serious criticism, it is the lack of a sum-up chapter at the end, bringing together the complex strands that Taylor describes so well.

This is an unusually fun read for a survey history. Taylor does a great job at pointing out the brutal underbelly of what transpired, no holds barred, but also in historical context of what the protagonists were thinking.

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