Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 [Paperback]

Jon Butler (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674006674 | ISBN-13: 978-0674006676 | Publication Date: December 28, 2001

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago - and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society - a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American revolution, Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of pre-Revolutionary America. It reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the 18th century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, this book shows us vast revolutionary changes before 1776 among a fantastically diverse assortment of peoples. Here are polyglot populations of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to African or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and made itself many times during the next centuries - a society that, for 90 years before 1776, was already becoming America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Historians have often argued that the colonies became "Europeanized" in the century before the American Revolution, but in his latest book, Yale historian Butler (Awash in a Sea of Faith) contends that we need to pay close attention to this slice of early American history. The decades in between the Puritan-dominated 17th century and the market-revolutionizing early 19th century were a formative period, he suggests, during which a distinctly "American" societyAand, as Butler would have it, the first "modern" societyAdeveloped. It was a culture "simultaneously aggressive and willful, materialistic as well as idealistic, driven toward authority and mastery." Butler examines the Americanizing process in the realms of politics, economics, religion and material culture. In the first chapter, "Peoples," Butler reminds readers that late colonial society was polyglot and diverseAincluding Germans, French, Scots, Ibo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Catawba and Leni-Lenape. The rest of the book is marked by Butler's characteristic innovation. Regarding politics, for instance, he suggests that Americans were no longer harmoniously self-governing through the town meeting; it was the colony itself, rather than the local microcosm, that was the center of political life. Likewise, distinctly American decorative arts began to develop during these years: after 1680, the relatively simple public buildings of the 17th century were "replaced by far larger, more elaborate facilities." Butler's original analysis is important reading on 18th-century America; he shows that the colonies were developing distinct ways of spending, building, praying, decorating and politicking even thenAa cultural revolution that anticipated the political revolution that was to follow. B&w photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A terrific book, filled with human interest and the kind of detail that makes abstractions meaningful. A commendable weaving together of themes and materials from political history, social history, and cultural history. Butler offers us a firm foundation for further exploration. (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (December 28, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674006674
• ISBN-13: 978-0674006676
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #83,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Synthesis of the American Experience between 1680 and 1770, November 13, 2006

By 

Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Paperback)

Jon Butler, well-known as a scholar of early American religion, broadens his area of concern in "Becoming America" to ask fundamental questions about the formation of American identity in the colonial era. In this book Butler traces a significant alteration in social, cultural, political, and economic perspectives in America between 1680 and 1770. He eschews discussion both of the early years of British America and the immediate origins of the American Revolution so common in historical texts in favor of this "middle period" which is usually passed over in traditional accounts. The result is a fascinating portrait of a people in flux, no longer dependent on the "mother country" but not yet independent. As he writes in the introduction: "The transformations occurring between 1680 and 1770 made the term `America' increasingly indelible. They made the direction of American history unmistakable, even if they did not make it inevitable" (p. 4).

Butler suggests that three major interpretive approaches have dominated colonial history, and in every case "Becoming America" is an attempt to move beyond them. First, he noted that historians have tended to concentrate on the story of the earliest British settlements in North America before 1650, especially Puritan New England and Virginia. In so doing, they gave short shrift to the middle colonies and the period after the first generation of the colonies and before the strife with England that led to revolution. Second, a younger generation of historians in the 1970s began to explore the history of the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, employing quantitative methods, emphasizing society and ethnicity, and analyzing the development of both unique political and economic institutions. Finally, a school of historical thought has emerged in the last twenty-five years that emphasizes the "Europeanization" of eighteenth century America and the rise of a "deferential," material society seeking to replicate the perceived finest aspects of European culture.

For Butler, who has admirably synthesized various studies representing these various interpretations, there are important truths in each approach but none offer a satisfying whole. He argues that what emerged in America by 1770 was a "modern society" in every sense of the word. It possessed, in his analysis, the five central traits of such a society: entrance into the international marketplace, a broad religious heritage with an overarching acceptance of other belief systems, a political system in which a wide range of groups participated, and overarching acceptance of ethnic and cultural diversity, and a "penchant for power, control, and authority of humanity and nature that brooked few limitations" (p. 2).

Having established what he views as the core ingredients of a "modern society" Butler then lays out his argument for assigning the British colonies in America that status. His chapters deal with peoples, economy, politics, things material, and things spiritual and each reinforces his major themes for a "modern society." These chapters are essentially self-contained essays rather than a narrative account, and they offer a fascinating window into the evolution of these British colonies. He employs revisionist historical investigations to overturn stereotypes of Anglo, masculine, aristocratic tendencies by paying greater attention to non-elites, non-whites, non-British, non-Protestant, non-male actors. He offers a multicultural synthesis of the colonial era. He also suggests that the American Revolution was significant not just for the rebellion against British imperial rule but also because it celebrated the fundamental values of the "modern society" that had emerged in Britain's North American colonies. He found those in a political culture of republican virtue, in the commitment to individual rights and civil liberties, in freedom to worship as one pleased, in the U.S. Constitution with its emphasis on division of power, and a fundamental commitment to the rule of law to which all must submit.

As impressive as this volume is, Butler leaves hanging several vexing questions that I wondered about as I read "Becoming America." For example, for all of the emphasis on individual liberty, how and why did this "modern society" allow itself to enshrine slavery as a fundamental principle, one over which the nation would eventually fight a civil war? One could extend that question to other groups also marginalized in this society, though not to the same extent. Even so, this is a powerful, provocative, and exceptionally useful synthesis of the period between 1680 and 1770 when America transformed itself from dependent colonies of Great Britain to a separate nation.

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good--delightful to read, November 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Paperback)

In this gracefully written book, Jon Butler in Becoming America "traces the enormous social, economic, political, and cultural changes that created a distinctively modern and, ultimately, "American" society in Britain's mainland colonies between 1680 and 1770." (2) With straightforward prose refreshingly free of jargon, Butler shows that the American colonies developed into surprisingly modern entities by the eve of the Revolution. In separate chapters, he details five major characteristics of American modernity in support of this claim: ethnic and national diversity; complex economies; "large-scale participatory politics"; religious pluralism; and "the modern penchant for power, control, and authority" over both their environment and other human beings. This change from primitive 17th century outposts of Britain's colonial empire to "complex and variegated" (3) colonies by the mid 18th century is what Butler terms the "Revolution before 1776."
By 1770, America was anything but a homogeneous society in terms of its population, particularly when compared to Europe. Butler notes that Indians and Europeans "lived side by side" (15) in most rural areas of the colonies. Religious, economic and cultural strife forced many in Europe to immigrate to the British mainland colonies, while after 1680 the American colonies "became a haven for non-English Europeans." (20) Butler points to a variety of newcomers-Jews, Scots-Irish, French Huguenots, Germans and Swiss-who settled all over America to make the New World a mix of ethnic groups, which "predicted the growing importance of ethnicity in America" which continues to the present. (25) Butler also details the "horrific suffering" of Africans, forced to America by the burgeoning slave trade at the end of the 17th century. Writing sensitively about the plight of these enslaved blacks, he also notes that their influx "recast the seventeenth-century colonies and [became] the American future." (36)
Not only was America's population diverse, so was its religious composition. "Colonial American religion," Butler concludes, was "varied and rich between 1680s and the American Revolution." (185) This "religious pluralism and vitality," far more extensive than was characteristic of Europe, has been "identified as the very soul of modern American culture" he concludes. Butler also points to ministers like George Whitefield as being modern, in their celebrity status, individualism and "nondenominational, media-conscious[ness]."
Butler points to the diverse and complex economies of the British colonies in America as evidence of their modernity, though he is careful not to ignore the growing poverty and inequality in New World.. Colonists "took command" of their commercial life and shaped it into a "notably autonomous economy," (51) especially in their agricultural pursuits, in which farming became more commercial after the 1680s. This new emphasis on the market was accompanied by diversification. Similarly, Butler shows that native Americans too "became enmeshed in complex and powerful economic relationships" with Europeans in the colonies. (67) Merchants won "wealth and status" through expansion, extension and specialization," (69) all of which demonstrate for Butler that colonial economics were modern and complex.
Colonial politics, Butler concludes, were "so complex that they often baffled observers." (90) Provincial politics, while not democratic, were popular and included that formation of "political groups that sometimes assumed almost modern, partylike appearances," (96) such as the Quaker party which emerged in Pennsylvania in the 1740s. America after 1680 became less deferential and became a "more open, ultimately democratic nation." (99) Butler also points to the maturation of provincial assemblies after 1680 and the expansion of their power to demonstrate an increasing modernity of colonial politics.
In Becoming America, Jon Butler has convincingly depicted British America from 1680 to 1770 as a place in which the colonies were becoming more modern, diverse and complex. Yet some of his evidence does not point to modernity at all. Although he vividly depicts the cultural and religious holocaust suffered by Africans upon their forced immigration to America, perhaps Butler should have made more out of the meaning of this labor system. "American colonists made modern American slavery," he writes, "they did not inherit it." (42) True enough; but they also slit noses, cut ankle cords, gelded and sold slaves far away from their kin. Butler holds that slavery was a "distinctively modern institution," (42) but readers may wonder if a society that sustains such barbarity through 1770 and beyond can truly be defined as modern.
This is a far better book than Jack Greene's misfire, Pursuits of Happiness.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars To Make the World Anew, February 2, 2008

By 

Chimonsho (Turtle Island) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Paperback)

Two important arguments appear in this ambitious work. Butler satisfactorily shows that a distinctive New World society had already emerged before the Revolutionary War, rooted in English culture but incorporating other vital elements. His other main point, that the 13 colonies comprised the first modern society, is intriguing but ultimately unpersuasive. His 1770 cutoff point is on the far side of too many crucial modern developments: the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions, the demographic transition, and the full impact of the Enlightenment. A better choice for First Moderns is Victorian Britain. Along with the above criteria, that society relied on fossil fuels; managed public health; had mass media, communication and transit, companionate marriage and public opinion in the true sense (hence the media). Becoming America is thus not wholly convincing but thoughtful nonetheless. On each nation, classics still repay attention: cf. R. Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." On modern Britain, see R. Williams, "The Long Revolution."